1 Aw, why worry? AOC tells us we'll all be dead from climate change in twelve years or so, and it's keeping her up at night, poor thing.
I wonder, though; if she finds out about this black hole problem, do you suppose she'd try to find a way to blame it on CO2?

2 More than likely, Dana. I have little doubt it will be human activity that is causing this in Occluded Cortex's view.

3 This is more of the hyperbolic media fearmongering. It's time to panic because the activity of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way has increased by .02% in the past decade. This nation can no longer live without it's daily diet of bullshit.
Vaping has been around for more than a decade and has been practiced by millions of peole. No problems have been reported until this month. Now we have 380 people sick and 6 people dead. Six people. Not six million, or even six thousand. Six.
These people vaped, so it's time to panic. It's time to screech about the "vaping epidemic" (six dead, for God's sake), and ban vaping. "They were vaping and now they're dead."
We don't know what else they were doing. They may have been huffing paint. They may have been smoking magic mushrooms. But we have a fucking "vaping epidemic."

God help us all.

4 Yeah; my mother worked for R.J. Reynolds when I was in high school and college (so many years ago) and they introduced vaping back then to get the anti-smoking crowd off their backs. It didn't work then, because they immediately started looking for some hook to use to ban vaping. It took a while but now they have this idiocy. Of course, the same zealots who want to ban vaping are eager to legalize marijuana across the country...

5 Oh, I should say, that the tobacco companies were working on vaping technology back in the eighties. That's how far back it went. As I say, my mother worked for Big Tobacco and she told me all about it at the time.

And Bill you are right about the black hole hysteria, too. It's what Michael Crichton observed in his excellent novel "State of Fear"; the Progressives use fear and hysteria as a means of control, and they generate all this stupidity in the Universities (which they own) and the media dutifully picks it up and breathlessly reports it. Then a commission is created to study the non-problem, then policy recommendations are made, then some left wing policy is enacted to "solve the problem" which never existed in the first place. But it starts with keeping people in fear and a sense of terrible urgency. It's a vile thing.

6 Come ON, guys... don't worry about Black Holes. That's so raaaaacist. We're actually gonna get done in by a huge undetected asteroid -- well, actually, it will have been detected but they won't tell us ahead of time.
Ideally, they (depending on whoever "they" really are) will have calculated that it will strike dead-center on Tehran, or maybe Chicago or Detroit. My preference of course is that it wipe out Iran's government. It would be wasted effort to hit an American city run by the liberals.
For those who want it to hit Israel, I'll get Jack to provide proper Hebrew curses. Jack, I hope you're reading these comments. . .

7 Yeah; black holes have black in the name. I suppose they worry about white dwarf stars...