> If American foreign policy was rational, we wouldn’t have been involved in Korea
YGBFShM.
(As to most of the others you do have a point, but hindsight is always 20-20 — and the Dem decisionmakers about Vietnam had to contend with a revanchist, Red-baiting GOP that had attacked the Dems for having "lost" China.)
China dervies a ton of authority and Legitmacy from the PLA (peoples liberation army) and Russia is run by from Inteligence service members of the KGB low level ones to be sure but I don't see how China and Russia are counter examples. The US isn't their yet we will see if the backslide happens in the next two years but I think its of a different qualia than we see in the "typical" Authorithian State.
Ironically I was watching Nuremberg last not and is is schocking how close some of the leaders of this country are to characters like Hermann Göring, or Hitler himself in talking points. They are certainly populists but the language they used is MGGA (make german great again) so to speak. And factually that were not particular that good at it either most of Germans recovery is really due to the liberal government that pass laws that built the Autobahn were laws not by the Nazi party. They certain jumped on them and accelerate them but effective governence is not really for the populist
In fact, the current administration, not headed by someone from the military (and VP has military credibility but not leadership) is not at all aligned to the military except in that their base appreciates the imprimatur of honorable military service. In fact, Trump 1 was in many ways a huge refutation to Trump of the idea that the military guys were leaders he could count on. Their brain-trust positions had more left-alignment than he maybe imagined. His administration, in 2025, fired high-ranking officers in a way that suggested he entered with the reverse conclusion: not military leaders as high-competence straight-shooters, but as all being suspect for having risen unstoppably in a system pervaded by partisan platitudes and shibboleths. Fortunately, the administration didn't take the Soviet approach of purging all those under suspicion.
They just finally had to fire their SecNav because reality butted heads with their ideological conclusion was that business experience was more conducive to military success. Unfortunately for their very-much-not-military-led plan, SecNav probably needs a bit more user experience from time in Navy leadership to successfully work within that labrythine bureaucracy.
A military coup in the U.S. is imaginable, which probably explains some of the top brass purges (until recently, where it's probably an attempt to deflect blame for the massive Iran fuck up).
Putin did it better; he kept the military weak and aggressively managed the risk via the FSB.
I don't think it's plausible, but an authoritarian president invoking emergency powers and deploying military and paramilitary forces to exert control on the streets is, on the basis it's already going on at a limited scale. All it takes is for that scale to gradually dial up over time until the frog's cooked.
The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.
>The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.
What a poorly thought out and questionably motivated take. It will no doubt be well received here.
In any case, reconstructing out legislature to copy european stuff isn't gonna change anything if the legislature still sees fit to vest so much power in the executive.
My point is precisely that the US system is substantially a copy of European stuff. It had some significant innovations for it's time of course, but it's really showing it's age. Meanwhile Parliamentary systems have significantly reformed and further innovated since.
Your main point is valid, but I'd argue it's less the power of the President and more the two-party system and the weakness of Congress that is the root of many American governance problems. Executive power has grown in the vacuum of Congressional impotence.
As far as reforms, we need more to be sure, but there's at least the 22nd Amendment, formalizing the two-term tradition that Washington initiated and FDR abrogated into a hard limit, that means Trump can't legally keep power past 2028.
I think, despite all the furor whipped up and attempts by high-ranking officials to foment a coup, the military is actually very unlikely to disobey Presidential orders; this is based on my frequent interactions with military officers over the last ten years. Do you perceive some other, more likely, coup scenario?
A coup from the same military that happily deployed foot soldiers into American cities to perform law enforcement duties they were not trained to perform? And is happily killing boat-people in the Caribbean? And ran a covert operation to kidnap a foreign head of state? And ran another covert operation to assassinate political leaders in another sovereign state and are now bombing that same state into rubble for no publicly disclosed reason?
Yeah, no coup is happening here. Our military is built around civilian control via the White House. That ain't changing any time soon. Ignoring the various uses of force above, when the generals were called before Hegseth to bend the knee, all but one of them did.
> A missile hitting a coal power plant will also be pretty bad, and there's not a giant shield around it.
Probably not even the same order of magnitude. A blown-up nuclear reactor would be WAY worse in short- and long-term effects (and cleanup costs) than a blown-up coal power plant producing comparable MW.
Coal is shockingly nasty. Combustion concentrates heavy radioactive elements that are present in the coal. Coal and nuclear plants can't be built too close together or the exhaust from the coal plant will set off the radiation alarm at the nuclear plant.
It also does the same thing to heavy metals in the coal like arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury. More than 90% of coal is carbon and therefore becomes CO2, but because of the huge difference in energy density, the coal plant has to burn millions of times more coal than nuclear reactors consume uranium, and thereby generates tens of thousands of times more toxic and radioactive coal ash than the nuclear plant generates nuclear waste.
Then they put the stuff into "wet surface impoundments" which is industry for dumping the toxic sludge into a lake. Those things frequently poison entire towns without any kind of terrorist attack.
What do you think happens if you send a missile to the "wet surface impoundment" that releases the contents of the lake into the town or the groundwater?
> What do you think happens if you send a missile to the "wet surface impoundment" that releases the contents of the lake into the town or the groundwater?
I can't speak to that. But nearly 50 years ago I did a deep dive into what would likely happen in the event of a nuclear "accident" (a term of art) in a Navy ship's reactor in port. This was when I was doing the Navy's prep course for the [chief] engineer exam after two years of sea duty running aircraft-carrier reactors. Current-design civilian reactors are much larger, so the effects of a missile-strike meltdown would be correspondingly worse. If I had to guess, it'd be far worse than even the missile strike you postulate.
Footnote: AFAIK there has never been a nuclear accident aboard a Navy ship, submarine or otherwise. That's something in which nukes take immense pride. It's largely because of the zero-defect, second-checking culture ferociously instilled by Admiral Hyman Rickover during his decades in charge of "The Program."
Back to non-missile dangers: Human error is what I've always worried about for nuclear power plants. From what's been made public, both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl could easily have been averted — had it not been for cascades of operator errors. Can we confidently say that such errors are less likely today? To be sure, many civilian nuclear plants in the U.S. are run by Navy veterans. But my guess is that working in such plants doesn't provide the same motivations and incentives as "the Fleet." (And a flock of suicide drones won't care either way.)
Relatedly: I was just reading an account of Air France Flight 447, which flew itself into the middle of the South Atlantic — killing all aboard — because of cascades of egregious pilot error that defeated all the autopilot systems.
I think it's an error that International Atomic Energy Agency classified both Fukushima nuclear accident and Chernobyl nuclear accident on International Nuclear Event Scale Level 7 (major accident).
In both the amount of released radionuclides and health effects of the accidents, Chernobyl accident was much, much bigger than Fukushima.
Dr. Atul Gawande† reported 20 years ago how obstetricians standardized on c-sections because the suppposedly-better alternative, forceps, (i) was very difficult to teach and supervise, and (ii) used incorrectly, could result in horrible injuries to both baby and mother:
<QUOTE>
The question facing obstetrics was this: Is medicine a craft or an industry?
If medicine is a craft, then you focus on teaching obstetricians to acquire a set of artisanal skills—the Woods corkscrew maneuver for the baby with a shoulder stuck, the Lovset maneuver for the breech baby, the feel of a forceps for a baby whose head is too big.
You do research to find new techniques.
You accept that things will not always work out in everyone’s hands.
But if medicine is an industry, responsible for the safest possible delivery of millions of babies each year, then the focus shifts.
You seek reliability.
You begin to wonder whether forty-two thousand obstetricians in the U.S. could really master all these techniques.
You notice the steady reports of terrible forceps injuries to babies and mothers, despite the training that clinicians have received.
After Apgar, obstetricians decided that they needed a simpler, more predictable way to intervene when a laboring mother ran into trouble.
They found it in the Cesarean section. [0]
</QUOTE>
(Formatting edited.)
† Surgeon, Rhodes scholar, MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" recipient, professor at Harvard Medical School, author of The Checklist Manifesto among many other things.
The patent means only that Google can sue people who practice the claimed subject matter without Google's permission.
That doesn't mean there wouldn't be other prohibitions and restrictions.
Example: Suppose you were to invent a drug that boosted IQ by 50 points, and body strenth and endurance by 80%, for 12 hours. You might be legally entitled to a patent for it. But you'd still have to get FDA approval to market the drug. (And your patent might be sidelined before issuance under a secrecy order because of the potential military applications — see, e.g., "The Rush to Patent the Atomic Bomb" (NPR.org 2008). https://www.npr.org/2008/03/28/89127786/the-rush-to-patent-t....)
And as others are pointing out, practicing the claimed method might constitute copyright infringement.
Funny on this type of article linking to Google Patents. Such great possibilities for replacement. Google publishes Google has patented something. Nobody checks.
The Beatles famously stopped touring, and stuck exclusively to studio recording (apart from the Abbey Road rooftop concert), in no small part because they got tired of not being able to hear themselves sing or play due to all the girls' screaming.
YGBFShM.
(As to most of the others you do have a point, but hindsight is always 20-20 — and the Dem decisionmakers about Vietnam had to contend with a revanchist, Red-baiting GOP that had attacked the Dems for having "lost" China.)
reply