Is this reckless? Alarming? Unnecessary? Am I jinxing the future by putting this in writing?
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder drives me to click the Google Chrome icon more often than I like. I search for a distraction—a WordPress comment, a Facebook notification, an email from a friend. I search for news. The pandemic turned me into a basket case, refreshing a graph several times a minute, watching for change. Click… breathe… breathe… breathe… click. Over and over. Anticipating the worst case scenario reduced to reflex.
I expect this headline, the nuclear bomb one, each time I open CNN. I’ve expected it from day-one. Why not? How is this different from other recent headlines? Seventy-seven years ago, the world determined use of nuclear weapons in war goes too far. The bombs dropped on Japan during World War Two killed 200,000 people—many vaporized, many poisoned, destined to die a slow death. The world agreed, indiscriminate, killing civilians simply to kill civilians. Unacceptable, on par with say, dropping bombs on refugees fleeing a country, or maybe on hundreds of children sheltered in a building. Everyone knows you don’t do that. Just like everyone knows you don’t use nukes.
The Other Stuff 
I was comments chatting with another blogger about the nukes a few weeks ago. He was kinda freaking out about it.
I reminded him that we’d both survived the 80s when things seemed to be much closer to the edge.
He started preparing a “fallout room” under his stairs. He finally burnt out on stress and joined me in “what the Hell can I personally DO about it” land. The answer is nothing, right?
I hope if it happens that none of us ever know.
I don’t see what kind of advantage anyone would gain from using nukes at this point. Things are very different now.
I’m sorry it’s stressing you out, Jeff. I image the OCD is something you’d love to be rid of.
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It’s not so much that I’m stressing out but that I’m obsessed with the certainty of the whole thing. I agree that using nukes makes no sense, but I feel like sooner or later, Putin won’t be able to see a reason to not use them. I felt no nuclear stress in the 80s. Too drunk? Maybe.
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Dear Jeff and Angie,
I concur with both of you. Speaking of Putin whom some would describe as “a small-spirited, petty bully– with nukes”, in my post entitled “We have Paleolithic Emotions; Medieval Institutions; and God-like Technology“, I have created and featured the following image:
This illustration has a resolution of 4038 by 2539 pixels and is titled “We have Paleolithic Emotions; Medieval Institutions; and God-like Technology with Nuclear Holocaust“.
Regarding Russia, you only need to substitute the lady in the foreground with an image of Putin, and perhaps change some or all of the medieval buildings to their Russian counterparts in order to depict “We have Putin, Russia and Nukes”.
As for the USA, you can do the same by replacing the lady with Trump or any other pro-nuclear agents.
The world ecological crisis and the threat of nuclear war aside, we are perhaps already accelerating inexorably towards some eventual calamities or runaway cataclysms, being well on track in facilitating a wholesale and terminal decline of Homo sapiens, a species unable to transcend its own fate, incapable of fathoming let alone solving the great riddle of life, and succumbing in due course to not merely a surfeit of wayward violence and aggressive expansion but also exiguous comprehension of its own existential mess, pernicious strain and destructive streak, never mind the spectres of an even deadlier pandemic (whether zoonotic or genetically engineered), industrial disaster, biochemical apocalypse and nuclear holocaust as well as all-out cyberwarfare, cyberterrorism and cyberattacks.
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle
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Yes, you’re right. Put another way, we’re effed. I like that image. It reminds me of a hallucinogenic dream in the midst of a five star hangover.
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Dear Jeff,
Hello! I am delighted to hear from you. Thank you for liking my comment submitted to your post entitled “Putin Detonates a Tactical Nuke“.
This “hallucinogenic” poster-size illustration (4038 by 2539 pixels) titled “We have Paleolithic Emotions; Medieval Institutions; and God-like Technology with Nuclear Holocaust” is actually one in a set of ten originated from my academically written and analytical post aptly entitled “We have Paleolithic Emotions; Medieval Institutions; and God-like Technology” published at
http://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2021/12/31/we-have-paleolithic-emotions-medieval-institutions-and-god-like-technology/#top
I welcome your input and feedback there. Given your own backgrounds, interests, insights and expertise, I am certainly very keen and curious about what you will make of my said post.
May you have a productive week doing or enjoying whatever that satisfies you the most!
Happy June to you soon!
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle
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Hi SoundEagle, I’ve been struggling over your essay for quite some time. I used to consider myself fairly bright. I’m not sure if I’m now ‘running with a sharper crowd’ or experiencing a decline in my brain power (I suspect the latter), but I’m recently encountering a lot of writing that is simply beyond my reading level. I’d like to read and comment on your piece, but I actually don’t understand it. It’s becoming a bit scary for me when this happens over and over. My apologies.
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Dear Jeff,
I understand your concerns in your reasoned reply. Thank you for visiting my post entitled “We have Paleolithic Emotions; Medieval Institutions; and God-like Technology“. I would be very grateful if you would kindly leave a comment there as a token of your visit. You are very welcome to copy and paste some or all of your previous reply as part of your forthcoming comment to be submitted to the comment section of the said post, to which your esteemed reply clearly pertains and also belongs. Please feel free to expand on your comment if you have additional matters to convey about the post and any salient aspects of its contents. Thank you in anticipation.
As a reward, I would like to invite you to peruse something altogether different. This post is so easy to read, light-hearted and whimsical that it will tickle all of the funny bones in your body, not to mention the rich buffet of bloopers and blunders featured vividly. The post is available at
https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2022/05/16/speech-error-anti-proverb-perverb-malapropism-eggcorn-yogi-isms-spoonerism-sreudian-flip/
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle
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Watch listen to the Kingston trio
They’re Rioting In Africa https://g.co/kgs/4vXCw5
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Exactly
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Oh, and thanks for dropping by, been a while.
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Shudder.
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Right
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All it takes is one maniac.
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And he is one. My father told me that in Russia, it takes 2 people to launch a missile but clearly, his military has no squeamishness about doing horrible things.
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I suspect he knows he could get away with what he’s doing to Ukraine, but using nukes would be a certain death warrant. Still possible, yes. A certainty? I don’t think so. But what do I know?
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I feel like one of the worst outcomes will be if they negotiate an end to the war and Russia walks away unpunished. I honestly don’t think dropping a small nuke should change much. The Russian military has been monstrous.
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The prospect terrifies me, to be honest. I can understand your fear and the need to be looking for news or stats every five minutes. I did the same with Covid at its worst and have now transferred this anxiety to the possibility of Putin dropping a nuke. The man (if you can call him that) is either insane or plain evil, or possibly both. Sorry you’re feeling so stressed, Jeff.
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Not so much stressed as obsessed. So much of this is swirling through my brain. I don’t understand how the military can carry out these crimes. Where do they find people willing to kill children? Dropping a nuke is a big line to cross, but so is the intentional slaughter of civilians, and they’ve done that countless times. If/when it happens, I won’t be surprised at all.
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It is a disturbing thought and I hope that whoever Putin tells to “push the red button” has more sense than him and doesn’t follow through with such a horrendous act of violence.
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The way the Russian military has embraced war crimes and murder, I don’t have much hope.
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