This. Peace cannot come unless the civilians on both sides are loudly and forcefully willing to die rather than kill civilians on the other side. The problems can only be solved on an individual level.

You would need to find a way to make food spontaneously emit microwaves so it loses energy and cools off. That probably involves altering the strength of one of the nuclear forces or something.

Yes! My thinking is that Riker stayed on the Enterprise as long as he did because Picard is the first male authority figure in his life that he can respect and learn from. Riker is hyper-competent, but he has no sort of relationship with his father, his first captain barely survived a mutiny while performing illegal experiments, he had no problem pushing back on the captain of the Hood doing dangerous stupid things, and he would rather step down than work for Jellico. Not to mention having to phaser a few admirals to death. Riker’s whole history is a search for a man he can trust, and he found that in Picard.

So what changed, that he finally gave that up and moved on?

Prigozhin was being politically displaced by the Ministry of Defense. His only hope was to displace the Ministry of Defense right back. Putin and the rest of the military didn’t bite, and Prigozhin’s position was strategically untenable. Maybe he could have taken Moscow, but everyone important had already left, and he couldn’t hold Moscow once he had it. So he accepted exile over a fight to his certain death, because he’s a mercenary and mercenaries don’t die for a cause.