ominous and interdasting…
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/479534-doomsday-clock-ticks-closer-to-midnight
The famed Doomsday Clock has been set at 100 seconds to midnight this year, the closest it's ever been to the metaphorical point of the Earth's destruction.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists unveiled this year's setting for the clock at a news conference Wednesday morning at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
"Speaking of danger and destruction is never easy. If you speak the truth, people will not want to listen because it's too awful. It makes you sound like a crackpot," said former California Gov. Jerry Brown (D), executive chairman of the Bulletin.
"Today we live in a world of vast, deep and pervasive complacency," Brown added. "Even if there is a one-in-100 chance that these men and women before you are correct and we are truly in a dangerous moment, you would never know that from the president, from Republican leadership and from Democratic leadership."
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists created the clock in 1947 to represent how close the planet was to annihilation by nuclear weapons. In more recent years, the journal has also weighed the effects of climate change in setting the clock.
Last year, the Bulletin set the clock at two minutes to midnight, choosing to leave the clock at the same time as the previous year.
This year, the Bulletin's panel of scientists and other experts decided to move the clock 20 seconds forward and for the first time express the time in seconds rather than minutes because the "moment demands attention," said Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin.