As IF Times

Source: Leaving NATO Would Make The U.S. And The World Less Safe | HuffPost

There has been ample teeth gnashing over recent geopolitical events, centering of course, around the adventures of Donald Trump.  This nemesis of the entrenched status quo has dared to question the arrangement of the decades old NATO agreement.  We did some research on the history of NATO because there should be a reality check on the howls of outrage emanating from the usual quarters.

As the link shows, the formation of NATO post WW2 was envisioned as a bulwark against the intrusion of influence from communist states, namely the old Soviet Union. Financial and military support would be provided to member nations, principally by the US and Great Britain, to rebuild after WW2 and to create stability to those nations with preferred western alliances.  The treaty provided a collective defense: if one of their nations were attacked, then all of the nations were bound to defend them.

This has worked quite well, since in the many years following the war, East Germany is gone and many of the old Soviet satellite states have moved into the western orbit.  The Soviet Union has shrunk to become the Russian Federation and their geographic reach has been reduced considerably.  Economically, Germany, France, Poland, Italy and Spain and many former Eastern bloc nations have flourished in world trade.  There’s no question that Europe has recovered.  And yet, the Americans are still providing the bulk of the funding for NATO’s defense operations even as the contracted amount of GDP spending of member nations for their own defense has fallen.  For those who believe in statistics, here is a graphic depiction of the trend:

This is an old set of statistics sourced from NATO and the trend clearly shows that the US bears the majority of the costs involved not only in absolute dollars but even worse, in terms of percentage of GDP.

So this is very much analogous to a parent giving financial support to their children while they develop and then to see the children buying iPhones and electric cars instead of providing for their own self sustenance.

The bizarre part of this is that while the alliance was established to protect them from an adversary, long since diminished, many of these countries have willingly allowed themselves to be effectively taken over by massive immigration, principally by refugees from Muslim dominated regions.  It’s not a secret that the flood of immigration has brought along all kinds of social and political unrest in the host nations even as funds are funneled towards supporting these policies and away from self defense.  So, while everyone watches the front door for an enemy long gone, their nations are hollowed out, with open arms, by enemies welcomed at the rear door.

Why would they be characterized as enemies?  Well, historically when a group comes into a nation en masse and wants to change the entire form of government, the foundations of religion and the very structure of society including language and law, that was considered an invasion.  NATO is worrying about the dog at the door, long gone, while the mice are ravaging the rest of the home.

Source: Iranian General Accuses Israel of Causing Drought by Stealing Clouds | Breitbart

Well this is a new one.  Over the past while, especially in the world of politics, no claim is too preposterous or accusation too unhinged to level  against ideological foes.  Stealing someone’s weather is actually quite novel and creative.  It hasn’t quite acquired the traction and mass hysteria concerning weather that Al Gore has wrought with his inventive and mercantile mind, but you know what they say about imitation and flattery.  But for creativity and the “way out there” factor, it’s a good one.

By now, invocation of the “N” word, that word being Nazi, to characterize anyone who happens to disagree with a preferred point of view, is as cliché as lisps and facial hair on hipsters.  That “N’ word is applied like cheap olive oil onto most every social and political issue.  Anyone resorting to that smear to silence their opponent has already lost the argument.  Closely following on the list of toothless barbs are the epithets of “racist”, “misogynist”, “sexist”, “Islamophobe”, “homophobe” all the way down the list to “anti-dentite”.

In my view, these supposed slurs expose two enormous and dangerous issues threatening  civilization.  The first is the obvious absence of originality.  It’s like calling someone a fatso. Rather than accurately portraying opponents in any articulate way, the smear industry lazily resorts to recycling tried and true monikers in their campaigns as if they were the next in the series of Rocky movies; or Star Wars; or Fast and Furious.  We know that numbers are important to successful films, you just don’t expect it to be the number in the film’s title.  It all becomes just noise, analogous to the cacophony of crying babies in a hospital birthing ward.  As we know, the entertainment industry is seemingly bereft of any new creative ideas and thus depend solely on retreads of the same tired franchises to pay the bills.  This represents an intellectual laziness that is also reflected by social justice warriors in their tired clichés and characterizations, contributing to the blunting of  intellectual thought.

Which brings us to the second fatal issue.  People willingly consume this crap. Like most Hollywood drivel and that includes the “music” industry, the wholly unoriginal social justice smear warriors can only exist if there’s an audience for their banalities.  We can postulate that there may be an almost chemical like dependency of a large swath of the population to consume the same drivel over and over again.  We expect to see this kind of behavior in adolescents, as epitomized by an entire generation hooked on video games and Facebook. But people generally grow out of this groupthink behavior as they mature.   Incredibly, large segments of the populace seem to be zombie-like  consumers of…crap.

Unfortunately, the present state of public discourse shows that lack of critical thinking, normally hallmarks of adolescents, has been pushed farther into adulthood than in previous generations.   People with wholly illogical and preposterous notions are given audience that rational people would dismiss as utter nonsense.  We are all familiar with the notion of the popularity of anti-heroes, but the embrace by much of the public of the moon bat ideas offered by many recent political demagogues is analogous to chickens embracing Colonel Sanders.  Right now, there’s a lot of willing chickens.