Listen to a reading of this article: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its symbolic Doomsday Clock to ninety seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been set since its founding after the second world war. Chief among their reasons for doing so is the
There is another thing that must be said. The idea that negotiating to prevent war means consigning Ukrainians to the barbarity and horrors of war is illogical. That's what they're enduring NOW because of a refusal on the part of Zelenski, egged by the US powers and NATO, to engage in negotiations. (Many of the claims of atrocities are surely faked, but there is plenty of real horror, death, displacement--it's a WAR.) Anyone with real concern for Ukrainians (and Russians) should be speaking up for an end to this, which is likely to come either through negotiations--or Armageddon. People buy into this because, as Caitlin has mentioned so many times, they're subjected to a media barrage of fake news and distortion that ignores everything going on between Russia, Ukraine and the US prior to last February, and pretends that "Putin" (not Russia, since propaganda to justify war always demonizes the leader, personalizes it) is simply bent on conquest.
The dialogue is tainted if not corrupted by ancient biases against Russia, no matter the situation. It's one thing to argue over a boundary: it's quite another to deliberately not consider a real existential threat to a country which is a world power that has contributed to our civilization's culture in music, philosophy and literature out of proportion to the size of its population. A country that has suffered more from Nazism than any other (John F.Kennedy, among many other witnesses) and might well have succumbed to it except for the extreme noble persistence and vision of its people. Don't ask such a country to bow to Nazism: you are asking the impossible.
Let us pretend that Russia were in fact guilty of everything it is accused of. It isn't, but whatever.
How did the world react to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968? Did NATO charge into WWIII? Did the Warsaw Pact afterwards invade neutral Austria, which was not then and is not now a NATO member?
JFK tries to de-escalate the Cold War in June 1963 with a magnificent speech...five months later, the CIA removes JFK.
Nixon brings in detente. A few months later, Watergate burglars, four of whom are CIA, begin the process to bring down the most popular president in American history. (Nixon won 49 states and beat his opponent by 18,000,000 votes.)
Trump signs 5 middle east peace treaties that haters never talk about. CIA and the deep state give Joe Biden 81,000,000 votes--most popular president ever!! (Whatever.)
Joe Mama then says he's running for reelection. Then his side, CNN, decides to take him out over the "document scandal." No one cares about documents, not when nukes are about to fly.
If you're an American, half of you think you live in a democracy. The other half are waking up that it's all fake, and the sociopaths would rather have their cronies in the military-industrial complex get rich, rather than get along with people.
Btw, in case you're wondering, I'm fairly right wing, mostly in the Ron Paul side of things. But I will side with anyone who wants to get at the truth, and is sick of all of the suppressions of our freedoms.
Western culture is mentally ill these days. We simply do not see things as they are.  The population needs to wake up soon or we could face disaster 
Those who have never experienced war are always the ones urging the sacrifice of others while they bask in the comfort of their cocoons. These might be the morons who experienced drills to hide under their desks in 1961 and now know how stupid that was or are they younger and missed the horrific films showing pigs and sheep being vaporized? Those in power appear to be so stupid or delusional that even the potential to vaporize us all is ignored.
From my interview with the late David Brower in '78:
Brower: If the United States doesn't lead the world back from the nuclear brink to which it led it in the first place, then nuclear war will be inevitable. A nuclear war would reduce civilization to a few fragments of whatever capable cultures there were that were not dependent on high technology... if we don't defuse the nuclear threat to humanity, everything else is academic.
" . . . weird mental gymnastics to squirm and compartmentalize . . ." My observations of my generation (Boomers) tend to suggest the weirdest of those gymnastics, falling under the canopy of diversion denial. It's the "as along as I'm still around, I'm going to give my grandchildren the best lives I can . . . ." The implication is that climate change and our adaptive foot-dragging thereto may ultimately make those children's lives a misery. Also implicit in that view is the "luck out" scenario, that neither direct nuclear immolation nor nuclear winter will do the crime in the short term before biosphere destruction gets it shot as assassin. The amount of what I'd call tenuous-secondary-villain diversion denial seems significant.
It is quite depressing and dangerous that Mecklin and the Bulletin scientists are obligated to spew US war mongering propaganda as an essential element of their warnings. This is pure Cold War intimidation and a betrayal of the scientist's obligation to universal principles and truth.
And, BTW, the overwhelming majority of people who live in Crimea support Russian governance and reject the Fascists and corrupt Oligarchs who run Ukraine.
If the mushroom clouds have a silver lining, it will be that our little planet will at last rid itself of the nuclear warmongers, propagandists and the hateful monsters and fools who parrot them. Not much of a consolation, admittedly, but it is not nothing.
I'm convinced that the only thing that will get insouciant Americans off their couches and into the streets would be if the government re-institutes the Draft. Per Col. MacGregor the military is not coming close to reaching its enlistment targets and the active military is the smallest it's been for many years, maybe since before WWII. Those who can are getting out. My understanding is that feminists have won their court case, so young women would have to be drafted too. Would normie American parents, who have supported the war up to now, put up with their daughters being drafted and sent off to die for the megalomanic beggar Zelensky?
Perhaps influenced by a ruling class terrified by mobilized ideologically motivated students (e.g. Situationists 1968, Weather Underground, anti-Vietnam war protests, punk anti-consumerism, CND), the past 40 years have seen a coordinated subversion of mass education.
By the 1980s the elites had decided to hoard institutional credentials, reduce funding, devalue teachers, vocationalize learning, and jack up college fees; to exclude the masses and reorient public education to serve the needs of corporate consumerism; to train a population of passive consumers mesmerized by ephemeral popculture but incapable of independent critical thought
The end result is we've bred a generation of fuckwits with no understanding (or care) either that nuclear war equals unavoidable omnicide or that escalation to war comes in stages and it'll be too late to prevent the holocaust if we do nothing until the only Russian left to negotiate with is the Deadhand (https://www.wired.com/2009/09/mf-deadhand/).
There is another thing that must be said. The idea that negotiating to prevent war means consigning Ukrainians to the barbarity and horrors of war is illogical. That's what they're enduring NOW because of a refusal on the part of Zelenski, egged by the US powers and NATO, to engage in negotiations. (Many of the claims of atrocities are surely faked, but there is plenty of real horror, death, displacement--it's a WAR.) Anyone with real concern for Ukrainians (and Russians) should be speaking up for an end to this, which is likely to come either through negotiations--or Armageddon. People buy into this because, as Caitlin has mentioned so many times, they're subjected to a media barrage of fake news and distortion that ignores everything going on between Russia, Ukraine and the US prior to last February, and pretends that "Putin" (not Russia, since propaganda to justify war always demonizes the leader, personalizes it) is simply bent on conquest.
"As former Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it, humanity survived the Cuban Missile Crisis by "plain dumb luck".
There's no logical basis for the belief that we'll get lucky again."
Sure there is, we're way dumber now than we were 60 years ago, therefore our odds of encountering dumb luck must be increased as well, right?
The dialogue is tainted if not corrupted by ancient biases against Russia, no matter the situation. It's one thing to argue over a boundary: it's quite another to deliberately not consider a real existential threat to a country which is a world power that has contributed to our civilization's culture in music, philosophy and literature out of proportion to the size of its population. A country that has suffered more from Nazism than any other (John F.Kennedy, among many other witnesses) and might well have succumbed to it except for the extreme noble persistence and vision of its people. Don't ask such a country to bow to Nazism: you are asking the impossible.
Let us pretend that Russia were in fact guilty of everything it is accused of. It isn't, but whatever.
How did the world react to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968? Did NATO charge into WWIII? Did the Warsaw Pact afterwards invade neutral Austria, which was not then and is not now a NATO member?
JFK tries to de-escalate the Cold War in June 1963 with a magnificent speech...five months later, the CIA removes JFK.
Nixon brings in detente. A few months later, Watergate burglars, four of whom are CIA, begin the process to bring down the most popular president in American history. (Nixon won 49 states and beat his opponent by 18,000,000 votes.)
Trump signs 5 middle east peace treaties that haters never talk about. CIA and the deep state give Joe Biden 81,000,000 votes--most popular president ever!! (Whatever.)
Joe Mama then says he's running for reelection. Then his side, CNN, decides to take him out over the "document scandal." No one cares about documents, not when nukes are about to fly.
If you're an American, half of you think you live in a democracy. The other half are waking up that it's all fake, and the sociopaths would rather have their cronies in the military-industrial complex get rich, rather than get along with people.
Btw, in case you're wondering, I'm fairly right wing, mostly in the Ron Paul side of things. But I will side with anyone who wants to get at the truth, and is sick of all of the suppressions of our freedoms.
Western culture is mentally ill these days. We simply do not see things as they are.  The population needs to wake up soon or we could face disaster 
Those who have never experienced war are always the ones urging the sacrifice of others while they bask in the comfort of their cocoons. These might be the morons who experienced drills to hide under their desks in 1961 and now know how stupid that was or are they younger and missed the horrific films showing pigs and sheep being vaporized? Those in power appear to be so stupid or delusional that even the potential to vaporize us all is ignored.
At our peril we have corrupt dipshits running the world.
From my interview with the late David Brower in '78:
Brower: If the United States doesn't lead the world back from the nuclear brink to which it led it in the first place, then nuclear war will be inevitable. A nuclear war would reduce civilization to a few fragments of whatever capable cultures there were that were not dependent on high technology... if we don't defuse the nuclear threat to humanity, everything else is academic.
" . . . weird mental gymnastics to squirm and compartmentalize . . ." My observations of my generation (Boomers) tend to suggest the weirdest of those gymnastics, falling under the canopy of diversion denial. It's the "as along as I'm still around, I'm going to give my grandchildren the best lives I can . . . ." The implication is that climate change and our adaptive foot-dragging thereto may ultimately make those children's lives a misery. Also implicit in that view is the "luck out" scenario, that neither direct nuclear immolation nor nuclear winter will do the crime in the short term before biosphere destruction gets it shot as assassin. The amount of what I'd call tenuous-secondary-villain diversion denial seems significant.
Caitlin for president!!! 💓🙏
It is quite depressing and dangerous that Mecklin and the Bulletin scientists are obligated to spew US war mongering propaganda as an essential element of their warnings. This is pure Cold War intimidation and a betrayal of the scientist's obligation to universal principles and truth.
And, BTW, the overwhelming majority of people who live in Crimea support Russian governance and reject the Fascists and corrupt Oligarchs who run Ukraine.
Hardly anyone is thinking logically period.
If the mushroom clouds have a silver lining, it will be that our little planet will at last rid itself of the nuclear warmongers, propagandists and the hateful monsters and fools who parrot them. Not much of a consolation, admittedly, but it is not nothing.
I'm convinced that the only thing that will get insouciant Americans off their couches and into the streets would be if the government re-institutes the Draft. Per Col. MacGregor the military is not coming close to reaching its enlistment targets and the active military is the smallest it's been for many years, maybe since before WWII. Those who can are getting out. My understanding is that feminists have won their court case, so young women would have to be drafted too. Would normie American parents, who have supported the war up to now, put up with their daughters being drafted and sent off to die for the megalomanic beggar Zelensky?
Perhaps influenced by a ruling class terrified by mobilized ideologically motivated students (e.g. Situationists 1968, Weather Underground, anti-Vietnam war protests, punk anti-consumerism, CND), the past 40 years have seen a coordinated subversion of mass education.
By the 1980s the elites had decided to hoard institutional credentials, reduce funding, devalue teachers, vocationalize learning, and jack up college fees; to exclude the masses and reorient public education to serve the needs of corporate consumerism; to train a population of passive consumers mesmerized by ephemeral popculture but incapable of independent critical thought
The end result is we've bred a generation of fuckwits with no understanding (or care) either that nuclear war equals unavoidable omnicide or that escalation to war comes in stages and it'll be too late to prevent the holocaust if we do nothing until the only Russian left to negotiate with is the Deadhand (https://www.wired.com/2009/09/mf-deadhand/).