Month: January 2017

The Pink Pussy Hat movement

by digby

This by Katha Pollit is the one to read on this issue: The Women’s March Succeeded Because It Spoke to Women’s Outrage. The success of the marches should put the critique of “identity politics” as divisive dead end to rest, once and for all.

The conclusion gets to the heart of it:

My own belief is that calling it a women’s march attracted far more people than it repelled, because it appealed to a deep sense of outrage and injury felt by women that went deeper than Trump’s policy positions. That the least qualified man, a self-confessed harasser and molester to boot, beat the most qualified woman, despite getting fewer votes, told women that no matter how hard they tried and how excellent they were, they were always going to be second-class citizens, always going to be passed over in favor of men, and that disrespecting, insulting, and even assaulting them was perfectly okay in 21st-century America. The shock of that recognition awakened something profound in women, including many who had not been active in politics before. There were a lot of newbies at the march. As one sign put it, “Hell Hath No Fury Like Millions of Women Scorned.”

That was my sense at the LA march — this realization that no matter how insane and incompetent the man, he’s always got an advantage over the most qualified woman. I saw that in my previous life over and over again. It’s infuriating. And this time an awful lot of women have had it with that.

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The Greatest Generation 

by digby

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it’s probably a good idea to look back at our own history of anti-Semitism:

In 1938, only 35% on Americans believed the Jews of Europe did nothing to deserve persecution.

America has come a long way since then. I’m sure attitudes toward Jews in America are much more sympathetic generally, although since Trump came on the scene the resurgence of anti-Semitism is alarming.

But what is going to happen with this, I wonder? I have to say, I wouldn’t be too sanguine about it:

It’s not too bad right now. But it could get worse with Trump. George W, Bush worked hard to keep right wing Islamophobia buried. Trump encourages it.

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Trump’s top international diplomat FTW 

by digby

I don’t know what to say about this other than “oh my dear God:”

The new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, pledged on Friday to overhaul the world body and warned U.S. allies that if they do not support Washington, then she is “taking names” and will respond.

Haley made brief remarks to reporters as she arrived at the world body’s headquarters in New York to present her credentials to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

“Our goal with the administration is to show value at the U.N. and the way that we’ll show value is to show our strength, show our voice, have the backs of our allies and make sure that our allies have our back as well,” Haley said.

“For those that don’t have our back, we’re taking names, we will make points to respond to that accordingly,” added Republican President Donald Trump’s U.N. envoy.

I have to assume that gave Trump a thrill up the leg he won’t soon forget. Yet another sign of the Trump administration’s isolationist policy. It’s called “My way or the highway, bitchuz. We’re run this planet.”

If our allies don’t fall in line, well we’re the ones with the most massive military in world history and we’ve got a guy with yuuuuge hands ready to use it, buleemeee.

She also arrogantly spewed this little directive:

“Everything that’s working, we’re going to make it better, everything that’s not working we’re going to try and fix, and anything that seems to be obsolete and not necessary we’re going to do away with.”

Maybe someone ought to mention to her that we don’t actually own the UN and that we only pay 22% of the money to support it, which is a lot, but it sure doesn’t confer the right to start ordering everyone around on your first day.

What a bunch of stupid, arrogant assholes.

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The full-time vote suppression zealots lining up to help Trump

by digby

I wrote about a couple of the bright lights who are going to help Trump’s push to deny voting rights in states that didn’t vote for him for Salon today:

Rumor has it that even though he seemed to be reacting in response to questions from the press this week, Donald Trump has wanted to launch his “voter fraud” investigation ever since he realized he lost the popular vote by a huge margin — and people inside the administration were desperately trying to talk him out of it. I have no way of knowing whether this is true, but Trump has made it clear since the election that he believes there was massive fraud in November:

For the record, there’s no evidence that systematic voter fraud exists. None. Nonetheless, Trump repeatedly made the claim the election was “rigged” during the campaign, eventually saying that he would accept the election results — if he won. He even lied about that. He won, but he still won’t accept the results.

It obvious that this obsession with voter fraud in the face of winning an election is another aspect of Trump’s bottomless narcissism. From what he said in his interview with David Muir on ABC, he believes that the problem only exists in places he didn’t win. He told Muir that every one of the alleged 2 million to 3 million illegal votes went to Hillary Clinton. But it’s important to recognize that Trump is felicitously playing into the hands of right-wing operatives who have been working to suppress the votes of Democratic constituencies for years. And they are very excited about this new “investigation.”

One of Trump’s advisers on immigration, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, has reportedly been encouraging Trump to initiate this investigation. He told the Wichita Eagle on Wednesday:

I’ve advised [Trump] on the issue of voter fraud in multiple forms. I’m not the only one, but he’s been very interested in finding ways to reduce voter fraud.

I know that he is interested in investigating the issue on a national scale, but I also know that he would like to see the Justice Department launch specific investigations where there is real serious, specific evidence of voter fraud.

There seems to be a plan to focus this “voter fraud” investigation on the big liberal states and urban areas that do not vote for Republicans. Indeed, this is something the right wing has been trying to do for years and it was that effort that led to one of the greatest political scandals of the George W. Bush administration: the U.S. attorney scandal. You may recall that this was all about trying to force federal prosecutors to pursue phony voter fraud cases in Democratic states, often against Democratic officials. When these prosecutors refused, they were fired and replaced.

I’ve written about Kobach for Salon before, both when he was a somewhat obscure figure in the conservative movement and again when he ascended to the highest levels of national politics. He has two missions in life, and they’re tied together. The first is to suppress the votes of Democrats and the second is to curb immigration. The Republicans see both of those goals as essential to their ability to win in the future since their base of white conservative voters is shrinking. Trump’s motives are simpler, as are his supporters’ — they believe immigrants and American-born people of color are cheating at the ballot box in order to gain “goodies” from the federal government, at the expense of hardworking Real Americans.

But Kobach is not the only person pushing these two interconnected issues. There is an entire political industry devoted to it, from sophisticated election attorney networks like the Republican National Lawyers Association to grassroots organizations like True the Vote. And there are certain “experts” who have been around for a long while, pushing the issue whenever the opportunity presents itself.

One of them is a man with the striking name of Hans von Spakovsky. Those who follow voting issues are very familiar with him from his time in the Bush administration’s Department of Justice Voting Section, where he worked to undermine the Voting Rights Act and played fast and loose with ethical rules, as amply documented in this piece by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate. Von Spakovsky was serving as a recess appointment to the Federal Election Commission at the time, and up for consideration as a permanent member. The Democratic Senate refused to confirm him, and not just because of his ethical lapses. He is a zealous activist for vote suppression all over the country.

He too has an attitude that often reveals his underlying motivations. He recently spoke with Breitbart News:

“Their attitude towards any voter fraud prosecutions has always been: if the defendants are black, well, you must be doing it for racist reasons,” he noted. “Remember, we saw that in the New Black Panther story out of Philly in 2008, when Eric Holder came in and immediately dismissed the voter intimidation case against them, despite the overwhelming evidence that the Black Panthers had been intimidating voters and poll watchers. It was dismissed by the Obama Justice Department because they didn’t believe that black defendants should be prosecuted. They don’t believe in the race-neutral enforcement of the voting and election law.”

The New Black Panther case was another cynical attempt by the right wing to turn the tables on Democrats and the Obama administration to show that African-Americans are the real racists. It was absurd but made for good copy, and continued to provide cover for conservatives who seem to see vote fraud in every urban neighborhood where black or brown people lived.

This week von Spakovsky wrote an op-ed for Fox News with fellow voter-fraud obsessive John Fund of the National Review, lauding President Trump for his decision to investigate. They re-litigated the tiresome Black Panther story and accused the Obama-Holder Justice Department of encouraging non-existent systematic voter fraud by refusing to force states to purge voters off of the rolls, quoting the same Pew study Donald Trump cites as his expert source on the subject. (The author of the study has repeatedly made it clear that he did not find evidence of voter fraud. They keep citing it anyway.) They particularly cited California as being a hive of fraudulent voter activity that requires federal intervention.

It’s unknown at this point who will be heading Trump’s “investigation,” or what form it’s likely to take. (It’s always possible that more rational White House aides can talk the president out of this foolhardy and wasteful boondoggle.) But Kobach is definitely advising him informally and you can be sure von Spakovsky stands ready to help in any way he can, along with dozens of others who have been working on this so-called issue for many years. Keeping people from voting is their calling, and Donald Trump has given them a new lease on life.

Not Silent Bystanders
by Batocchio

It’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day (one of several such memorial days worldwide). Last year, I quoted a piece about remembering by Holocaust survivor Gene Klein. He wrote a timely piece about intervention last November that I wanted to feature this year:

In the time preceding our deportation from our home in Hungary, my family experienced many acts of anti-Semitism. A brick was thrown through our living room window. A man spoke at an assembly at my school, shouting that the Jews were responsible for all of the country’s troubles. My sister’s high school prom was ruined by a group of local hooligans who burst in shouting anti-Semitic slogans. The street became a gauntlet of threats and taunts.

All of our assailants felt empowered by the Nazi party influence in Hungary, but none of these actions were officially sanctioned by the government. They were the result of people inspired by racial rhetoric to take matters into their own hands.

I am reminded of these affronts to my family’s freedom and safety as I read the news about the dramatic increase in racial hate crimes since the election (as reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups). Some people now feel empowered to insult immigrants, African Americans and Muslims the way people in our town felt empowered to say hateful things to us. It felt terrible to be the target of such hatred, having done nothing to bring it about. And most of all, it felt incredibly lonely. The abuse that we experienced before we were deported took place in public, often in front of many onlookers. The failure of others to intervene—those who watched silently and then carried on with the business of their day—was socially isolating, and their silence dramatically increased our sense of fear and vulnerability.

It is critical in today’s climate that we not be silent bystanders who simply witness the victimization of others. Social psychologists have studied for decades the circumstances under which people will intervene when others need help. They find that three factors are critical. First, when we feel empathy for the victim, we are more likely to help. Second, when we feel that we have the ability to help, we will feel more confident about stepping in. And third, when we recognize that it is our responsibility to help, we are more likely to do so. When there are many onlookers, this responsibility can be diffused in a crowd: everyone thinks that someone else will help, and so no one does, and since no one is helping, it seems like the appropriate thing to do is just to watch or walk by.

What this means for all of us is that if we witness someone who is abused because of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation, there are three things we can do:

1. Feel their pain. Imagine what it would feel like to be in their place. Even if you see that person as very different from you, we can all remember—or at least imagine—what it is like to be threatened, shouted at, or physically harmed. Act as if the victim is a family member or a close friend.

2. Feel confident, because it is not that hard to help. All you need is a few kind words for the victim. Simply walking up to the target of the attack and asking if he or she is okay can mean the world to that person, and this will likely encourage others to follow your example. Research on bystander intervention tells us that once one person helps, others follow. That first courageous helper sets the tone, makes clear that intervention is called for, and leads the way for others to join.

3. Recognize your responsibility. If you think that you can remain quiet because others will step up, the victim is likely to go unaided. Imagine you are the only witness—that unless you help, you are condemning someone else to suffer.

Klein provides a vivid example of this:

When my two sisters and my mother were in a concentration camp, they were marched through a German town every evening on their way to work the night shift in a munitions factory. They were often taunted by people on the street. Children would stick out their tongues. Passing soldiers would curse at them. On one occasion, Hitler youth wearing neatly pressed uniforms and ugly smiles shouted at them, and the women were surprised when an elderly German man shouted back at their persecutors: “Don’t laugh at them! There is nothing for them to be ashamed of. It is not their shame; it is our shame!” The boys stopped and stared at the old man, uncertain of what to do next, then straggled off. My sisters always remembered that German gentleman who stood out in contrast to the malice all around them.

My hope is that if a woman is yelled at today on the street of your hometown for wearing a headscarf, she will find herself surrounded by others defending her right to dress as she pleases, and the perpetrator will stand alone, shamed. I hope that if you see an immigrant being told to go back to where he came from, you will stand with him in support of his right to be here. We must all be ready, always, to demonstrate what this country truly stands for.

I normally avoid getting too topical with Holocaust posts, but the relevance of these issues is unavoidable. The sobering reality is that ugly incidents are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. As Klein notes, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations have been tracking an increase in hate crimes. And the national news continues to be troubling.

Consider: President Trump lied about the size of his inauguration crowd (size insecurity) and then had two surrogates aggressively attack the press for fact-checking his obvious lie. Trump compared the CIA to Nazis and then blamed the media for depicting a “feud with the intelligence community” by Trump. These are bullying, authoritarian moves, amounting to ‘suck up to me, agreed with my lies or I’ll hurt you.’ Candidate Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States, lied about seeing thousands of American Muslims cheer the 9/11 attacks and has otherwise lied to incite racial tensions and violence (as Josh Marshall points out, “authoritarian figures require violence and disorder”). Candidate Trump repeatedly referred to Mexican immigrants as criminals, drug dealers and rapists and has vowed to go ahead with his crazy plan to build an expensive wall on the Mexican border. He’s ordered that a weekly list of crimes by undocumented workers be published, which is sure to stoke further racial tensions. Trump has claimed, without a shred of proof, that 3 to 5 million illegal votes caused him to lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, has cited bizarre, illogical reasons for believing this and has announced he will investigate voter fraud, which is likely laying the groundwork for further conservative voter suppression efforts. Trump claims that he’ll defer to Defense Secretary James Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo on the issue of torture (officially, they don’t endorse it), but he’s a strong proponent of it, even though a mountain of evidence shows that torture is notoriously unreliable for producing accurate intelligence. This means Trump has accused Americans of being Nazis… while endorsing torture techniques used by the Nazis (among others). In terms of lessons learned from World War II and the Holocaust, so far Trump has shown he’s learned all the wrong stuff. And Trump has only been president for a week. Things can get much, much worse.

Hatred and fear certainly don’t need to reach the level of genocide to destroy a country, and many lives before that. We know how these stories can go. The United States has plenty of ugly history but also some great accomplishments. Right now, we’re seeing shades of the same spiteful, hateful and fearful spirit that displaced and killed Native Americans, enslaved black people, held lynchings as public entertainment and perpetuated Jim Crow laws. We don’t need to and dare not wait for those impulses to grow further to oppose them. Luckily, we’re also seeing some of the same spirit that moved abolitionists, suffragettes and freedom riders and we can’t encourage or support those impulses enough. As Klein says, we can “demonstrate what this country truly stands for.” We don’t need to be silent bystanders. The lessons to be learned from World War II and the Holocaust are many, but they include: The nation that held the Nazis accountable to the rule of law at Nuremberg should not throw away those principles every time some insecure bully with a megaphone shits his pants. Bigotry must be challenged. And we can empathize, intervene and support one another.

A cavalcade of chaos
by Tom Sullivan

Ronald Reagan, Mr. “Morning in America,” must be rolling over in his grave. The first week of the Donald Trump administration has been a cavalcade of chaos. From bringing a cheering section to his embarrassing speech to the CIA, to pressuring the Park Service to support boasts about his crowd size, to his press secretary’s bratdown of the press (the typo works; leave it), to calling for torture, more torture, to Kellyanne Conway’s tantrum on “Meet the Press,” to hinting at blowing up the regime of international trade with an import tax on Mexico, to … what did I miss? It’s damned hard to keep up.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has been watching too. The group has moved up the hands on their famous Doomsday Clock to two and a half minutes from midnight based, unpresidentally, on the words of one man: Donald Trump.

Ah, yes, and the coming Muslim ban. CNN’s Resa Aslan has a few choice words on that. His family fled Iran during the Iranian hostage crisis. People on the streets here shouted at them to “go back home“:

It didn’t matter that we had no home; we had abandoned everything and everyone we knew for an uncertain life in a foreign land precisely because we were fleeing the same repressive regime that our neighbors were so frightened of. What mattered was that we looked different. We seemed different. And so we became the enemy.

And yet we knew that no matter what happened, we had the law on our side. That was, after all, the entire reason we had come to the United States. While many of our friends and family members in Iran fled to France, Germany and the United Kingdom, we chose America because we knew what America meant. We knew what it stood for. We were certain we could weather any attack on our faith or ethnicity because the US Constitution — which we had heard so much about in Iran — would be our shield against the fears and prejudice of our neighbors.

Today, the man whose job it is to enforce that Constitution is taking yet another step toward abandoning the principles upon which it was written. Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order that will effectively bar citizens of a number of Muslim countries — including Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Somalia and Syria — from entering the United States. The reported plan would be a first step in Trump’s repeated promise of a ban on all Muslim immigrants.

But not from “Muslim-majority countries where his Trump Organization has done business or pursued potential deals.” The man-child does have his priorities.

At The Atlantic, Richard Stengel ponders whether we are witnessing the end of the American Century. Trump exhibits no devotion to American ideals, no thirst for America to retain its role as moral beacon:

No, Trump’s vision does not spell the end of American power, but a retraction of American influence. It suspends American involvement as a global leader on global decision-making for a resolute policy of non-interference. At the State Department, when I traveled abroad for discussions with another nation’s government, I talked not only about agreements and exchanges and trade deals, but also about freedom of religion and expression, transparency, and rule of law. I sat in diplomatic “pull-asides” with President Obama and Secretary Kerry and foreign heads of state where they talked not only about America’s interests but universal values—free expression, religious liberty, rule of law. I sat next to Kerry as he demanded the release of political prisoners and journalists who were behind bars. These were uncomfortable discussions. I once had an African foreign minister say to me with a touch of annoyance: “You come and talk to me about transparency, but the Chinese come and build a super-highway.”

And that was often the case. And no other nation, I promise you, ever talked to that foreign minister about transparency. That is America’s strength, not its weakness. The Chinese, and now the Trump administration, will resolutely practice non-interference in other nations’ affairs. America First is not a policy that any of our allies around the world want to hear. Our adversaries are delighted. Our power and influence with our friends and adversaries came in large part because we were the one nation that did not always put ourselves first.

Welcome to the new abnormal:

Donald Trump’s “emotional maturity [and] stability” are being discussed in private by senior members of his own political party, according to veteran Washington journalist Carl Bernstein, in a turn of events he has described as unprecedented.

Unprecedented, unpresidented, whatever.

Stay thirsty, my friends 


by digby

This stuff is just getting crazier and crazier. The White House said today that it was going to pay for the wall with a 20% import tax at the border.  Tequila and salad lovers were appalled. They walked it back a bit later since it’s cray-cray but who knows what ridiculous BS these people are talking about?

I’m done for the day. This is exhausting and we all need to make sure we take care of our mental health. Therefore, I’m going to take a walk on the beach pour a cold Bohemia and a shot of Tequila Ocho and make some guacamole. I may not be able to afford them for much longer. (And I am NOT going to eat green pea guacamole and drink Budweiser. It’s just not happening.)

@LindseyGrahamSC I guess pic.twitter.com/YEVMvGL0lI

— manu saadia 🖖 (@trekonomics) January 26, 2017

Unhinged

by digby

I know you probably saw this already but I just had to post it in case you hadn’t.

“The world is a mess.” Donald Trump is officially unhinged. May God have mercy on us all. (By @ToddDracula) pic.twitter.com/TmhOcXUwN3

— CAFE (@cafedotcom) January 26, 2017

Sure, that’s normal.

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I gotcher red meat for you right here

by digby

Well, I guess we know who in the White House is indulging Trump’s worst instincts:

Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s chief White House strategist, laced into the American press during an interview on Wednesday evening, arguing that news organizations had been “humiliated” by an election outcome few anticipated, and repeatedly describing the media as “the opposition party” of the current administration.

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Mr. Bannon said during a telephone call.

“I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

I don’t think Bannon is crazy. He knows that Trump’s cult desperately needs enemies and they need to have their hatreds stoked. The press is an easy target. I doubt it will be enough for Trump’s crazies — their hatred run toward more powerless populations. But they desperately need to convince their people that all this bad press isn’t true. I’m sure this will get big play on Fox and talk radio.

The scathing assessment — delivered by one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted and influential advisers, in the first days of his presidency — comes at a moment of high tension between the news media and the administration, with skirmishes over the size of Mr. Trump’s inaugural crowd and the president’s false claims that millions of illegal votes by undocumented immigrants swayed the popular vote against him.

Mr. Bannon, who rarely grants interviews to journalists outside of Breitbart News, the provocative right-wing website he ran until last August, was echoing comments by Mr. Trump this weekend, when the president said he was in “a running war” with the media and called journalists “among the most dishonest people on earth.”

During a call to discuss Sean M. Spicer, the president’s press secretary, Mr. Bannon ratcheted up the criticism, offering a broad indictment of the news media as biased against Mr. Trump and out of touch with the American public. That’s an argument familiar to readers of Breitbart and followers of Trump-friendly personalities like Sean Hannity.

“The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong,” Mr. Bannon said of the election, calling it “a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there.”

“The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign,” Mr. Bannon said. “Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: they were outright activists of the Clinton campaign.” (He did not name specific reporters or editors.)

“That’s why you have no power,” Mr. Bannon added. “You were humiliated.”

Of all of Mr. Trump’s advisers in the White House, Mr. Bannon is the one tasked with implementing the nationalist vision that Mr. Trump channeled during the later months of the campaign, one that stemmed from Mr. Bannon himself. And in many ways Mr. Trump’s first week has put into action that vision — from the description of “American carnage’’ Mr. Trump laid out in his inauguration speech, to a series of executive actions outlining policy on trade agreements, immigration, the building of a border wall and the demands that Mexico pay for it.

He is one of the strongest forces in a White House with competing power centers. A savvy manipulator of the press, and a proud provocateur, Mr. Bannon was among the few advisers in Mr. Trump’s circle who was said to have urged on Mr. Spicer’s confrontational, emotional statement to a shocked White House briefing room on Saturday, when the White House disputed press reports on the inauguration crowd size. He mostly shares Mr. Trump’s view that the news media has misunderstood the movement that the president rode into office.

On the telephone, Mr. Bannon spoke in blunt but calm tones, peppered with a dose of profanities, and humorously referred to himself at one point as “Darth Vader.” He said, with ironic relish, that Mr. Trump was elected by a surge of support from “the working class hobbits and deplorables.”

The conversation was initiated by Mr. Bannon to offer praise for Mr. Spicer, who has been criticized this week for making false claims at the White House podium about the attendance of Mr. Trump’s inaugural crowd, for calling reporters dishonest and lecturing them about what stories to write and for failing to disavow Mr. Trump’s lie about widespread voter fraud in the election.

Asked if he was concerned that Mr. Spicer had lost credibility with the news media, Mr. Bannon chortled. “Are you kidding me?” he said. “We think that’s a badge of honor. ‘Questioning his integrity’ — are you kidding me? The media has zero integrity, zero intelligence, and no hard work.”

“You’re the opposition party,” Mr. Bannon said. “Not the Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party. The media’s the opposition party.”

Mr. Bannon mostly referred to the “elite” or “mainstream” media, but he cited The New York Times and The Washington Post by name.

“The paper of record for our beloved republic, The New York Times, should be absolutely ashamed and humiliated,” Mr. Bannon said. “They got it 100 percent wrong.”

They did get it wrong in that they enabled James Comey’s hit job and worked diligently to bring Clinton down to Trump’s level and it worked. They were not wrong, however, in assuming that Trump was not overwhelmingly popular in this country. He is not. Here’s yet another new poll showing Trump at 36% approval. That means he’s lost ground since the election.

He’s also just straight up trying to intimidate them. It may work. They have not been known for their courage in speaking truth to power in recent times. And Bannon is one scary guy.

Update: This is interesting. It posits that in order to achieve Trump’s foreign policy aims, the media and the intelligence community both have to be thoroughly discredited.  I’m guess that would be Bannon. He’s a self-proclaimed Leninist. 

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20, 30 million tops

by digby

I grew up during the cold war. When I was a little kid we did duck and cover drills in elementary school. I knew people who had bomb shelters in their back yards.

But even I am too young to have experienced the doomsday clock at a greater level of danger than it is today:

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced Thursday that the Doomsday Clock now stands at two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, suggesting that existential threats now pose a greater danger to humanity than they have at any time since the height of the Cold War.

The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic warning about how close the world stands to “midnight,” that is, nuclear or existential catastrophe. Since 1947, the Bulletin’s scientists and security experts have updated it annually. Many of the world’s most acclaimed scientists—including Stephen Hawking, Susan Solomon, Lisa Randall, and Freeman Dyson—sponsor, oversee, or consult with the Bulletin.

“This is the closest to midnight the Doomsday Clock has ever been in the lifetime of almost everyone in this room. It’s been 64 years since it was closer,” said Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University and the chair of the Bulletin’s board of sponsors.

I think we know what’s caused this change, don’t you? Having an orange, unbalanced imbecile running the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world is the problem. The second problem is that it encourages other unbalanced imbeciles to take risks and makes sane countries believe it’s necessary to become nuclear powers in self-defense.

This is a very grave situation.

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