NATO, Nuclear, or Both
Randy Newman had a funny song called Political Science. No airtime in most of USA.
No one likes us, I don't know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
And all around, even our old friends put us down
Let's drop the big one, see what happens
[Verse 2]
We give them money, but are they grateful?
No, they're spiteful and they're hateful
They don't respect us, so let's surprise them
We'll drop the big one and pulverize them
[Verse 3]
Asia's crowded, Europe's too old
Africa is far too hot, and Canada's too cold
And South America stole our name
Let's drop the big one, there'll be no one left to blame us
[Bridge]
We'll save Australia
Don't wanna hurt no kangaroos
We'll build an all-American amusement park there
They got surfing too!
[Verse 4]
Boom goes London, boom Paris
More room for you, and more room for me
And every city, the whole world 'round
Will just be another American town
Oh, how peaceful it'll be
We'll set everybody free
You wear a Japanese kimono, babe
There'll be Italian shoes for me
This news blurb does on the Pope consecrating Mary to the Ukraine and Russia. https://www.thecompassnews.org/2022/03/pope-to-consecrate-russia-ukraine-to-mary/
In this curious context 3 students from Krakow journeyed to greet the Ukrainian Faust and gift him an Occult book. Poland’s deputy prime minister and the head of the country’s ruling party has urged for a "peace mission" in Ukraine led by the NATO bloc, proposing an operation geared toward humanitarian aid but backed up by "armed forces."
Jarosław Kaczyński – deputy PM, leader of the Law and Justice Party and a top decision-maker in Warsaw – made the suggestion during a sit-down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev on Tuesday. "I think that it is necessary to have a peace mission – NATO, possibly some wider international structure – but a mission that will be able to defend itself, which will operate on Ukrainian territory," Kaczynski told reporters after the meeting, which was also attended by officials from fellow NATO states Slovenia and the Czech Republic.
With Ukrainian Faust Volodomyr Zelensky receiving a standing ovation Wednesday morning after his brief addressto Congress, you should know that over 1/3 of Americans polled by Pew Research support the US 'taking military action even if it risks a nuclear conflict with Russia.' (Zero Hedge)
The yield threshold for major optical and climatic consequences may be very low: only about 100megatons detonated over major urban centers can create average hemispheric smoke optical depths greater than 2 for weeks and, even in summer, subfreezing land temperatures for months. ... NuclearWinter Debate, Science, 235, 4791, (831-831), (1987 ...
The Catholic historian Christopher Dawson shared some of Marx’s concerns concern that in the bourgeois world the urbanized proletariat, toiling endlessly for the nouveau lords of capitalistic commerce, is cut off from the duties of distributive justice, which their aristocratic and feudal forbears either executed or at the very least praised with their lips. As Dawson explains, the bourgeois spirit “turns the peasant into a minder of machines and the yeoman into a shopkeeper, until ultimately rural life becomes impossible and the very face of nature is changed by the destruction of the countryside and the pollution of the earth and the air and the waters.” But Dawson’s displeasure with the bourgeois mind reaches beyond mere Marxist anxieties over the ascendancy of alienation, the gluttonous destruction of the earth, and the exploitation of many who inhabit it—substantive as these crises may sometimes be. For the Catholic historian, the highest spiritual matters are at stake: “there is a fundamental disharmony between bourgeois and Christian civilization and between the mind of the bourgeois and the mind of Christ.” (Front Porch Republic)
Berdyaev: Man is no longer master of the machines which he has invented. Our contemporary mechanized civilization is fatal to man’s inner life, for it destroys his integrity, disfigures his emotional life, makes him the instrument of inhuman processes, and takes away from him all possibility of contemplation by a rapid increase in the tempo of life.
Recent warnings from repentant social media entrepreneurs Chamath Palihapitiya and Sean Parker have done nothing but affirm Berdyaev’s observation, and the situation must now be far worse than he ever could have imagined. Such a dehumanized world, according to Berdyaev, “puts man under the sign of demonic possession and loss of balance.” As we have become all too aware, both capitalism and communism participate in this dehumanization, and no existent political structures offer an alternative. “The world threatens to become an organized and technicized chaos in which only the most terrible forms of idolatry and demon-worship can live.”
For Berdyaev, though, the rise of the technological colonization of man did not simply happen by accident. Rather, it is the result of the breakdown of culture and the failure of Christianity to transfigure society. Influenced by Solovyov’s conviction that Western Christianity, while it created a culture, did not create a Christian culture, whereas Eastern Christianity failed to create a culture at all, though its society was Christian, Berdyaev lays the blame at the feet of a Christianity mired in its many sins and more invested in preservation of the past than concern about the future. His critique is scathing:
We are witnessing a judgement not on history alone, but upon Christian humanity…. The task of creating a more just and humane social order has fallen into the hands of anti-Christians, rather than Christians themselves. The divine has been torn apart from the human. This is the basis of all judgement in the moral sphere, now being passed upon Christianity.
Christianity, furthermore, failed to save culture, because it failed to be Christian:
In this visible world there is no external unity in the Church; its œcumenicity is not completely actualized. Not only the division of the Churches and the multiplicity of Christian confessions but the very fact that there are non-Christian religions in the world at all, and that there is, besides, an anti-Christian world, proves that the Church is still in a merely potential state and that its actualization is still incomplete.
In addition, Christianity, for Berdyaev, is too enamored of its own past, thereby neglecting its true vocation:
In historical Christianity the prophetic element inherent in it has become enfeebled and this is why it ceases to play an active and leading role in history. We no longer look to anything but the past and to past illumination. But it is the future which needs lighting up.
And not only has the prophetic element become enfeebled, but, because it has, so has Christianity tout court:
Christianity in the course of its history has too often been submissive to brute facts; the leaders of the churches have too often adapted themselves to various political and social orders, and the judgement of the Church is only pronounced after the event. The result of this has been a loss of messianic consciousness and an exclusive turning towards the past.