Ever heard of Stanislav Petrov?

Probably not – but you may very well owe him your life.

Petrov, a former member of the Soviet military, didn't actually do anything – but that's precisely the point.   

In 1983, Petrov held a very important station: As lieutenant colonel, he was in charge of monitoring the Soviet Union's satellites over the United States, and watching for any sign of unauthorized military action.

This was the Cold War era, and suspicions were high – on September 1st, the Soviet Union had mistakenly shot down a Korean aircraft it had believed to be a military plane, killing 269 civilians, including an American Congressman. The Soviet Union believed that the United States might launch a missile attack at any moment, and that they would be forced to respond with their own arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Several weeks after the airplane disaster, on September 23rd, another officer called in sick, so Petrov was stuck working a double shift at a secret bunker, monitoring satellite activity, when "suddenly the screen in front of me turned bright red," Petrov told BBC News. "An alarm went off. It was piercing, loud enough to raise a dead man from his grave."

According to the system, the United States had launched five missiles, which were rapidly heading into Soviet territory. The U.S.S.R. was under attack.

All Petrov had to do was push the flashing red button on the desk in front of him, and the Soviets would retaliate with their own battery of missiles, launching a full-scale nuclear war.

 "For 15 seconds, we were in a state of shock," he told The Washington Post. "We needed to understand, what's next?"

Though the bunker atmosphere was chaotic, Petrov, who had trained as a scientist, took the time to analyze the data carefully before making his decision. He realized that, if the U.S. did attack, they would be unlikely to launch a mere five missiles at once. And when he studied the system's ground-based radar, he could see no evidence of oncoming missiles.

He still couldn't say for sure what was going on, but "I had a funny feeling in my gut," he told The Post. "I didn't want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it."

Luckily for all of us, he decided not to push that button. Later, his instincts were proven right – the malfunctioning system had given him a false alarm, and the U.S. had not deployed any missiles. Thanks to Petrov's cool head, nuclear war had been narrowly averted, and millions of lives were saved.

Unfortunately, Petrov didn't exactly receive a heroic reward from the Soviet military: Embarrassed by their own mistakes, and angry at Petrov for breaking military protocol, they forced him into early retirement with a pension of $200 a month. Petrov's brave act was kept secret from the outside world until the 1998 publication of a book by one of Petrov's fellow officers, who witnessed his courage on that terrifying night.

Since the book's publication, Petrov has been honored by the United Nations and presented with a World Citizen Award, and there has been talk of giving him the Nobel Prize. Still, the humble Russian scientist plays down his role in averting a nuclear crisis: "I was simply the right person in the right time, that was all," he said in the documentary, The Red Button and the Man Who Saved the World.

We've got to disagree with him. Sure, he may have done nothing – but in this case, it might just be the hardest thing to do.

Thing is, I don't do stuff that I say I do. I'm never happy. Things are never enough. I'm always damn bored of everything. But now, because of this whole breakup thing it's like everyone thinks I'm doing all this because I'm affected. I'm not. It's always the way things are, and people just don't realize that. So now I have to pretend to be happy so people don't get concerned over little things I've always done before. I should say that I'm fine with the way I am. It's not a happy existence, but I've pretty much come to terms with the fact that happiness is as ephemeral as life. And while I'm always questioning so many things, I'm living my life.

On that note, I really don't get what people fear about death. As humans, is death not inevitable? Yet people still cling to that senseless hope. Always wishing for longer lives, to live to see their grandchildren and whatnot. Why can't just people wish to be happy. I'm contradicting myself I know. But I think it's a much better option to live for the moment than live for some future that you have no idea of.

Decorations stimulate the skyline
Of the Empire in red
In the flicker of its light
A flash of death is bled
When in the earliest of hours
Don't tell my dad
The Dancer says
As she pirouettes off buildings
And takes her final breath

Silence is a weak and weary stranger
To the Empire in blue
A prayer lies in its vocals
But is lost within the gloom
Of the gunshot heard on Houston
Running down
Fifth Avenue
Dear Mother cries for justice
When it's never just a wound

Heaven, Heaven
Hold this lonely city
In your hands
Heaven, Heaven
Give this broken town
A second chance

I like this :

Objectively, watching Cops, you see just another animal beating upon another animal. One is the Prime Male Ape of Authority, the other, the weak invert of itself, created as a means to try to loose the slavery, often that animal just thinking to itself, that it is itself doing what is illegal, and not allotted to it.

Thus, do not look at any of this as triumphant, but merely as two and more exulted apes beating upon one another, and between the criminal and the authority criminal, there will be no abation, no stop nor stymie to one or the other; one feeds the other, and the other feeds the other, thus is good and evil, good and bad, thus is authoritarian and rebel.

Thus is the endless base moralism which we have called our existence, which feed from one another, and cause the other to keep existing in mutuality and co-funding, whenso truly neither exist, especially in such dichotomy, though good does exist, apart of the evil and bad, but not so morally as we have said, and that pain, as what evil and bad are corely, allow good to flounder and flourish gargantuanly.

There is nothing just in this good and evil, illegal and legal, good and bad, authority and criminal, there is nothing grand in this, there is only oppression in this. And I am neither of those; I am just a man, past the game, staring at the source, which we are obfuscated so from, so far, and away; but thus, being in the actor guise of a mere twenty-one year-old, it appears as if I am just but the rebel to them, but it is not so.

I call being as individuated as I am, that I should be above such surrendered habeas corpus as the predilection of presuming me to be doing illegalities, when in fact, all is done so as that I may grow, and not be as vacuous and dead alive zombie as so many, who are. Thus is to understand, I have just said, of being beyond good and evil, and truncating and having only Good, and not fearing looking into what is presumed evil, to see angel.

Every bit of unhappiness in my life, is rooted in ego.

Every bit of ego I possess, is rooted in delusion.

Every bit of delusion I suffer from, is rooted in laziness.

In a 24-hour period, I've managed to feel extremely uncomfortable in a restaurant that sells slabs of meat that cost more than most of the clothes I can assemble into a reasonable outfit; discovered an abnormality in the plumbing of my bathroom that makes the pipes in our house roar when I flush my bathroom toilet; made friends with the floozy, tail-less cat that we suspect almost put our own cat's eye out; and had my hair dyed and styled till I resemble a certain Edward Cullen by a barely sane Twilighter hairdresser. Ugh.

The Angel says don't
The Devil says yes
He is begging me
It's the easiest choice, he says.
I know it is.
It's the easiest for me.
The Angel says no,
Asks me to see it from anothers view.
My Family, my friends.
The Devil argues and says
It will be easier for them too.
Be shot of you
All your problems.
The Angel begs, her face fallen in sadness
The Devil twisted in to the same face which has haunted my nights for years.
The Devil is hopping from one leg to another in excitment knowing he is winning.
The Angel, face in her hands knows she is clutching at straws.
Who do I decide?
The Angel, honest, but marred by her happiness to see my pain?
Or the Devil, who knows that by ending this will end my pain.
I miss those days,
Those that lasted forever,
The ones where you didn't want to end.
I miss the days where I didn't will for it to end as it is another closer to my death.
The days when the sun shone
And I appreciated their beauty.
The days when the blue sky seemed to last forever.
Now I only see it, not appreciate it, and only think of Heaven above the sky.
I'm tired of thinking how'd it do it.
I want to smell the spring,
I want to appriciate the beauty of a butterflies flight.
I want to believe you when you say you love me.
Who do I chose?
The Angel now crying,
or
The Devil who's dancing?

force of motion. the force required for motion to occur. motivation. desire. want. need. the need to be wanted. the want to be needed. the beat of life in so many keytaps. recurring themes. signs and portents that matter to you an nobody else. your thoughts mangled in the careless hands of the ignorant. who can fault them? not you. not you. most certainly not you with your complexes. comprehension that cannot be taught only pushed towards. 'i told you so' not a phrase you let fly because you'd like to spare them the humility. and yet, humility is one of the more rewarding (and sometimes one of the rather more painful) of lifes' lessons. a lesson you deprive them of by withholding rebuke. ah, well.

In today's very evil world, at a time when one cannot trust what one sees, all must read this book written 500 years ago.

It strips politics of the speeches and images and tells you what really happens.

The wisdom, including how evil some of the content and advise printed within its pages, can only be classified as eye-opening.