Here in California, we mash-up pizza ideas from all over, no matter what people think of it anywhere else. It turns out Detroit-style square pizza, with BBQ chicken and artichoke hearts, is pretty damn tasty.
My impression is that US missile silos are located mostly in sparsely populated areas of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, where there are not a lot of locals to overhear the garage door opening.
I have relatives in western Colorado. My impression is that folks there are more than a little tired of being "Boebert Country". Being tangled up in Trumpie stuff has not done them any good, and it has saddled them with a stigma that they now have to work their way out of.
Perceptions of crime waves are mostly driven by propaganda, not measurement.
In some cases, a "crime wave" doesn't represent an undifferentiated mass phenomenon, but rather the behavior of a single organized crime group: it's not that "everybody is being more criminal today" but rather "there is a specific gang that has figured out how to get away with a lot of crime". This seems to be the case for a lot of property crime in my part of the country.
I suppose that's a hazard when you rent your office space from fascists: if you later go against fascism even a little bit, they might take revenge on you.
It's not a matter of "the president having the ability to remove social media posts".
It's more like "should government agencies be allowed to use the 'report' button?"
For example: Facebook has their own policies against violent hate incitement, COVID health fraud, and so on. They choose to have those policies; they're not forced to by the government. If someone at the CDC sees a Facebook post that tells people to avoid vaccination and drink bleach instead, should they be allowed to report it to Facebook as a violation of Facebook's rules? If someone at the State Department sees a Facebook campaign that incites people to commit genocide, should they be allowed to tell Facebook what their platform is being used for?
The plaintiffs' argument was, roughly, "If a government agency tells Facebook about a violation of Facebook's rules, that's the government pressuring Facebook to silence someone's speech, which is a First Amendment violation."
That's the argument the court rejected. Government agencies are allowed to use the "report" button just as much as anyone else. They're allowed to communicate with social media sites about social problems such as hate incitement and health fraud. Doing so doesn't constitute forcing Facebook to take down someone's post.
By the way, this is also what the "Twitter Files" stuff was about: not government requiring Old Twitter to censor posts, but government agencies communicating with Old Twitter about things that were already in violation of Old Twitter's rules.
Surely then the Arabs will give it back to the French, whom they conquered it from at the end of the Crusades ... but the French have to give it back to the Arabs ... who have to give it back to the Greek Christians that they conquered it from ... who have to give it back to the Romans ... then the Jews again ... then the Assyrians as representative descendants of the Babylonians (note: the Arabs have to give them back Iraq, too) ... then the Jews again ... then the Spanish, Lebanese, and Sardinians as representative descendants of the Sea Peoples (the original Palestinians) by way of the Carthaginians ... then the Jews ... then the Canaanites if anyone can find them ... eventually it goes back to the Akkadians or something, right?
(Also, I think I left out the Turks [though they'll be busy in Kazakhstan], the Persians, the Macedonian-Greeks, and a few others ...)
The "pretending to be wise" answer is that it's easier to deal with mass extinction than with individual mortality; that the thought of your own death is weakened by the thought of gigadeaths.
More seriously, though:
Major disasters have always been a large part of human cultural experience. Cities have been destroyed by earthquakes, volcanoes, or hurricanes. Within recorded history, plagues and famines have reduced prosperous civilizations to desperate stragglers living in ruins.
Preventing or surviving disasters is, therefore, one of the most important things humans can work on. Disasters loom large in our cultural consciousness because they really are large and because we can actually do stuff to make these problems less bad.
Disaster preparedness is, in fact, no-kidding, really important for you, your family, your city, your country, and the world as a whole.
Preventing avoidable disasters, including manmade ones such as nuclear war, is a major part of what makes world politics morally significant. Avoiding the devastation of war is a really good reason to get good at politics, diplomacy, peacemaking, mutually beneficial relations among peoples; and the high stakes of "shit, we could actually kill off humanity if we fuck up politics too badly" is a pretty good motivator.
So ... we think a lot about bad shit that could happen, because bad shit really can happen, and we can do something about quite a lot of it.
Here in California, we mash-up pizza ideas from all over, no matter what people think of it anywhere else. It turns out Detroit-style square pizza, with BBQ chicken and artichoke hearts, is pretty damn tasty.