The Divided States Of America

So the way the alt-left are fighting it out with President Trump...with violent protests, riots, marches, insults, beatings, fires, broken windows, and sheer contempt,  you'd think we were in a third world country under a brutal dictator, or worse.  

Gone is the respect, decency, compromise, and diplomacy among valid differences of opinion and points of view. 

Talking it out and working it out...forget about it. 

Aside from taking up arms, it's almost like this country is in a second civil war. 

The United States has become the divided states. 

Hitler, Nazis, Stalin, Commies!

California wants to secede (like Texas wanted to previously). 

Lawsuits against the President.

Screams, posters and groups of "Not my President."

Celebrities threatening to pack up and leave the country. 

Refusals to carry out the laws of the land. 

People joining the resistance and underground. 

Secret communications in agencies. 

Plotting and threats for a military overthrow of the Presidency. 

Calls for blowing up the White House.

Tweets calling for assassination and pics posted of what it would look like. 

Yet there are no death camps, no razor sharp wire, no attack dogs ripping the flesh off people, no forced labor, no death marches, no brutal beatings, no starvation of prisoners, no poison gas showers, no crematoria, no firing squads, no mass graves, no gruesome experiments on twins, no vicious assaults, no sexual abuse and rapes, no Star of David patches to be worn, no threats to exterminate. 

While of course, we need to ensure "Never Again" for all of us-- even the slightest inkling of it--is there really a bona-fide "again" or "inkling" here in the first place? 

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

The Divided States Of America

Chicken Big And The Asteroids

The story of Chicken Little running around yelling that "The sky is falling" has become the epitome of those who "cry wolf" about the world ending--falsely worrying about and predicting catastrophic events.

However, the reverse can be true as well--where people say, "The sky is not falling," when it really is. This is a "Chicken Big" event--where people are afraid "big time" of admitting the truth and so they hide themselves and others from it. Sort of like saying "What I don't know can't hurt me!"

Yesterday was just such as Chicken Big--hide your head in the sand--moment.

Asteroid DA14 passed just 17,000 miles from the Earth--less than the distance from New York to Sydney! It was 140 foot long and 143,000 tons, and possessed the destructive power 700 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. According to the Wall Street Journal (13 Feb. 2013) it was able to devastate a region the size of the San Francisco Bay area.

While, thank G-d, this dangerous asteroid missed us, just a few hours earlier, a meteor about 55 feet long and 10,000 tons exploded over the Ural Mountains in Russia, with the destructive power of 33 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs injuring 1,000 people and damaging 4,000 buildings.  

Of course, it is a frightening reminder of what could've happened had asteroid DA14 hit as well. 

The Guardian reported that according to The European Space Agency "No link between the events is thought possible," and the Wall Street Journal (15 Feb. 2013) declared that it "was just a coincidence".

Interestingly, the Journal itself states that a meteor event such as that which exploded over Russia yesterday happens "every 100 years," and even more, the chances of the asteroid that passed very close overhead actually hitting Earth occurs "once every 200 to 1,000 years," with the next close pass over earth not expected again until 2046. Thus, these types of events don't happen exactly every day, do they?  

So what are the chances of these 2 events (one exploding overhead and the other a near miss) occurring simultaneously yesterday--just hours apart!

People need to know--deserve to know the truth about the dangers we face--not to cry wolf--but rather to help us as a society and civilization recognize the genuine dangers we face, so we can adequately take precautions and prepare ourselves. 

Interestingly enough, the WSJ states, "We have the technology to deflect these asteroids" with spacecraft to impact into them and "gravity tractors" to change their trajectory--the one thing we need is "years of advance warning."

Let's acknowledge the meteor explosion yesterday in Russia and be grateful that it wasn't over a heavily populated major urban area, where the effect could've been much worse, and of course the same with the near flyby of the asteroid--and resolve to invest in the monitoring, tracking, and defensive technologies to keep us safe from a future catastrophe where the sky really is falling.

Calling the two cosmic events yesterday a "coincidence" is a Chicken Big event--buck, buck, buck. ;-)

 (Source Photo: here with attribution to Sascha Grant)

Chicken Big And The Asteroids