If Tom Clancy had come up with a plot in which a Russian president was accused of killing 10 people to take out a friend turned adversary, while not being able to attend an international conference for fear of being arrested for war crimes, his publishers would have rejected it as incredible.
An alternative, in which a former US president who had survived two impeachments and was running again turned himself at the Fulton County Jail to be finger printed and have his mug shot taken, would also be unlikely to make the cut.
So, what is to be made of a world in which this happened in the space of 48 hours, two Bond-villain-like billionaires are reportedly gearing up for a cage fight in Moscow, and others vie to outdo themselves in a breathtakingly costly private space race?
The expressions "you wouldn't read about it" and "only in America" no longer seem to apply.
The world has reached a level of peak crazy in which those addicted to the early morning news can, like the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland, believe in "six impossible things before breakfast".
None of this has happened overnight. The only reason human beings are not suffering from a severe bout of cognitive dissonance is that, like the unfortunate frog in the hypothetical pot of water being brought to the boil, the shift from rationality to absurdity has been incremental.
Why is it, for example, nobody finds it exceptional that if Joe Biden is re-elected he will be 86 at the end of his second term?
Really? John Howard is only three-and-bit years older than the President. Why couldn't he make a comeback then?
It doesn't help that both Putin and Trump are, according to the many free-range psychologists happy to make television diagnoses, egomaniacal and narcissistic sociopaths who lack empathy and firmly believe the philosophy "the end justifies the means".
Or, as Napoleon, who shared many of those traits, is reported to have put it: "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs".
The eggs Putin has scrambled are many and varied. The war in Chechnya, the annexation of Crimea, the poisoning and imprisonment of numerous political adversaries, and the full-blown invasion of Ukraine all spring to mind.
But all of those seem halfway rational in comparison to what appears to be his latest trick; the alleged murder of 10 people, including three flight crew, to take out Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of a private army known as the Wagner group.
Putin has quite bizarrely eulogised his former friend and ally turned traitor, saying: "this was a person with a complicated fate, and he made serious mistakes in life, but also sought to achieve the necessary results - both for himself and at a time when I asked him to, for the common cause, such as in these recent months".
Putin, a former KGB spy who spent some time in New Zealand, then offered his condolences to the families of those killed when the jet on which Prigozhin was apparently travelling plunged to earth in pieces. There were no survivors.
While the diminishing vote for both the LNP and Labor, concerns about the Voice, and criticism of the Albanese government's refusal to go beyond "bite-sized" chunks of reform indicate that faith in our own system of government appears to be on the decline, at least most of our leaders are rational.
Like them or loathe them, Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are doing the best they can with what they have. They, and the majority of our elected politicians, have the best interests of the country at heart.
One only has to look to Russia or the US to conclude: "there but for the grace of God go we".
