A Thanksgiving message from the Prophet of Doom

Happy Thanksgiving. We're doomed.

Yesterday, Brett Kavanaugh quietly released a brief opinion that lays out his blueprint for one-party Republican rule.

Totally doomed.

Thus, if a Republican Supreme Court disables major legislation like the Clean Air Act, that law is likely to remain disabled for the foreseeable future.

That is why the Nondelegation Doctrine could be a recipe for one-party rule. Republican justices can disable regulations at their leisure — or even strike down the very laws permitting such regulation. And Democrats are unlikely to ever win a Senate majority large enough to do anything about it.

Doomed, I tell you.

Frank Wuco, a senior adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, came under scrutiny last year when his past comments involving the promotion of far-right conspiracy theories surfaced.

Some of those included debunked claims that former president Barack Obama was not born in the United States, former CIA director John Brennan converted to Islam, former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. had been a member of the Black Panthers and former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Yes, doomed.

The same person who attacked the Boston Globe for exposing pedophilia is, of course, heading up Mike Pompeo’s “Human Rights Commission.”

Doomed!

If you want a guaranteed way to anger a Ukrainian, tell them Crimea belongs to Russia.

Ukrainian diplomats are lashing out at Apple after it gave in to Moscow’s demands to show Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula as part of Russian territory on its maps and weather apps when accessed from Russia.

DOOMED.

When you can’t have a baseline acceptance of what reality is—not your view of reality, not your view of the facts, but IS this a fact, did this event happen? Did this person say this?—that makes it really hard to have a functioning civil society. And I think that’s just as much of [the base’s] ambition as is trying to promote Trump or Trumpism. They want the very concepts of truth or integrity in politics to be destroyed. I think that many, many different political actors are going to take advantage of these social media networks to continue to do that. It makes it very hard to trace precisely who is responsible when there’s often no accountability from the platforms themselves.

Seriously, doomed.

Rebels have attacked and killed several health workers responding to Ebola in eastern Congo, the head of the World Health Organization said on Thursday, an alarming development that could cause the waning outbreak to regain momentum in an area that has been the site of heavy fighting.

Perhaps the wisest course is to embrace nihilism. I've reached the point where I welcome DOOM.

The Earth is heading toward a "global tipping point" if the climate crisis continues on its current path, scientists have warned, as they called for urgent action to avoid "an existential threat to civilization."
The group of researchers, who published a commentary in the journal Nature, say there is growing evidence to suggest that irreversible changes to the Earth's environmental systems are already taking place, and that we are now in a "state of planetary emergency."

A global tipping point is a threshold when the planet's systems go beyond the point of no return -- such as the loss of the Amazon rainforest, accelerated melting of ice sheets, and thawing of permafrost -- the authors of the commentary say.

Such a collapse could lead to "hothouse" conditions that would make some areas on Earth uninhabitable.

"We argue that the intervention time left to prevent tipping could already have shrunk towards zero, whereas the reaction time to achieve net zero emissions is 30 years at best," the authors said.

Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy your feast! We're doomed!