The doomsday clock gets a big yawn.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientist moved the hands on their doomsday clock from 100 seconds to midnight to 90s seconds.
The globe yawned.
The doomsday clock dates back to 1947, when the bulletin, not without good reason, began to worry, originally, that the United States and the Soviet Union were going to blow the world to smithereens with atomic weapons. Originally, in 47, when the US had most of the globe's atomic weapons, it was put at seven minutes to midnight, i.e., complete oblivion.
Since that time, it's been set up and down, with the end of the Cold War setting it way back.
It's still mostly based on the threat of nuclear war, but at some point they began to include other threats, such as climate change.
This year they moved the hands up to 90 seconds, mostly based on the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, which poses next to no threat of going nuclear whatsoever.Other factors are in there, but that was the biggie.
M'eh.
When I was a kid in the 70s, when the hand was much further back on the clock, this was terrifying and people took it fairly seriously. They no longer do, and with good reason. We were probably closest to a real nuclear exchange in the 1950s, when the hand was moved up, and throughout the 1960s. The closest we ever came to a nuclear war was during the Cuban missile crisis, when a Soviet submarine commander and an underling got into an argument about launching their nuclear torpedoes and then violated protocol by surfacing and asking for instructions. Had they followed their standing orders, they would have nuked local vessels of the U.S. Navy.
Indeed, while we're no fans of the Soviet military, at least three times during the Cold War the Soviets held off on nuclear launches in spite of having reasonable beliefs that war was about to commences. That's really to their credit.
I don't mean to make light of our current problems, but the problem with this is that a lot of things have actually improved since 1947, and being this close to oblivion again and again isn't really credible, and nobody is listening to this anymore. Indeed, the best reaction was that of the Babylon Bee which had a headline that millions had died as they inadvertently set their clocks ahead to daylight savings time.
The Bulletin may want to reconsider how they approach this.
Speaking of things hard to take seriously:
Carlson insults Canadians specifically and everyone else's intelligence.
Tucker Carlson: “We're spending all this money to liberate Ukraine from the Russians, why are we not sending an armed force north to liberate Canada from Trudeau? And, I mean it.”
Speaking of clowns
We are on the edge of a spy scandal with major implications for how we understand the Trump administration, our national security, and ourselves.On 23 January, we learned that a former FBI special agent, Charles McGonigal, was arrested on charges involving taking money to serve foreign interests. One accusation is that in 2017 he took $225,000 from a foreign actor while in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. Another charge is that McGonigal took money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after McGonigal’s 2018 retirement from the FBI. Deripaska, a hugely wealthy metals tycoon close to the Kremlin, "Putin's favorite industrialist," was a figure in a Russian influence operation that McGonigal had investigated in 2016. Deripaska has been under American sanctions since 2018. Deripaska is also the former employer, and the creditor, of Trump's 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
That's interesting, but it doesn't prove anything, maybe.
But it also might support the thesis that Trump is closer to the Russian orbit, probably due to weaknesses in his character, than his fans are willing to concede in any fashion.
What we should all concede is this. Trump's 2016 campaign really was supported by the Russians. No, they weren't giving him cash, but they were doing what they could, and effectively, to get him elected.
At the time the claim, for those who care to remember that it was widely known it was occurring, was that they simply wanted to undermine faith in democracy. If that was the goal, they were enormously successful at it. Some have claimed, however, that they feared having Hilary Clinton in office and preferred a Boofador as President.
Others, however, have asserted they wanted their man in the Oval Office. And it's certainly possible. Trump had long connections with Russia. Maybe they had something on him. Or maybe they'd just played to his vanities so as to make him an unwitting asset.
There's certainly a Russian history for both. The Soviets were enormously successful in recruiting Western agents to their cause in all sorts of ways. Some people became spies or unwitting spies simply due to their intellectual allegiance, but others through being trapped in honey pots, or through being members of isolated disliked groups, such as well-educated British homosexual intellectuals. Trump can't be accused of being an intellectual, but he certainly has his personal faults.
One of them is narcissism, and that's a trait that just doesn't suddenly develop, but which can be facilitated and groomed. I suspect that might be it. Narcissist tend to love their loyal fans or sycophants, and Putin might fit into that category for strategic purposes.
They certainly act like it. As soon as Trump said he could end the war in 24 hours, they endorsed that absurdity.
But what about guys like Tucker Carlson.
This is all simply too weird not to raise questions.
The Pope says things that aren't really new, and aren't really shocking.
For years and years, one of the favorite things for the Press to do is to misreport Papal news. Nearly anything the Pope says is shocking to the press.
By the same token, nearly everything he says is misinterpreted by Protestants, who don't grasp what the Pope's actual role is, and any more by Catholics who are looking for a reason to be mad.
The AP just interviewed Pope Francis, and he said a bunch of things that were to be expected and frankly aren't, in some instances, even all that interesting.
One is that he said homosexuality shouldn't be illegal, but homosexual conduct is sinful.
This isn't news. This isn't even new. More specifically, he stated:
Being homosexual is not a crime. It's not a crime. Yes, it's a sin. Well, yes, but let's make the distinction first between sin and crime
Frankly, even that is more conservative than the regular Catholic thought on this. Most thoughtful Catholics would say that being a homosexual isn't sinful at all, but engaging in sex outside of marriage, and marriage can only occur between a man and a woman, is sinful.
Lots of stuff work like this. For Catholics, divorce and remarriage is sinful, but nobody proposes to criminalize it. Sex outside of marriage is sinful, but Catholics aren't proposing to re-criminalize it. You get the point.
The Pope also lamented on the resort to firearms for self-protection, going beyond that and becoming habitual with people. Frankly, that is a real risk and we see it going on here. It used to be the case in Wyoming that you had the common law defenses on the use of force, but then the legislature saw fit to codify it, and now its expanded to the point where if I declare myself threatened while car camping I can gun somebody down. The current state legislature has a bunch of bills right now that would pretty much make Tom Horn thing we'd gone nuts in this area.
Pope Francis lamented that the use of guns by civilians to defend themselves is becoming a “habit.”
What the Pope actually said was:
I say when you have to defend yourself, all that’s left is to have the elements to defend yourself. Another thing is how that need to defend oneself lengthens, lengthens, and becomes a habit. Instead of making the effort to help us live, we make the effort to help us kill.
Based on the current state of the law and legislature, I'd have to say that's right.
Bristol Palin's self mutilation
Bristol Palin has been on Twitter complaining about the after effects of her self mutilation. She stated:
Sharing wayyyyy tmi right now, but had my 9th breast reconstruction surgery last night – yes, NINTH all stemming from a botched breast reduction I had when I was 19 y/o,I’ve had previous surgeries trying to correct that initial damage of muscle tissue and terrible scaring. The whole situation has honestly made me very self-conscious my entire adult life. Praying that this is the last surgery needed.
Well, the first ones weren't needed.
I know very little about Bristol Palin other than that she's Sarah Palin's daughter and was in the news for a while for having a child while an underage (17) teen. She later married the father and they later divorced. I really don't particularly care about any of that.
At any rate, we now know that she had breast reduction surgery when she was 19.
Breast reduction surgery is the one breast related plastic surgery not involving cancer or injury that can make sense, as some women are so large in this area its painful. Maybe that was the case here. I don't recall her appearance that well, as I'm not a Palin fan, but I don't recall people routinely stating that she was gigantic. At any rate, the real cautionary tale here is just leave the mammaries alone unless there's a real medical necessity to do something.
That, moreover, goes for anything. Don't remove them for sport or transitory belief of "transitioning", and don't enhance them because you think they are too small. These things are the size they're supposed to be. Leave them alone.
Youthful mistakes
You'll note that I'm not criticizing Palin for her youthful motherhood, although that certainly isn't an ideal start in life. Teenage pregnancy followed by teenage breast reduction shows a whole string of bad decisions at work.
I note that as the Democrats in Congress have proposed a bill to reduce the voting age to 16.
We all know that's going nowhere, but as recent science has confirmed what the founders of the republic originally thought, that you really ought not to be making adult decisions until your early 20s, this is not only an idea whose time hasn't come. It's one whose time shouldn't come.
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