We have a split Congress and face the prospect of a presidential rematch next year. President Biden managed Republican hecklers reasonably well during his State of the Union speech. And in response, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders said,
The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.
She should know, and we're pretty sure which side she's on.
I've wondered how many near-misses there may have been during the Ukraine war, especially since Putin put his nuclear forces on "high alert," that we won't learn about for many years (if we ever do). How close have we come to the brink without realizing it? It remains entirely possible that a mistake, tomorrow or next week or next month, could start World War III.
This is the world we now live in, and it's why the warnings behind the Doomsday Clock are nothing to sneeze at. And we haven't even gotten to climate change ...Evaggelos Vallianatos notes that U.S. actions shouldn't be overlooked as a contributing factor.
[G]uests in the doomsday clock ceremony denounced Russia but said nothing about America funding the war in the Ukraine that could explode into a doomsday war. This is disturbing. After all, these doomsday clock scientists should not allow narrow nationalistic feelings to confuse them about the high moral ground they espouse for the abolition of their handiwork, nuclear weapons. Taking sides diminishes their standing, and that of the importance of the iconic doomsday clock.
Robert Hunziker quotes Julian Cribb on the bigger picture.
We humans are facing the greatest emergency of our entire million-year existence. This is a crisis compounded of 10 catastrophic risks, each of our own making. These threats are deeply interconnected and are now arriving together. However, their collective scale is so vast and their relationships so complex that few yet understand the peril they place us in.
