The world is never peaceful. Peace is only found within oneself. America invaded Iraq, with no cause, and our populace are elevating the talk to WWIII. Thankfully we now have a President who is trying hard to avoid that. I don't think Putin will invade NATO because he doesn't want it, either, but he does want the old USSR back so will absorb non-NATO nations. We have little to say about him doing that.

Sanctions will fuck that land, trust me, it's just a matter of time. sadly not fast enough

Well, he doesn't have a wife or girlfriend. So I think he already is impotent!

@davknight He’d just have to kill them, too, so doesn’t bother.

I have suggested he take the Hitler/Himmler exit by cyanide on Putin's Twitter account. But I don't think he even looks at it .Therefore, it behooves one of his inner circle to arrange for him to sleep with the fishes, like Lucca Brazzi, or succomb from a splitting headache, like Leon Trotsky!

@Matias Debateable. Putin cannot launch a nuclear weapon - he can only give the command. Now imagine if you are one of the people receiving a command to condemn yourself, your family and your friends to nuclear war in order to satisfy a "death of glory" madman.

@Matias From 1939 thru 1941 Stalin had a pact with Hitler and the nazis and they moved into and divided up Poland. Britain and France had a pact to defend Poland against Germany no such deal existed against Russia so they only declared war on Germany. IMHO putin's Russia is doing a full on Stalin and I think putin was hoping for more support from China. It does rest with the people who would need to carry out a command to push the button and putin is getting rid of the ones who would not push the button and keeping the ones who would.

@silverotter11 Good call. I’m sure he’s disappointed by China’s silence but noting it’s only silence. They will remain open for business, and dealing with COVID rise, until the last minute. Xi would not have made such a promise if he were not willing to commit to it, however, so I expect Putin is not worried. Unless this goes NATO then the idea of nukes is mistaken, though. Putin will win in time and nuking them does him no good afterward.

The greatest number of lives are saved by playing dead. If stopping the death/destruction is the goal, now, then taking the resistance underground is Ukraine’s best option. I doubt the world is coming to their funeral but it will support resistance.

@Matias That's his underlings. I'm talking about the skilled technicians who carry out the actual launching.

@Matias I served my country in the army, for 4 years. But we were intelligent, thinking soldiers!

@Matias That's your opinion, not mine. In my regiment loyalty to each other and the ability to think clearly were paramount. ... and it showed in the gallantry medals we received.

@Matias In which case explain why Ukranian forces operate so successfully as small, thinking, well equipped units.
Surely it's not (gasp!) because they can think and outwit their opponents?

@Garban Yet two cities have recovered from such scorching. I agree with Diaco. Economic especially but one can do a lot of economic damage through cyber attacks. That leaves the people to use as the winning nation desires. Nukes leave nothing behind.

Certainly an arguable position. USSR lost but it’s hard to continue fighting a one-sided war. Maybe the end desire is simply to rekindle it? Think that’s what the invasion is about? That and taking control of those nuke plants?

Ukraine is not the problem it is a symptom of a much bigger problem. The supply cannot keep up with the increasing demand and people are starting to look for someone to blame. It's an age old phenomena. Now we get to add climate change to the mix.

@JackPedigo Heather Cox Richardson covered some of the issue in her facebook political chat today. I shared the link on fb.

@silverotter11 I saw that but it was for 3/21.
Just read something in the Atlantic and thought of you and your sister. I know you used up all your free links but I can put an article (have done it before) and send the document. I did copy the beginning of the article and will add it here. Basically, it's about why and how people get to a certain belief system. Basically, it's about a lack of basic resources for many and they think they can be privy to 'special' sources. Let me know if you want the whole article.

Stiff Neck

I’d run out of sympathy for COVID skeptics. Then I remembered my father. By Richard Russo

The call is one we’ve been expecting, so when it comes we’re jolted but not surprised. It’s from my wife’s sister, who lives in Arizona. She and her husband are both proudly unvaccinated— predictably enough, since their chief sources of information are Fox News and social media. ¬They’ve believed from the beginning that the coronavirus has been overblown by mainstream media, and that doctors are in on it because they somehow get paid more when they record the death of somebody who died in, say, a car accident as having been caused by COVID-19, though how exactly that would work, my relatives don’t explain. For them, the vaccines are not about public health so much as personal freedom. My body, my choice, and they’ve made theirs. And now, the reckoning. For a year and a half they’ve been lucky, but their luck has finally run out. Both have been infected by the virus. On the phone my sister-in-law can’t stop coughing, though she says her own case is relatively mild. Her husband, however, is being put on a ventilator; his chances of survival, according to his doctors, are roughly 50–50. She’s distraught, and the question she wants my wife to help her with isn’t “How could we have been so stupid?” but rather “Why is this happening?,” and she asks this in all sincerity. Th¬e obvious answer is one she can’t or won’t accept—in part, I suspect, because it naturally leads to another question that, even in this excruciating moment, she refuses to entertain: “What else have we been wrong about?”
I can’t listen. As my wife tries her best to console her sister, I have to leave the room. ¬e events of the past two years— political, cultural, epidemiological—have eroded my ability to sympathize with people who should damn well know better. I ought to be able to summon a more sympathetic response than “What on earth did you expect?” but often I just can’t. I am fed up and, I admit, no longer my best self. Somehow it has come to this. We are now a nation that has to be specifically warned not to drink bleach. Out of necessity, a feed-store owner in Nevada is refusing to sell ivermectin to anyone who can’t prove they own a horse. Through three different vaccines against the coronavirus have been proved safe and effective for use here in the United States, and though those vaccines are free, people like my wife’s sister and her husband will use up precious oxygen berating their doctors for refusing to treat them as a veterinarian would treat a barnyard animal suffering from a completely unrelated malady. Such lunacy makes common decency difficult to summon and act upon.

@JackPedigo The guy's sister-in-law does sound exactly like my twin. Too funny and SOOOOOOO sad. Thank you for the the copy paste but no need to read further on that BS. I did find out my sister's husband got vaccinated so that's something. At this point, I honestly think I'd feel far worse if he passed than if my sister did. John has no mean streak like my sister.
As to the link for Heather's video chat yesterday, did you get that one? It's on her FB page and worth a listen - about an hour long - it's different than her letter.

@silverotter11 No, I saw no video. I did read and respond to the letter from 3/21

@JackPedigo Just shared the video to your FB page.

@silverotter11 So what's wrong with your sister and how does he put up with his spouse?

@JackPedigo Love is blind and her mean streak really did not truly shine until around 2007 when our mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Like I said John is a very nice guy but he can not stand conflict so when her mean behavior was not something he wanted to see his solution was to go help our mom when my sister was not there.
Dysfunctional family behavior lives on, it really is a good thing she never had kids. Me too. Leaving when I was 20 did make it easier to see but did not necessarily make it easier to avoid - can take years to recognize the subtle stuff.

@silverotter11 Interesting, as I had a brother (he died two years ago) whose 2nd wife was from VietNam. Her parents left the family when she was young, she was raised by a brother, and, living in Saigon, the family had to endure constant barragment from the N. Vietnamese. She escaped to Hawaii but was seriously traumatized. When we met her she seemed nice and had a lot in common with my late partner (petite, dark haired, skinned immigrant) and they hit it off. But when we went to Vietnam we saw another side of her and her relationship with her two daughters. Parvin was constantly interceding in their fights and was actually more welcomed by her family than she was. Later she wrote us off and I asked my brother what was her problem. He told me she liked to burn bridges and tries to do so even with him - but he won't let her. Sound familiar?

@JackPedigo Oh Yeah!