Should we be concerned when a Credentialed Media outlet runs an article like this?
To survive nuclear apocalypse, you may have to eat nothing but mushrooms, rats, and insects
An asteroid plummeted through Earth’s atmosphere and crashed into the sea floor about 66 million years ago, causing an explosion over 6,500 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima.
The impact sent clouds of debris and sulfur into Earth’s atmosphere, blocking the sun’s light and warmth for about two years. Photosynthesis ground to a halt, which meant no more plant growth. The surviving dinosaurs starved to extinction.
But fossil records show that fungi thrived in the aftermath.
According to science journalist and Vox editor Bryan Walsh, that makes mushrooms crucial for human survival if such an apocalyptic event were to occur in the future.
Walsh’s 2019 book “End Times” examines how catastrophic events, both natural and human-made, threaten our existence. In it, he points out that three types of potential catastrophes — asteroid impacts, supervolcano eruptions, and nuclear war — all have one thing in common: they could block the sunlight needed to feed plants.
It’s a book from 2019: why are we revisiting this right now, if not for worry that Biden and his European Comrades are going to get the world into a nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine?
In order to survive, he says, people would need to adopt sunlight-free agriculture — cultivating mushrooms, rats, and insects.
That sounds like fun, right?
The west must give Ukraine what it needs
The first anniversary of Russia’s assault on Ukraine has been greeted with soaring rhetoric. Notably, US president Joe Biden stated in Warsaw that “Our support for Ukraine will not waver, Nato will not be divided, and we will not tire. President Putin’s craven lust for land and power will fail. And the Ukrainian people’s love for their country will prevail.” These sentiments are admirable. But is the commitment genuine? Will they in fact do whatever is needed to ensure Ukraine’s survival as an independent democracy?
Even those who demand a negotiated settlement should realise by now that a necessary condition for this outcome is the realisation by Vladimir Putin that the west will not allow him to absorb Ukraine into his empire. His army’s failures over the past year may have caused him some doubts over his ability to do so. But still he believes that Russia will prevail. That is not even an unreasonable view, given the relative size of the principal adversaries and Putin’s control over the human and other resources of his country. The only force able to turn the tide for good is a combination of Ukrainian determination with western resources, both military and financial.
Please stop trying to get us into a world war.
And here’s the NY Times (you can also read it non-paywalled here)
The greatest blunder President Vladimir Putin may have made so far in Ukraine is giving the West the impression that Russia could lose the war. The early Russian strike on Kyiv stumbled and failed. The Russian behemoth seemed not nearly as formidable as it had been made out to be. The war suddenly appeared as a face-off between a mass of disenchanted Russian incompetents and supercharged, savvy Ukrainian patriots.
Such expectations naturally ratcheted up Ukrainian war aims. President Volodymyr Zelensky was once a member of the peace-deal camp in Ukraine. “Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to go for it,” he declared one month into the conflict. Now he calls for complete victory: the reconquering of every inch of Russian-occupied territory, including Crimea. Polls indicate that Ukrainians will settle for nothing less. As battles rage across Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine’s leaders and some of their Western backers are already dreaming of Nuremberg-style trials of Mr. Putin and his inner circle in Moscow.
The trouble is that Ukraine has only one surefire way of accomplishing this feat in the near term: direct NATO involvement in the war. Only the full, Desert Storm style of deployment of NATO and U.S. troops and weaponry could bring about a comprehensive Ukrainian victory in a short period of time. (Never mind that such a deployment would most likely shorten the odds of one of the grimmer prospects of the war: The more Russia loses, the more it is likely to resort to nuclear weapons.)
The article tries to take a more analytical, neutral stance, but, it does show that Biden and his Euro allies really do not know what they’re doing. The rest is an interesting read.
