CayceG

You should read "The 2020 Commission."

It goes into that. 

We really should do something about all these nukes and the ease with which they can be used - intentionally or accidentally. 

This is why if there's a nuclear war, I will be ending my life before anything else has a chance to!

5 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

I just hope that my family and I are atomized instantly by a detonation and don't have to live through minutes, hours, or days of the aftermath before we die. Better to not even know you are dead than to go through the pain. I wonder if my city is on a target list. Maybe, we do have an oil refinery and large steel plant/mill, so we could be a strategic target.

Sorry to burst your bubble. 

Man, fuck the NYT. 

From the other thread:

I cast my ballot today - the first day of early voting. 

Karl Dean for Governor

Phil Bredesen for Senator

Jim Cooper for Rep

And there were a few ballot measures too:

I voted in favor of a Community Oversight Board for Metro Nashville's police department. I voted against a change in term limits of City Councilmen from 2-6yr terms to 3. And I voted against requiring councilmen and mayors to take an oath against the Metro Charter. Because fuck oaths. 

I cast my ballot today - the first day of early voting. 

Karl Dean for Governor

Phil Bredesen for Senator

Jim Cooper for Rep

And there were a few ballot measures too:

I voted in favor of a Community Oversight Board for Metro Nashville's police department. I voted against a change in term limits of City Councilmen from 2-6yr terms to 3. And I voted against requiring councilmen and mayors to take an oath against the Metro Charter. Because fuck oaths. 

1 minute ago, mclumber1 said:

 

This a parody tweet, right?

That happened. 

The most recent information I'm seeing is that between 4 and 10 F-22s were affected. This doesn't mean destroyed. 

My guess (sans-evidence) is that the F-22s were not flight capable due to maintenance or whatever and were stored in various hangars. I know I saw two that were in the big hangar with the QF-16s. But they looked intact. 

Take a look at Tyndall on this imagery:

https://storms.ngs.noaa.gov/storms/michael/index.html#18/30.06343/-85.57752

There's a massive hangar that's getting all the attention, and that was where several planes were stored. It took lots of damage. But there are also several other hangars around the base that are either lightly damaged, or not at all damaged. Assuming there were 2 F-22s in the big hangar, my guess is because the rest of the Raptors were stored in more hardened hangars and they just didn't have room for these two.

I am quite happy Tao is back. 

Kaufman's schtick was to fool the audience and the public. 

If he were alive, he'd be playing the role of total MAGA chud and pissing off everyone he came into contact with. Everyone except Trump, who he would lavish praise on. 

The joke being, we'd all be mad, but Andy would actually be apolitical and just doing it to make us mad. 

@Remarkableriots

https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/24/the-empire-strikes-back/

Direct refutation:

Quote

The most famous event was called Starfish Prime — a 1.4 megaton nuclear explosion conducted by the United States in the Pacific in July 1962. By contrast, North Korea’s 2013 nuclear test — its largest and most successful — was on the order of 10 kilotons, or more than a hundred-times smaller.

 

EMP threat-mongers sometimes dramatically exaggerate the effects of Starfish Prime. For example, Lowell Wood, later a member of the EMP Commission, described the impact of Starfish Prime to Congress in plainly apocalyptic terms. Starfish Prime, he said, "very unexpectedly turned off the lights over a few million square miles in the mid-Pacific. This EMP also shut down radio stations, turned off cars, burned out telephone systems, and wreaked other mischief throughout the Hawaiian Islands, nearly 1,000 miles distant from ground zero."

 

All of which was terrible — or would have been, had it happened. It did not.

 

Starfish Prime was bad, but it was not nearly so dramatic as Wood claimed. In fact, lots of people turned out to watch the explosion from hotels and beaches in Hawaii, including reporters sent to cover it.

Quote

Now, as I say, Starfish Prime did do some damage, even if Waikiki’s luau schedule was uninterrupted. The electromagnetic pulse and other effects probably killed off two or three satellites in orbit, which was bad enough. The explosion may also have damaged some telephone equipment, but there were no telephone outages. (Military communications and test instrumentation all worked fine.) Some street lights on Ferdinand Street in Manoa and Kawainui Street in Kailua also went out. Of course, street lights and telephone systems experience everyday failures, too. You’d be surprised at how hard it is to demonstrate that street light failures are the result of an electromagnetic pulse rather than, say, faulty fuses. (Apparently, the answer turns on fascinating questions like "How many clear plastic washers were in transformer cutouts that failed?") Contemporary reports mention continuous radio coverage of the event with no outages.

 

So let’s be clear: Starfish Prime did not turn off the lights over a few million square miles in the mid-Pacific." It did not shut down any radio stations or cars or burn out the telephone system. 

Quote

For example, the EMP Commission exposed 37 cars and 18 trucks to EMP effects in a laboratory environment. While EMP advocates claim the results of an EMP attack would be "planes falling from the sky, cars stalling on the roadways, electrical networks failing, food rotting," the actual results were much more modest. Of the 55 vehicles exposed to EMP, six at the highest levels of exposure needed to be restarted. A few more showed "nuisance" damage to electronics, such as blinking dashboard displays.

Regarding the people on the EMP Commission, they theoretically want to stop nuclear detonations in space, right?

Wrong:

Quote

Lest you think these ideas collapsed with the Soviet Union, EMP Commission members William Graham, Johnny Foster, and Robert Hermann were all members of the Defense Science Board when it made an ill-fated effort to revive nuclear-armed missile defenses in the Bush administration. The George W. Bush administration. This led Senators Ted Stevens and Dianne Feinstein to sponsor an amendment that prohibits any expenditure on such a cockamamie scheme. Stevens called the idea "stupid," which would be the first and last time that the late senator from Alaska and I agreed completely.

One might very well get the impression from all this that certain people are perhaps not quite as worried about electromagnetic pulse as they let on, at least not when it threatens sacred causes like national missile defense efforts.

So, again, I say: Wrong. Fucking wrong on each and every count. 

EMPs are not a threat. 

Nuclear weapons are a threat. Period.

OR HAS SHE??

[Insert tweet from another reporter contradicting Axios]

15 minutes ago, mclumber1 said:

Who wins in a Turkey vs Saudi Arabia war?  SA may have better, more advanced weapons, but are they necessarily a better military? But say Turkey does win this hypothetical war, imagine the quagmire they would be in if they had to occupy the Kingdom.  

Any war with Saudi Arabia should have the end goal of decapitating the leadership and letting the rest of the factions within devolve into chaos. 

What do you bet the former Interpol chief wasn't the one that sent that resignation letter. 

Just now, CitizenVectron said:

I wonder what it feels like to be one of the FBI agents that was a part of that "investigation."

"Just shakin' the bushes boss!"

4 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

If I had superpowers I would definitely (probably) kill many American politicians.

I want to wish so many people into the cornfield. 

So many fucking people. 

38 minutes ago, thewhyteboar said:

 

Can we stop doing this?

And there are always going to be a series of grievances du jour because there's no lingering specter of Evil outside waiting to ruin the country. 

We're so listless and without purpose as a country that we are forced to look at minor political differences as forces of polar opposition. 

Actually, I'll amend my statement. The Fall of the Soviet Union was the US winning without having to do anything that we commonly had done. Take it back to the beginning of the Cold War and you see that the US won WW2 and utterly defeated Japan - not by negotiation to avoid a prolonged war or ground invasion of Japan, but by complete destruction brought on by the atomic bomb. We won on our terms with complete capitulation. In Europe, the same was done (with help). We got high as fuck on that as a country. That colored how MacArthur went into Korea. That informed the bad decisions in Vietnam. It STILL infects our ideas on how to prosecute a war and what the ultimate goals are. Desert Storm didn't help either. Without a win to close out a 40 year period in our existence, we were a ship adrift in the ocean.

In short, I blame Hitler.

2 minutes ago, osxmatt said:

 

It’s obvious that Supreme Court nominations, or any judicial nomination, should come from within the judicial branch, instead of Congress.

 

It’s one of the countless examples that the founders were myopic fools.

If you'll remember, Kavanaugh was handpicked by Kennedy as his successor. He communicated this to Trump and it was so. 

Your solution is already in place. 

And based on that, I'm trying to find a genesis point for where it all went wrong. 

Trump being elected is one thing, but the people that elected him were always here. You could say that 40,000 people initiated this, but that misses a larger point. These people were always here and always going to do something like this. And they were energized after...

The election of Barack Obama is the other moment I could think of. That was when things really really ramped up. But Obama's election was a response to the Bush Administration and the horrors that it wrought upon this Earth. Which really got set off by...

9/11. That fucked us up good. But our response was something that wasn't appropriate to the scale of the attack and the perpetrators. I think that this all happened because of...

The Fall of the Soviet Union. This left us with no enemy. No moderating factor. No Big Bad. Nowhere to focus our discontent, our factionalism, or our xenophobia. I agree with Putin--this event was the largest, most significant geopolitical catastrophe in modern times. I'm not saying I wished the bad old days were back, but I think that is genuinely where our demise began. 

This is essentially the path to the ultimate breakup and demise of this country. 

27 minutes ago, mclumber1 said:

 

Can you tell us how you really feel?