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http://themostimportantnews.com/archives/2-very-ominous-events-that-are-going-to-happen-this-week

2 Very Ominous Events That Are Going To Happen This Week

You only practice for something if you think that there is a decent chance that it will actually happen.  This week, two “tests” will be conducted that sound rather ominous.  The first of these “tests” will happen in Russia on Tuesday.  Vladimir Putin has ordered the very first “nationwide nuclear attack exercise” in the entire history of his country, and that is making headlines all over the globe…

Russia will stage its first nationwide nuclear attack exercise across 11 time zones in preparation for potential nuclear war.

It is scheduled to take place on October 3 and will see Vladimir Putin’s regime present the West as a nuclear aggressor.

If Vladimir Putin was entirely convinced that there is zero chance that a nuclear war will happen, he would not have ordered these drills.

Obviously he believes that there is at least a remote possibility that the conflict in Ukraine could spark a nuclear war.

It is being reported that this exercise will assume “that martial law has been introduced in Russia” and that a nuclear attack by the western powers would destroy “up to 70% of Russian housing”…

The one-day nuclear attack exercise, which has only ever been done region by region, will include preparation for the destruction of up to 70% of Russian housing stock and life support facilities.

It will assume the scenario that martial law has been introduced in Russia and that is has gone through full mobilisation.

But that doesn’t mean that most of the Russian population would die during such an attack.

Russia has more than 16,000 nuclear shelters, and some of them can hold vast numbers of people.

Here in the United States, we have one.  It is in the Seattle area, and at the time it was built it could hold about 200 people…

In November 1962, only a month after the Cuban Missile Crisis, excavation of a shelter in Seattle began.

It was expected to be the first of several fallout shelters across the U.S., but ended up being the only one built in the country.

The May 15, 1962, Seattle Times identified the structure as “the nation’s first fallout shelter to be built into a freeway.”

And of course the U.S. is not likely to hold a “nationwide nuclear attack exercise” any time soon, because our leaders have fooled themselves into thinking that the Russians would never dare fire their missiles at us.

But just last week thousands of Russians were involved in extensive nuclear combat drills…

The combat drills took place in the Sverdlovsk region on Thursday and saw 3,000 Tagil Rocket Division soldiers being trained on the “highest degrees of combat readiness”, according to RadarOnline.com.

Video footage of the nuclear missile division’s combat drills was shown on the Russian defense ministry TV channel, Zvezda.

The clip shows thousands of soldiers training and Yars thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, feared throughout the world because of their massive 6,835-mile range.

If both sides continue to escalate matters in Ukraine, this is where things are eventually heading, and the Russians realize this.

Unfortunately, our leaders in the western world just don’t seem to get it.

If push comes to shove, the Russians will use their nuclear weapons.

In fact, many prominent voices inside Russia are already encouraging Vladimir Putin to go in that direction.  Here is just one example…

The rhetoric was raised by loyalist MP and army commander Lt-Gen Andrei Gurulev who demanded Putin be ready to use nuclear weapons.

‘Our strategic capability is our [nuclear triad],’ he said.

‘This is what is designed for the landmass of the United States of America. This is specifically for them.

‘And they know very well that after that there will be no United States of America. We 100% inflict an unacceptable defeat on the USA. They know that.’

If our leaders had any sense, they would be looking for a peaceful way out of this mess while it is still possible.

Because Ukraine is not going to defeat Russia, and the Russians are not going to back down.

Last week, it was being reported that Putin has decided to bring in another 130,000 conscripts…

Russian President Vladimir Putin is calling up 130,000 conscripts for military service this fall, increasing the age limit of conscripts from 27 to 30, according to a document posted on the Russian government website on Friday.

Russia’s lower house of parliament voted last July to raise the age for conscripts, and that legislation will take effect on January 1, 2024. Putin said earlier this month that he is bracing for a long war with Ukraine as Russia’s armed forces press on with their “special military operation” in Ukraine, now in its 20th month.

We are rapidly approaching a point of no return with Russia, and so we should sit down and talk while we still can.

The second ominous event that I wanted to discuss is the “Nationwide Emergency Alert Test” that will happen just one day after the Russians conduct their “”nationwide nuclear attack exercise”.  On Wednesday afternoon, televisions, radios and phones all over the entire country will suddenly come alive at 2:20 PM eastern time…

Get ready to not freak out. On Wednesday, Oct. 4 at 2:20 p.m. EDT, every TV, radio and cellphone in the United States should blare out the distinctive, jarring electronic warning tone of an emergency alert.

It’s a test – only a test.

Officially, the trial is called the Nationwide Emergency Alert Test. You know it’s a test and not an actual emergency because it’s accompanied by an explanation of the test.

Even if your phone is set to silent mode, you will still hear a very loud alarm…

The alerts include a series of loud alarms meant to attract attention. These will go off even if devices are set to silent mode. The test will last for about one minute on radio and television, and cellphones should receive the alert within a half-hour of the test starting.

The test system will broadcast a message reading, “THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.” A translated message will be delivered for those whose language is set to Spanish.

So does this mean that something really bad will happen on Wednesday?

Probably not.

They are telling us that it is just a test, and hopefully that is all it is.

But they are obviously practicing because they believe that there is a reason to do so.

We live at a time when one bad thing is going to happen after another.

This summer, Hawaii was devastated by wildfires, a massive tropical storm hit California, and Hurricane Idalia caused an enormous amount of damage in Florida.

Even if a major disaster does not occur this week, the truth is that it is just a matter of time before we get hammered with more major disasters.

But some disasters are avoidable.  Hopefully our leaders will pull us back from the brink of nuclear war with Russia, because that really would mean the end of our society as we know it today.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/01/contemplating-the-unimaginable-costs-of-a-nuclear-war/

Contemplating the Unimaginable Costs of a Nuclear War

If you are on the road to annihilation—get off.  

....The Proliferation of Violence

In these decades, the lack of deterrence of violence itself, even if not the nuclear version of it, has been profound. The Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped found, has made it all too clear that suffering from armed conflict extends far beyond the battlefield and generations into the future. If we are going to say something about “deterrence,” then we need to be clear on what we’re deterring. After all, thanks to just this century’s conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen, our project has estimated that 4.5-4.7 million people have died from bullets, bombs, improvised explosive devices, drone missiles, and other versions of war’s violence, as well as from disease, accidents, and various side effects and aftereffects of such conflicts (not to mention suicide).

In these years, a staggering number of people have had their lives forever changed by losing limbs or loved ones, suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic pain — and all such suffering from war-making doesn’t even take into account certain signature consequences of prolonged conflict like the deterioration of democracy or the loss of educational opportunities, not to speak of the mass displacement of populations. It’s true that, as conflicts go, the forever wars our country has fought since September 11, 2001, don’t faintly measure up to the direct slaughter and bloodshed of World War II. Still, when it comes to human suffering globally (the Holocaust aside), the scale of what we’ve witnessed in these years of our disastrous Global War on Terror (even before the Ukraine War began) should be considered stunning.

The question we at the Costs of War Project return to endlessly is: How do you measure the indirect effects of war? What kind of “security” — if any — has prevailed in the era following the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

A Very Small Margin of Error

Of all our preconceptions about nuclear weapons, what’s probably the most destructive is the unstated assumption that they are the sole alternative to a more constant state of conventional warfare. There are, of course, conflict-resolution options that don’t involve violence at all, including diplomacy, the use of targeted intelligence, and anti-poverty programs the likes of which the United Nations and its affiliated human rights and humanitarian organizations promote. Conventional warfare exacts staggering opportunity costs and only makes it harder for leaders to pursue such routes.

Yet the sole type of conflict that could foreclose all alternatives whatsoever is, of course, nuclear war. It could vaporize the very skeleton of civilization — infrastructure, communications, government, and of course people in staggering numbers — all potentially in a matter of minutes, or less time than it takes you to read this piece.

These days, however, we in the U.S. seldom talk about the ever-present possibility of nuclear annihilation by, for instance, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), warhead-bearing projectiles capable of traveling thousands of miles (of which the U.S. and Russia have about 400 each). To be sure, there are checkpoints in place that the leaders of each country would need to cross to launch such an attack, but an error, or even confusion, at any one of those checkpoints could lead to disaster.

Scenarios that would place us all on the brink of nuclear annihilation could involve an all-too-human mix of everyday mistakes, incompetence, and heightened emotions. Consider, for instance, the possibility that a simple accident might detonate a warhead before it even leaves the ground, killing untold numbers of people. For example, in 1980 at a Strategic Air Command base in Damascus, Arkansas, a technician tasked with maintaining nuclear-armed ICBMs (capable of producing an explosion several times the magnitude of both bombs that destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima) accidentally dropped an eight-pound socket from a socket wrench. It punctured one of those missiles, causing it to explode and blow its nuclear component out of the silo. Fortunately, that didn’t explode and so only a single worker there was killed. Had the attached warhead detonated, however, staggering numbers of people might have died, including then-Arkansas governor and first lady Bill and Hillary Clinton and then-Vice President Walter Mondale who, at the time, were about an hour’s drive away. 

According to Command and Control, a documentary director Robert Kenner made about that incident, as of 2016, somewhere between 32 and 1,000 near-misses of the same accidental nature had occurred. Consider it a matter of sheer luck that no warhead has ever detonated.

A different kind of near disaster occurred in November 1979, when a military officer accidentally lodged a realistic training tape indicating the launching of a major Soviet nuclear attack aimed at the U.S. in the military’s early warning system. President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had only minutes to decide what to do after being contacted about a massive Soviet missile attack. Luckily, his team soon learned that there was no such attack, but the false alarm led to at least 10 fighter jets taking off, the convening of a threat assessment conference involving all three command posts of the nuclear triad, and the launching of the president’s doomsday plane, all of which would have made it far too easy for us to proceed with a “retaliatory” strike.

And in yet another near-world-ending miss, in 1995, the U.S. and Norway launched an atmospheric testing rocket over Europe to study the northern lights. Russian officials mistook it for a U.S. Trident missile. Within minutes, Russian President Boris Yeltsin had for the first time ever activated that country’s “nuclear football” allowing him to communicate with his military leaders in the event of an attack. Even in that chaotic post-Soviet moment, however, Russia had a good enough early detection system for its officials to quickly realize that the country wasn’t under attack. Still, consider that another daunting moment near the brink.

Other near misses have involved everything from faulty computer chipsto high-altitude clouds to ailing Soviet leader Yuri Andropov’s desire to stoke Russian fears of an imminent American attack and so consolidate power. In most cases, a handful of vigilant people caught errors in defense systems and intervened in time. 

From my point of view, any one of those examples represents too high a risk to take when ordinary people like us could face the prospect of dying thanks to a nuclear attack or its fallout. Even a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, which have far smaller arsenals than the U.S., Russia, or China, could cause a planetary “nuclear winter” and a global famine that might wipe out — yes! — billions of us.

Given our costly lessons about how politicians can use misinformation or disinformation to rally people — think of George W. Bush wielding those Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” as a justification for his baseless invasion of that country! — it should come as no surprise that those of us psychically prepared to dehumanize an enemy state can easily be convinced to do so. Take, for example, the present conflict in Ukraine. When Ukrainian drones were sent over the Kremlin in the spring of 2023, a Christian apocalyptic group using the official-sounding name DEFCONWarningSystem alerted Twitter followers that the Russian leadership was readying a nuclear response. All too many of them took the message to heart and retweeted it, stoking rumors of imminent nuclear conflict (though fortunately no truly important people took it seriously).

Still, however nuclear rumors can spread, in or out of official circles, control over life and death on this planet remains in the hands of a powerful few who are no less likely to err than the rest of us in times of stress. In retrospect, it seems all too appropriate that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead scientist in the creation of the only nuclear bombs ever used in battle, paraphrased a passage from the Bhagavad Gita after watching the world’s first nuclear fireball explode during the Trinity test in New Mexico. “Now,” he said, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Mrs. Oppenheimer

As a military spouse, I’ve witnessed the tension and fear in those having to think about how many people would die in a nuclear war. I also understand why most of us, including those in the military, would rather not think about such possibilities at all. In fact, the limited information military spouses like me received included little more than brief warnings about what to do and where to take our children should such an attack ever take place. 

One thing is certain, though, and tells you all too much about our dangerous world: the reality of nuclear weapons and what they could do to us can’t be found in the antiseptic, highly technical picture painted by the Pentagon’s own Nuclear Matters Handbook 2020. It hardly mentions “death” at all. Quite the contrary, it focuses instead on how (of all the grim things to worry about) to maintain the “survivability” — yes, that’s the term used! — of our nuclear arsenal.

Growing up in a multi-ethnic community in New Jersey that included both robust Japanese-American and Jewish populations, I became accustomed to firsthand accounts of the Holocaust, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and even some of the horrors of the only time nuclear bombs were ever used. The specter of loss and suffering from nuclear war I absorbed then — of children vaporized, faces melted, and cancers growing beyond control among the survivors — will never leave me....

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/10/02/in-support-of-the-policy-of-deterrence/

In Support Of The Policy Of Deterrence

There’s been a lot of debate lately over the US strategy of surrounding nations like Russia and China with war machinery in order to deter them from aggressive actions. Some argue that since powerful nations tend to respond aggressively to the amassing of military threats on their borders, this policy actually provokes the very aggressions its proponents claim it prevents.

And to these people I say: hogwash. Only peaceful and harmonious responses can possibly be expected from policies of military encirclement.

That’s why I propose that the People’s Liberation Army should begin militarily encircling the continental United States with Chinese war machinery as quickly as possible, in order to deter future US aggression around the world.

The US has after all been the single most aggressive government on the world stage for generations now. It has repeatedly invaded and staged regime change operations against its neighbors in Latin America, to say nothing of its military aggressions and proxy warfare in nations like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. No other government has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression. No other government has been surrounding the planet with hundreds of military bases, deliberately targeting civilian populations with deadly force around the world via starvation sanctions, and working continuously to topple any government on earth which disobeys its dictates. Only the US has.

Therefore as a Super Serious Foreign Policy Pundit I recommend that China begin working with the leftist governments in Latin America which have a contentious relationship with Washington and establishing some military alliances of mutual defense, ideally including Russia and Iran in those alliances as well. Hopefully Mexico will allow China to construct missile systems and military bases along the US border, and the Chinese navy can continually patrol US coastlines to ensure that its aggressions remain fully contained.

Some of the people with whom I’ve shared this proposal objected that it would instantly provoke a war and result in a great increase in the military violence I aim to deter, including increasing the likelihood of nuclear war. So naturally I screamed at those people and called them appeasers and White House propagandists.

“You’re basically another Neville Chamberlain!” I shrieked. “If it had been up to you we’d have appeased Hitler and made deals with Nazi Germany! You American troll! You Biden puppet!”

These people just don’t understand how deterrence works. If history has shown us anything, it’s that amassing military threats on the borders of powerful nations only ever leads to peace and love, and has never caused anything bad to happen at any time ever.

I am a very reasonable person. Everyone should listen to me. Give me a big house and a senior fellowship at an influential think tank.

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https://brownstone.org/articles/the-white-houses-misinformation-pressure-campaign-was-unconstitutional/

The White House’s ‘Misinformation’ Pressure Campaign Was Unconstitutional  

I am one of five private plaintiffs in the landmark free speech case Missouri v. Biden. Earlier this month, the Fifth Circuit Court found that the government “engaged in a years-long pressure campaign designed to ensure that the censorship [on social media] aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints” and that “the platforms, in capitulation to state-sponsored pressure, changed their moderation policies.” This resulted in the censoring of constitutionally protected speech of hundreds of thousands of Americans, tens of millions of times. Based on this finding, the Fifth Circuit in part upheld an injunction on certain public officials put in place by a district court.

Even when the government appealed the injunction to the Fifth Circuit, its lawyers hardly disputed a single factual finding from the court’s ruling. A unanimous three-judge panel upheld the core findings that “several officials—namely the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and the FBI—likely coerced or significantly encouraged social-media platforms to moderate content, rendering those decisions state actions. In doing so, the officials likely violated the First Amendment.” The government again appealed the injunction to the Supreme Court, where we expect a ruling this week.

The government’s claim that the injunction limits public officials’ own speech is absurd misdirection. The government can say whatever it wants publicly; it just cannot stop other Americans from saying something else. Free speech matters not to ensure that every pariah can say whatever odious thing he or she chooses. Rather, free speech prevents the government from identifying every critic as a pariah whose speech must be shut down.

We are all harmed when our rulers silence criticism. Our government’s self-inflicted deafness prevented officials and their constituents from hearing viewpoints that should have had a meaningful impact on our policy decisions. Instead, government censorship resulted time and again in the silencing of scientifically informed criticisms of, for example, harmful COVID policies. This allowed misguided and divisive policies to persist far too long.

The scope of the current government censorship regime is historically unprecedented. “The present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” the district court judge explained in his ruling. He went on, “The evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario… The United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’.” The Fifth Circuit panel concurred: “The Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life.”

The government’s only attempted defense is that it was merely offering help to the platforms without jawboning them—”just your friendly neighborhood government agency.” But the law is clear that even “significant encouragement” to censor protected speech—not just overt threats or coercion—is unconstitutional. We discovered that social media companies frequently tried to push back against government demands, before finally caving to relentless pressure and threats. The evidence we presented from 20,000 pages of communications between government and social media demonstrated both significant encouragement and coercion—as when Rob Flaherty, White House director of digital strategy, berated executives at Facebook and Google, dropping F-bombs, launching tirades, and browbeating the companies into submission—until they removed even a parody account satirizing President Joe Biden.

But the more insidious and powerful censorship happens when government pressures companies to change their terms of service and modify their algorithms to control what information goes viral and what information disappears down the memory hole. With sophisticated deboosting, shadowbanning, search results prioritization, and so forth, citizens do not even realize they are being silenced, and viewers remain unaware that their feeds are carefully curated by the government. Novelist Walter Kirn compared this to mixing a record: turn the volume up on this idea (more cowbell) and turn the volume down on that idea (less snare drum). The goal is complete top-down information control online.

We were dismayed to discover the number of government agencies now engaged in censorship (at least a dozen) and the range of issues they targeted: the State Department censored criticism of our withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Ukraine War, the Treasury Department censored criticism of our monetary policy, the FBI (surprise!) ran point on several censorship ops, and even the Census Bureau got in on the game. Other targeted topics ranged from abortion and gender to election integrity and COVID policy.

Much of the state censorship grunt work is outsourced to a tightly integrated network of quasi-private (i.e., government funded) NGOs, universities, and government cutouts employing thousands of people working round the clock to flag posts for takedown. But constitutional jurisprudence is clear: the government cannot outsource to private entities actions that would be illegal for the government itself to do. If a government agent hires a hit man, he is not off the hook simply because he did not personally pull the trigger.

So-called “misinformation research” at places like the Stanford Internet Observatory is a slippery euphemism for censorship—not only because Facebook executives admitted to censoring “often true” but inconvenient information under government pressure, but because these entities function as laundering operations for government censorship.

Recent attempts to rebrand the work of the censorship-industrial complex with more anodyne euphemisms—”information integrity” or “civic participation online”—don’t change the fact that this is not disinterested academic research, but cooperation in state-sponsored suppression of constitutionally protected speech, always in favor of the government’s preferred narratives.

CISA, the government’s censorship switchboard and clearinghouse agency housed within the Department of Homeland Security, described its work as protecting our “cognitive infrastructure”—i.e., the thoughts inside your head—from bad ideas, such as the ones advanced in this article. (Not kidding: YouTube recently censored a video of our lawyers giving a talk on our censorship case.) These ideas aren’t throttled by government censors because they are untrue, but because they are unwelcome. There’s a more accurate term for the government’s takeover of our “cognitive infrastructure:” mind control. I don’t know a single American of any political persuasion who wants to be subjected to that.