I’m a child of the 1950s, and I grew up with those stupid duck-and-cover drills and a general feeling of fear. The threat was that a foreign power might decide to shut down the US for their advantage, and the fear would escalate with the amount of sabre-rattling we’d hear from elsewhere. We were also concerned about the Strangelove scenario — what if a madman got control of our nuclear arsenal?
Now we have the new nightmare: what if we had a conventional war with all sides shouting hatred AND a madman with a finger on the button? That’s where we’re at now: our president has staked his already massive ego on achieving a quick, easy victory over Iran, which isn’t going to happen. He’s gone from claiming that there will be a quick surgical strike to we’ve already won the war to begging for $200 billion to continue the war. The polls are plummeting, the public is finding him unpopular, and we know how much his ego hinges on his poll numbers. As the war worsens, as the oil stops flowing, as we eventually decide to back off because we can’t afford to continue, someone is going to be looking for a quick fix. And if that someone is remarkably stupid, launching a few tactical nukes will look increasingly attractive.
I’ve been checking out my desk. There’s room under there, I’d fit.
Nazi Germany had 85 million citizens. Iran has 91 millions. The allies had to put in a massive effort to defeat the Nazis. And then there was Imperial Japan. Anybody who thought Iran could easily be defeated in a month knows almost no history. About 3 million Americans fought in Europe to defeat Nazi Germany. This is going to drag on for years.
Hegseth is a bona fide fascist who celebrates violence and carries a tattooed cross and a slogan written with German fraktur font, a combination only used by far right groups.
His boss also worships violence, and is handicapped by a multitude of personality flaws that makes him impervious to good advice.
You need some spider news to cheer you up.
‘Last of Us’ Spider Pretends to Be a Zombie Fungus—and It’s Bizarrely Brilliant
And Nazi Germany did not have the perfect geographical situation to control the flow of several resources vital to the global economy, and indeed our ability to both keep the lights on and feed ourselves…
I grew up in the 50s/60s. Dumpster grew up in the 50s/60s, too, but oblivious to anything…except staying out of Vietnam. Obviously he doesn’t know any history. Not sure he knows anything. But, he doesn’t care. Some of those around him may know the difference between World War I and World War II but for various reasons aren’t willing to intervene in the madness…or they are openly participating in it. That’s mostly the money. The grift is strong in these a**holes.
I spend some of my time dealing with my anxieties. Not so much that we’re again the target of nukes, but rather on the instability of the economy. I’ve got one more month until I’m “Business Analyst, 1st Class, Retired.” So it’s Dumpster’s disastrous impact on the economy that keeps me up. I appreciate that’s kind of crass compared to getting blown up, but it’s much more real for me and my family at this point than warheads coming in.
BTW when I was a kid in the mid-50s we moved to a new neighborhood that was outside the city limits. Every now and then I would wake up in the middle of the night to sirens blaring, terrified that the nukes were about to arrive. I had seen “Duck and Cover” multiple times by then. Sometimes I would have terror dreams of nuclear holocaust complete with blaring air raid sirens. It was years later that I realized that the sirens were the volunteer fire department in the area summoning firefighters.
TACO Trump again in latest news as put here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-7/#comment-2296055
Of course, the worry is Netanyahu and the Samson Option – oh as well as Trump natch, a sociopathic bad loser who will go to the most extreme and murderous measures to NOT lose and is virulently racist and islamophobic becoz obvs. Sorry folks.
Grew up in the 1980’s here. Cold War. Yeah.
Used to walk around imagining what wuld happen if The Bomb was dropped all the time.
Nuclear apocalypse.= real fear that we have become far, far, far too complacent about these days.
Been to Hiroshima and its museum and the Genbakudomu too. No words suffice.
Yeah, me too.
We lived near a Polaris nuclear submarine base, an ICBM missile assembly plant, and a plutonium producing reactor complex. We knew if there was a nuclear war, we were going to get hit hard.
We had the duck and cover drills in school.
Plus, the follow up exercises.
We were supposed to go home after the bombs hit, and gather emergency supplies, food, and camping gear while our parents came home from work. Then we were supposed to drive up into the mountains and wait. Wait for what? Until civilization restarted I guess.
All the road out had “evacuation route” signs on them.
There was nothing in the instructions about what to do if our parents didn’t come home because they had been vaporized in a nuclear explosion.
I used to nag my parents about building a fallout shelter in the back yard.
They agreed it would be a good idea but never quite got around to making one.
All this was considered normal in the 1950s and 1960s.
In Sweden all major schools and other major state-owned buildings made from 1950s on had a fallout shelter (typically used for storage in peacetime).
This was considered normal. The mind deals with prolonged stress by shutting off.
-While Netanyahu may be an ordinary sociopathic extremist, the crowd around DJT are akin to people-shaped protoplasm. They have no guard rails and the internal bickering between different actors blur their judgment even more.
I grew up in the 1960s, and I remember fallout shelters and fear of The Bomb quite well, fears that eased a bit in the 1970s but then came roaring back when Reagan was elected in 1980.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, you guys were about to bomb the crap out of us Any Day Now, which is why (pretty much) every school in eastern .de had a bomb shelter in the basement, complete with steel doors, air filtration systems and all that.