Who Is Authorizing Biden's Nuclear Brinkmanship While The President's Brain Is Missing?

Caitlin Johnstone

Nov 20, 2024

505

161

106

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Ukraine has already begun using US-supplied long-range missiles in Russia, despite Putin’s warning that this exact sort of escalation will place NATO at war with Russia. This happens as Russia officially changes its nuclear doctrine to lower the threshold for when it’s permissible to use nuclear weapons in retaliation for attacks on its territory.

So far the attacks appear to have been mostly repelled without having done any significant damage.

This is frightening, but I have a hard time imagining that Russia makes any extreme moves against the US before Trump takes office. It seems like they’d want to wait and see what Trump does once he gets in before taking any horrifying risks like that. It is much more likely that Russia will instead respond to this escalation by escalating its attacks on Ukraine, like it normally does.

Who knows, though? If these attacks on Russia continue, there’s literally no limit to how bad this could get.

❖

It’s so fun how the Biden administration is using its lame duck months to skyrocket hostilities between nuclear superpowers and we don’t even know who’s really making these decisions because the president’s brain is cottage cheese.

❖

These escalations happen as Ukrainians begin moving into a majority consensus that it is time to seek peace. A new Gallup poll has found that a majority of Ukrainians throughout the country now support peace talks to end the war with Russia, with 52 percent favoring peace and 38 percent wanting to fight on.

As usual people are more opposed to continuing the war the closer they are to the frontline, with 63 percent of the respondents in eastern Ukraine supporting peace talks and only 27 percent wanting to continue fighting. The further you are from the effects of this horrific proxy war the more likely you are to support it; it’s just as true inside Ukraine’s borders as it is when you include all the western armchair warriors who want to continue fighting to the last Ukrainian.

“Listen to the Ukrainians,” we were told when all this started. Well, here they are. This proxy war has been waged in the name of defending Ukrainian democracy, and yet it continues to dangerously escalate against the will of the majority, at the direction of a president in Kyiv whose elected term ended months ago.

❖

Fighting a war with Russia always seems like a swell idea until you actually try it. The fact that the majority of Ukrainians now support ending the war is yet another example of this oft-repeated history lesson.

❖

The only way to view Trump as significantly worse than Biden is to take very little interest US foreign policy, and the only way to take so little interest in US foreign policy is to care very little about non-western lives.

❖

Every day I’m interacting with liberals who inadvertently reveal that they are only just now beginning to pay close attention to what’s happening in Gaza, now that they’ll be able to blame the genocide on someone else. I was just talking to a Democrat who informed me I’m going to miss Biden after hundreds of Palestinians begin starving to death in Gaza when Trump gets into office. I told him Palestinians are believed to be starving to death by the tens of thousands presently; we just don’t hear about it because indirect deaths like malnutrition aren’t part of the official daily death toll.

It’s so much worse than they realize because they spent more than a year looking the other way while it was happening, so now you’ll often see them warning that Trump is going to do things that Biden has been doing this entire time.

❖

People who say you get more conservative as you get older are just projecting their own personal shittiness onto everyone else. I get more radicalized by the year. It’s not even about older people having more wealth to protect; I’m making more money than ever before and I still want to obliterate capitalism.

You get more conservative and right wing as you get older if you fail to grow as you age. It just means you’ve been wasting your time on this planet and allowing yourself to become intellectually lazy and morally stagnant.

_______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.