Since we don't have a "What the heck...?" category here, I'm filing this one, or rather, "these", under the "You Tell Me" category, because for all our speculations and exchanges of ideas here, this one is a bit baffling, although it does offer an opportunity to add some more high octane speculation to the mix.

Watching Washington D.C.'s (District of Corruption) foreign policy gyrations regarding Russia is a bit like watching one of those 1930s jitterbug dance marathons. Everyone is utterly exhausted, yet they continue to dance their jitterbug, twitching and "spasming" in a blizzard of arms and legs, and moving from point A to...er...uhm... point A with breathless inefficiency. This week the blizzard of arms and legs reached new heights, or depths, of contrariness. Case in point: the USA may be on the verge of abrogating the Open Skies Treaty. "Never heard of it," one might say. So, for those who haven't, the treaty itself was signed in 1992, though the idea was much older, being the brainchild of Nelson Rockefeller during the 1950s, when he was a senior order-giver and commander national security advisor to President Eisenhower. The basic idea was to avoid a thermonuclear "Pearl Harbor" by allowing both the USA and USSR to overfly each other's country and keep a close eye on each other's military deployments, to avoid any nasty surprises.

It was this idea, more or less, that initiated the era of spy satellites and U-2 and later SR71 Blackbird overflights of the Soviet Union. Similarly those Russian aircraft that fly uncomfortably close to American airspace or, as a recent story alleged, over the White House - which is restricted airspace - are all part and parcel of Mr. Rockefeller's idea. After all, it takes two to jitterbug and move from point A to...er...uhm... point A. Here's the article shared by several people this week:

US Set to Restrict Russian Flights Over US, Violating Open Skies Treaty

As the article makes clear, both the USSA and former USSR and quite a few other nations are signatories to the treaty. But now Russia is claiming the USSA is making mountains out of molehills, and there is discussion in the Trump Administration on whether to pull out of the treaty. All this of course occurs during a period of renewed sanctions on Russia, and curiously un-escalating tensions over recent Russian allegations that US special forces embedded in various ISIS units were ultimately responsible for the death of a Russian general in Syria.

In other words, the situation remains normal: the two powers continue to dance their jitterbug marathon, arms and legs flailing madly about, and move absolutely nowhere. No translation vector, but lots of infolded scalar potentials from zero-summed translation vectors, moving nowhere and creating an enormous energy on that spot (point A).

But then lots of people - in many cases, the same people as noticed the above article - also noticed this:

Russia & US to create new space station in moon’s orbit

United States And Russia To Build NASA-Led Space Station

The Zero Hedge version of the story points out the problem here with some deliciously sarcastic and satirical comments:

The liberal science community has a moral dilemma on its hands following today’s announcement that the United States is partnering with Russia on a NASA-led project to build an orbiting lunar station. On one hand, the international base for lunar exploration will serve as a “gateway to deep space and the lunar surface,” according to NASA. On the other hand, Russia is involved – which means they’ll undoubtedly slit our throats in space, populate the surface of the moon, build a moon cannon (having read a U.S. astronaut's Heinlein collection), and fire silicon, magnesium, and aluminum-rich moon rocks at the United States. Once we are obliterated, Russia will invade the country and enslave all surviving Americans in moon-rock crushing factories. Pretending not to be evil, Igor Komarov - Roscosmos’s general director, stated that Russia, the United States and other participants agreed it was important to work using unified standards to avoid future problems in space, citing Sandra Bullock’s movie “Gravity” in the process.

That's the rub: why all the villification of Russia down here on terra firma, and yet, up there in space, why, sure, we need to cooperate with those always-Byzantine-never-to-be-trusted-Russians-and-their-evil-super-criminal-genius-mastermind-Vladimir-Putin. The contradiction here is glaringly obvious, leaving everyone - including me - wondering just what the heck is going on. And that, of course, brings us to our high octane speculation(s) of the day. The RT version of the story implies two things, namely, that NASA and Russia have agreed on standards for docking ports, because the Russians have more recent experience with docking maneuvers. OK... I get that: they can thread a needle in space. It also implies that part of NASA's interest is in the fact that the Russians have the largest boosters in the terrestrial inventory, and can haul more "stuff" up there per launch than anyone else, with maybe the exception of the Chinese (whose boosters are upgrades to the Russian technology seeded into China decades ago anyway).

Let's add one more thing to this strange mix: a few months ago, you'll recall, Roscosmos and the European Space Agency concluded a similar deal to build a space station in Lunar orbit. And since the European Space Agency is really the Franco-German Space Agency, the picture that emerges is even more intriguing, namely, that of a Russo-American-Franco-German effort to build a Lunar orbit station, which makes the contrast between terrestrial and extra-planetary politics even more glaring.

So what's the resolution here? One possibility is a speculation I advanced some months ago with respect to the various plans being drawn up for the governance of such an international space colony. If one looks closely at those schemes, the possibility emerges that they are testbeds, that they are prototyping efforts, to impose on a global scale. In other words, it is the ultimate version of Mr. Globaloney's "top down" imposition of New World Order. In this respect, these efforts would be revisions and extensions of prior international space-based platforms like the International Space Station.

But there's a second, far more disturbing possibility. I and other authors have speculated on the idea that there may be a "breakaway civilization" in possession of a "secret space program." The idea is actually that of well-known and respected UFO and national security researcher Richard Dolan, who first proposed the idea of a breakaway civilization in his now classic tw0-volume study UFOs and the National Security State. In Mr. Dolan's view, the UFO problem provoked a secret study of the phenomenon, one which ultimately may have issued in the possession of technologies and infrastructure well in advance of the public technologies and infrastructure, and these in turn would have provoked an entirely new "culture" or "civilization" with unique analytical and decision-taking processes. I and others have fleshed out this or that detail of the hypothesis, but the broad conceptual outlines as Mr. Dolan first proposed them have remained basically unchanged, a testament to the strength of his hypothesis.

In my own speculations over the years on this hypothesis, in various articles and particularly in interviews, I've advanced the idea that perhaps what began as a more-or-less uniquely American "breakaway civilization", as a component of its "deep state," may have either merged or networked with similar "breakaway civilizations" that may have emerged in the post-war and Cold War periods in Russia, which certainly had its own extensive black projects research base and infrastructure. In effect, one might be looking at a "breakaway civilization" that is no longer exclusively "American" or "Russian," but something genuinely international in outlook and extent, a "third extra-territorial actor" on the stage, with possession of exotic technologies and capabilities. In this respect it is worth noting the research of Mr. Richard Hoagland, who suggested that President Kennedy had proposed a similar joint-lunar landing project to Mr. Khrushchev in 1963, and who, to that end, ordered the CIA to review its UFO files and open many of them up to the Soviet Union as a part of this larger international space effort. Mr. Khrushchev finally decided to accept this plan and participate in it, when Kennedy was assassinated, and Mr. Khrushchev was ousted from power by Kosygin and Brezhnev and literally confined to a kind of house arrest and kept strictly incommunicado. What has triggered the sudden about-face? I strongly suspect that the "messages" that were sent back and forth that were revelatory of exotic technologies in the past few decades - the strangely convenient (for the West) and inopportune (for the Soviets) earthquakes that preceded German reunification, the USS Donald Cook incidents, which strongly suggest unique Russian electronic warfare capabilities, Secretary Mattis' recent comments about "kinetic weapons" in the context of North Korea - all of it, represent a new kind of "stalemate", and that the Kennedy plan has been revisited and updated in the light of this situation.

In other words, the problem of announcing itself - if indeed it has any intentions of doing so - might thus very well be predicated on some sort of "controlled release" and "limited hangout" position...

... such as building an international lunar orbital space station.

In this respect, it is indeed intriguing to note those space powers that, as of now, have not been included in this effort, namely, Japan, India, and most importantly, China...

See you on the flip side...