#doomsday scenario

[my-forgotten-notepad]

Dungeon Crawler Carl: Doomsday Scenario

I figured based off the advertising and social media that both Donut and Carl were probably not going to change their races in any meaningful way. But Donut's immediate and blind refusal to change and remain a cat made me chuckle (but considering her opinion on cats being superior I am not surprised at her desire to remain wholly unchanged.

I do like how she was able to quickly cement her decision beyond simple refusal. Pointing out that her popularity and virality comes from her persona on the Private Tunnels stems from her being a cat. Also, I like the mix of utility and humour within the classes she received, with some being "viable" but only if she planned on risking life and limb at every turn as a Martial class. I do adore that Odette coached Donut and Carl into effectively kidnapping Mordecai, so that they can weaponise his knowledge in both the dungeon as well as alchemical/magical matters.

Donut's Former Child Actress Class is incredibly interesting. The Class feeds into her stats and approach to combat and social encounters, while giving her an out against lethal damage, poison and disease immunity. As well as boosting any and every one of her charisma-based skills, making her an even bigger force in convincing and controlling Mobs with her voice and creative mind.

On top of that, Donut is capable of receiving certain buffs and benefits via her Character Actor Skill, maintaining her Charisma skills. Though her options to pick from each floor she descends will be random and limited.

In turn, Carl agonising over each and every option, mulling over his viability with Donut and Mongo, but also from his own talent, stat, and skills. He weighed and pondered over the seesaw over remaining human or becoming a Primal; some strange, undefined Super Ancient Alien Conquerer of the universe. Due to the lack of any visual evidence, Carl get's to remain exactly as he is, receives an acceleration to all of his future skill develops at the cost of taking an immediate drop in his stats.

He even accepts taking a drop in his battle effectiveness and trailing behind Donut again as he choosing the Compensated Anarchist. Working with his explosive talents and skills, but recognising that the associated benefits and ability buffs are far too good to pass up. Just that he would need to further work on developing his plans and approaches to conflict to compensate for his lower stat pool due to him having to divert critical points into Charisma to be able to select the Compensated Anarchist.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Rebecca Solnit 

Cheering (for us, not them).

Garrett Graff writes: Trump may want to be a dictator and emulate Franco and Orban, and — who knows — maybe the ridiculous White House ballroom he’s building is an indication he doesn’t plan to leave peacefully on January 20, 2029, but time tells us that he’s never going to be Franco, the dictator who reigned in Spain from 1939 until 1975. The reality is Donald Trump is 79 and not well — and probably less well than the media is willing to dig into — and his reign as president and America’s would-be king will be measured in years, not decades.

Whenever and however Donald Trump exits the stage, there just isn’t anyone who will step into the MAGA movement’s shoes — there are plenty of people who will try, from JD Vance to Marco Rubio to Ron DeSantis to Don Jr. to Ted Cruz, but the thing we’ve seen over and over across the last decade is that no one is Donald Trump. Vice President JD Vance, an incredibly awkward and unfunny Trump-lite who is widely despised by both sides, is most certainly not Donald Trump.

Trump has built in MAGA not a movement but a personality cult — a fragile coalition of anti-government extremists, white nationalists, conspiracists, disaffected people hurt by globalization, and a lot of low-information voters whose brains have been fried by right-wing media and social media algorithms.

Post-Trump, the MAGA cult will likely splinter and fracture into bitter power-hungry factions, many of which will be terrified about their own culpability to criminal, civil, or other public accountability. That fragile coalition is unlikely to survive months past Trump himself — and if and when that collapse happens, the reality of #1 (“there are more of us than of them”), powered by the history and mission of #2 (“the dream of America is a country that gets more just and more free”), will have an important opening and opportunity.

[elsewhere in the piece] Many days it seems like Trump is on an unstoppable roll; he’s not. He is historically unpopular. The percent of Americans saying the country is on “the wrong track” has hit a new high. The increasingly unhinged Republican taking points are losing the public opinion battle in the government shutdown. Democrats are overperforming in countless contests this year and are looking strong in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races for next month. ABC had to cave on letting Jimmy Kimmel come back to the air. Many of Trump’s actions are getting turned back by the courts; even Harvard has gotten most of its federal funding back. Democratic governors and states are having success turning back some of Trump’s excesses and organizing around the federal government. And the costume-heavy protests outside ICE facilities in Oregon, Chicago, and elsewhere are helping to display the absurdity of the administration’s attempted crackdowns.

More of “Official America” would do well to recognize that Trump’s actions stem more from weakness than strength. As G. Elliott Morris, one of the only prognosticators of public opinion I bother to listen to anymore, argues, “A lot of powerful people just don’t realize how unpopular Trump is.” Greg Sargent wrote yesterday, “ICE's military raids and masked kidnappings are resonating deeply/negatively in the cultural spaces we keep hearing Dems need to reach: Manosphere, Joe Rogan, country music, disengaged voters. That’s rare and it gives Dems a big opening to engage.”

Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and the other corrupt cronies and would-be fascists of this administration are in many ways racing the clock. As Paul Krugman wrote last month, “Trump is nakedly following the playbook of autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. As his poll numbers fall, he is rushing to lock in permanent power by punishing his opponents and intimidating everyone else into submission… Yet Trump has a significant problem that neither Putin nor Orban faced. When Putin and Orban were consolidating their autocracies, they were genuinely popular. They were perceived by the public as effective and competent leaders. Just nine months into his presidency, Trump, by contrast, is deeply unpopular. He is increasingly seen as chaotic and inept.”

[Three Reasons I Still Have Hope for America]

[mixtapefortheapocalypse]

A House of Dynamite: When the Clock Stops and the Questions Begin

The credits rolled, and I sat there in silence. Not the satisfied silence of a story well-told, but the unsettling quiet that comes when a film refuses to let you off the hook. Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite doesn’t end—it suspends. And in that suspension, it asks us to reckon with something far more uncomfortable than a nuclear strike: our own complicity in a world rigged to explode. The…

A House of Dynamite: When the Clock Stops and the Questions Begin

[rheinlegendchen]

Ulterior motives are Trump's only motives

What We Know About the U.S.-Ukraine Minerals Deal

A draft agreement discussed on Tuesday does not include a $500 billion payout the Trump administration demanded earlier.

People, this is not a peace deal in the making. Trump brokering peace? Who seriously believes that? It would be entirely against his selfish, narcissistic character. He is singularly focused on material gains for himself, himself, himself and the United States.

This is my theory on what is really happening in those talks, and I expect to be proven right in the future:

In their recent conversations, Trump gave up Ukraine in its entirety to Putin, provided the Kremlin gremlin accepted that the US first secure a share of Ukraine's natural resources. Towards Zelenskyy, Trump gave vague security assurances (although no guarantees in writing) in exchange for a deal for those very same resources.

Phase 2 of the Trump plan forces Ukraine to cede to Russia all of the occupied Ukrainian territories in return for a ceasefire. That way, Putin accomplishes his short-term territorial goals, and American investors can soon start mining on Ukrainian/Russian soil.

Over the next few years, Trump will veto any attempt to include Ukraine in a formal Western alliance (i.e. NATO; the EU will typically remain idle on membership for Ukraine even without Trump's involvement), until Putin is ready to absorb the rest of Ukraine in a follow-up war.

When the second invasion starts, Trump will withhold US military support, instead blaming the countries of Europe for not having done their share to arm and protect Ukraine. He will use their insufficient military spending as pretext for the US to stand aside.

Terrified of a potential nuclear war, no country in Europe will declare war on Putin. Without Western interference, Russia will eventually wear down Ukrainian resistance and take over its neighbor, much like when Nazi Germany splintered and then absorbed Czechoslovakia in 1938/39 with everyone else just watching.

All the EU (and Britain) will then be able to do is to assure its easternmost members (Poland and the Baltic states) that unlike Ukraine they will be protected from Russia by the Western alliance, thus creating a situation similar to the guarantee for Poland that triggered World War 2.

[deadpresidents]

“For nearly fifty years, the inner workings of the nation's COG [Continuity of Government] protocols were some of the government's best-kept secrets...Even colleagues in the same office didn't know the scope of COG plans. When Aaron Sorkin was researching  what would become The American President and The West Wing, Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos pulled out of his wallet what the Hollywood director first thought was a bus pass -- it actually was the little card explaining how Stephanopoulos would be evacuated in the event of a nuclear attack. Sorkin incorporated that card into a later West Wing episode, where character Josh Lyman received such a card from the National Security Council and felt guilt because his co-workers wouldn’t also be saved. While shooting the scene, set consultant Dee Dee Myers, the former press secretary to Bill Clinton, pulled Sorkin aside to tell him that the scene was unrealistic because those cards didn’t actually exist. Sorkin was shocked: Even as a top aide, she’d never realized that her co-workers had exactly those cards -- and she never did.”

Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself -- While the Rest of Us Die (BOOK | KINDLE)

This is just one of the endless fascinating anecdotes in Graff’s revealing new book about our nation’s Continuity of Government plans in case of a devastating attack on the United States which might decapitate the senior leadership and threaten the government’s survival.

Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself -- While the Rest of Us Die by Garrett M. Graff is available now from Simon & Schuster.

[deadpresidents]

Excerpt from “Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself -- While the Rest of Us Die” by Garrett M. Graff

This nuclear world is filled with seemingly harmless gobbledygook, acronyms piled upon acronyms, that explains how the world would end in thermonuclear war...

The result of the president launching the nation’s bombers, submarines, and missiles against Russia would almost surely destroy not only both countries but all human life on the entire planet. There were some 30,000 nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal, the rough equivalent, on CIA director calculated, of 55 billion traditional 500-pound TNT bombs from World War II. Enough, as he said, to carpet each state in the union with a billion bombs -- and still have five billion bombs left over.

From start to finish, the entire process would take under an hour.

Even as the nation lay in ruins at the end of that hour, the government would have already carefully considered how the United States itself -- how the idea of the United States -- would continue forward. During the Cold War, the government secretly invested billions of dollars in a complicated set of plans known as “Continuity of Government” (COG), “Continuity of Operations” (COOP), and its most secretive level, “Enduring Constitutional Government” (ECG). Through these programs, planners gave deep thought to what activities and processes would be needed following a nuclear attack -- and even what totems of American culture should be saved. The World War II command bunkers in London eventually inspired a breathtakingly audacious and complex network of dozens of bunkers, ships at sea, scores of helicopters and planes overhead, even secret rail trains, and convoys of tractor-trailers in the United States.

Prewritten presidential executive orders sat in office safes across Washington, as did secret draft legislation known as the Defense Resources Act, ready to be filled in Mad Libs-style with dates and emergencies, that laid out an entirely new structure and entirely new roles for how the government would function during a national emergency -- effectively suspending the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The presidential Football is well known, but less well known is how the attorney general was accompanied through the darkest days of the Cold War by an “Emergency Briefcase” outlining FBI plans to sweep up thousands of Americans deemed a security threat. Long before Barack Obama made the Washington title “czar” popular, Dwight Eisenhower had imagined an expansive set of secret powers, preselecting nine men -- mostly private citizens -- who would be real czars, stepping in during an emergency to remake the private sector, seize assets coast to coast, and create new bureaucracies that would control nearly every aspect of American life until peace could be restored.

The Post Office would be in charge of registering the nation’s dead; the National Park Service would run the refugee camps; the Department of Agriculture would distribute rationed food. Congress would retreat to a special bunker at a West Virginia resort; the Supreme Court would relocate to another resort in the North Carolina mountains; the Department of the Interior would move to the grounds of a former college in Harpers Ferry. The Federal Reserve kept an underground bunker stocked with a billion dollars cash inside Mount Pony, seventy miles south of Washington. FEMA would help the nation rebuild from regional bunkers in places like Denton, Texas, and Maynard, Massachusetts.

It was also carefully decided that at the National Archives, the Declaration of Independence would be saved before the Constitution, and at the National Gallery of Art, Leonardo da Vinci’s Florentine masterpiece Ginevra de’ Benci took priority over Rogier van der Weyden’s Renaissance masterpiece Saint George and the Dragon. The Library of Congress knew it would save the Gettysburg Address ahead of George Washington’s military commission, and in Philadelphia, a specially trained team of park rangers stood ready to evacuate the Liberty Bell into the mountains of Appalachia.

At every level, the COG system offered redundancy piled atop redundancy. It was a system that touched every state in the union -- and nearly every state hosted a hidden COG facility. The scope of power involved was unlike anything our nation has ever experienced.

-- Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself -- While the Rest of Us Die By Garrett M. Graff Simon & Schuster (BOOK | KINDLE)

[thatstormygeek]

It was unclear what role, if any, Musk’s forces would allow parliament to have in the new governmental structure by the time it next returned to the national assembly known as Capitol Hill.

What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks. With rapidity that has stunned even longtime political observers, forces loyal to Musk’s junta have established him as the all-but undisputed unelected head of government in just a matter of days, unwinding the longtime democracy’s constitutional system and its proud nearly 250-year-old tradition of the rule of law. Having secured themselves in key ministries and in a building adjacent to the presidential office complex, Musk’s forces have begun issuing directives to civil service workers and forcing the resignation of officials deemed insufficiently loyal, like the head of the country’s aviation authority.

Musk's Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government

Imagining how we'd cover overseas what's happening to the U.S. right now

The mentally declining and aging head of state, who has long embraced conspiracist thinking, spent much of the week railing in bizarre public remarks against the country’s oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, whom he blamed without evidence for causing a deadly plane crash across the river from the presidential mansion. Unfounded racist attacks on those minorities have been a key foundation of Trump’s unpredicted rise to political power from a career as a real estate magnate and reality TV host and date back to his first announcement that he would seek the presidency in 2015, when he railed against “rapists” being sent into the country from its southern neighbor. In one of his first moves upon returning to the presidency, he mobilized far-right paramilitary security forces to begin raids at churches, schools, and workplaces to identify and remove racial minorities, including those who had long lived in harmony with the country’s white Christian majority. He also immediately moved to release from prison some 1,500 supporters who had participated in his unsuccessful 2021 insurrection, including members of violent far-right militias who promptly upon release swore fealty to him in any future civil unrest. Elsewhere, even as he released violent criminals onto the streets, Trump by fiat pulled longstanding government security protection from former military and health officials he felt had betrayed him.

[calmgrove]

Nuclear winter our worry once; our new fear now: global warming