Some US policymakers and pundits are declaring that Russia—and its population—are cut off from the rest of the world.

This Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will address the world to likely announce the raising of interest rates. With the first rate hike in several years and the promise to reduce the balance sheet later this year, the stage for 2022 will be set. Also tomorrow, per CNN:

…Moscow needs to hand over $117 million in interest payments on dollar-denominated government bonds…

Russia owes foreign creditors in US Dollars, yet at the same time:

For understanding our modern monetary troubles, Nik Bhatia’s pamphlet-sized book from last year hits exactly the right intersection between money and banking, between the past and the future. Clocking in at around 150 pages of easy prose, it’s accessible but not dumbed down, revealing but not inaccurate. It has a simple framework that Bhatia explains and explores with great expertise.

Max Weber, citing Leon Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk, bluntly stated that “every state is founded on violence.” The imaginative theories that have been at times employed to justify the state violence do not fall under the scope of this article.

A non sequitur is a rudimentary yet common logical fallacy that occurs when a supposed conclusion does not necessarily follow from the previous argumentation.

While Russian military forces are encircling several of Ukraine’s key urban centers, American hawks on both sides of the political aisle are squawking in typical fashion.

During the Cold War, people were shocked to see the Soviet Union lock up dissidents in state mental institutions because being against socialism was “proof of mental illness.” Soviet psychiatrists were condemned for violating the Hippocratic oath, with one of the most important promises of that oath being “First, do no harm.”