leicsmac

Apparently, Ukraine should "never have started" being invaded by Russia. Well...that's certainly an interesting way of seeing it.

https://www.chron.com/news/space/article/nasa-layoffs-musk-20173396.php By the end of Tuesday, NASA's workforce will be 10 percent smaller than it was at the start of President Donald Trump's second term. Per a report from Eric Berger of Ars Technica, sources confirmed to the publication that about 750 employees at the space agency have accepted a "fork in the road" offer to take deferred resignation later this year. The deferred resignations add to the Trump administration's firing of 1,000 probationary NASA employees, including new hires who joined the workforce within the last one to two years or long-time employees who recently moved up in position. The space agency once had a workforce of nearly 18,000 civil servants. ... just the thing the world needs when a city destroying asteroid has a greater than 1/50 chance of hitting Earth in the next decade.

I'm curious to know exactly what they could have done more that would have stopped the current situation occurring, short of being much more effective at neutralising Trump.

Two European nations possess nuclear weapons. That might give the bigger fish at least a moments pause before trying to throw their weight around too much. And to think I advocated for the UK to give up theirs around a decade ago because I never thought the US and Russia would become ideologically aligned in the cause of strongman repressive autocracy. How wrong I was there.

The Chinese are, at least, moving in the right direction. The other two, however... I fear the timeline of the next five decades might end up going down in (what's left of) history for all the wrong reasons.

I'd be with you on all of this apart from a word of warning on the bolded: current voting patterns indicate that enough people in enough places around the world still buy into that bigotry enough to significantly affect policy decisions, and,by extension, everyone else. They may be a minority, but they case a long shadow, and, more worryingly, they now increasingly include the younger.

"Personal" isn't always, or even often, the same as "important".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce85709xdk4o The UN climate summit in the United Arab Emirates in 2023 ended with a call to "transition away from fossil fuels". It was applauded as a historic milestone in global climate action. Barely a year later, however, there are fears that the global commitment may be losing momentum, as the growth of clean energy transition is slowing, external down while burning of fossil fuels continues to rise. And now there is US President Donald Trump's "national energy emergency", embracing fossil fuels and ditching clean energy policies – that has also begun to influence some countries and energy companies already. In response to Trump's "drill, baby, drill" slogan aimed at ramping up fossil fuel extraction, and the US notifying the UN of its withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, Indonesia, for instance, has hinted that it may follow suit. The current US administration, leading the rest of the world into catastrophe for the sake of short term self interest. Well, if the worst should happen, those that record it should be able to say for the benefit of those still left, very clearly, who was responsible.

Fair to say. For instance, Nixon created and greenlit a federal agency dedicated to safeguarding the environment. Trump is bound and determined to destroy that agency, with all the associated consequences for the natural world.

Trump: "he who saves his Country does not violate any law". Nixon: "when the President does it, that means it's not illegal". Any difference here?

Two reasons come to mind: - if Russia can't conquer or subjugate Ukraine (though they've had military support from elsewhere), I'm not sure they can take on another country equally if not better prepared at a similar time. - Poland is a NATO member, so Article 5 would be triggered, and though Trump is likely only paying lip service to NATO obligations, I'm not sure even he can ignore that without consequences.

I hardly ever get to use the word "turpitude". It's a shame because it's such a fvcking good word. Absolutely so. And so perhaps as time moves forward, so might the value structures of our species.

I emphatically agree. Perhaps with that in mind, people might reconsider the feelings of gratitude they hold at what was simply an act of cut-throat business and the actors that drove it - especially so long after the fact.

It certainly was, but it's not very "matey" for a "mate" to rip you off on hardware necessary to your survival.

... and then those people try to justify their obvious sociopathic inflicting of pain, misery, oppression and sometimes death with weasel words. Moral turpitude in the name of morality. With an additional dose of divisive and supremacist ideals that lead nowhere good.

And then people had the temerity to say that Project 2025 wasn't the exact, bullet-pointed objective just because Trump went on TV and lied about having anything to do with enacting it.

Honestly don't get why people get so pious about what consenting adults get up to between themselves, harming no one else.

Immigration was always just only one part of it. Have to tip the hat at the successful manipulation of media, social and otherwise, to make so many folks think and act like it was just the one issue.

Good to see ice hockey upholding its sterling reputation for entertainment

Sadly, as this current administration seems bound and determined to stand as the "American ideal", to speak of them appears to be to speak of the nation itself. I understand, however, that there are a great many Americans who are altruistic and don't buy into the death-worshipping social Darwinism being passed off as policy right now.

It's like the lad who saves your life and becomes famous for doing so when you're both young, and then insists on you standing him a pint 80 years later and all the time in between because he did it. Again, I'd hardly begrudge the help they gave, but both Russia and the UK (to name but two) paid far more proportionally in lives and money, and IMO it's a rather simple fact that we don't owe the current odious administration over there anything for the large favour they granted us and that they considerably benefitted from eight decades ago.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgeydkz08go The world's frozen oceans, which help to keep the planet cool, currently have less ice than ever previously recorded, satellite data shows. Sea-ice around the north and south poles acts like a giant mirror by reflecting much of the Sun's energy back into space. But as rising temperatures cause this bright layer to shrink, the dark ocean below can absorb more heat, warming the planet further. This latest sea-ice low appears to have been driven by a combination of warm air, warm seas and winds breaking apart the ice. Over the 5 days to 13 February, the combined extent of Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice was 15.76 million sq km (6.08 million sq miles), according to BBC analysis of data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). This breaks the previous 5-day record low of 15.93 million sq km (6.15 million sq miles) from January-February 2023. Record breakers!

Agreed. But that's not a recipe for success going forward.

Oh, no doubt. Pardon me though for not expressing gratitude towards a favour, though considerable, was firstly done almost entirely in the name of self interest and secondly was done long enough ago to have little bearing on how the UK should view that nation today.

At the last possible opportunity and only because they had been injured personally and had no other choice and/or saw the opportunity for massive personal gain. Not out of any real sense of altruism.