As IF Times

Source: The Doomsday Clock just advanced, ‘thanks to Trump’: It’s now just 2½ minutes to ‘midnight.’ – The Washington Post

You know what they say about a broken clock.  In that case, a broken clock would be more accurate than the ‘doomsday clock’ propagated by this cabal of atomic scientists for decades now.

The recent claim from this group is that because of Trump, the clock now figuratively points to a few minutes before kaboom day. Not North Korea’s version of Elmer Fudd playing with matches, not Iran enriching uranium for nuclear weapons, not Pakistan and India whom are already in possession of them and not Russia with their aggressive leader Putin.  Apparently, it’s the election of Donald Trump that pushes the minute hand on the death clock.

This of course is just one of the numerous swords of Damocles looming above the human race if you paid attention to the numerous chicken little industries that always seem to flourish.  The tin foil hat business should be booming.  When not paralyzed by the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation, people are also paying through confiscatory taxes to assuage the effects of hysterical global warming, also incidentally on the verge of irreversible damage.  Or at least, was a while ago.  They’ll have to push the date back a bit to get more money. But we get it; the end of the world isn’t always that easy to pinpoint.

No less than Stephen Hawking has raised the imminent possibility of alien takeover, not to mention the likelihood of a catastrophic asteroid strike. At various points in my lifetime, hysteria has been pushed on imminent human extinction events ranging from: starvation, disease, overpopulation, religious retribution, Y2K, global cooling, now of course, global warming, atomic war, asteroid crashes and alien takeover.  The one that will soon be in vogue will be robot takeover, so we may want to stock up on metal detectors.

Someone can certainly make a lot of money on this.  There’s no point being paralyzed like myotonic goats awaiting death. As mentioned earlier, fashionable tin foil hats can be offered for sale on Amazon.  What about worry beads? They’d have to be sustainable of course…though that shouldn’t really matter.  How about special lotion for all the hand wringing brought on by on-going angst? We hear of billionaires building bunkers in anticipation of the final kabing, so someone’s already taking advantage of the gullible.  Whatever the product, it may as well be shameless because there’s no downside.  If it all ends, well then you’ve done your bit.  If it doesn’t end, you at least get rich. Now that is a good ending.

Source: Trump’s Immigration Order Tests Limits of Law and Executive Power – The New York Times

Donald Trump has officially been in office just over one week.  In that time, he has produced a virtual avalanche of directives that have his detractors feel as if they were drinking from a firehose in attempting to react to them.  Who could have known that he would: approve the building of a wall at the Mexico border, move to redact and repeal Obamacare, move to reduce burdens of over regulation, restrain the EPA, approve the Keystone pipeline and now restrict the movement of individuals from areas of the world where terrorism is endemic?

Actually, if anyone was paying attention, everyone should have known!  For well over a year, his entire campaign platform had all these planks firmly front and center without apology or reservation.  Now that he’s acting with the blessing of the recent vote, detractors are ‘shocked’.  Imagine that; a political executive doing what he promised.  It’s not as if his campaign rhetoric included promises to lower the oceans and heal the earth. You may not like the guy, but a liar and a slacker, he ain’t.

The most current uproar surrounds the “sudden” restrictions imposed on persons travelling from areas of the world known to be terrorist hot spots.  Again, no one was paying attention to his campaign rhetoric if they think this was ‘sudden’.  Predictably, a collective howl has arisen from all corners of the usual leftist world, invoking racism, Nazism, etc etc.  On the very next day of the travel restrictions, headlines were already screaming about how Trump has impeded the progress of science.

We are not in the lawyer racket, (and amen to that), but claims of Trump’s actions being illegal and unconstitutional are as valid as Michael Moore beauty products.  The primary mandate of the president of the nation is to keep the nation safe.

No doubt, many innocents will be caught up by this policy, but a logical question arises.  Why do refugees and immigrants need to come to the US, or for that matter, any country.  Nations have the right to restrict people from entering their borders, or else, why have borders?  But a more logical question may be framed this way: If a person was being persecuted for religious or personal safety reasons, why would they board a plane and make the onerous trip all the way around the world when there are presumably options in the immediate vicinity? Why not Germany or Sweden or even Canada, all known for their expansive immigration policies.  Or how about any of the nation states within a 4 hour drive, such as Saudi Arabia? Oddly, most Muslim dominant nations have been quiet so far on this.

One of the more kooky critiques of the new policy is that this will serve to further inflame anti-American sentiment among certain nations and that this will be another recruitment incentive for radicals to join ISIS.  Really?  There’s yet another notch of hatred above what we’ve seen?  How far does this scale go?

To be clear, the new policy is not a permanent ban.  It is a temporary measure to allow more scrutiny of people from dangerous areas of the world.  If this is irrational, then so are security lines at airports, so are travel restrictions upon persons travelling from disease infected locales; recall the SARS outbreak of many years ago.  But as we’ve seen, almost half of the population are not known for any ability to think rationally.