I call it "coaching from the couch." We all do it. It sounds like this:
Sports:
"Oh man, that coach is crazy. He shoulda sent his guy straight down the middle, with a bowl of ramen."
Movie:
"What was the writer thinking? They didn't have to kill everyone."
News:
"What does Elon think he is doing allowing Kim Kardashian to use his Starlink? It's gonna kill the bandwidth for everyone in the Ukraine!"
So it goes with everything and the conflict in the Ukraine is not exempt. Everyone has an opinion, 8 billion opinions. But the truth.... the real truth is hidden behind some old mayonnaise in the back of the fridge at Putin's place.
All we have are patterns of behavior which we can use to try and predict what's going to happen. Good luck. If Putin's most trusted advisors can't sit at the same end of the table with him, what makes anyone else think they can predict anything. Unless that's all just staged.
We have fake news we think is real, the real news we think is fake, social media being lovingly censored by our favorite villains at Twitter and Meta because, well, clearly god took off to another dimension and season five of Lucifer is over, so that must mean Meta and Twitter can play god now, right? What? Mad at the labeling? Everyone's hero is someone else's villain, so we can just get over that. We got Russians who think Putin is looking out for them, we've got Russians who think Putin only looks out for himself. There are Ukrainians fleeing for their lives, their are Ukrainians who want Putin to succeed. The truth is almost nobody knows anything and the ones that might know something are making sandwiches using different mayonnaise.
Wait, we do know something.... Trump is going to run in 2024. Isn't ANYONE a little curious why this conflict in Ukraine just happened to unfold right before Biden's State of the Union? Anyone? Beuller? ....Beuuuuller?
Whatever.
But let's just cut to the part everyone cares about. Thunderdome time. Are the nukes getting launched? Is this it for humanity? Is it an empty threat? Wait. . . let's define an "empty threat." An empty threat is when some tool comes at you and says, "I know Putin, and . . . and . . .I'll tell him to launch his nukes at you!"
That's empty. This threat... Putin made it, right? He's got the keys to the boom-booms and gauging by how well he's getting along with his advisors, I am willing to wager he doesn't have a two-key restriction. Enumerator - click. Denominator - click. Over 6,000 nuclear warheads.
Now, I am going to wager things could go either way. Therefore, to cover down on those two options, I am going to split this post into my message for Putin (the one) and my message for everybody else (the many).
Dear Putin,
I don't know you. I don't know Biden, either. For decades, I have seen the conflict between Russia and the United States as a "love-hate" relationship. We fight like enemies but we are not enemies. I am talking at the country-energy level. There's people, and then there's their government. Our people get along. Our governments do not.
I don't know your end goal. I am certainly not your judge. I am coaching from the couch here. I control one missile. It's made out of foam.
But whatever your goal is, there's a death toll associated with it. Like the US invading Iraq for WMDs that were never found - there was a death toll there, also. You got enough boom-boom juice to wreck the entire Earth - probably permanently. The other 7.9B of us, I think most of us like it here. Or at least prefer it to the alternative where it's NOT here.
Dear everyone else,
There's this thing called "preparedness." It's a cascading set of plans we put into place when things go wrong. Not much we can do if the planet gets erased, but take some time to prepare. Everything might turn out OK, and all your friends might call you paranoid. No problem. I can't cover preparedness in this post, it would go on for hundreds of pages but think about reading the "Family Preparedness Handbook" or some similar research if that's not available where you are.
All the best,
Ted
