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Old 01-28-2018, 07:29 AM   #1
Prowler
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2 minutes to midnight

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/...s-darkest-hour

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"The world is closer to nuclear annihilation than at any point since the first hydrogen bombs were tested in the early 1950s, says a group of scientists who monitor global tensions.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced today that it has moved its Doomsday Clock to 2 minutes before midnight, citing North Korea’s recent tests of missiles and nuclear weapons and the world’s lack of progress in confronting climate change.

“In 2017, we saw reckless language in the nuclear realm heat up already dangerous situations and relearned that minimizing evidence-based assessments regarding climate and other global challenges does not lead to better public policies,” said Rachel Bronson, the Bulletin’s president and CEO in Chicago, Illinois. Last year the clock moved half a tick, from 3 minutes to 2.5 minutes before midnight; it has been in single digits since India and Pakistan staged back-to-back nuclear weapons tests in 1998.

In addition to a war of words between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board flagged steps by all of the world’s nuclear powers to enhance their nuclear arsenals. The lack of high-level negotiations between the United States and Russia on arms control, Russia’s activities in Crimea, and plans to strengthen the U.S. nuclear arsenal have also heightened tensions, said Sharon Squassoni, a board member and international affairs expert at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “With U.S.-Russian relations so strained, there is little room for progress anywhere else,” she noted at a press briefing.

Trump bears blame for being “unable to develop, coordinate, and clearly communicate a coherent foreign, much less nuclear, policy,” said Robert Rosner, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. The panel cited a dearth of diplomats and Trump’s October 2017 decision not to certify that Iran was in compliance with an international agreement to throttle back its nuclear weapons program.

The Bulletin scientists said worsening effects from climate change have also increased the risk of global annihilation, citing destructive hurricanes in the Caribbean, heat waves around the globe, wildfires in the United States and Canada, rising greenhouse gas emissions, and declining Arctic ice cover.

Are things today as bad as in 1953, when both the United States and Russia exploded thermonuclear bombs? Comparisons are difficult, Bronson says, but there are more nuclear weapon states today than in the 1950s. “We’ve made the clear statement that we feel the world is getting more dangerous. … We present the clock not so much as doom and gloom, but as an opportunity to get government and the public discussing the important issues,” adds physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University in Tempe.

A Doomsday Clock report by the Bulletin scientists suggests ways world leaders can step back from the brink, starting with Trump ignoring Kim Jong-un’s provocative rhetoric. But because leaders and governments have proved ineffective at easing many threats, says Sivan Kartha of the Stockholm Environment Institute, moving the clock back will require the public to “compel their leaders to once again respect scientists, heed the facts, and make rational choices that move us further from the brink.”
A fitting song for this:

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Old 01-28-2018, 02:51 PM   #2
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Lol Mr D was just listening to that earlier while doing the dishes this afternoon.
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Old 01-29-2018, 03:52 AM   #3
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"Trump's fault!"

Why else should I expect anything less, when the mainstream media didn't report about Obama's role in contributing to the Iran and North Korean situation earlier?

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In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.
Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

They followed cocaine shipments, tracked a river of dirty cash, and traced what they believed to be the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.

The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.
http://archive.is/Nx5JI#selection-457.2-457.133


Quote:
The Obama administration secretly derailed Drug Enforcement Administration efforts targeting the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah as it worked to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, according to a new report.

In 2008, the DEA launched “Project Cassandra” to track Hezbollah’s trafficking of drug and weapons, money laundering and other criminal activities, some of which were happening in the U.S.

As Project Cassandra carried on, the Obama administration threw a series of roadblocks in its way, Politico reported Sunday.

When investigators sought approval for prosecutions, arrests, and financial sanctions, the Justice Department and Treasury Department officials delayed, hindered, or denied their requests, the report said.

“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” Defense Department illicit finance analyst David Asher said. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

Project Cassandra members said Obama officials blocked or undermined their efforts to chase down top Hezbollah operatives, including one of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers who was also a top supplier of conventional and chemical weapons used by Syrian President Bashar Assad against his own citizens.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ob...rticle/2643790

Quote:
Iran may have received an additional $33.6 billion in secret cash and gold payments facilitated by the Obama administration between 2014 and 2016, according to testimony provided before Congress by an expert on last summer’s nuclear agreement with Iran.

Between January 2014 and July 2015, when the Obama administration was hammering out the final details of the nuclear accord, Iran was paid $700 million every month from funds that had previously been frozen by U.S. sanctions.

A total of $11.9 billion was ultimately paid to Iran, but the details surrounding these payments remain shrouded in mystery, according to Mark Dubowitz, executive director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

In total, "Iran may have received as much as $33.6 billion in cash or in gold and other precious metals," Dubowitz disclosed.
http://freebeacon.com/national-secur...-payments-u-s/



Quote:
The Obama administration concept of 'strategic patience' emerged early on in the administration after the scathing experience of North Korea’s 2009 nuclear test. The strategy essentially demanded that North Koreans recommit to concrete steps towards denuclearization—such as allowing inspectors and freezing fissile material production—as a precondition of any future talks.

"It meant that the administration didn’t want to be driven by a DPRK-orchestrated sense of crisis, and would respond in its own time to North Korean initiatives," said Scott Synder, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"The Obama administration came into office with a healthy skepticism of North Korea's ability to follow through on its commitments.,” explains Daryl Kimball, publisher of Arms Control Today. Given the breakdown of the denuclearization agreement reached under Bush, the Obama administration “came in with the view that before talks began again North Korea should recommit to taking steps to show that they were committed to meeting that pledge."

It is a strategy that has proven to be a failure, given the most recent nuclear test. North Korea has simply accepted sanctions and international isolation as the cost of a slow and steady expansion of its nuclear weapons program.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/expert...reas-new-nukes
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Old 01-29-2018, 03:59 AM   #4
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Lol Mr D was just listening to that earlier while doing the dishes this afternoon.
Maiden have a lot of great songs, indeed. I admit, I made this thread because I wanted to post that song
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Old 01-29-2018, 06:00 AM   #5
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Whenever someone criticizes Trump, my favorite polarized respose from the Right is to throw up a bunch of examples of Obama’s failures. Who cares about that? Obama wasn’t perfect. Got it. Guess you still need a whipping boy to blame everything on.
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Old 01-29-2018, 08:20 AM   #6
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Exactly.
I'm sure that time change has absolutely nothing to do with the current administration's utter lack of chill.
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just ignore what you don't like rather than obsessing over it and move on with your life.
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Old 01-29-2018, 09:09 AM   #7
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Or people skills. Or tact. Or......
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Old 01-29-2018, 09:34 AM   #8
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I haven't looked much into this, but I'm assuming this is more nonsense about North Korea? This is even more meaningless than the "Threat Level: Orange" stuff we had a decade ago.
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Old 01-29-2018, 10:03 AM   #9
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And there went any residual desire I had to attempt meaningful discourse with you.
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Originally Posted by Spike Spiegel View Post
So your wants and needs as a fan should outweigh everyone else's?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sabacooza View Post
There's no sense catering just to one demographic which is idiotic.
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Originally Posted by Vegita-San View Post
just ignore what you don't like rather than obsessing over it and move on with your life.
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Old 01-29-2018, 10:21 AM   #10
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Originally Posted by Katie View Post
Whenever someone criticizes Trump, my favorite polarized respose from the Right is to throw up a bunch of examples of Obama’s failures. Who cares about that? Obama wasn’t perfect. Got it. Guess you still need a whipping boy to blame everything on.
Look at "Lefties" being all touchy-touchy.

You see - past failures lead to the problems in the present day. A lot "Lefties" consider Obama as a perfect president who "did not do no wrong".
But the thing is he was one of the people who had contributed to the modern state of things. Under him Republicans took control over almost everything and it was under Democratic party become inept shade of itself. He had endorsed Hilarity as a candidate.

So yeah, he had contributed to what US of A has today. It's undeniable and only completely drunk on left kool-aid not particularly bright "lefties" will argue, that what we have here and now, in now way shape or form connected to the past and Obama presidency.

"Lefties" act a lot like conservatives, who deny reality because it doesn't fit their world view.
From people who like to pretend that they are smarter and more understanding I had expected better. But I get used to disappointment from people I had hopes for.
Carry on, kids, but don't be surprised, if Trump get another 4 years - you did everything possible to make it possible.

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And there went any residual desire I had to attempt meaningful discourse with you.
Don't pretend you had any desire in the first place.
Just another hilarious self-righteous posturing.
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Old 01-29-2018, 11:41 AM   #11
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Not surprised with having Orange Haired Peter Griffin as our president.

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Old 01-29-2018, 12:18 PM   #12
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Originally Posted by Katie View Post
Whenever someone criticizes Trump, my favorite polarized respose from the Right is to throw up a bunch of examples of Obama’s failures. Who cares about that? Obama wasn’t perfect. Got it. Guess you still need a whipping boy to blame everything on.
Don't Forget Righties like to blame Hillary Clinton for everything too
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Old 01-29-2018, 04:35 PM   #13
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Nothing will happen.
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Old 01-29-2018, 04:40 PM   #14
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You never know, Kim might surprise us all with this!

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Old 01-30-2018, 07:10 AM   #15
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Is it true that if Trump one day decides to order a nuclear attack no one can stop him from doing it? As in they gotta follow his orders? Os is that a myth?
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