dasein and thermo-nuclear war?

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The window of opportunity for Russia is shortening as well. The cybernetic singularity coincides with a projected ICBM defense system’s successful development and global People also ask
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A new study sponsored by the American Physical Society concludes that U.S. systems for intercepting intercontinental ballistic missiles cannot be relied on to counter even a limited nuclear strike and are unlikely to achieve reliability within the next 15 years.Mar 1, 2022
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Does the US have a viable missile defense system?
Three shorter range tactical anti-ballistic missile systems are currently operational: the U.S. Army Patriot, U.S. Navy Aegis combat system/SM-2 missile, and the Israeli Arrow missile. In general short-range tactical ABMs cannot intercept ICBMs, even if within range (Arrow-3 can intercept ICBMs).”

So the war if conceivably could protract for as long as 15-20 years, nukes may become obsolete on a global scale as well.

The intelligence of covert operation is not factored into this equation, making the 15-20 year window of opportunity for Putin to go nuclear.

So instead of lightening up, given present trends in political , economic-and strategic forecasts being what they are within the differing think tank, cybernetic fail safe warning communities, is probably reversing course toward a critical mass/mess of conondrums, which has increasing uncertainty and insecurity at it’s core.

Then there is this from the UN chief :

“fears world headed for ‘wider war’ over Ukraine-Russia
UN chief Antonio Guterres warned nations Monday that he fears the likelihood of further escalation in the Russia-Ukraine conflict means the world is heading towards a “wider war.”
The secretary-general laid out his priorities for the year in a gloomy speech to the United Nations General Assembly that focused on Russia’s invasion, the climate crisis and extreme poverty.
“We have started 2023 staring down the barrel of a confluence of challenges unlike any in our lifetimes,” he told diplomats in New York.
Guterres noted that top scientists and security experts had moved the “Doomsday Clock” to just 90 seconds to midnight last month, the closest it has ever been to signaling the annihilation of humanity.
The secretary-general said he was taking it as a warning sign.
“We need to wake up – and get to work,” he implored, as he listed his urgent issues.
Top of the list was Russia’s war in Ukraine, which is approaching its one-year anniversary.
“The prospects for peace keep diminishing. The chances of further escalation and bloodshed keep growing,” he said.
“I fear the world is not sleepwalking into a wider war. I fear it is doing so with its eyes wide open.”
Guterres referenced other threats to peace, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Afghanistan, Myanmar, the Sahel and Haiti.
“If every country fulfilled its obligations under the (UN) Charter, the right to peace would be guaranteed,” he said,
He added it is “time to transform our approach to peace by recommitting to the Charter – putting human rights and dignity first, with prevention at the heart.”
More broadly, Guterres denounced a lack of “strategic vision” and a “bias” of political and business decision-makers towards the short term.
"The next poll. The next tactical political maneuver to cling to power. But also the next business cycle – or even the next day’s stock price.
“This near-term thinking is not only deeply irresponsible – it is immoral,” he added.
Stressing the need to act with future generations in mind, the secretary-general repeated his call for a “radical transformation” of global finance.”
“

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“KYIV, Sept 10 (Reuters) - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday that all-out war with neighbouring Russia was a possibility, and that he wanted to have a substantive meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Asked at the Yalta European Strategy (YES) summit if there could really be all out-war with Russia, which seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and backs pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s east, Zelenskiy said: “I think there can be.”

“It’s the worst thing that could happen, but unfortunately there is that possibility,” he added, speaking in Ukrainian.

Kyiv says the conflict in eastern Ukraine has killed 14,000 people since 2014.”

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‘Khodorkovsky warns West of war with China if Russia wins in Ukraine

LONDON — A Russian military victory in Ukraine will embolden Beijing and lead to war between the United States and China over Taiwan, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the exiled Russian tycoon and vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, warned in an interview ahead of remarks that he will deliver to global leaders at a major security and defense conference in Germany this weekend.
“A lost war in Ukraine is a steppingstone to war in the Asia Pacific,” Khodorkovsky said in the interview with The Washington Post in London, where he now lives. “You need to understand that when even a big guy is hit in the face, a number of other guys will start to doubt whether that guy is really that strong, and they will want to go for his teeth. … If the U.S. wants to go to war in Asia, then the most correct path to this is to show weakness in Ukraine as well.”
Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison in Russia before being pardoned by Putin in 2013, said stepping up Western military aid to Ukraine and securing its victory was the only way for the United States to avoid such a military conflict with China.
Khodorkovsky is due to speak this weekend at the Munich Security Conference, where he and two other opposition figures, the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, have been invited instead of official representatives of the Russian government.
Their invitations represent a clear rebuke of the Kremlin over Putin’s war in Ukraine. It is the first time that members of the opposition have been invited instead of Russian officials to the security conference, a high-profile event where Putin gave a landmark speech rejecting the West in 2007 and where Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is normally a familiar face.
Russia declined to participate in last year’s conference, which was held just before the start of its invasion, saying the event was “transforming into a transatlantic forum” and “losing its inclusiveness and objectivity.”
Christoph Heusgen, the security conference chair, has said official Russian representatives would not be invited as long as Putin “negates Ukraine’s right to exist.”
In the interview, Khodorkovsky, who was once Russia’s richest man as the main owner of the Yukos oil company, said that the West now has a choice among three paths in its strategy of support for Ukraine.
The current trajectory, despite recent agreements to supply advanced battle tanks, represents only incremental military support and is setting a path for a protracted and risk-filled war, Khodorkovsky said. In this situation, there are no guarantees that Ukraine can sustain its current level of casualties, while political disputes in the United States ahead of the 2024 presidential election could prompt lawmakers to cut off weapons supplies and economic aid.
“If the West considers that Ukraine has enough strength to continue to lose 350 to 500 people a day in killed and wounded, and if they can ensure a guaranteed and constant supply of weapons and ammunitions, then fine,” he said. “But this is a very big risk.” In the meantime, he said, Putin could seek to respond “asymmetrically” by destabilizing governments in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, as well as potentially in the West.’

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United States ready to defend Baltic allies, defense secretary says

VILNIUS (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the United States was ready to defend the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania if required, and will keep its military presence in the region.
“We are committed to Article 5, you can bet on that”, said Austin, referring to the requirement in the NATO Charter that each member of the alliance defend each other if they come under attack.”

AP

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“In a prepared speech, the Hungarian-born investor and founder of the Open Society Foundations advocacy network said that a Third World War must be “avoided at all costs.”
“That would be a big change for the better. It would bring huge relief to open societies and create tremendous problems for closed ones,” Soros said of a Russian defeat in Ukraine.
A Ukrainian victory in the war with Russia would result in the collapse of Moscow’s empire, billionaire fund manager George Soros told the Munich Security Conference on Thursday.“

La Times

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"In Biden’s Unannounced Visit to Kyiv, a Preview of an Increasingly Direct Contest With Putin" new york times

This revolves in particular around my argument regarding “dasein and thermo-nuclear war”.

It’s not just two nations with different historical, political and economic assessments of Ukraine. It is, in turn, the psychological profile of these two individual men.

What will prompt them as individuals perceiving the world around them existentially given the embodiment of dasein as I understand it, to go “too far”. To miscalculate how far the other will go and bring about the use of nuclear weapons?

Most focus on Putin, but, to me, “Sleepy Joe” is no less potentially dangerous here.

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Let’s not forget something Biggy, Biden is no re-publican Southern Bible thumper. His religion rises from black letter law, not from fanatic call to those belie in’ the exact letter of biblical verse.

Putin, is an absolute revisionist, thinking in images of past Soviet grandeur, subject to fits of messianic necessity. They are not exactly like apples and oranges, even with the dubious state of the hotline.

Besides, all fail safe tools are constantly re-evaluated(my guess). and this is an era where AI is playing more the role of conjuror of prophetic uncertainty than a Greek Oracle could ever be.

On one level it’s more a game of smoke and mirrors, including the ‘sleepy Joe act’, then the reality of a Trump presidency revival.

The identity of these two are more inclined to support comic effects to entertain troops of disenchanted voters, robbed of their green grass feeding grounds than anything else.

It’s the certain reliance on tech-efficiency translated into the respective war machines that seem to me, are of utmost concern, as well as falsifying viruses to invade them, in order to play ‘mistaken identity’

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tiktok.com/t/ZTRn6Noj4/

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On the ITV Evening News this evening… a young Russian soldier to the reporter: “We have no Starbucks, no Mc Donald’s, nothing…” he said, smilingly.

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Do you think his smile was cover for avoiding a political backlash, or a feeling against ‘ imperialistic’ expansion, or simply a message to fellow soldiers : not Russian and Ukrainian, who are busy making coffee out of their meager food supplies?

531

Good question… I wondered that too.

I’m rewatching it on the ITV+1 airing, to film it… so please await my edit. Most Western franchises have closed down their businesses in Russia… so full sanctions, not lack of choice.

532

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My bad… it was a civilian, not a soldier… but still he had smiled, when he spoke of the sanctions… the Russian soldiers followed after He. I was eating dinner, so not wholly focused on the details at the time.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy38V00K2SQ[/youtube]

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Thanks that clears up who smiled, but since there is viral spread between civilian and military realms, the question of who shifts to the why the smile factor.

Or do affects trump effects even in this post glasnost-troika land of arguable motives. Or are there any left to make a difference?

534

Um, yea… over and out!

Let web-search be your friend… ; )

535

Thanks for sidelining affect-effect to rhetoric,

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Putin tiktok.com/t/ZTRnGfrmR/

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[b]Feb 27 (Reuters) - Russia’s former president and an ally of President Vladimir Putin said in remarks published on Monday that the West’s continued supply of arms to Kyiv risked a global nuclear catastrophe, reiterating his threat of nuclear war over Ukraine.

Dmitry Medvedev’s apocalyptic rhetoric has been seen as an attempt to deter the U.S-led NATO military alliance and Kyiv’s Western allies from getting even more involved in the year-old war that has dealt Moscow setbacks on the battlefield.[/b]

A bluff?

Well, there’s one way to find out. Biden and Nato can continue to up the ante and provide Ukraine with whatever it finally takes to thump – humiliate – Putin.

Place your bets.

538

That’s gotta be a lookalike, no? :-s

…or can/does he sing?

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More weaponry? how about more peace-talks… or is there still no money in that nor the objective? That’s even if there is a war going on, that is. :icon-rolleyes:

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No, he is the real thing.

The Guardian - Back to homeThe Guardian: news website of the year

Golden photo ops … clockwise from top left, Steven Seagal, Leonardo DiCaprio, Gérard Depardieu and Mickey Rourke.

Putin’s Hollywood pals – the stars who snuggled up to the Russian dictator

From Leonardo DiCaprio to Steven Seagal, Tinseltown’s biggest names were once happy to hang out with the invading president. Are they all now cringing? Not entirely

It was one of those surreal moments when light entertainment mugs history. Vladimir Putin crooned the song Blueberry Hill at a children’s charity benefit in St Petersburg in 2010, as a crowd of celebrities – including Sharon Stone, Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, Goldie Hawn, Gérard Depardieu, Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci – clapped along like they were in kindergarten. When the politician reeled off the opening line – “I found my thrill” – thoughts of the Georgian invasion or the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko didn’t seem to be urgently popping into anyone’s head. Knowing what we know now, the spectacle plays more like Dr Evil’s rendition of Just the Two of Us – but far less funny. In 2022, after Putin’s ruthless assault on Ukraine, the guests present that day must feel very naive, perhaps even ashamed – but they are not the only western celebs who cosied up to Putin. In defence of this bunch, they had been booked to appear by Samuel Aroutiounian, a New Yorker who specialised in bringing Hollywood talent to Russia and later said that he had been unaware Putin would be appearing.

Now, as big names from Angelina Jolie to Sean Penn and Mark Ruffalo issue their support for besieged Ukraine, Hollywood must be cringing at the days when a public appearance with Putin wasn’t beyond the pale. In the mid-00s, he had merely nibbled at a few former Soviet provinces and seen off the odd dissident – events that didn’t trouble most Entertainment Weekly readers. Russia was an important emerging film market, and firmly on the celebrity junket circuit. So Jean-Claude Van Damme, in 2007, could happily buff the president’s macho credentials at a St Petersburg MMA event, while Leonardo DiCaprio purred at his fellow feline lover during a big-cat conservation summit in 2010.
His hegemony firmly established by then, Putin already had a domestic entertainment machine working hard in his favour. Channel One – descendant of the Soviet-era state TV station RTO – had produced Night Watch and Day Watch, two aspiring global blockbusters that put a manichaean gloss on the chaotic post-communist Russia that Putin had quelled in the early 21st century. “Dark means freedom and light means responsibility – and, in real life, Putin, for sure, is a light one,” said director Timur Bekmambetov at the time. “He is trying to fix everything, make everything organised. But it’s very bad for freedom.” Perhaps the succession of jingoistic military films the Russian cinema industry was also starting to churn out – which included 2005’s 9th Company, 2008’s Admiral and 2013’s Stalingrad – were a true bellwether of his actual allegiance.
But Putin – lambasted for his aggressions in Chechnya and Georgia, and with suspicions swirling around state agencies after the killings of Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya – was sorely in need of international legitimacy. Photo ops with big stars and the implied entry into the VIP area of global mass entertainment helped normalise his rogue state in the eyes of the world.
Picks his moments to challenge the leader … Oliver Stone during the making of The Putin Interviews. Photograph: Komandir/Courtesy of Showtime
Or so he assumed. By 2014, when Putin had annexed Crimea and by which time it was obvious he wasn’t going to surrender the leadership any time soon, Hollywood was starting to run shy. Talking to Time magazine, Blueberry Hill mastermind Aroutiounian said of the A-list: “They’re much more concerned about not killing their careers. [In the current political climate] they don’t know what will happen to them when they come back home. They will take a lot of heat.” With his inscrutable air, machiavellian geopolitical schemes and his critics’ habit of dying in outlandish assassinations, Putin was increasingly resembling a cartoonish arch-villain of the Blofeld ilk. His foreign military intelligence agency was even called GRU, like the Despicable Me baddie. But there remained a coterie of film-world refuseniks who were unbothered by his growing pariah status: not just Depardieu, but Mickey Rourke, Steven Seagal and director Oliver Stone. In fact, this set of leathery iconoclasts and libertarians seemed to actively embrace it.
Three of them fell into the useful-idiot camp. Depardieu took Russian citizenship, and its refreshing 13% flat tax rate, in 2013, after criticising the French government over its levying plans. On friendly terms with Putin, he called Russia “a great democracy” in an open letter. At a Latvian film festival in 2014, Depardieu was sufficiently high on great sentiments to declare Ukraine “part of Russia”. Cue tanks rolling across the border in 2022 and the sound of tarte à l’humble being scoffed: “I am against this fratricidal war,” he said. “I say, ‘Stop the weapons and negotiate.’”
Rourke, meanwhile, was unfazed by Putin’s Crimea incursion and judged him “a real gentleman” while buying a T-shirt with the leader’s face on it at a Moscow department store in 2014. “I met him a couple of times and he was a very cool regular guy, looked me right in the eye,” he told Sky News. It’s easy to assume this was some kind of edgelord publicity stunt from the one-time hellraiser, but he offered up his Russian girlfriend as the real reason: “It’s all about family. I don’t give a fuck about the politics. That’s not my department.”
Seagal doesn’t even try to play that get-out-of-jail-free card. Granted Russian citizenship in 2016, he had already called Putin’s Crimea annexation “very reasonable” and lauded the president as “one of the world’s greatest living leaders”. With his old pal now trashing the rest of Ukraine, he’s only dialled down his support one notch: “I look at Russia and Ukraine as one family and really believe it is an outside entity spending huge sums of money on propaganda to provoke the two countries to be at odds with each other,” he told Fox News.
Putin shakes hands with martial arts movie star Jean-Claude Van Damme as they watch a mixed fight event in St Petersburg in 2007. Photograph: Vladimir Rodionov/AFP/Getty Images
You can see why – in a kind of Botoxed 21st-century version of the Hollywood Ten – three over-the-hill blowhard actors might identify and want to shack up with the Russian president. Stone’s case is more complicated. He had already made documentaries about Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, so with his past proclivity for revolutionary figureheads, Putin was a logical next candidate. The director’s four-hour 2017 series, The Putin Interviews, undoubtedly indulges the leader but in doing so it draws him out in all his bland cynicism. It also picks its moments to challenge him: on Chechnya, on Russian “democracy”, on election interference.
It’s not hard to understand what Stone got out of discussing realpolitik with his country’s adversary. The bigger question is how Putin benefited from this arrangement. Could the series, in continually insisting on the equivalence between US and Russian expansionism, have been part of his broader disinformation strategy? To throw a tantalising bone to sympathetic liberal anti-imperialists to distract them from his real endeavour during the period: radicalising the US and Europe’s nativist right wing.
At least Stone’s dalliance with Putin gave us an opportunity to sit and watch the surface of the man – even if it didn’t quite get at what lay beyond. In one remarkable …….

© 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

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Can Putin sing his way out of this pickle.

…will Zolensky dance his way out, of it.

:laughing: