Unlike the Donald, who really is that one-dimensional.
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It’s just that the one dimension is perpendicular to all three of the dimensions that the rest of us exist in.
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If someone were to actually play a game of chess against Trump and needs more than a week to win, they might indeed not be smart enough for most career options.
But then, getting Trump to concentrate long enough to make more than one move is probably next to impossible. The whole “playing a game of chess” imagery just does’t really work, but that’s because of Trump, and not because of Ms. Daniels.
It’s reassuring to hear that. In fact, I want to hear things like this from as many people as possible, preferably even from Americans serving in the US armed forces There are other orders where I would have liked to place my trust in the people who happened to be in the chain of command - (Iraq, “renditions”/torture, drones). From across the Atlantic it becomes really hard to judge how far people who supported those “lesser” atrocities would be willing to go if Trump told them to.
Unfortunately, we also exist in a fourth dimension. And the only two scenarios that I can think of where Trump doesn’t cover at least 1050 more days in that fourth dimension involve nuclear annihilation or Mike Pence, neither of which I am particularly looking forward to.
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Oh, gawd!! I’m not going to be able to unthink that! BRAIN BLEACH, PLEASE!!!
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Not Russia though.
Yeah, because they might retaliate. . . by releasing the ‘pee tape.’
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Major Kong, I know you’re gonna think this a crazy but I just got a message from base over the CRM 114.
It decodes as Wing Attack plan R. R for Romeo.
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Does anyone else find themselves thinking “good thing for Stormy that we’re the United States and not Russia” as Putin would have had her rubbed out / terminated / disposed of years ago.
I’m sure Trump’s thinking that exact same line of reasoning.
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It’s true that no matter how much the USA is slipping towards authoritarianism the gulf between it and Russia is pretty wide. A porn actor who had sex with Putin wouldn’t be paid hush money, they’d know to keep their own mouth shut.
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Where ending up in a Thai jail is the good option.
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Queen takes Bishop (or so I’ve heard)
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Who?
Mike Dukakis?
Walter Mondale?
Ross Perot?
Mitt Romney
Ever notice how most people stop giving a sh1t about people who lose an election after the election? That is except supporters of Cheeto Caligula.
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One of my favorite parts of the Firefly universe was the role of Inara Serra. Street smarts
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Well, if the NPR program was at all accurate, simply asking whether a mechanism exists to prevent a madman from ending the world is reason enough to be removed from the launch chain.
Also, I’m think the generals are not involved in a presidentially launched strike, although this is not as clear. The launch codes are apparently for one a few pre-planned strikes and aren’t supposed to have anything much between the president and the silos. The whole point is to have enough of the missile fleet in air with only a few minutes warning that an attempt at a decapitation strike will still result in annihilation of the attacker. It’s not a co-ordinated assault, which is why it only involves hundreds of missiles, not thousands.
Again, the entire design is to prevent anyone from being able to interfere from the president’s launch order. You ask a question, you are removed. You fail to launch when you’re given the command to do so, you are removed, etc.
Now, there’s not a lot of material that I’ve been able to find, but anything I have found points to the system operating under the usual game theory assumptions of MAD. I’m going to guess that the “we’ll stop him” mumbling is mostly there to allow us to sleep at night and the process hasn’t materially changed in the last 40 years.
Well, it has to be one of the pre-programmed targets, so its either Russia or China, and in the apocalypse scenario, you want to nuke someone who will launch a thousands nukes everywhere. No one gets out alive (except you in your bunker). That shows those sorry SOBs who didn’t appreciate you.
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This is what I was thinking of:
Some scholars (and Wikipedia entries) insist that a system of checks and balances puts the secretary of defense in the decision loop. But Bruce G. Blair, a research scholar at Princeton University who as an Air Force officer would have launched a nuclear missile if an order had come from the president, said that rule applied in the silos but not at the top of the command chain.
“There’s nothing the secretary of defense can do,” Dr. Blair, who wrote a book on nuclear command and control, said in an interview. “He has no authority to refuse or disobey that order.”
Mr. Sagan, the Stanford expert, agreed, but noted that there were other ways for the secretary of defense to slow things down. “I think we’d be in uncharted waters if a president ordered the use of nuclear weapons and the secretary of defense refused to concur,” he said. “This has never happened.” No one, he added, could predict what would ensue if the nation’s top defense official tried to declare that the president was unfit to issue such an order.
“In some scenarios,” Mr. Sagan added, “such as an unprovoked nuclear attack by a president in peacetime, a constitutional crisis would be more likely than a prompt following of rules regarding succession and command authority.”
It intersects with the 25th amendment issue. The whole process you describe is military. First, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has to accept the order from the President. If I were the Joint Chiefs, and there was some crazy first strike order and, say, the secretary of defense had just resigned, etc., I’d wait, and let the Cabinet convene under the 25th.
edited to add: My point is not to defend this administration, but just saying I think you should sleep a little easier, because world events would have to deteriorate in the direction of global war, and so there would be some warning.
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Thanks for the NYT pointer. I’ll definitely read it.
Certainly if I’d expect sane people to step in if given the chance. But a 3am launch is certainly going to fire before any politician or general is even aware an order has been given. The part that isn’t clear to me is whether the location that the “football” transmits its orders to has a human in the loop before the orders go to the silos so at least whomever is on night watch could step in.
Honestly, I doubt it. It would be a huge security hole.
Anyway, this is not a political thing, this is a power of war that is entrusted to the president. Now, Trump’s presence may mean they eventually claw that power back (please!).
(The NPR program ended with short interviews of former Secretaries of Defense pointing out they wouldn’t have been informed if the button is pressed.)
Another hope: The codes are a moderately long series of letters. Maybe Trump can’t read them.
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