Guest “Let’s run out the clock!” by David Middleton
It’s amazing that these clowns didn’t explicitly blame this on President Trump:
Closer than ever: It is now 89 seconds to midnight
In 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe. Trends that have deeply concerned the Science and Security Board continued, and despite unmistakable signs of danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed to change course. Consequently, we now move the Doomsday Clock from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been to catastrophe.
[…]
In regard to nuclear risk, the war in Ukraine, now in its third year, looms over the world; the conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation. Conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral out of control into a wider war without warning.
[…]
The impacts of climate change increased in the last year as myriad indicators, including sea-level rise and global surface temperature, surpassed previous records.
[…]
In the biological arena, emerging and re-emerging diseases continue to threaten the economy, society, and security of the world. The off-season appearance and in-season continuance of highly pathogenic avian influenza…
[…]
An array of other disruptive technologies advanced last year in ways that make the world more dangerous. Systems that incorporate artificial intelligence…
[…]
The dangers we have just listed are greatly exacerbated by a potent threat multiplier: the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood.
[…]
Seven paragraphs full of “misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories” followed by a stern warning about spreading “misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories”… I couldn’t make this sort of schist up if I was trying.
Nuclear Risk
[T}he conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation…
That risk left the White House on January 20, 2025, right after preemptively pardoning his entire crime family.
Climate Change
Sea-level rise and global surface temperature, surpassed previous records…
According to NASA sea level has risen by 100.9 mm since 1993. That’s almost four whole inches!!! Enough to swamp four quarters or a baseball card or even a beer can!
Sea level actually receded a bit since last June…
2024 was the warmest year in the satellite era…
2024 beat the previous record by a whopping 0.4 °C. Let’s apply some scale and context::
It’s currently about 1.4 °C warmer than when “The Ice Age Cometh“…
If not for the warming allegedly caused by capitalism, it would still be just as cold now as it was in March 1975:
Seems kind of mild compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis or Soviet tanks rolling into Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.
Pandemics and Skynet and Free Speech! Oh My!
The off-season appearance and in-season continuance of highly pathogenic avian influenza…
The price of eggs sucks! But… 89 seconds to Doomsday? Not!
Systems that incorporate artificial intelligence…
AI is a long way from Skynet I Googled my favorite garbled lyric from the Toto song Africa: “There’s nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do.” The Google AI confirmed my garbled lyric:
The actual lyric is, “There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do.” Now I know how Captain Kirk was able to short circuit androids.
The dangers we have just listed are greatly exacerbated by a potent threat multiplier: the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood.
Remember when this was a misinformation conspiracy theory that would get you banned from social media?
The Shamdemic and 2020 coup de d’état clearly demonstrated this principle:
The notion that we are much closer to Doomsday now than when we were losing the Cold War is clearly the perfect example of “the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood.”
So… I say… Let’s run out the clock!
Let these clowns keep on crying wolf right on down to midnight. I’m pretty sure we’ll still be…
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All we have to do is wait until we “Spring Forward” and we will be living after midnight. Or don’t the doomers do daylight savings?
Involves “saving.” Not part of the program.
From all the “junk stuff” they are putting forward..
… its more like we are in “The Twilight Zone” !!
What do they mean by “now believes”?
They always believed it was a lab leak. They just refrained from saying so because it might get them cancelled.
The bigger question to me being is this kind of research still going on? Paying someone outside of the US to do research that is illegal inside the US was beyond absurd. Paying a nation that wants to surpass the US in global power to do it for you is treason at best. So what happened to that research? Did it get stopped? Moved to another country? Are other countries engaged in such research on their own? Are terrorists?
It is beyond me why this revelation comes out of the CIA and everyone is content to say “I told you so”. The reality is we should be much more concerned about what happens with this type of research going forward.
Ever since I was a kid it’s been 11:55 pm or later on that stupid clock. And I’m 50 now.
Who cares about those irrelevant fraudsters?
I’ve seen them all — from 7 minutes at the start, up and down, and now 89 seconds, or as most would say 1 minute 29 seconds.
Hey, not to worry! . . . after all, the measurement “clock” comes from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Therefore, we still have available all of the seconds under 1 minute remaining, all those milliseconds under 1 second remaining, and all those femtoseconds under 1 millisecond remaining, and on and on down to quantum-scale minimal time constants.
/sarc
What are the error bars on the Doomsday Clock?
Is one second significant?
It was an archaic idea born out of the birth of the Cold War when everyone was afraid that we would be embroiled in a nuclear war with the USSR that would end civilization. Now that we don’t have such an obvious existential threat they had to find something else (although who knows with Czar Putin). This meme has outlived its usefulness (if there ever was such). Besides, only us oldies know how to read an old-fashioned clock face ;).
There is an end, but it is solely in the purview and authority of God of the Bible. Any other talk about doomsday, Global Warming, Nuclear Annihilation, etc., is ignorant foolishness and can be strictly ignored. God only will bring about ends of such lofty things, before He creates His new beginning, so to speak.God is the ultimate sovereign over all things.
Which God is that? Or are they all involved?
How many genders does God define?
Great mocking post. Alinsky Rules for Radicals #5, well played.
I was curious about ‘doomsday’, so just went to the BAS website to learn what they meant.
The Doomsday Clock was created by them in 1947, to help us visualize ‘how close to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making’.
For 6 decades, that meant only atomic bombs.
In 2007 they added climate change (obviously not an area of atomic scientist expertise, but politically correct).
Apparently this year they now also agree with the CIA that Covid19 originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology from gain of function research funded by (newly pardoned by Biden) Fauci at NIH thru cutout EcoHealth Alliance—just banned from any new NIH funding ‘forever’. Should not have taken the CIA to only figure this out after Biden and NIH actions.
Based on 47’s first few days after inauguration, they will have to move it much closer to doomsday next year. Trump is dangerous to the world status quo and is of our own making as of 5 Nov 2024.
I wonder what it is in human nature that causes some people to keep forecasting the end of the world?
Whether it is Paul Ehrlich and his population bomb, Rachel Carlson and her mosquitos repellents, or Y2K and the great computer crash that never happened, or the Club of Rome with their mass starvation by the year 2000, or the hole in the ozone layer caused by our evil air conditioners that were going to wipe out all life on earth, or the Branch Davidians and whatever craziness they believed in there seems to be some psychological reason that some people need to ditch reality for an end of the world cause.
Does it make their meaningless lives somehow seem more meaningful to have a world saving cause and to throw a can of tomato soup at a classic piece of museum art to “save the planet?” Is this how unimportant people can make themselves feel important? Or is it that they are highly suggestable people lacking in critical thinking skills?
Or is it that they are highly suggestable people lacking in critical thinking skills?
I suggest you read The Madness of Crowds.
Crowds are easily manipulated, rebels who call out that the emperor has no clothes are the exception, not the rule.
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner!
Can I just have an end to winter? I’d notice. End of world? Nah!
In general, I agree with almost everything you said there. The one exception is the Y2K bug. Unlike those other things there really was a problem facing computers systems, though the effects of that problem were greatly blown out of all proportion by the doomsayers. The only reason the “crash never happened” is because those responsible for the computer systems took the problem seriously enough to spend the necessary resources in the years leading up to y2k – fixing the software bug in important systems so that the issue was resolved by time the clock stuck midnight on Dec 31st, 1999. That wasn’t “ditching reality” that was addressing reality and fixing a very real problem before it could inconvenience the populous. (which is pretty much all the unfixed software would have caused in the vast majority of cases)
Don’t forget the Great Paul Krugman. Although he “retired” from the NYT (crap paper) but now can demonstrate his utter incompetence on Substack. SARC!. Oh, and please don’t subscribe to his “retirement” gig.
It was ‘2 Minutes to Midnight’ with Iron Maiden in the 80s. So not much change!
I should have incorporated that! I like Iron Maiden even more than I like Judas Priest.
Hey I would like a vote for Sammy’s Heavy Metal
“It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” – R.E.M.
🙂
‘We are on the eve of destruction’
The “Doomsday Clock” must run very slowly according to the song “In the year 2525”.
The difference between the doomsday clock and a broken clock is that the broken one is right, but only twice a day.
These people, who were undoubtedly financed by the Soviet union back in the day, have been banging their cups on their high chairs for almost 80 years now. They advanced their stupid clock from 11:58:30 to 11:58:29.
Big Whoop.
The problem here is that the failure of prophecies of the Apocalypse does not invalidate the religion of Gaia anymore than the the failure of the Apocalypse to occur in the 1st Century C.E. (1 Thessalonians) invalidated Christianity. Such failures often cause the faithful to double down, not to give up.
1st century C.E. Hmmm. What does C.E. mean … riiight, it means AD. And what does BCE mean, well it means BC. And the number 1, as in 1st century, that’s an Arabic number. We don’t stop using Arabic numbers so that we don’t offends non-Arabs. So why should we stop using BC and AD. And talking about dates, what on Earth were they thinking with BP. They say it means Before Present, but actually it is Before 74 Years Ago. 74 years ago is ‘present’??? Next year it will be Before 75 Years Ago. And they say it’s scientific.
C.E. means Common Era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era It can also be taken to mean Christian Era, Current Era, or Civil era.
It is a name for the Gregorian Calendar system (365 day solar year with leap days added 97 times in 400 years) with its epoch at 0001:01:01 of the Julian Calendar System (365 day solar year with every 4th year having a leap day). That epoch was retconed by a monk named Dionysius Exiguus early in the 6th century on the basis of his calculation of the date of Easter. The epoch he chose does not match the description in the Gospels, of Jesus having been born during the reign of Herod, because Herod died 4 years before the epoch.
The epoch and year numbering from it was popularized, slowly starting with Bede in the 8th Century. The reforms of Pope Gregory XIII in the 16th Century reset the calendar by 10 days.
The term common era was used to distinguish the system from royal systems. Many societies have numbered years by the reign of the monarch. English legislation was cited by the year of the reign of the monarch it was enacted in, e.g. The Government of India Act 1935 (25 & 26 Geo. 5. c. 42). Romans used the names of the consuls for that year. The Japanese have each emperor name the era of his reign. The current Japanese era is Reiwa meaning beautiful harmony. It began when the current Emperor Naruhito assumed the throne on 1 May 2019.
BP sets an epoch at 1 Jan 1950 because 1950 was the first full year after the first use of radiocarbon dating. It is also used by some star catalogs and is called the Besselian years in that context. For Geologists 80 years is in the error term. You have to pick an epoch, and that is the one they picked. Unix computer systems use 01:01:1970 as their epoch.
Basically, you should do what makes you happy. CE makes me happy because I am not a Christian and anno domini does not refer to my lord. If AD makes you happy, go with it.
“the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood.”
pretty accurate statement. Doesn’t say that the government is the one spreading it all.
Yes, the typical “leftists accuse others of exactly what THEY are doing.”
As with Zeno’s paradoxes there an infinite number of time steps possible between 89 seconds (or whatever) and the ‘midnight’ catastrophe so be stoic stay calm and carry on.
It is said that a broken clock is accurate twice a day, but the Doomsday Clock has never been accurate.
Just a couple of thoughts.
If the world does blow itself to bits in a nuclear war, are these clock fiddlers going to be really upset that they didn’t get to wipe the last 89 seconds off the clock? Imagine all those clock shuffling days, move forward, move backward, stay the same. And then they missed the ending.
Or alternatively, it’s a 24 hour clock and they’re in the wrong time zone. Now that would be ironic.
Has an extensive survey been done to get an estimate of how manty people worldwide are actually losing sleep or even altering their lifestyles to help set this imaginary clock back a few minutes or even seconds? I’d bet if one were to be taken, the numbers would be so small that the fearmongers would be certain suppress them because people have real things to worry about, not pipedreams or nightmares.
All you ever need is the “total perspective vortex” Zaphod.
“Don’t say no it’s the end of the world
it ended when you said goodbye”
Skeeter Davis (1962)
The Doomsday Clock is powered by a Li-ion battery that just caught fire.
Oh the horror!
Man!, time moves slowly on that clock!
Call me when it’s 0.00000001 second to midnight (but not if I’m having a nap).
So, 4″ is now significant.
My reputation is restored so no more laughing, ladies
If the metric is the number of people dying from war, nuclear weapons have issued in a golden age of peace.
Ushered in?
I think we may have to give that idiotic clock a pink slip or else get ready to pay for overtime.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists claims Nobel Laureates on its sponsors board. I looked them up. Many were in disciplines that are not relevant to this topic of annihilation.
A non-Nobel sponsor is from Australia. Gareth is a politician from the socialist left whose poisonous legacy for Australia is an abnormally large number of treaties with other countries, often involving the United Nations. I wonder what wisdom Gareth, now aged 80, could bring to Atomic Science.
Geoff S
Undoubtedly the same wisdom he and the rest of them bring to the risk of “doomsday.”
IOW, *none.*
Not the entire crime family. “Dr.” Jill didn’t get a pardon.
The funny thing: Anyone who accepts a pardon would no longer be able to invoke the 5th Amendment, if called to testify before Congress or in a court proceeding. If they refuse to testify or lie under oath, they could still be prosecuted for contempt or perjury. I can’t wait for Rand Paul to subpoena “Dr.” Fauci!
According to 1915 Supreme Court, anyone accepting a pardon is also admitting guilt.
Unlike taking the 5th… which doesn’t admit guilt. Too fracking funny!
According to the US Constitution and the US Supreme Court, the President does not have the authority to confer immunity, which is exactly what a pre-emptive pardon is.
One has to be convicted of a crime or, as a minimum, indicted to be eligible for a pardon under the Constitution.
What Biden did wrt his family is un-Constitutional.
I required more than 89 seconds to read this article. Are we dead yet? 😉
“The dangers we have just listed are greatly exacerbated by a potent threat multiplier: the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood.”
Who knew there was a “communication ecosystem”?
But I think what they really mean is that free speech threatens their “communication echosystem”?