He tried multiple times to pull out of Syria—Obama promised that there would never be boots on the ground in Syria—and Trump tried to avoid conflict with Russia. Now the so-called left tells us nukes are Safe & Effective.
The key thing is to stand in the middle of your living room (not clear why this is so much better than your bathtub, which is hailed as the safest place from hurricanes and tornadoes.)
That is some really creepy shit. So, let's say I'm a 24-year-old working my first job, in NYC. (For one thing, I sure as hell wouldn't be living in that building.) I see this and think, yeah, got it, kind of like a tornado, but make sure I throw away the radiation stuff. Why would I be nervous about a proxy war with an unpredictable nuclear power?
Maybe another PSA is in order, using the maps showing blast radius, etc. And some captured Red Army lists of targets. WHAT?!? NYC might be nuked?!?
One other reason I don't want nuclear war (apart from the mass death and destruction thing): in such a war, both coasts and the northern plains would be destroyed. Texas and New Mexico would be left. I lived in Texas over 20 years. Greg Abbott takes the worst attributes of Trump, Desantis, and Greene (with none of their positives) and makes them his own. Real big asshole. And he'd be left to be President.
As always, Bill, nailed it. From time to time lately I wonder if free speech is the most important. Then I remember war can get you killed a lot easier. Someone noted earlier about young people not paying attention to cable news anymore. I worry about young people not having any fucking clue about what nuclear war can do. Hell, they don't even remember the 80s movies like The Day After that were designed to scare us off nukes. People used to wonder why we didn't drop the Big One on Tokyo instead of Hiroshima. It was because we had already fire-bombed Tokyo to dust. At least Hiroshima was a mostly standing city. Only took a few seconds to do what had taken us months to do in Tokyo. And, of course, modern warheads DWARF the firepower of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs.
(I don't think Carter started any wars, did he? The man's got to get credit for something.)
Jimmy Carter was/is a good man, however like Trump (who's not) he was an outsider and though not totally locked out of most government policies like Trump, he was an ineffective President. Only those politicians tied into the Corrupt Establishment can truly make a difference (FDR?)
Carter IS responsible for allowing Zbigniew Brzeziński, the Pole who had a generational hatred of the Soviet Union/ Russia, to provoke the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The US, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan teamed to turn Afghanistan from a peaceful secular Muslim country (similar to Turkey) in the Soviet sphere of influence into a cradle of jihadism. This lead to the Taliban theocracy after foreign mujahideen brought in and trained by the CIA such as Osama bin Laden and the CIA's al Qaeda/ ISIS, setting Afghanistan back two hundred years (another huge victory for US "Democracy"!) And led to 9/11 and more resplendent War!
Neocon historians claim the small sacrifice of Afghanistan broke the Soviet Union. I think Mikhail Gorbachev (another good man, but more importantly, Clinton's drunken puppet Boris Yeltsin) destroyed the USSR. The neocons even cite Brzeziński's great success as a model for Ukraine, a model that has been in the works since before 2005 (the Orange Revolution). Putin is no Yeltsin, and there is no Gorbachev in the background, just more crazed militant hardliners similar to our collection of neocons from their ancestral Eastern European fiefdoms (who have constantly crushed each other for the last 500 years or more).
I agree, it seems that like with so much else, younger people have not gotten the message about thermonuclear weapons. I grew up in Halifax a city that was destroyed in explosion so big that it amounted to a small nuclear bomb. My dad lived through it. My grandmother told me the story of a man who was working on their barn roof, he was killed instantly. She saw another man with his eye hanging out. My aunt, on her way to school was wafted up and rolled head over heels down for a full block. She lived. Growing up there was still literal wreckage like twisted giant anchors strewn about, some of it miles from the explosion. Thousands died instantly.
That said, it was a nothing really, compared to the 100 megatonne Tsar Bomba. So I always had a visceral sense of what the bomb was and is. That, and like you said, there were so many great and terrifying films, like Failsafe, By Dawn's Early Light, and perhaps the most frightening, The Day After as you mentioned.
Yes, Lemay and McNamara had already completely destroyed almost every city in Japan over 100k people. Firebombing was a perfected art, entire cities could be destroyed overnight. The fact that America did that is one of the reasons Japan hesitated to surrender as they already knew that their cities could be dustified in a few hours.
Hiroshima was selected, not because they were a big producer of war matériel; but precisely because it had not been bombed. The war planners were very interested in seeing exactly what 'the gadget' would do to a city and its inhabitants. Lemay later openly stated, "we were acting as war criminals", and they were. No charges of course.
And since the topic today is the NYT lying and covering up, if you go back and read their bullshit, "no radiation", no pictures of incinerated children, nothing but rah rah, "WINNING!" lies, you will see that the NYT was always a willing propaganda organ, maybe not as bad as today, but bad.
Free speech is critical yes, and as we scrabble in the radioactive mud, trying to avoid the roving gangs of marauders in a futile search for an undamaged can of has beans, at least we will be able to talk freely! ;)
The other thing that most everyone misses is that even a conventional global war (which is impossible, it will nuclear FAST) will destroy civilisation and quickly. c.f. Ukraine.
And finally, it seems to have been erased from history as I cannot find it anywhere but here: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/hotaru-no-haka but IMO, "Grave on the Fireflies" is the most powerful anti-war film ever made. It's about the firebombings. My wife is Japanese. Her grandma, who I have met, was strafed in her rice paddy by an American plane. My wife will get back from Japan today, where she, inter alia, visited Hiroshima. All schoolchildren are taken there at some point. Japan was antiwar, they learned but have now forgotten those lessons. Today The Empire is pushing them to become more warlike and to abandon Article Nine of their constitution so they can help America fight China.
*Jimmy, as a young naval officer, did go into a melting down nuclear reactor at Chalk River, a few miles up the Ottawa river from here. They stopped it too. I cannot imagine any other POTUS doing that. My god. To his credit, Jimmy has tried to make up for his many sins since by doing good works.
We are in so much trouble. Where are the protests?
"Did you know, for example, that your chances of surviving an atom bomb attack are excellent?" - Groucho Marx
You're not insinuating that Groucho would lie are you?
Decades ago the US government came up with an ingenious "Duck & Cover" strategy that rivals the "lock yourself in Mom's basement" Covid strategy that was recently all the rage.
I also understand that you can find a barn & pile hay along its sides for even more protection.
Whatever happens we should all sleep soundly knowing that, in the event of a nuclear bitch slap, Joe Biden will be in a bunker somewhere spouting red, white & blue gibberish until the Ensure runs out.
If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it."" Scheer, a Los Angeles Times reporter and former Ramparts editor, got that assessment of American civil defense capabilities from T. K. Jones, current Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, and a former Boeing manager. What ""T.K."" meant was that, with a shovel, anyone can dig a fallout shelter--a simple hole in the ground with a door over the top and three feet of earth on top of that. ""It's the dirt that does it,"" he said.
I read that back in the 80s. It was very disheartening to say the least that freaks like the ones in the book are planning our doom on our dime. Fucking psychos.
I've been to a nuclear survival shelter near Ottawa called the Diefenbunker, a fancy name for a really big tomb. The thing that struck me is that they had a jail there for survivors who went insane.
I suppose that a post apocalyptic bomb shelter spree shooter would be mighty inconvenient.
My own post apocalypse goal is to be able to choreograph my own shadowing so my bomb created shadow is in the process of making that stupid gesture of surprise where both hands are mimicking an exploding head.
A little post modern self referential ironic humor for the surviving cockroaches.
This has always been my favorite nuclear madness site:
Call me crazy but I would say that going insane deep underground, knowing for sure that all of your friends, family, indeed, your nation, is dead, is the sane thing to do.
Are you talking about Reset Button Hillary? Because I don't think the Hillary that helped grease the skids on the Uranium One sale to Russia was going to be any sort of impediment to Putin.
More likely, if Hillary had won in 2016, we wouldn't be talking about Ukraine today, because it would all be over but for the Ukrainian crying years ago.
Trump's only sin was his refusal to fight Russia the way Hillary would have for sure.
And for that sin they tried to destroy him.
He tried multiple times to pull out of Syria—Obama promised that there would never be boots on the ground in Syria—and Trump tried to avoid conflict with Russia. Now the so-called left tells us nukes are Safe & Effective.
For me there is no greater issue, none, than WAR, in particular, global thermonuclear war.
It transcends everything.
Trump, almost alone in history, started no new wars.
"He has to be stopped!" - Hillary, the MIC and the Deep State
NYC and presumably all Blue States are prepared:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zznmdUJbeU8
The key thing is to stand in the middle of your living room (not clear why this is so much better than your bathtub, which is hailed as the safest place from hurricanes and tornadoes.)
That is some really creepy shit. So, let's say I'm a 24-year-old working my first job, in NYC. (For one thing, I sure as hell wouldn't be living in that building.) I see this and think, yeah, got it, kind of like a tornado, but make sure I throw away the radiation stuff. Why would I be nervous about a proxy war with an unpredictable nuclear power?
Maybe another PSA is in order, using the maps showing blast radius, etc. And some captured Red Army lists of targets. WHAT?!? NYC might be nuked?!?
One other reason I don't want nuclear war (apart from the mass death and destruction thing): in such a war, both coasts and the northern plains would be destroyed. Texas and New Mexico would be left. I lived in Texas over 20 years. Greg Abbott takes the worst attributes of Trump, Desantis, and Greene (with none of their positives) and makes them his own. Real big asshole. And he'd be left to be President.
Shower?
Like the water would be on.
Normalising Armageddon?
Just don't do it!
My god. What a creepy video.
I prep, but only for tornadoes, floods and the like. I don't want to 'survive' a nuclear war.
Where are the protests? Where is the fear?
As always, Bill, nailed it. From time to time lately I wonder if free speech is the most important. Then I remember war can get you killed a lot easier. Someone noted earlier about young people not paying attention to cable news anymore. I worry about young people not having any fucking clue about what nuclear war can do. Hell, they don't even remember the 80s movies like The Day After that were designed to scare us off nukes. People used to wonder why we didn't drop the Big One on Tokyo instead of Hiroshima. It was because we had already fire-bombed Tokyo to dust. At least Hiroshima was a mostly standing city. Only took a few seconds to do what had taken us months to do in Tokyo. And, of course, modern warheads DWARF the firepower of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs.
(I don't think Carter started any wars, did he? The man's got to get credit for something.)
Jimmy Carter was/is a good man, however like Trump (who's not) he was an outsider and though not totally locked out of most government policies like Trump, he was an ineffective President. Only those politicians tied into the Corrupt Establishment can truly make a difference (FDR?)
Carter IS responsible for allowing Zbigniew Brzeziński, the Pole who had a generational hatred of the Soviet Union/ Russia, to provoke the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The US, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan teamed to turn Afghanistan from a peaceful secular Muslim country (similar to Turkey) in the Soviet sphere of influence into a cradle of jihadism. This lead to the Taliban theocracy after foreign mujahideen brought in and trained by the CIA such as Osama bin Laden and the CIA's al Qaeda/ ISIS, setting Afghanistan back two hundred years (another huge victory for US "Democracy"!) And led to 9/11 and more resplendent War!
Neocon historians claim the small sacrifice of Afghanistan broke the Soviet Union. I think Mikhail Gorbachev (another good man, but more importantly, Clinton's drunken puppet Boris Yeltsin) destroyed the USSR. The neocons even cite Brzeziński's great success as a model for Ukraine, a model that has been in the works since before 2005 (the Orange Revolution). Putin is no Yeltsin, and there is no Gorbachev in the background, just more crazed militant hardliners similar to our collection of neocons from their ancestral Eastern European fiefdoms (who have constantly crushed each other for the last 500 years or more).
Thanks Jeff!
I agree, it seems that like with so much else, younger people have not gotten the message about thermonuclear weapons. I grew up in Halifax a city that was destroyed in explosion so big that it amounted to a small nuclear bomb. My dad lived through it. My grandmother told me the story of a man who was working on their barn roof, he was killed instantly. She saw another man with his eye hanging out. My aunt, on her way to school was wafted up and rolled head over heels down for a full block. She lived. Growing up there was still literal wreckage like twisted giant anchors strewn about, some of it miles from the explosion. Thousands died instantly.
That said, it was a nothing really, compared to the 100 megatonne Tsar Bomba. So I always had a visceral sense of what the bomb was and is. That, and like you said, there were so many great and terrifying films, like Failsafe, By Dawn's Early Light, and perhaps the most frightening, The Day After as you mentioned.
Yes, Lemay and McNamara had already completely destroyed almost every city in Japan over 100k people. Firebombing was a perfected art, entire cities could be destroyed overnight. The fact that America did that is one of the reasons Japan hesitated to surrender as they already knew that their cities could be dustified in a few hours.
Hiroshima was selected, not because they were a big producer of war matériel; but precisely because it had not been bombed. The war planners were very interested in seeing exactly what 'the gadget' would do to a city and its inhabitants. Lemay later openly stated, "we were acting as war criminals", and they were. No charges of course.
And since the topic today is the NYT lying and covering up, if you go back and read their bullshit, "no radiation", no pictures of incinerated children, nothing but rah rah, "WINNING!" lies, you will see that the NYT was always a willing propaganda organ, maybe not as bad as today, but bad.
As for *Jimmy, the great Scott Horton had this to say about him: https://youtu.be/liaV2wttpZU
Free speech is critical yes, and as we scrabble in the radioactive mud, trying to avoid the roving gangs of marauders in a futile search for an undamaged can of has beans, at least we will be able to talk freely! ;)
The other thing that most everyone misses is that even a conventional global war (which is impossible, it will nuclear FAST) will destroy civilisation and quickly. c.f. Ukraine.
And finally, it seems to have been erased from history as I cannot find it anywhere but here: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/hotaru-no-haka but IMO, "Grave on the Fireflies" is the most powerful anti-war film ever made. It's about the firebombings. My wife is Japanese. Her grandma, who I have met, was strafed in her rice paddy by an American plane. My wife will get back from Japan today, where she, inter alia, visited Hiroshima. All schoolchildren are taken there at some point. Japan was antiwar, they learned but have now forgotten those lessons. Today The Empire is pushing them to become more warlike and to abandon Article Nine of their constitution so they can help America fight China.
*Jimmy, as a young naval officer, did go into a melting down nuclear reactor at Chalk River, a few miles up the Ottawa river from here. They stopped it too. I cannot imagine any other POTUS doing that. My god. To his credit, Jimmy has tried to make up for his many sins since by doing good works.
We are in so much trouble. Where are the protests?
#bigwarcoming
"Did you know, for example, that your chances of surviving an atom bomb attack are excellent?" - Groucho Marx
You're not insinuating that Groucho would lie are you?
Decades ago the US government came up with an ingenious "Duck & Cover" strategy that rivals the "lock yourself in Mom's basement" Covid strategy that was recently all the rage.
I also understand that you can find a barn & pile hay along its sides for even more protection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2djuNBHwrg
Whatever happens we should all sleep soundly knowing that, in the event of a nuclear bitch slap, Joe Biden will be in a bunker somewhere spouting red, white & blue gibberish until the Ensure runs out.
Nothing else should matter.
"With enough shovels"
If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it."" Scheer, a Los Angeles Times reporter and former Ramparts editor, got that assessment of American civil defense capabilities from T. K. Jones, current Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, and a former Boeing manager. What ""T.K."" meant was that, with a shovel, anyone can dig a fallout shelter--a simple hole in the ground with a door over the top and three feet of earth on top of that. ""It's the dirt that does it,"" he said.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/931997
I read that back in the 80s. It was very disheartening to say the least that freaks like the ones in the book are planning our doom on our dime. Fucking psychos.
I did too. I was young enough then that I saw some point in "surviving".
Since I have learned that fighting over a scorched and irradiated can of beans at in the remnants of a supermarket is not really a life worth living.
They were shoveling something all right, it just wasn't dirt.
People, quite correctly, used to fear nuclear war.
Today, they seem to be insisting on it.
Where are the protests?
Yeah, Eric Weinstein said that we need to restart above ground nuclear testing because people seem to have forgotten how horrific those weapons are.
I tend to agree.
Although I think that Forrest Gump once said that "stupid is as stupid does," so maybe that covers it.
I am thinking that Putin may nuke say, Chicago, as a wake up call.
I only know that if he nukes East Palestine no one will give a shit.
If Putin was shooting the legs off Pals, then it would be an issue. As it is?
It was Trump who said he didn’t understand why we had nuclear weapons if we weren’t going to use them
I've been to a nuclear survival shelter near Ottawa called the Diefenbunker, a fancy name for a really big tomb. The thing that struck me is that they had a jail there for survivors who went insane.
#bigwarcoming
That is fucking priceless.
I suppose that a post apocalyptic bomb shelter spree shooter would be mighty inconvenient.
My own post apocalypse goal is to be able to choreograph my own shadowing so my bomb created shadow is in the process of making that stupid gesture of surprise where both hands are mimicking an exploding head.
A little post modern self referential ironic humor for the surviving cockroaches.
This has always been my favorite nuclear madness site:
http://conelrad.com/index.php
Freedom Is A Hammer
May It Forever Reign
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCJqPyNCick
The cafeteria has beach scene murals.
Bad ones.
It sounds like they might need bigger jail.
That's a great idea!
Call me crazy but I would say that going insane deep underground, knowing for sure that all of your friends, family, indeed, your nation, is dead, is the sane thing to do.
Another oldy but a goldy
https://youtu.be/vWLNPCPs1Zc?t=30
I forgot to add that another one of Trump's 'crimes in the eyes of the Permanent Government was his almost successful attempt to make peace with Kim.
The Plan, which they exercise every year on North Korea's border, is to invade and destroy Kim, and then put US bases right on the Chinese border.
Nucular is only safe and effective for warfare
Not so much for power generation
200 years ago, sure.
The way Hillary would have?
Are you talking about Reset Button Hillary? Because I don't think the Hillary that helped grease the skids on the Uranium One sale to Russia was going to be any sort of impediment to Putin.
More likely, if Hillary had won in 2016, we wouldn't be talking about Ukraine today, because it would all be over but for the Ukrainian crying years ago.
Propaganda is a hell of a drug.