I know she's trolling, but this is still shocking to see. https://t.co/1u5yJTNSgX
— Andrew Lebovich (@tweetsintheME) December 19, 2015
.@KatrinaPierson: "What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you're afraid to use it?" #OReillyFactor pic.twitter.com/KWe9fNTu0R
— Fox News (@FoxNews) December 19, 2015
Hand-picked-by-Fox-News correspondent Hugh Hewitt cunningly asked The Donald about the “nuclear triad” during the last GOP debate, and it was clear that Trump wasn’t sure whether the phrase referred to foreign affairs or American’s Next Great Bake-Off. Now, of course, all the Repubs are strutting for the cameras, explaining how they will triad anybody so much as side-eyes Heartland America(tm), no lie. Which is not at all what the busy little minds in Ailes’ shop had in mind, oh my however could one cast such aspersions on their asparagus?…
Scientists Baffled As Doomsday Clock Simply Flashes "lol i quit" Repeatedly
— Hayes Brown (@HayesBrown) December 19, 2015
(… also, notice they sent the “chick” out to take the heat, she said…)
Peale
Listen, libtards. I’m tired of hearing about becarful this and cities destroyed that. We haven’t used any nuclear weapons for 70 years and it hasn’t gotten us anything. How can you even be sure Russia would be able to fire back?
Mnemosyne
Wingnuts are apparently unaware that radioactive crude oil is useless.
BillinGlendaleCA
Maybe, whoever the Dem nominee is, should bring back the Daisy ad.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mnemosyne: Wingnuts are apparently unaware.
that radioactive crude oil is useless.BillinGlendaleCA
@srv: Are you stupid, high, or both?
MikeBoyScout
When I’m President we’ll have a quadrad and it’ll be YOOOOOGE
Redshift
OT: Woo, Caps come back from being down 3-0 to win it 5-3! Top team in the NHL!
Ruckus
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Based on past performance I’m going with both. To a major degree in both cases.
BillinGlendaleCA
@srv: You are correct about one thing, I did take German in high school and college.
ThresherK
@efgoldman: To steal from Churchill, only one of those conditions will abate by tomorrow morning.
Amir Khalid
@srv:
You do know, don’t you, that 99 Luftballons is an antiwar song?
David Koch
Hillary’s “Daisy Ad” against Trump writes itself
Adam L Silverman
@Amir Khalid: And that there’s an English version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPOAeDBH1_U
David Koch
how can you be 69 years old, raised during the cold war, attended a military prep school, and never heard or read the phrase nuclear triad? Especially given the vast amount of cable news Trump watches.
Mike J
@Mnemosyne:
If you want to drive up the price per bbl of American crude, make everybody else’s radioactive.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike J: The Goldfinger Gambit.
Mike J
@Omnes Omnibus: I almost made a joke about the Bond girl from that movie, but remembered it would put me in moderation.
bk
@srv: Actually, we cling to knowledge as a good thing.
Mandalay
It’s probably tough for anyone here to get too excited about it on a Friday night, but MoveOn has a worthy petition right now: “Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Give the voter file back to Bernie Sanders’ campaign”.
They currently have 243k signatures, with a goal of 250k, so if you have any harsh feelings towards the vile DWS please sign it.
Amir Khalid
@Adam L Silverman:
Like Silent Night, it sounds better in the original German:
max
@srv: You probably know all the words to 99 Luft Balloons in the original German
Here’s the updated version with all the lyrics. Printed. On screen, even.
and now pine for the triad
I got to wonderin’ about that, because as I recall, the conservatives made a big deal about restarting the B-1 project during the 1980. (Because Carter had canceled it and authorized what became the B-2 project. And in fact, the Reagan administration, did reactivate the B-1B project, and eventually built the B-2 as well, demonstrating that bad decisions were made all around.) At any rate, Digby had posted a Ben Shapiro tweet about Reagan didn’t know about the triad and that didn’t matter – what mattered was that he had good values and Trump did not, or something. So I went looking to see if I could find any speeches about it. I did not find any BUT (and keeping in mind that Reagan announced for President on 11/13/1979), I did find this:
So I believe young Ben there was correct – Reagan started out pig ignorant about nuclear weapons and the defense posture of the United States, presumably including the triad. On the other hand, he did get elected and did nearly help blow up the world in 1983 during Able Archer! So I guess Donald Trump is a Reagan-like figure in that sense.
max
[‘What an interesting, yet incredibly boring world we live in.’]
Yutsano
@Amir Khalid: @max: Hast du etwas Zeit für mich?
Applejinx
@Mandalay: That should probably be in the relevant thread, but it’s cool to see how big the petition has become. I think it’s a great idea to blow off steam on such a petition: it sends a message but we can also put it behind us when things clear up, without too much trouble. I signed it too :)
BillinGlendaleCA
@Yutsano: Nine, Nine, Nine. Oh wait, Herman Cain isn’t running this time.
kindness
What will define Peak Chest Puffing by these people? And these are those folks ‘leaders’ for gods sake.
Amir Khalid
@Yutsano:
Ich habe immer Zeit für dich.
Mike J
@Mandalay: Promise to stop committing crimes, we’ll give back the file.
BillinGlendaleCA
@kindness: Much as there is no Peak Wingnut, there is no Peak Chest Puffing.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: Get a room you two.
Omnes Omnibus
@BillinGlendaleCA: There could be a Mr Creosote moment.
FlyingToaster
@srv:
Doesn’t everyone? I saw 10000 Maniacs live in 1985 (under REM headlining), though in Bloomington they sang in English.
However, I admit, I’m a pro; I sing Falco in the original German (well, östereichischer Deutsch). Alles Klar, Herr Kommissar?
What are you smoking? Nobody but airheads at FoxNoise pine for triads, and I’m sure they’re actually thinking “three-way”.
That’s a buzzword thing. Politicians (left and right) say this shit because it polls well.
No Fly Zones only work if there’s a large indigenous population you want to protect. Anywhere Daesh controls, the people we would want to protect are few, in hiding, on the run, or gone.
Shrub’s worked over Kurdistan and the Chaldees — until the Iraq stopped having a central government worth mentioning and then militias and tribal patriarchs started thinking about the color of the sky thirteen hundred years ago when those guys ancestors done their ancestors wrong…
I know you’re here to troll, but quit putting words in our mouths. The insanity on your side of the aisle is just fucking breathtaking. As in “vacuum sucking the air out of my lungs” breathtaking.
Davebo
@Mnemosyne:
If radioactive crude becomes useless and pushes oil up to $70 a barrel I’m all for it!
Then again, I have ulterior motives….
I paid $1.68 for gas yesterday and cursed the whole time I was pumping it.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mike J: You drive a hard bargain.
Tom Levenson
@Mandalay: signed it too. Clinton supporter, me, but this is nonsense. And playing into GOP narratives. DWS needs to go.
Omnes Omnibus
@FlyingToaster: 10000 Maniacs?
BillinGlendaleCA
@Davebo: Price too high, or pissed that you had to pump your own gas?
Omnes Omnibus
@Tom Levenson:
I think everyone can agree on that.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: I guess they could have covered it.
liberal
@max:
This cannot be emphasized enough.
Omnes Omnibus
@BillinGlendaleCA: ::shudders::
amk
Thanks toc for updating the ebbj.
Davebo
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Price too low. We’ve fracked ourselves into losing over 250,000 jobs. I know, the market at work. But my business depends to a great extent on overseas deepwater exploration and that shit has gone down the drain.
$120 a barrel was just silly but seriously, couldn’t we all live with $70 a barrel?
liberal
@Davebo:
What does Saudi Arabia deciding to maintain market share by pumping more out of the ground have to do with “teh market”?
Adam L Silverman
@Amir Khalid: I liked it in the original, but it is available in English.
Steeplejack
@amk:
Speaking of which, has anyone else been having problems with The Other Chuck’s MBBJ script? I did a Firefox update a few days ago, and that—or something—seems to have broken MBBJ for me (under Win10). But with all the changes happening constantly to this site I don’t know for sure that that is the problem.
Adam L Silverman
@max: And so the same folks that came up with trickle down also invented missile defense. Not like there wasn’t a physicist somewhere who was a registered Republican in 1979.
As for Able Archer, its not that simple. Yes it brought us far to close to the brink of war, but a good chunk of that was because the Soviet intel folks couldn’t process that it was 1983s version of an annual exercise. Could we have handled things a bit better? Sure. Was it all our fault? No.
We used to show the students in our seminar at USAWC this documentary on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ciy5R-tLiE
Its very good.
Davebo
@liberal:
Saudi Arabia is just trying to keep up. You really can’t blame them, or Brazil, or Venezuela.
And the Saudi’s aren’t pumping more out of the ground, they just refused to pump less.
If, for instance, you had a business that made and sold shoes and the price of shoes fell through the floor could anyone blame you if you refused to cut down on your shoe production?
Some see the massive drop in oil prices as a good thing and I understand that. But don’t blame OPEC.
liberal
@Davebo: I’m just saying there’s nothing “market” about it, in the usual sense of a competitive market with many buyers and sellers.
FlyingToaster
@Omnes Omnibus: I know, it’s a Nena song, I never got to see them live (dammit, being one of the siblings who didn’t live in Europe). There was a band before 10KManiacs who did a cover — in German — but I don’t remember the name of that band. Yet another midwestern bar band. Since I and the housemates all took German, we really enjoyed it.
beltane
@Mandalay: Though I don’t usually sign online petitions, I had to sign this one. The 2016 election is not such a sure thing that DWS can afford to treat any Democrat as the enemy. Too bad she is averse to treating Republicans this way.
Omnes Omnibus
@FlyingToaster: It makes more sense now. Thanks.
Davebo
@liberal:
I’m not sure what you mean.
It’s a global commodity. Supply and demand. In just about any sense, it’s the purest market.
liberal
@Adam L Silverman:
Glad to know we have a Reagan apologist on board here.
liberal
@Davebo: LOL. A “pure market” where one supplier has this amount of influence on price?
You might know a lot about oil exploration, but you certainly know nothing about economics.
Omnes Omnibus
@liberal: Right. Saying something is a bit more complicated than “Reagan nearly blew up the world” equals being a Reagan apologist. Get a fucking grip.
Adam L Silverman
@liberal: Not apologizing for him. This happened when he was president. But given that it was a multinational exercise, that it occurred the same time every year, and that while what was going on within the exercise was classified, the fact that we did an exercise every year was not, Soviet overreaction carries some of the blame. Not sure how explaining what happened is an apology, but okay. Regardless, watch the documentary. Its very well done.
amk
@Steeplejack: Try updating the script (in addons). After alain, the fixer, did his job, the back button went all screwy and toc fixed it with the update. I am also on W10 so for once we can’t blame bill for this fuckup.
seaboogie
This is maybe a good thread to comment that I have noticed that there is a not insignificant number of commenters who studied German and retain a working knowledge of it – more than any other language ever mentioned. What is up with that? Are there words/concepts that are better expressed in German than in other languages?
I studied French and am still semi-fluent, and notice nary a reference to it here.
ETA: I’ll give you Schadenfreude, esp. with the Shrkeli news this week….
Omnes Omnibus
@seaboogie: The German speakers are the types who would violate Belgian neutrality at the drop of a hat.* Just saying. N’est-ce pas?
*Yeah, especially that Amir character.
ETA: French cycles around every once in while – often if Yutsano and I are both around on the night shift.
Steeplejack (phone)
@amk:
There has been no update to MBBJ since November 19. I was/am current with that.
Note: I’m talking about MBBJ, not EBBJ (which I haven’t installed).
Mandalay
@Mike J:
Actually I’m glad that it has happened. About nine thousand people have signed the petition in the past eighty minutes, and MoveOn has raised the goal to 275k signatures.
This incident will just wake more people up to the fact that DWS is a vile piece of shit who is a huge liability to the party.
Arcadia Berger
@Davebo: What we really need to do is stop thinking of coal and oil as “fossil fuels”.
There are so many nifty things we could be doing with the precious remaining stocks of fossil carbon besides burning them up.
max
@Adam L Silverman: And so the same folks that came up with trickle down also invented missile defense. Not like there wasn’t a physicist somewhere who was a registered Republican in 1979.
Well, they also missed on the ABM treaty (and why it had been signed) and why Nike Zeus never paid off (same reasons the second and third go-rounds never paid). It was a raison looking d’etre.
As for Able Archer, its not that simple. Yes it brought us far to close to the brink of war, but a good chunk of that was because the Soviet intel folks couldn’t process that it was 1983s version of an annual exercise. Could we have handled things a bit better? Sure. Was it all our fault? No.
Urmmm. Hrmm. Yes and no. Yes, it was an annual exercise and the Russians misread the situation. But there are two reasons for that – the first reason is that when Hitler was building up German forces in the east to prepare for Barbarossa, he gave the Russians the excuse that it was a deception exercise aimed at Great Britain and they never forgot that. The second reason goes back to the R shenanigans of the late 70’s starting with the Team B exercise conducted by the neo-cons that said Soviet forces were much more powerful and dangerous than the CIA gave them credit for. (Team B was wrong.) Brought to you by the same folks that brought you Iraq, interestingly enough.
At any rate, the US started building up forces more during Carter’s term and went overboard with it during the first part of Reagan’s term, based almost entirely on the presumption that the Russians intended to fight a nuclear war (they didn’t), and that the Russians intended to move against Western Europe. The Russians had no such intentions – they believed they were slowly eating away at the American position around the world and were thus winning. Fighting in Europe would result in a nuclear war (they believed) so they never had any intention of attacking NATO.
Combined with the very bellicose talk that developed around Reagan’s victory in 1980 the Soviets got nervous and started believing the US intended to fight a nuclear war (fair’s fair – some of the hard right type and the neo-cons were totally down with the idea and always had been). In that context Able Archer occurred and the Soviets misread the situation, which Reagan did not understand until 1985.
A miniature version of that very escapade occurred in 2008 when the US accepted the Baltic states into NATO and promised Poland a missile defense battery, supposedly to defend against the Iranians (!!!). (The Russians looks at it as a medium range nuclear missile battery.) That was the point at which American-Russian relations turned really sour and the Russians began ramping up their defenses and preparing much more heavily for future conflict (a stance they have maintained for some years now).
Which takes up into the situation in Ukraine via a long and meandering path.
max
[‘And Chris Christie wants to shoot down some Russian planes. That should go well.’]
amk
@Steeplejack (phone): I have both, but ebbj was better, so disabled mbbj.
Villago Delenda Est
@BillinGlendaleCA: He’s a pathetic wingtard troll. Best ignored.
Villago Delenda Est
@seaboogie: Well, I use French when it’s appropriate, n’cest ce pas but there are some things that the Germans have words for that just don’t work as well in English. To be fair, my knowledge of German is much better than my knowledge of French or Spanish, which I have also studied. Probably because I spent three years in Germany being the chief translator for everyone setting up a hail and farewell off base.
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: Christ, they let a SigO arrange social things? V Corps?
Mike G
Start Wars: Attack of the Clowns
Dmbeaster
@srv:
OK. You couldnt type inanity and be high, so I am going with stupid.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus: Well, yeah. I did a lot of coordination for this huge party for our sister battalion of the Bundeswehr and got mad props from my battalion commander for it. It had a wild west theme, and the Germans are REALLY into wild west stuff. We had cap guns and hats and just about everything.
Also, too, “Dance Little Bird”.
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: I spent a year on brigade staff where that kind of shit came into play. Protocol is so fun. Is a German Prince seated higher than a lord mayor?* Oddly there is actually a way to play that out (the US Embassy helped).
*Titles translated in English.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus: I was the only officer even close to being a fluent speaker of German in both my first battalion, a division signal battalion, and my SigO job with the infantry. So it fell on me to help out whoever was the officer stuck with arranging a hail and farewell off base.
Joey Maloney
99 dead baboons
Sitting in my living room
How I’m glad that they’re not apes
‘Cause apes they would clash with my drapes…
Sorry, random neuron fire.
VidaLoca
@Tom Levenson:
@Omnes Omnibus:
@efgoldman:
Isn’t it possible that the DWS/Chuck Schumer/Rahm Emanuel model of the Democratic Party is Working As Intended (rather than as “working as you dream”) by the people who ultimately control how the DP works?
newtons third
I find it interesting that Hewitt defined the Triad during the questions. From the Washington Post transcript:
HEWITT: Mr. Trump…
(APPLAUSE)
… Dr. Carson just referenced the single most important job of the president, the command, the control and the care of our nuclear forces. And he mentioned the triad. The B-52s are older than I am. The missiles are old. The submarines are aging out. It’s an executive order. It’s a commander-in-chief decision.
What’s your priority among our nuclear triad?
And he still could not answer coherently. Even Rubio a few moments later more precisely defined the Triad. How hard is it for Trump to count and break down the word Triad to know that there are three things in it?
The Other Chuck
@Steeplejack (phone): I just updated MBBJ yesterday. Since the site’s moved over to https, stylish is probably not checking for an update when the site doesn’t match. If that’s the case, you’ll need to update it by hand this one time.