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April 2, 2023
Ukraine Open Thread 2023-79
Comments
Posted by: Featherless | Apr 3 2023 15:19 utc | 264
Wow. Leave some Kool Aid for the others. How on Earth did you wind up in this bar? And not read any of the extensive, high quality, non corporate media analyses or non western government statements from the past year? And how have you come to a conclusion comparable to a seven year old who has been forced to watch BBC news?
Zelensky has utterly ruined Ukraine with his belligerent warmongering and delusional refusal to negotiate. He’s banned all domestic opposition, created a military junta, created around 15 million refugees, lost 240,000 troops, lost territory larger than Switzerland and Austria combined and been totally incapable of controlling the fascist elements in his forces or in his society for that matter as they take to attacking old ladies while they pray.
I’d suggest you adjust your nom de plume to signify your lack of brains, not your lack of feathers.
Posted by: Lev Davidovich | Apr 3 2023 16:55 utc | 301
Posted by: Lev Davidovich | Apr 3 2023 16:55 utc | 302
Remain calm, now you know what the Morning TrollTeam Message was……
Posted by: SwissArmyMan | Apr 3 2023 16:59 utc | 302
You are forgetting that the natural processes over that first 500 million years will have sequestered all of the Carbon, which forecloses on the possibility of future Carbon-based life forms evolving.
Posted by: Dave | Apr 3 2023 16:18 utc | 295
Complete misunderstanding.
Complex life probably has only another 500 millions years, microbial will survive another billion or two. But it is not because all the Carbon will have been sequestered, it’s the opposite in fact.
The problem is that the Sun is getting brighter all the time — it is now 25% brighter than it was in the beginning. Earth would have been frozen solid if it wasn’t for a much stronger greenhouse effect early on (and indeed, it actually did nearly freeze over on several occasions when unfavorable continental layouts and various evolutionary even geologic events combined to reduce the GH effect significantly).
Carbon sequestration is what is keeping the planet from becoming like Venus. Thanks to active plate tectonics and the activity of life forms on the planet.
But there are limits — we were at 285 ppm CO2 pre-industrially, now pushed to over 400 ppm and still rising, but once it gets down to the 100s ppm, photosynthesis will become much more inefficient.
And eventually the Sun will become even brighter and there will be no way to compensate.
Posted by: shadowbanned | Apr 3 2023 17:20 utc | 303
shadowbanned | Apr 3 2023 17:20 utc | 304
Good explanation, appreciated. Now find a way to reduce human population from 8B to 500M, as you said is necessary, without needing a nuclear war or an overly strict fertility control regime that can’t be enforced. But remember, when people are living happily and like in paradise, what will they be up to? Make children.
Posted by: grunzt | Apr 3 2023 17:50 utc | 304
@127,128, I’ve been using duck duck go for years and I don’t ever receive those messages. Also, I usually ignore them anyway. You can always type in the MOA address without using a service.
Posted by: Immaculate deception | Apr 3 2023 17:58 utc | 305
@231,Giyane, You must not live in the US or else you would know just how unhinged these people are. There will be no peace while they are in control.
Posted by: Immaculate deception | Apr 3 2023 18:14 utc | 307
@juliania | Apr 3 2023 15:20 utc | 265
The reason that churches are collapsing has nothing to do with attacks, and everything to do with their increasing irrelevance, possibly supplemented by our understanding that induced psychosis is harmful to individuals and society, particularly the denigration of women and hostility to people who do not conform to the gender-norms and antiquated moral imperatives imposed by some religions. This is why the US, which had religion imposed on it in the 1950s by the government, motivated by business and religious leaders in opposition to “godless socialism” (Refer Kruse, Kevin M. (2015-04). One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. Basic Books) which resulted in the US becoming the most religious developed country on earth, with 87% of young adults claiming to be christian in 1991, a ratio that has now declined to less than 45% (Refer Davern, M., Bautista, R., Freese, J., Morgan, S. L., & Smith, T. W. (2022, March 7). General Social Survey, 2021.
As Joseph Cambell put it, “Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. There is a real danger, therefore, in the incongruity of focus that has brought the latest findings of technological research into the foreground of modem life, joining the world in a single community, while leaving the anthropological and psychological discoveries from which a commensurable moral system might have been developed in the learned publications where they first appeared. For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man’s place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And the world is now far too small, and men’s stake in sanity too great, for any more of those old games of Chosen Folk (whether of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or the Devil) by which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent still could talk. ” Joseph Cambell (1960), “The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology”, Secker Warburg, London. Accessed 2017-08-19.
Posted by: Hermit | Apr 3 2023 18:21 utc | 308
@g wiltek | Apr 3 2023 16:36 utc | 297
More like 31 to 33 million. The 28 million is an estimate based only on the known deaths, whereas we know, from modern population analysis based on surplus deaths that many unknown people also died.
Posted by: Hermit | Apr 3 2023 18:27 utc | 309
@rjb1.5 | Apr 3 2023 16:17 utc | 294
What grounds do you have for imagining that any human would survive a significant thermonuclear war?
Posted by: Hermit | Apr 3 2023 18:29 utc | 310
@rjb1.5 | Apr 3 2023 16:17 utc | 294
When the Brits decided to abandon half-a-century of negotiated advantages by abandoning the EU, they became fully dependent on trade with the US and those parts of the rest of the world, primarily ex colonies, where they have retained power and influence. The UK has, for the last century, pretended to itself that the US is its friend, to such an extent that they imagine it to be a fact. This requires them to ignore the insurmountable evidence that the US has no friends, only interests, along with the principal that a person in need is a person to be avoided.
Posted by: Hermit | Apr 3 2023 19:33 utc | 311
If the dinosaurs didn’t survive the meteor impact (or comparable catastrophe), we as tiny humans shouldn’t be too sure we could survive a nuclear war. Because once a critical amount of population reduction has occuured, total collapse may be very swift. It will not be a “new beginning” because the past always determines the cultural future. And if, say, a million people survive, how will they ever rebuild society, law and order, food production, shipping, medical care and all of that? It’s rather easy to write an apocalyptic novel about that situation.
Not only that.
Seeing a single human person – or an animal for that matter – being burned alive, should make us hang our head in shame that we even thought about inventing an atomic bomb.
Burning billions of living organisms alive ? How sick is that? Yet our dear Western leaders play with it. And we can be very thankful that a level-headed Putin isn’t replaced by some less intelligent hothead already – let the idiot trolls take note.
Posted by: Anthony | Apr 3 2023 19:39 utc | 312
On Intel Slava there recently was a video of a boot.
A boot in a trench.
Well there still was a foot in it.
You couldn’t see where the rest of the past human being was, good for you perhaps.
That’s not hysterics, that’s war.
That what our nice politicans in their expensive suits and shoes (no boots) have planned and made happen.
The Leopards will burn, a great grandson of a very great writer said. Deservedly so, but I still think of the corpses burning inside them. Ah, we politely pay taxes and bow our heads to our leaders…
Posted by: Anthony | Apr 3 2023 19:52 utc | 313
Ignoring global heating caused by anthropogenic climate change, the current rate of producing waste heat, will result in the oceans boiling within 400 years (Refer e.g. Hossenfelder, Sabine (2023). I recently learned that waste heat will boil the oceans in about 400 years.YouTube).
So even if we somehow managed to escape more urgent crises, like thermonuclear warfare, climate change and the impending potable water and phosphate catastrophes, and everpresent long term threats like mega volcanoes, local supernova, mega impacts and Harrington Events, it is probable tha, without the kind of effort we need, but failed to put into preventing AGW, that most extant species will be long extinct within 500 years, let alone 5 million.
Posted by: Hermit | Apr 3 2023 20:03 utc | 314
@Don Firineach | Apr 3 2023 15:58 utc | 282
The US was founded by oligarchs for oligarchs as a totalitarian oligarchy, masquerading as a constitutional republic while pretending to democracy. It has more known prisoners, on a per capita or total basis, than any previous totalitarian state in history, and most of its population lives in poverty. The oligarchy controls the economy, the media, the military-security system, the political parties and the elections. Refer my article, The USA is an oligarchy in the Greanville Post.
Posted by: Hermit | Apr 3 2023 20:12 utc | 315
@Hermit #317
About time for a revolution of the American serfs then – Who is Spartacus?
Posted by: Don Firineach | Apr 3 2023 20:27 utc | 316
@ Hermit
Just read it. Very neat piece of work – I recommend it.
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2021/01/25/the-usa-is-an-oligarchy/
Posted by: Don Firineach | Apr 3 2023 20:35 utc | 317
@Orange | Apr 3 2023 11:35 utc | 227
Try Yandex instead.
This is part of the US effort to prevent people living there from hearing anything but their propaganda. Refer e.g. Brown, Elizabeth Nolan (2023-03-29). Could the RESTRICT Act Criminalize the Use of VPNs? Plus: States consider mandatory anti-porn filters, tariffs create baby formula shortages (again), and more. Reason Magazine.
Posted by: Hermit | Apr 3 2023 20:42 utc | 318
Re. Finland. Nothing more to comment, other than as a part of Nato they just guaranteed to be the first to hit with nuclear Iskander. It doesn’t have to even begin in Finland, the Polish colonial ambitions in Ukraine can easily drag Finland to war… many people there seem to be cheering on this prospect. Many people seem to be bored to have a satisfactory life and want to live on “the edge”.
Just goes to say that sometimes you only value things you previously had, once the are taken away.
Posted by: unimperator | Apr 3 2023 20:53 utc | 319
@ Immaculate deception 309
Considering they are encased in $ 30 trillion of insanity – causing debt, I think they are doing quite well. Like an ancient Egyptian mummy, nobody really wants to unwrap the curse of such a disintegrated specimen of humanity. Leave well alone.
Posted by: Giyane | Apr 3 2023 23:14 utc | 320
@Lev Davidovich | Apr 3 2023 16:55 utc | 302
Could its name be an allusion to the Apteryx (kiwi), a “wingless bird with hairy feathers” and the last of his species, so already extinct, which featured in the widely syndicated BC comic strip. In which case Schlog “foam of the surf, with no visible means of support” would appear to be a much more apt name, given that this brainless and featherless, but noisy, creature’s risible assertions also appear to be utterly lacking in visible means of support.
Posted by: Hermit | Apr 4 2023 0:22 utc | 321
More than likely the borders will be where the fighting stops.
Posted by: Flashspur | Apr 4 2023 3:17 utc | 322
April 3, 2023: China announces ‘renaming’ of 11 places in Arunachal Pradesh, including one close to Itanagar
Beijing had previously released similar lists in 2017 and 2021, attempting to lay claim to Indian territory
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/china-releases-third-set-of-chinese-names-to-assert-its-claim-over-arunachal-pradesh/article66695225.ece
Great BRICS partner, China!
Posted by: Antonym | Apr 4 2023 4:20 utc | 324
# 324
Gazing into your crystal ball
You can predict all that?
Let future situations unfold like they always have.
In a random, absurd manner.
Posted by: Dingo | Apr 4 2023 5:26 utc | 325
My apologies if this has already been posted here, but I’ve only just spotted it:
EU may need to reintroduce tariffs on Ukrainian grain, PMs say
Oh, the irony..
I am increasingly convinced that the Russians wish to drag this out for as long as possible.
Posted by: Pat Bateman | Apr 5 2023 11:51 utc | 326