HeebieTake is awesome, no follow-up required.
Re the OP link: Heritage is bullshitting in that (1) it blames "both parties" (rather than Republicans) for fucking up with the budget control act, which has had the effect of cutting the DoD's budget below what it needs to maintain its establishment at combat readiness; and (2) that it says/implies that out of control welfare spending (rather than Republican tax cuts) is responsible for the budget deficit. AIUI they are nonetheless right about the effect on the military. To Heebie, the workload includes things like the ability to defend Korea, Taiwan and NATO, and to help out with natural disasters (rare occurrences, I know, but worth planning for); IOW, to carry out the basic tasks of the US world order, regardless of Trump's lunacy or GWB's legacy clusterfucks.
If the Republican bullshit in the budget crisis back in 2011 keeps Trump from starting a war, it will at least have done something good. Anyway, the Navy definitely seems to be running in overdrive. Crashing into largely, slow things sure sounds like overwork.
Trump's tweets about Puerto Rico this morning are appalling.
Of course the best judge of military budget needs is the military!
I can't tell if 5 is kidding or not. I'd certainly say something like that about a university or a library.
3: It won't stop him from starting a war, but might stop him winning it. This may or may not be a good thing.
What if the military had to hold a bake sale and the library had to nuke North Korea?
6: Yes, it's kidding. In principle you always want some neutral body able to conduct assessments; in practice for those institutions you name it's easier to listen to those on the ground, partly because they've been so squeezed over the years, partly because their functions and domains are much more circumscribed (a specific range of buildings or population of students), and there aren't all the snugly-nestled contractors who will spend infinite dollars if you let them. (I'd definitely like more oversight of university management salaries!)
5: AIUI the military's budget request is based on what it figures it needs to fulfill the tasks given it in the National Defense Strategy, which originates with the president (not the current president, but the one 2-3 years ago, because the strategy and budgeting takes forever). The process of figuring out involves plenty of civilians, in DoD and presumably in Congress too.
I was referencing the multitudinous generals quoted and .mil links provided in the linked Heritage thing.
In light of Heebie's take, I hope it's not off-topic to note that the US has withdrawn from UNESCO, again.
As for whether things are particularly bad things are these days, I periodically check this list of professional historians ranking the presidents. To summarize, they pretty consistently say that the 5 worst are Buchanan, Johnson, Harding, Pierce, and Fillmore. The one who botched Reconstruction, the three right before the Civil War, and one particularly corrupt and ineffective guy. (Dying in office makes it difficult.) Sounds about right to me. IMO if anyone is out of place on that list, it's Harding. As bad as he was, was he really worse than all the other antebellum presidents, Harding, and GWB?
Trump may yet turn out to be worse than Harding but I still doubt he'll manage to cause a civil war. He's doing the best he can to roll back Reconstruction, but as far as I can tell he's in Reagan's league on this front, not Johnson's league.
Of course, "maybe the worst president in 100 years but probably not the worst in 150, probably won't literally tear the country apart" is still pretty bad.
15 He may well launch some nukes.
Dying in office makes it hard to be corrupt, but very easy to be ineffective.
I certainly don't share your confidence that Trump won't cause a civil war.
He's doing the best he can to roll back Reconstruction, but as far as I can tell he's in Reagan's league on this front, not Johnson's league.
I read this as LBJ at first and wondered what I missed.
Trump now has a Katrina-level fuckup on his ledger, but otherwise has been so ineffectual that it is still possible to hope that he won't be as bad as GWB, whose awfulness is somehow underappreciated these days.
Reserving judgment on Trump, I think your list, which seems about right to me, could swap out Harding in favor of GWB. Jackson and Polk are reasonable to bring into the conversation, but they were both at least competent in their villainy.
Crashing into largely, slow things sure sounds like overwork.
I was talking to somebody who speculated that the crash was caused by cyberwar -- somebody testing an attack on either the ship's computer or GPS -- and that the Navy didn't want that to be public for obvious reasons.
I don't know enough to even have a good intuition about the chances that is correct.
4
They really were beyond the pale. Just when you think Trump can't actually get more repulsive...
I'm thinking they're still supposed to have a guy with binoculars looking ahead.
I'd say this is in some ways worse than Katrina. Katrina was non-benign neglect and incompetence. Trump is gleefully welcoming the total further collapse of PR. I don't think GWB had that level of malice.
as bad as GWB, whose awfulness is somehow underappreciated these days.
I've had this thought too. GWB listened to and appointed such amoral people, and facilitated their agendas so much more swiftly than Trump is able to. Thank fucking god for Trump's dysfunctionalness. And then GWB sunk out of sight and painted dippy pictures and the edges all softened in everyone's memory, what with the black president and all.
The other thing to take into account when scoring GWB is the generally favorable situation he inherited. In addition to how low the country ended up after 8 years of Bush, we need to give him credit for how far it fell.
This article suggests that GPS spoofing is very much a thing, but wouldn't have been a sufficient cause. My understanding is that warships are supposed to have multiple layers of redundancy, including someone physically keeping lookout. Anecdotally, the US navy forces personnel to do some pretty extreme hours. I think the ships crashed for the same reasons that the patients of junior doctors used to die at very high rates.
The fact that the commanders and senior officers of the John McCain and the Fitzgerald all got fired suggests either a ruthless US operation to conceal knowledge of the new GPS attack vector, or that there was a significant degree of incompetence involved, regardless of whether spoofing also contributed.
Also, with GWB, you really have to keep track of the death toll. GWB gets but-for credit for the whole Iraq war, which is somewhere not far off a million excess deaths. Trump is showing strong potential, but he's not close yet.
Here's a word problem for the Unfoggetariat:
Person 1: "Trump said x."
Person 2: "I don't believe that. Trump would never say anything that vile."
Solve for x.
Extra credit question: Same scenario, but for "Trump did x."
Yeah, the War in Iraq + War on Muslims terror is really unforgivable, with a death/destruction toll in the millions. We destroyed a relatively stable populous country for no reason at all, and basically destabilized an entire region with no end in sight.
I think you also have to judge Fillmore in context. What was the realistic alternative to the Compromise of 1850? Immediate civil war? Would that have turned out better or worse?
Johnson seems the most temperamentally similar in his ability to create continual public embarrassment, in his case via alcohol.
What follows is the "official" or "sanitized" version of Johnson's controversial address, which most witnesses considered an embarrassment to himself and to the administration. Johnson, not completely well from debilitating illness, had, before leaving the anteroom for the ceremony, asked outgoing Vice President Hamlin for some whiskey to strengthen himself. Adversely affected by the warm Senate chamber, the Tennesseean made "a rambling and strange harangue, which was listened to with pain and mortification by his friends." .... The fullest, as well as the most widely published, report is the following, which appeared in the New York Times of March 5.
Turning toward Mr. Chase, Mr. Johnson said, And your exaltation and position depend upon the people. Then turning toward the Cabinet, he said, And I will say to you, Mr. Secretary Seward, and to you, Mr. Secretary Stanton, and to you, Mr. Secretary—(to a gentleman near by, sotto voce, Who is Secretary of the Navy? the person addressed replied in a whisper, Mr. Welles)—and to you, Mr. Secretary Welles, I would say, you all derive your power from the people.
"a rambling and strange harangue, which was listened to with pain and mortification by his friends."
I was at a wedding where the best man did that.
14
IMO if anyone is out of place on that list, it's Harding. As bad as he was, was he really worse than all the other antebellum presidents, Harding Hoover, and GWB?
Just correcting myself in case anyone was confused.
15: Maybe. If so, that definitely makes him worse than Harding. Whether it makes him the worst ever depends on the fallout from the nukes, both literally and figuratively.
18: Sorry about that. I thought fairly hard about consistent name formatting. I didn't want to do initials for most of those because I'd have no clue who some of them were by their initials, but I used them for GWB because there have been two President Bushes. This is your regular reminder that political dynasties are bad. I didn't even think about the two Johnsons.
19
GWB, whose awfulness is somehow underappreciated these days.
Looks good by comparison to Trump, when handicapping for eight years vs. less than one so far? A monster in the conventional machine politician sense, while Trump is a monster in the fascist and/or black comedy sense? Obama didn't clean up Bush's messes as well as we'd want, so we have to spread the blame around a tiny bit?
On the health care front, the executive order is ridiculous and dangerous but has no effect just yet, as it's an order for agencies to start crafting new regulations. It looks like there will be potential for blue states to shield themselves 100% by banning the same garbage plans the EO looks to promote.
GWB also sped up and exacerbated deregulation started by Clinton. Clinton gets off a bit light in this analysis.
Speaking of management failures contributing to accidents: in risk management, people sometimes use the "Swiss cheese" model to explain why you need multiple redundant risk control systems to prevent embarrassing disasters. You imagine each system as a slice of swiss cheese, with a hole in it (because no system is 100% infallible: the hole represents a system failure). With lots of slices piled on top of one another in a random order, an accident only happens when all the holes are aligned. The more slices, the less chance of hole alignment / factory explosion / collision with merchant ship. However, for practical reasons, systems tend to involve some degree of human interaction (and/or they can be overriden by humans) and this is almost inevitably where the failures happen. Switching off the system because the alarms were irritating you, or blithely ignoring them because "they're probably caused by another short circuit" etc counts as eating one of the slices.
I once saw this explained to an audience of Chinese factory managers who all seemed fairly baffled (presumably because nobody in China eats Swiss cheese).
In conclusion, good pedagogy involves cultural awareness, and the analogy ban deserves a McArthur grant.
Who moved my cheese?
With lots of slices piled on top of one another in a random order, an accident only happens when all the holes are aligned. The more slices, the less chance of hole alignment / factory explosion / collision with merchant ship.
Unless they were sliced from a single block of swiss cheese.
A really bad analogy would involve taking swiss cheese, and slicing it into finer and finer slices, and hoping that somehow resulted in the holes no longer aligning. That somehow has to be the Republican party. Or the Republican party just points to another dish entirely and says "THOSE ARE THE HOLES!" And then they get mad when people stick stuff in them.
And then they get mad when people stick stuff in them.
They really care about the gender of the person sticking.
39
You should have called it the lotus root analogy.
At one point in my life I had to politely and attentively watch a lot of presentations on risk management, which would always take the form of 160 slides of very dry statistics, tables, checklists and schematics, with 20 slides to conclude on the consequences of overlooking any of the previous information. The last slides frequently included content that wouldn't be out of place on rotten.com - like images from the Los Alfaques disaster (absolutely Do Not Google).
I'll never live near a chemical plant, oil refinery, fireworks factory, or anywhere that stores a significant quantity of hydrocarbons. I'm also quite nervous around gas tankers (and suspect their use will be inevitable at some point as an even less pleasant version of the recent truck attacks in Europe).
42: Surely that depends on the thickness of the block and the thickness of the slices? Although I take your point in general; more-correlated holes correspond to greater risk of multiple simultaneous failures (in life as well as in dairy products).
44: Ha. Plus the number of holes would also more accurately reflect current OSH practices in China.
"We have missiles that can knock out a missile in the air 97% of the time, and if you send two of them, it's going to get knocked out."
Looks good by comparison to Trump, when handicapping for eight years vs. less than one so far?
But in Trump's favor, I think there's every reason to believe that he won't last eight years. If he gets impeached/quits/dies soon, he won't be close to the disaster that Bush was.
And GWB already had 9/11 at this stage in his presidency. I know that Decent Americans have given him a mulligan on that one, but I sure haven't.
But in Trump's favor, I think there's every reason to believe that he won't last eight years. If he gets impeached/quits/dies soon, he won't be close to the disaster that Bush was.
On Trump's executive order, will that stand up in court? Does the president really have the power to just strike down large portions of legislation, especially something that couldn't get through congress?
51: Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
52 As I understand it -- and I'm only barely following this one -- he's not actually doing anything other than telling HHS to conduct a rulemaking. He can do that. Whether the rules that emerge comply with the statute will get litigated.
One thing I believe, but that I hope we never find out, is that if some 9/11-equivalent terrorist attack occurs, everybody -- particularly the media and the Republican Congress -- will just know that Trump fucked something up. Certainly his administration will break down into recriminations and finger-pointing regardless of the underlying facts.
Trump won't get the benefit of the doubt that Bush got, in part because Trump isn't shrewd enough to circle the wagons and say, "Heckuva job, Brownie," or whatever. He'll join right in on the finger-pointing.
54 For example, here's the test on short-term:
Expanded Availability of Short-Term, Limited‑Duration Insurance. Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretaries of the Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services shall consider proposing regulations or revising guidance, consistent with law, to expand the availability of STLDI. To the extent permitted by law and supported by sound policy, the Secretaries should consider allowing such insurance to cover longer periods and be renewed by the consumer.
And association plans:
Expanded Access to Association Health Plans. Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Labor shall consider proposing regulations or revising guidance, consistent with law, to expand access to health coverage by allowing more employers to form AHPs. To the extent permitted by law and supported by sound policy, the Secretary should consider expanding the conditions that satisfy the commonality‑of-interest requirements under current Department of Labor advisory opinions interpreting the definition of an "employer" under section 3(5) of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. The Secretary of Labor should also consider ways to promote AHP formation on the basis of common geography or industry.
It's more substantive than a tweet, I guess . . .
I didn't even think about the two Johnsons.
Ahem. THIRTY johnsons.
54: Right. Like most of Trump's executive orders, this one doesn't have any immediate effect. Whether it has any substantive effect at all is uncertain and won't be known for a while.
|| So, how about that Ryan Zinke?
I'd thought he was going to run for Governor in 20, and would therefore gear everything towards that end. Instead, he seems to have actually caught some sort of virus from the President.
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I'd thought he was going to run for Governor in 20, and would therefore gear everything towards that end.
His fundraiser-heavy travel schedule certainly seems to ahve been geared that way.
No, that's bribery for the present. Everyone thinks AG Fox will run for Governor, and that the Republican nomination is his to lose. Sen. Daines is up for re-election in '20 -- I'd still think that Gov. Bullock might well scope that one out pretty carefully (and I think his feint at the presidency [did folks see the recent Politico article?] is just to help with that.) So Zinke won't have anything good until 2024 when Sen. Tester's seat comes up again.
We would like it known that we have concerns about the strategy of telling Congress to do what Trump wants or the American people get it.