Guest [censored] by David Middleton
Armageddon Update: ‘Doomsday Clock’ Stands at 2 Minutes to Midnight
By Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer | January 25, 2018
Updated at 11:52 a.m.
The “Doomsday Clock,” a hypothetical timepiece that measures humanity’s proximity to destruction by our own actions, hovers perilously close to midnight, the time that denotes global Armageddon.
Today (Jan. 25), the clock has crept even closer to the zero hour. This morning, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) — an organization of science and policy experts who assess human scientific advancement and risk — revealed the clock’s new “time,” with the hands now standing at 2 minutes to midnight.
The time has only ever been this close to midnight in 1953, following hydrogen bomb tests by both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., ushering in the era of the first nuclear arms race. In 2018, it reflects the breakdown of global efforts to reduce reliance on and risk of nuclear weapons; increased posturing and threats regarding the use of nuclear weapons; and an insufficient response worldwide to curb the impacts of climate change. [Apocalypse Now: The Gear You Need to Survive Doomsday]
It is not any one of those factors, but a combination of all of them — and the weakening of public faith in knowledgeable expert voices...
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Blah, blah, blah. Without copious expletives and the -tard word, I have no words. Well… maybe a few words…
We’re doomed because we have lost faith in the modern-day combination of Chicken Little and The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf… I think I’m good with that.
Imagine if some folks made a doomsday clock based on their reading of the Bible. Next imagine that they kept fiddling with the time based on the latest news.
That’s about how asinine these “scientists” look.
Meanwhile, the clock for when Social Security kicks the bucket really is ticking.
SS trust fund will be depleted by 2034. Of course, it contains only IOUs from the general tax fund.
Anyone who expects to be alive in 2034 and receiving a SS check better expect for a pittance of current promised value in that actual check value.
Financial advisor, Ric Edelman, has an idea to replace social security.
https://www.edelmanfinancial.com/pressroom/2017/personal-finance-expert-ric-edelman-reveals-solution-to-the-social-security-crisis
South River
The SS trust fund is a
meaningless stack of IOUs
(when there was a surplus — the money was
used for other government spending, and that
is logical — and replaced by IOUs (non-marketable
Treasury bonds).)
The extra complication
from the legal entity
of a trust fund
with no real money in it
is used to confuse people.
I read the SS and Medicare
annual reports
every year,
believe it or not.
SS is a pay as you go
senior citizen welfare program.
It went into cash flow
deficit spending
in 2010, and will
never have
a surplus again.
No president has made
any attempt to consider
the huge borrowing required
to fund SS, Medicare, and Medicaid
for retired baby boomers
… except for Reaagn,
who hiked SS taxes over 20 years
before a tax hike was needed
(for the retired babu boomers) !
Dedicated to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
I like this one from the Man in Black…
https://youtu.be/kwfNAAWYBbk
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qbRHY1l0vc&w=640&h=390]
Josh: Come up with a cartoon for this topic using a Cuckoo Clock. (I was going to add something else, but won’t.)
noun
Your have to admit though, the image of those somber faced beard scratchers moving the hands on that ridiculous clock like it actually meant anything is priceless.
Music appropriate for the old hippies whinging…. er, winding the ‘Disaster Crock’!
The Doors – When The Music’s Over
https://youtu.be/YkKRU1ajKFA
I would’ve thought “This Is The End” would be a better fit.
Clock in clock out and that rod still cannot wake up. Do something about it! Details on my page 🙂
I was a school boy in England and still remember 1962 very clearly. What is wrong with this people?
Correction – these people.
If any good at all comes from nuclear weapons it is that the leaders themselves are likely to perish in flames. In the old days they could start a war, and if they lost retire with their families in exile in luxury. Today they and their families will die along with everyone else, the irony is that among Western leaders Trump is one of the few to actually have a family.
Well, yes. Mutually Assured Destruction works in no small part because the leaders can’t escape from it. Yes, they have mountain fortress hidey-holes, but unless they are the ones to start it, they will never be able to get there in time.
The greatest contribution to peace is the US fracking industry which by its ingenuity is denying funding to our enemies. Here’s hoping that sanity breaks out in UK soon too.
Nigel
Here’s hoping . . . . . .
But, unhappily – given the timidity centred on Drowning Street – I am not holding my breath.
Auto – struggling for words!
That’s the sister site to space.com. I can’t believe the drivel they post now. The hype is over the top. I call it a sci-fi site.
Appeasers never learn until it is far too late, if at all.
Let’s face it, push comes to shove, we’re one Trump Casino and Resort in Pyongyang away from a peace agreement. Trump’s heart isn’t in the White House, he’s still a property developer.
And BTW, it’s not the hours you clock in, who cares how much a president plays golf or watches TV?
This Soros quote seems to sum up their reasoning, I’m surprised they can read a clock:
“Indeed, the United States is set on a course towards nuclear war by refusing to accept that [North] Korea has become a nuclear power,” Soros said. “This creates a strong incentive for North Korea to develop its nuclear capacity with all possible speed, which in turn may induce the United States to use its nuclear superiority pre-emptively, in effect to start a nuclear war to prevent a nuclear war, obviously a self-contradictory strategy.”
Soros seems to think the U.S. should accept a nuclear-armed North Korea, led by a murderous dictator.
That’s unacceptable. The U.S. is not going to put itself at the mercy of a person who has no mercy.
I sure am glad Trump is running the show instead of Soros. The U.S. will be a lot safer that way.
Back in the days of the Soviet Union, you could be pretty sure that the only way a nuclear war could start would be by accident. The Soviet and Chinese leaders weren’t crazy.
Unfortunately we have decided that letting crazy people get their hands on nukes is okee dokee.
‘The U.S. is not going to put itself at the mercy of a person who has no mercy.’
God forbid the Progressives regain control – because they will. Without a doubt. And pat themselves on the back for it.
And then they’ll looked shocked and surprised when half the continent is blown to hell.
And anyone left alive will spin it to absolve themselves of all blame.
Point totally missed in the Australian MSM. Happy Australia Day, while it lasts!
The situation is that we all run into our losing, some find it funny. I do not consider this to be funny, but I would quickly introduce geoengineering and cold fusion. It would be almost in no cost to introduce them.
The atomic scientists were probably the original group of self-important scientists who thought their discipline entitled them to special political insights denied to lesser mortals. Their spawn are today Manning the climate models, and are no more likely to be correct.
Good grief, not the Doomsday Crock again.
You’d think they’d have moved it closer when the Pentagon acknowledged that the Russian Ocean Multipurpose System Status-6 autonomous nuclear ‘torpedo’ does exist. The ability to launch a 100 megaton cobalt encased ‘torpedo’ capable of traversing the Pacific undetected would be a tad bit more concerning to them than Trump’s antics with the ‘Fat Frat Boy’. That system gives them a 1st strike weapon capable of devastating the major cities on the west coast and, via enhanced fall out from the cobalt sheathing, potentially destroying the American breadbasket.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/262309-pentagon-report-confirms-russian-development-massive-nuclear-torpedo.
So much for the Obama & Bush admins ‘unilateral disarmament’ attempts
Hollywood first, as usual. Are you saying that New York and DC are safe?
Ah, 1953… I remember it well. My dad used to serve dinner after church on Sunday and always put too much on our plates. He had a digestive system that could have engulfed a gray whale, but we were little kids and little kids don’t have adult appetites, so we couldn’t finish those huge portions. And he would yell at us that people were starving to death in China, thanks to Lysenkoism’s destruction of Chinese agriculture under Mao Tse-Tung, but he wouldn’t tell us why they were starving. So my brother and I would retort, ‘Then send it to them. We can’t eat all that food.’
So to deflate the arguments, my mother started filling the plates in the kitchen. That ended the charming tales of starvation in China.
I used to sit in the swing hung from the tulip tree and wonder what the world would be like in 50 years. It is both better and worse.
These people are just desperate for attention and grants money. They are irrelevant and they know it. It is baloney. Keep a close eye on them and the silly things they say, and make sure that they are shown to be completely wrong, as often as possible.
The Doomsday Clock suffers from Zeno’s Paradox. The alarmists only want to push it forward, never back. But since it cannot actually reach midnight, the increments get ever smaller along with the impact of the doom predictions.
Not to mention, all thermodynamic engines work best just below the point where they self destruct. Human progress depends on living at the very edge of chaos. If there was no doom, we would have to create it.
They do push it back though. Whenever a Democrat is elected president.
Clocks run by committee are not reliable.
They run forward, then back, forward, then back, forward, then back, forward, then back…
Depending on the personalities involved and the cliques.
waste of perfectly good idiots…
fwiw I got no problems using nukes, if using one accomplishes mission while saving our service members lives then release them to tactical (first then if needed strategic) units and have a go at it.
You really need a great diplomat to have the clock set back to a safer point…….like maybe Neville Chamberlin.
On the ideology-time continuum, time is relative. Think of it as a giant spring sitting on a rubber sheet.