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The Doomsday Clock Is Reset: Closest To Midnight Since The 1950s (npr.org)
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has taken the unprecedented step of moving the Doomsday Clock ahead 30 seconds, taking the world to two-and-a-half-minute to midnight. The scientists said Thursday that several factors weighed heavily in their decision, particularly climate change denial by people in power -- they cited U.S. President Donald Trump -- and talk about more nuclear weapons. From a report on NPR: The setting is the closest the clock has come to midnight since 1953, when scientists moved it to two minutes from midnight after seeing both the U.S. and the Soviet Union test hydrogen bombs. It remained at that mark until 1960. "Make no mistake, this has been a difficult year," Rachel Bronson, executive director and publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said as the new setting was announced Thursday.
Make some arbitrary metric from an infinite series of divisible time units, politicize it, and call it "science".
And no, "advancing" the "clock" is hardly an unprecedented event.
And people call eschatology a dubious methodology.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
"and gave Iran a clear path to Nuclear weapons" - When you lie does your penis shrink accordingly to your nasal growth? Tiny hands, tiny alternative facts?
Let's face it : The Iran deal is the SINGLE factor reducing or delaying Tehran's procurement of nuclear weapons. If you can't face it, the facts?
Then you're perfect Trump material. Yes, it's all Obama's fault. Dipshit.
The risk of cozy relations with Russia leading to nuclear war is that if the US/NATO isn't being the 'leader of the free world' and protecting smaller nations, they will be more likely to arm themselves with nuclear weapons to protect themselves from Russia/whoever. Once you've armed every little country with nuclear arms, throw in some Global Warming related crop failures etc to crank tension, and you've got yourself a tinderbox.
iran HAD a clear path to nuke weapons thanx to W/fucking neo-cons.
What O and others did, was delay in hopes that down the road more intelligent ppl would take over on BOTH sides.
With the death in Iran and our election, it is obvious that we went the opposite direction. Still, it will be another 10 years before we have to be concerned about Iran (though they WILL build it).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The sanctions were working. And all that deal did was show how naïve people are when it comes to negotiating with tyrants. You think they'll all just want to sing kumbya with you if you hold out an olive branch. But snakes don't turn into soft cuddly bunnies just because you hold a carrot out. And to top it all off, we gave them $400M, followed by another $1.3B. Yeah, that's gonna help delay them.
Just another day in Paradise
And you don't think fucking over the next few generations by unrestrained CO2 emissions, thus creating vast costs for them to pay for, isn't passing on a debt?
How about this. We use market forces to fix the problem, slap a price on carbon, and then we start solving the problem now. Screw the carbon credits and all that nonsense. Charge $200 a ton for emissions across the board.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
He could, for example, put a large tax on remittances.
There are proposals to confiscate all remittances to Mexico. Nobody cares about screwing over illegals. But Mexican-Americans will file lawsuits left and right.
For anyone else, such extreme measures would be unthinkable. But this is Trump: Normal rules do not apply.
Or Mexico could declare war, deliberately lose with minimum causalities, and Trump will have no choice to annex Mexico into the United States of North America. That would take care of the existing border problem.
Also, the symbolic atomic clock is not just about nuclear annihilation. It also considers other threats to humanity as a whole, such as climate change. And the current US president and a great chunk of his cabinet are climate change deniers with the stated goal of pulling out of the internationally mediated Paris climate agrement.
I keep hearing that, and yet every year more and more people keep moving here to Phoenix because they don't like the cold, and we still haven't had any kind of movement out of even warmer areas that can't afford air conditioning.
I could see people moving away from coastal areas, but frankly that wouldn't be anything new at all; the coastlines have never actually been all that constant, we're just used to thinking they are because we see them remain relatively similar across enough generations that we never notice how much they actually change.
And truth be told, there are many former towns that are now under ocean water. It's only going to be harder to deal with it now because we've built massive infrastructures right on the sea line, where in the past it was small huts that were easy to move or just flat out ignore if they got flooded.