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What stupid shit has Trump done today?

CRI said:
Ah yes, the white dudes who only just discovered the 150 year old institutionally racist convict labor system in the US. Funny their only takeaway seems to be an incident 30 odd years ago they can use to bash Hilary Clinton, and slate African Americans (particularly women) on social media as "race traitors" for backing her in the election. How very progressive. :rolleyes:

Related - have you seen the Ava DuVernay film 13th, as in the 13th Amendment? If not, I highly recommend it.
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The real racists are the ones who object to black prisoners being used for forced labour so that a rich, decades later destined to be 'woke', white couple were spared the horror of cleaning up after themselves or paying someone to do the work.
 
On FiveThityEight Is Bernie Sanders Really The Democratic Front-Runner?
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natesilver: Agree or disagree with the following SAT-style analogy?

Elizabeth Warren : Bernie Sanders :: Rand Paul : Ron Paul.

clare.malone: Agree. I wonder if they still ask SAT questions like that?

harry: Well. Hmm. I don’t remember Warren beating the Senate leader’s preferred choice in a Senate primary like Rand Paul did. But I get what you’re going for.

perry: Not really. I sort of see Warren as a much more establishment-friendly person than either of the Pauls. So I disagree.

clare.malone: I love how everyone in these chats redefines the rules. Remind me to never play parlor games with you guys.

natesilver: I suppose I mean the analogy in this way: Ron Paul, like Bernie, got a lot of credit from voters for perceived authenticity and for really being quite pioneering.

perry: The analogy will work there. Sanders is reportedly mad at Warren for endorsing HRC and not him.

natesilver: One of Yglesias’s points is that “Bernie Sanders has a clear message” — everyone knows what he stands for. Do you agree that everyone knows what Sanders stands for? And how much of an advantage is that?

clare.malone: It’s certainly a big one, particularly since the only thing that most Democrats can seem to come up with is just to rant against Trump.

perry: I think I see Sanders much more through demographics than message. He was really strong among independents who voted in the primary and people under 30, really weak with blacks, weak with self-identified moderates and stronger with liberals.

I think that by 2020, many Dems will be closer on ideology to Sanders than Clinton was. I think you will see more Democratic presidential candidates pushing for single-payer health care, taking on the wealthy and big banks, etc.
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Nate Silver & co throwing around 2020 Dem candidates. Interesting analogy with the Pauls.

They don't get into it but it's quite possible the Dems won't get it together to beat Trump in 2020. The Trump Presidency also highlights something obvious. A President needs support in the Senate and particularly Congress to do much domestically. Trump ran against the GOP establishment as much as Clinton but is saddled with many of their policies. In reality the billionaire scam artiste is fine with a lot of that but what if he'd been sincere? He's so divisive he's proved repellent to the Dems. He came into office as a Lame Duck. The Dems are tilting liberal but an awful lot are pretty conservative. The GOP is a smaller tent increasingly going radically rightward and willing to flirt with really unpopular policies like Trumpcare. There's an awful lot of very Red states and GOP Reps tend to fear primary challenges from the right backed by folks like the Kochs and Mercers. Right wing candidates often did better than Trump despite Trump. There's a tendency to stasis as there's little scope for the bipartisan accommodation the US system is designed to expect. The consensus that Obama promised and conspicuously failed to deliver. And policies he pushed through without that are now being feed into the meat grinder by Trump while the GOP eye up even LBJ era stuff. Hope won elections but was not a strategy that delivered change. How would a sincerely Social Democrat POTUS who's alienated much of the Dem establishment fair in this system?
 
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Truly horrific stuff is being built upon what was already a pretty horrible system. I have picked out a few but the whole thing is worth reading to understand the absolute barbarity of it.

Here are the hidden horrors in the Senate GOP's new Obamacare repeal bill

—Buyers of cheap Cruz plans would be locked out of the insurance market if they get sick. A little-noticed aspect of the Cruz proposal is that the cheap plans it allows would not qualify as legitimate insurance coverage under the GOP’s “continuous coverage” rules.

Those rules, embodied in both the House and Senate GOP repeal bills, guarantee coverage for preexisting conditions as long as the buyer maintains insurance coverage without a break of longer than two months. Under the Senate bill, anyone with such a lapse would face a six-month waiting period for new insurance before the preexisting condition guarantee would be effective.


—The senators exempt themselves from the loss of consumer protections. A convoluted provision in the amended measure exempts Congress and its staff members from the loss of guarantees for those with preexisting conditions and other consumer protections.

You won’t find the words “Congress” and “exemption” next to each other anywhere in the bill. You have to know that “1312(d)(3)(D)” is the provision of the Affordable Care Act requiring members of Congress and their staffs to obtain coverage through the Obamacare exchanges, and then notice, on Page 167 of the Senate bill, that the elimination of consumer protections is “non-applicable” to that section.

—The bill still cuts taxes for the wealthy. One widely noticed change from the original Senate bill is the retention of two taxes the ACA imposes on high-income taxpayers — those earning more than $200,000, or $250,000 for couples. These are a 3.8% surcharge on capital gains and dividends and a 0.9% increase in the Medicare tax for those taxpayers. The original Senate bill would have repealed those taxes, handing over an estimated $346-billion windfall to the rich over 10 years.
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Part of the problem on focusing on civility policing, norms, the Russia stuff and personality driven politics is that there seems to be very little discussion of the particularities of how people are going to be hurt, impoverished and in many cases actually killed by this legislation.
 
J Ed said:
Truly horrific stuff is being built upon what was already a pretty horrible system. I have picked out a few but the whole thing is worth reading to understand the absolute barbarity of it.

Here are the hidden horrors in the Senate GOP's new Obamacare repeal bill



Part of the problem on focusing on civility policing, norms, the Russia stuff and personality driven politics is that there seems to be very little discussion of the particularities of how people are going to be hurt, impoverished and in many cases actually killed by this legislation.
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The media alternates between Russiagate and Trumpcare. There's still some hope the Repub senate won't be able to get their shit together to pass it. I gather they've got it set so the suffering and dying of the low income victims will be phased in and won't really be felt until after the 2018 or even 2020 elections. Majority leader McConnell is an evil genius at parliamentary shenanigans.
This just in: The vote has been delayed due to McCain's recovery from surgery. They can't afford to lose one vote.
The Senate will delay votes on a bill to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, announced Saturday night, because of a new obstacle to winning enough support...Mr. McConnell said the Senate would “defer consideration” of the bill, scheduled for this week, because Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, would be absent, recovering from surgery...Mr. McConnell had said that he wanted to begin debate on the bill and pass it this week, using special fast-track procedures. But without Mr. McCain, Senate Republicans would not have the votes they need to take up or pass their bill to repeal and replace major provisions of the health care act...It was unclear how long the delay will be. “The leader has not announced a date” for the Senate to take up the legislation, said an aide to Mr. McConnell...
The announcements...dealt another setback to the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act
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McCain’s Surgery Will Delay Senate Votes on Health Care Bill
 
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In The Atlantic Why Do Republicans Suddenly Hate College So Much?
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In fact, what’s most striking about Trump is that he barely talks about higher education at all. Sure, there were some desultory boasts about his own attendance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School during the campaign, but Trump never even bothered to produce a higher-education platform (even as Hillary Clinton made a plan for affordable degrees a centerpiece of her stump speech). When he finally did get around to discussing it, in the campaign’s closing days, it was mostly to criticize rising tuition and to promise to bring it down.

Trump’s innovation maybe wasn’t to bash college so much as to ignore it. Previous candidates, in both parties, paid at least lip service to the idea of expanding educational opportunities and retraining workers whose jobs were eliminated by changes in the U.S. economy. The first indications that that was changing came in the 2012 GOP primary, when Rick Santorum (B.A., Penn State; M.B.A, Pitt; J.D., Dickinson Law) accused Barack Obama of being a “snob” for trying to expand access to education. Trump didn’t bother to make the case for retraining or education; he simply promised dispossessed blue-collar workers that their jobs in mills, factories, and especially coal mines were going to come back.

Meanwhile, college is becoming increasingly expensive and therefore out of reach, even at the public universities that have historically been a boon to lower-income citizens. While college enrollment jumped during the recession, as people sought shelter from a poor jobs market, graduation rates fell. And since then, enrollment has fallen, too, especially for lower-income students. A PRRI/The Atlantic poll found that 54 percent of white working-class voters now consider college more “a gamble that may not pay off” than “a smart investment in the future”; those who viewed it as a gamble were almost twice as likely to back Trump as those who disagreed.
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Trump's other innovation was to acknowledge and celebrate less educated voters. Not to see this as a social trap that needs fixing as aspirational US politicians usually have but a path to power. The future (or reclaimed past) Trump promised was one that was bright for folks who didn't finish high school. A big lie that can harm people but it's a cunningly crafted one.

Cites that Pew poll posted above. What I noticed there was younger, poorer GOP voters weren't so attracted to this anti-education trend. It's older, better off and better educated Republicans who seem to be most down on education and set on pulling up the ladder they climbed. The reverse of their peers amongst Dems. That might reflect a knee jerk loathing of snooty liberals and all they advocate for amongst their conservative peers who brushed up against them at college.
 
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On Politico The John Birch Society Is Back
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In that quest, they have common cause with powerful allies in Texas, including Senator Ted Cruz, Representative Louie Gohmert and a smattering of local officials. Recently at the state level, legislators have authored Bircher-esque bills that have made it further through the lawmaking process than many thought possible in Texas, even just a few years ago—though these are less the cause of the John Birch Society’s influence than an indication of the rise of its particular strain of politics. These include bills that would forbid any government entity from participating in “Agenda 21,” a UN sustainable development effort which JBS pamphlets describe as central to the “UN’s plan to establish control over all human activity”; prevent the theoretical sale of the Alamo to foreigners (since 1885 the state has owned the former mission, Texas’ most visited historic landmark, where the most famous battle of the Texas Revolution occurred); and repeal the Texas DREAM Act, which allows undocumented students who graduate from Texas high schools to pay in-state tuition at public colleges. And last month, Governor Greg Abbott signed the “American Laws for American Courts” Act into law, guarding against what the society has called “Sharia-creep” by prohibiting the use of Islamic Sharia law in Texas’ court system.

This is what the 21st-century John Birch Society looks like. Gone is the organization’s past obsession with ending the supposed communist plot to achieve mind-control through water fluoridation. What remains is a hodgepodge of isolationist, religious and right-wing goals that vary from concrete to abstract, from legitimate to conspiracy minded—goals that don’t look so different from the ideology coming out of the White House. It wants to pull the United States out of NAFTA (which it sees as the slippery slope that will lead us to a single-government North American Union), return America to what they call its Christian foundations, defundthe UN, abolish the departments of education and energy, and slash the federal government drastically. The John Birch Society once fulminated on the idea of Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government; now, it wants to stop the investigation into Russia’s 2016 election meddling and possible collusion with the campaign of President Donald Trump.
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It's some reboot even when facing a Commie deficit. Still fighting the Illumanti and the Council on Foreign Relations and the great evil of active government.

Links to an interesting paper Political Orientation Predicts Credulity Regarding Putative Hazards
 
Postwashington Melancholia | Richard Seymour on Patreon

It's quite plausible, if the US ruling class is unable to manage the excrescences of the system -- get its shit together in other words -- that we have reached "peak globalisation". Certainly the idea of its inevitability, of it being like seasonal change or the laws of gravity, has been destroyed. Nikil Saval, in a very interesting long reads piece for The Guardian, argues that what has happened is that crisis, and the loss of intellectual glamour and ideological uniformity, have brought the long-suppressed dysfunctions and iniquities of 'globalisation' to the fore. There is no longer an assured political constituency for it.

The focus on Trump, and his nationalist bombast and ineptitude, allows this to be obscured. A certain kind of nostalgic centrist yearns for the days when their side was in power, was the global elite, and obsessing about Trump's patent shortcomings enables them to imagine that "the world" is "united" against Trump, and that they will be back on top soon. But there's a growing undertone of mournfulness, perhaps even tending toward melancholia.

Nothing sums this up better than the 'viral' video of Chris Uhlmann, a conservative journalist working at ABC News, laying into Trump at the G20. Uhlman is a reactionary, who has fully signed up to the Breivikite myth of "cultural marxism". But he's a Cold War reactionary, not a Bannonite.

And he said of Trump that he had "no desire and no capacity to lead the world". He lamented that Trump wasn't hawkish enough on North Korea, which he said "would have put pressure on China and Russia". He had "pressed fast-forward on the decline of the United States as a global leader" and "managed to isolate his nation, to confuse and alienate his allies and to diminish America." "He will cede that power to China and Russia — two authoritarian states that will forge a very different set of rules for the 21st century." Uhlmann concluded:

"Some will cheer the decline of America, but I think we'll miss it when it is gone."And that is the biggest threat to the values of the West which he claims to hold so dear."
That this was the subject of such global cheers and hoots from broadcasters and newspapers, that it went 'viral', says a lot about the disposition of today's centrists. This wasn't a defiant rallying cry against Trumpism, a call to resist, even to defend the Washington Consensus. It was a conservative sigh of defeat. It registered a loss.

Of course, there are always losses in political life, and we mourn them. But one of Freud's distinctions between melancholia and mourning lies in the nature of the attachment to the lost object. When the attachment is narcissistic, the loss is likely to be experienced as a catastrophic immiseration and impoverishment of the self. And the identification with American power, with a fantasy of global omnipotence, clearly has been a narcissistic one for the organic intellectuals of the Washington Consensus. There is a sense here that, if they have lost this love object, the object of a long-running romance, they have also lost whatever is worth having in the political ego of 'the West'.

Postwashington melancholia, (cf Paul Gilroy), is -- insofar as it operates -- an emerging ideological formation. It can be deferred through scapegoating abjected portions of humanity, such as 'cultural marxists', immigrants, Muslims, the 'white working class', the Russkies, and so on. But ultimately, and ironically, this sort of formation would tend to collapse into a version of Trumpism. The same people now berating Trump will probably begin to sound a lot like him: 'Member when we were great? 'Member when was used to win? We used to win all the time. We were so winning, we got sick of winning. 'Member?

And the spiralling descent into militarist and ethno-chauvinist death-drive will not be far behind
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I think Seymour is underselling it, we're well into the process of neoliberals sounding like Trump. See Macron's lamentation of African birthrates, Obama's references to the unentrepreneurial Slav, Clinton advisors who call for the 'KGB' to the bombed, Remainers who want to remove voting rights from Brexiters and centrist MPs who want to remove anonymity from social media accounts because they fear scrutiny and want to expose their critics who could then be pressured by hounding them from their jobs.
 
On The Resurgent This is Really Just Stupid
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On top of it all, it is more and more obvious that most of the leaking is coming from within the Trump team. In fact, one person in the White House tells me he is even convinced it is his colleagues leaking and not the Mueller team leaking. Two senators familiar with the Mueller investigation also tell me the leaks are Trump team originated and not with Mueller’s team in their opinion. In fact, one person with direct knowledge of the investigation tells me that Mueller’s team is looking at something the media speculation is not currently covering and has only shifted its attention to Trump, Jr. after the release of that email thread. But even this guy will not say what the team is actually looking at. And I should note that it was Jared Kushner’s legal team that threw the Don, Jr. email out there.

The people in the Trump team, as a White House friend said to me, are engaged in “amateur Game of Thrones bulls**t” and have largely succeeded in sabotaging the rest of this year for the President.
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Having followed the ups and down of Trumps business career for decades I did think the man had some talent. He did appear a master of self promotion. The gold fixated gombeen man, a sleekit chiseler never giving a sucker an easy break. A walking embodiment of Devil take the hindmost American capitalism. His supporters were often attracted by the fairly daft idea that this bullshitting billionaire would be more capable than the time serving politicians they'd tired of. This theory isn't surviving contact with high office.

How did these people ever survive in the real estate business? You might think they were just entitled, wealthy twits playing monopoly badly with a slice of daddy's fortune.

This sad farce of squabbling mediocrities is what you get when you elect a chaotic Queens real estate guy who seems most comfortable with conspiracy theorists and 2nd rate hacks.

Despite the shit show and sleekit eagerness to betray Trump's favourability is only down 2% with GOP voters:
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On Politico Don’t Compare Trump to Nixon. It’s Unfair to Nixon.
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Finally, never underestimate presidential hubris—or just plain stupidity.

“My stupid theory of the case is that they’ve done such dumb things since he was inaugurated and the dumbest of all was that historic night when he fired the FBI director. Now, Nixon was a much smarter man than Trump is. Nixon read books. Nixon thought. Nixon thought about policy. You could have a coherent conversation with Richard Nixon,” Drew says. “But they both made the same mistake, which was firing your prosecutor. That was really stupid.”
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Nixon was a very calculating, intellectually curious and paranoid man sometimes disabled by rage. Trump does share the last two qualities. Even clever people are prone to mistakes when scared or angry. It's a great leveller and Trump seems to spend a lot of time turning puce.

Nixon during Watergate was covering up past behaviour that violated political norms even by his old hardball standards. He'd colluded with South Vietnam to disrupt peace talks during an election race. Something that very dirty player LBJ knew about but thought indecent to make public. Tricky Dicky knew that was out there and it rattled him into rash actions that led to the bungled Watergate break in. Trump has nothing like Nixon's depth as a politician. He's no respect for political norms and flaunts his transgressive qualities. He's quite happy with Don Jnr's willingness to collude with Russians and inept attempts to cover it up. It's quite likely he has a cupboard very full of shabby skeletons. But will there ever be anything he is actually ashamed of or that his indulgent supporters would disown him over? Meanwhile he'll be getting on with High Crimes & Misdemeanours as if it was just another day in the real estate business.
 
On Bloomberg Americans Feel Good About the Economy, Not So Good About Trump

Outside crisis situations Presidents have relatively little power over the immediate economy as that's the business of Congress. Factors like the price of oil or demographics have a bigger sway even than Congress. A President can set a direction as Reagan did in heading towards NAFTA. They can wreck things e.g. by abruptly pulling out of established trade agreement but even Trump has baulked at that. We're still basically dealing with the legacy economy of the last administration. Under Trump the stock market has been emboldened by all the signs that there will gravy for the upper percentiles and he is getting some good marks beyond his base (~36%) in some areas but he's losing people on the hottest domestic issue healthcare.
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This provides some idea of the salience of issues for Americans:
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Healthcare seems to be the in your face issue with bipartisan appeal but also a third rail. It's going to be magnified by the looming cancellation of Obamacare. The labour market, which isn't so bad in a lot of places, a distant second. Immigration and Climate Change are highly partisan polarising issues both clashing with jobs and powerful lobby groups. Do this poll at county level you'll get different answers but I suspect those top five issues would still dominate. I'm a bit surprised taxes rate so low as this always seemed really salient for Republicans. Americans do not seem close to being up in arms about trade.
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I do wonder about the fifth of Americans still expecting bipartisan collaboration for the common good.
 
Half of America think it's possible for a Nth Korean Nuclear weapon to hit the United States? The only manage to find the ocean 50% of the time....
 
8den said:
Half of America think it's possible for a Nth Korean Nuclear weapon to hit the United States? The only manage to find the ocean 50% of the time....
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It's an exaggerated fear but perhaps more rational than hysterically overrating the comparatively slight threat from IS. Folks who know about this stuff do think the capability to hit the US with a nuke could arrive in a few years and it's clear the North Koreans want it.

In The Diplomat North Korea's ICBM: A New Missile and a New Era
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If this sounds familiar, it should. This is exactly Pakistan’s nuclear strategy against India (in addition to technological cooperation between Pakistan and North Korea, we are also seeing strategic mimicking). The difference is that Pakistan does not require ICBMs to hold its primary adversary, neighboring India, at risk. North Korea does. North Korea’s strategy was telegraphed well before it could be implemented: Use short-range nuclear capabilities to defeat a conventional invasion, and long-range ICBM capabilities to deter American nuclear retaliation by holding U.S. homeland targets at risk. On July 4, North Korea completed the puzzle when it demonstrated the credible (if unreliable) ability to hold targets in America (if not the continental United States) at risk.

Based on its deterrence strategy, we should not expect North Korea to stop with the Hwasong-14. Kim Jong-un’s plan calls for longer-range capabilities than this, and North Korea tends to do what it says. Expect longer-range missiles to appear in the near future, including ones that can reach America’s eastern seaboard. Down the road, these may appear in larger numbers and with greater responsiveness, such as solid fuel missiles. We underestimate North Korea’s ability to develop the capabilities it needs at our own peril.

So what? North Korea was nuclear before; it is nuclear after. What’s the big deal? The big deal is that now the United States cannot threaten a conventional invasion of North Korea without risking direct nuclear attack on its homeland. Not only does this curtail American defense and deterrence options, it has significant implications for its allies in East Asia. North Korea’s ability to hold the U.S. homeland at risk cuts a knife through the credibility of American extended deterrence commitments to Japan and South Korea. With North Korea developing the ability to strike the United States, Seoul and Tokyo may soon wonder whether the United States would truly give up New York or Los Angeles for them — in other words, would the United States still respond in kind to a nuclear attack on an East Asian city if it meant provoking retaliation on U.S. soil?

Indeed, the core strategic implication of North Korea’s ICBM development is an old Cold War goodie known as “decoupling.” That is, Bonn, Paris, and London feared that with Soviet ICBMs pointed at the U.S. homeland, American security guarantees in continental Europe were not credible. It is one thing to expose American military forces forward deployed in theater; it is quite another to expose American population centers to nuclear retaliation. It is part of what motivated de Gaulle’s France to pursue an independent nuclear deterrent. As hard as it may be to deter Kim, reassuring our allies may now be even harder.
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Goes on to point out the North Koreans don't seem to be especially irrational or suicidal. They probably won't nuke a US city just because Trump calls Kim Jong-un a fat kid who probably plays with himself nights.

Of course the odd thing is they asked about North Korea but not Russia. A peer adversary in nuclear terms the US is perhaps more liable to stumble into a nuclear conflict with. The strategy of rapid escalation to tactical nukes while waving city killing weapons described above is much like the latest Russian doctrine. A pretty mad flirting with winnable nuclear war rather than Mutually Assured Destruction. Not likely but deterrence's great weakness was always we'd bumble into genocidal warfare unintentionally. Particularly if you have a man in the Whitehouse who seems just as jittery and thin skinned a fucker as Kim Jong-un.
 
On The Cipher Brief The "Main Enemy": Russian Active Measures in the United States
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The Cipher Brief’s experts agree that this was likely only one of many attempts to gain access – or throw doubt over – the Trump campaign. In Hall’s view, the arrangements to speak with Trump Jr. represent classic Russian tradecraft to attempt to penetrate the Trump campaign. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “the Russians are absolutely expert at this.” According to him, Russian intelligence officers exploit American openness to information – based on a tradition of freedom of speech and freedom of association.

The result? “The Russians take that to the bank every time.”

However, Daniel Hoffman, a former Chief of Station with the Central Intelligence Agency, frames it slightly differently. While he too sees the Kremlin’s hand in the meeting, he believes it was simply meant to create an image of collusion that will damage the reputation and legitimacy of the Trump Presidency, and cast doubt on the American electoral system writ large.

“This particular influence operation is straight from Russian intelligence playbook,” he told The Cipher Brief. “In this case, I believe the Kremlin wanted purposely to create a compromising situation with an eye towards soiling our electoral process.”

In his view, establishing coordination with the Trump campaign was not necessary for the meeting to be successful. “I do not believe Russia required collusion with a campaign to weaponize the intelligence they stole via their cyber hacking operations directed against our electoral process,” Hoffman said.

But Hall does not see the two as mutually exclusive. “If I was the Russian operations officer running the HUMINT piece of trying to get into the Trump campaign, my first goal would have been to identify people inside the campaign who were willing to talk. If, as a secondary one off, that interaction also gave the appearance of collusion somewhere down the road, and that’s damaging to the American democracy, then that’s just great. That’s something that you take as part of the operation,” he said.

And repeated failures by Kushner and Trump Jr. to reveal the meeting – whether to government investigators via security clearance forms or to the press – simply play into the Russian attempts described by Hoffman to create what the President himself has described as a ‘cloud’ over his administration.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a Cipher Brief expert and former Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the Department of Energy, wrote in the Washington Post that “the most notable achievement of this encounter lay in the campaign’s failure to report it to the appropriate U.S. authorities.”
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Counter Intelligence people do tend to be very paranoid. Odd to think the conspiracy theory loving Team Trump may have been insufficiently wary when it comes to wealthy Russians bearing gifts.
 
CrabbedOne said:
It's an exaggerated fear but perhaps more rational than hysterically overrating the comparatively slight threat from IS. Folks who know about this stuff do think the capability to hit the US with a nuke could arrive in a few years and it's clear the North Koreans want it.

In The Diplomat North Korea's ICBM: A New Missile and a New Era
Goes on to point out the North Koreans don't seem to be especially irrational or suicidal. They probably won't nuke a US city just because Trump calls Kim Jong-un a fat kid who probably plays with himself nights.

Of course the odd thing is they asked about North Korea but not Russia. A peer adversary in nuclear terms the US is perhaps more liable to stumble into a nuclear conflict with. The strategy of rapid escalation to tactical nukes while waving city killing weapons described above is much like the latest Russian doctrine. A pretty mad flirting with winnable nuclear war rather than Mutually Assured Destruction. Not likely but deterrence's great weakness was always we'd bumble into genocidal warfare unintentionally. Particularly if you have a man in the Whitehouse who seems just as jittery and thin skinned a fucker as Kim Jong-un.
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Whether the chance of Nth Korean nuke hitting the US is now more or less likely to happen since the last test isn't the point. It's that more Americans are worried about this possibility than the near certainty of Russian hacking their elections AGAIN.

Putin has just discovered than for a insignificant amount of money and potentially zero repercussions he can do more damage to the USA in two years than in 40 years of the Cold War. It's a near as to a dead cert that unless the US radically overhauls its electoral system it could be irrevocably damaged.

That's the point I was making, not whether the North Korean threat was viable, but rather "why are you worrying about something that is likely to never happen, instead of freaking out over something that did happened, is still ongoing and is likely to be a massive problem in the future?
 
8den said:
Whether the chance of Nth Korean nuke hitting the US is now more or less likely to happen since the last test isn't the point. It's that more Americans are worried about this possibility than the near certainty of Russian hacking their elections AGAIN.
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What does 'hacking their elections' mean? What proof do you have of this?
 
Trump wants everyone to hire Americans first.
He cuts number of visas for temporary help.
Companies start screaming that they can not operate without foreign workers.
Trump increases number of visas.

That makes no sense - force the companies to hire Americans.
 
J Ed said:
What does 'hacking their elections' mean? What proof do you have of this?
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Jed, here's how these sorts of investigations work.

The relevant authorities determine to investigate allegations of wrongdoing.

A process of discovery begins, wherein leads are followed, evidence is gathered and evaluated.

This process can take months or even years, because people who are involved in alleged wrongdoing, usually go to great lengths to cover their tracks.

And because in criminal or quasi criminal proceedings, the standard of proof required is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, those who will prosecute the case, must make sure all the i s are dotted and t s crossed, before going before a trier of fact.

So: asking for the proof at the beginning of the investigatory period, simply reveals a lack of understanding of why the investigatory period takes place.
 
Johnny Canuck3 said:
Jed, here's how these sorts of investigations work.

The relevant authorities determine to investigate allegations of wrongdoing.

A process of discovery begins, wherein leads are followed, evidence is gathered and evaluated.

This process can take months or even years, because people who are involved in alleged wrongdoing, usually go to great lengths to cover their tracks.

And because in criminal or quasi criminal proceedings, the standard of proof required is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, those who will prosecute the case, must make sure all the i s are dotted and t s crossed, before going before a trier of fact.

So: asking for the proof at the beginning of the investigatory period, simply reveals a lack of understanding of why the investigatory period takes place.
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There has to be reasonable suspicion to start an investigation in the first place. So what is it?
 
8den said:
Whether the chance of Nth Korean nuke hitting the US is now more or less likely to happen since the last test isn't the point. It's that more Americans are worried about this possibility than the near certainty of Russian hacking their elections AGAIN.

Putin has just discovered than for a insignificant amount of money and potentially zero repercussions he can do more damage to the USA in two years than in 40 years of the Cold War. It's a near as to a dead cert that unless the US radically overhauls its electoral system it could be irrevocably damaged.

That's the point I was making, not whether the North Korean threat was viable, but rather "why are you worrying about something that is likely to never happen, instead of freaking out over something that did happened, is still ongoing and is likely to be a massive problem in the future?
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Yup.

South Carolina May Prove a Microcosm of U.S. Election Hacking Efforts
There were nearly 150,000 attempts to penetrate the voter-registration system on Election Day 2016, State Election Commission says

It's behind a paywall, but reported here with a link to the full report from state the Election Commission.

I'm thinking now the actual truth is genuinely not important to Americans who voted Trump and are still devoted to him.

It's like over the past few decades, folks who now back Trump saw their cherished American ideal of "freedom" extended too far. That is, extended to people they don't think deserve it - people of colour, women, Lesbians and Gays, refugees, non-Christians, non-conformists, etc. They feared if others are gaining, they must be losing something. It was a piece of cake for Trump and GOP legislators to tap into the barely concealed rage.

They've re-defined "freedom" to something for them to enjoy almost exclusively, because "freedom" given to others = unacceptable threat to them. Heck, the idea autocracy probably sounds quite attractive with it's strong leadership, order, security and "stability." They're sensible enough to know that while there may be some inconveniences, they and others like them will always enjoy most of the freedoms they already have, in some way. Some may even expand - freedom of religion could become "freedom to live in a country governed by Christian principles. If they have faith, they'll be okay. People who won't be okay aren't their concern, but they might pray for their salvation.

If the 2018 or 2020 elections aren't "free and fair," it doesn't matter. It's God's will. Ultimate cop out.


 
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