OT: Bolton is deeply unpopular pick among ZH readers

[snip]

One could certainly make an economic argument... why should we send our finest out to war when we have a whole collection of art majors, whose contribution to the GDP is nil, that we can send instead ?>:-}

Bring back the draft. ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Jim Thompson
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Probably in 1954, at the point where Ho Chi Minh had defeated the French, a nd the West started a long campaign to defer the inevitable consequences.

US policy was ill-informed from the start. It took a while to turn a diplom atic disaster into a military disaster, but trying to prop up an incompeten t and unpopular pro-west regime was always going to be an expensive waste o f time, money, and as it turned out - lives.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Best at confrontation - worst at getting anything sorted out.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Jim hasn't noticed that arts and culture is 3.2% of the US GDP.

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That's apparently $504 billion dollars. Some people might get peeved if their labour force got conscripted and sent off to fight in some place like Irak that they might be able to conquer, but couldn't hold.

Jim-out-of-touch-reality-Thompson in classic form.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

several countries have a draft even though they are not "at war" it makes for a more diverse selection of men entering the military

Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

Sorry ol' feller. Nobody's going off to war cuz ol Republican never-serveds get their kicks from stuff blowing up and people dying on TV.

Reply to
bitrex

Presumably because they're a bunch of pansies who would make useless soldiers?

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Cursitor Doom

Perhaps, but the US had the draft, and one of the problems was that the well-off were more successful in avoiding getting called up. People like Dubbya and Bolton served in the national guard at home, while the less well-connected got shot in Vietnam.

That's a less diverse selection of men entering the military, not more diverse.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Cannon fodder ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
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Jim Thompson

Decoys

Reply to
krw

Like Frederick the Great?

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

I don't get the impression Trumparino engineers are exactly what you'd call "nuanced" people. Limited range of emotional states. Smug condescension or white hot rage are the limits of that bang-bang controller's outputs. Art doesn't generally intersect with those states so naturally its purpose is lost.

Guys who start out life with a technical talent tend to go one of two ways as time progresses; broaden out or further up their own asshole. The latter is probably more common but it's never a pretty sight.

Reply to
bitrex

So do cigarettes and opioids and medical care for people in car crashes.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin

On Sunday, March 25, 2018 at 11:57:22 AM UTC+11, Lass

marts 2018 kl. 01.53.21 UTC+1 skrev snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org:

-0700 (PDT),

rote:

1:24 AM UTC-4, Jim Thomps>>>>>> On Sat, 24

Mar 2018 14:30:46 -0000 (UTC), Cursitor Doom

snipped-for-privacy@notformail.com wrote:

Not one of Trump's better appointments according to th is (usually

://tinyurl.com/ycdmh46d

ad. My kind of guy... he'll cut you a new asshole if

00% mouth, chickenhawk draft evader:

ing the 1969 Vietnam War draft lottery, Bolton drew nu mber 185. (Draft numbers corresponded to birth dates.) [27] As a result of the Johnson and Nixon administrati ons' decisions to rely largely on the draft rather tha n on the reserve forces, joining a Guard or Reserve un it became a way to avoid service in the Vietnam War.[2

8] Bolton enlisted in the Maryland Army National Guard in 1970 rather than wait to find out if his draft num ber would be called.[29] (The highest number called to military service was 195.)[30] After serving in the N ational Guard for four years, he served in the United States Army Reserve until the end of his enlistment tw o years later.[31] He wrote in his Yale 25th reunion b ook "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast A sian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam alrea dy lost."[32] In an interview, Bolton discussed his co mment in the reunion book, explaining that he decided to avoid service in Vietnam because "by the time I was about to graduate in

that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to take it away from."[33][34]

lton

I had a secret clearance before I

T, and, assigning numbers to the methods of killing I

than _any_

_never_ served in the armed forces

ou're clearly a pansy.

"... oh, woe is me >:-}

e a Ted Kennedy type... blame everyone but yourself

rry... bitrex is

p buffoon :-)

Thompson makes his own bid to become group buffoon.

uch, and tests other peoples opinions purely on the ba sis that they line up with his own.

pson and John Larkin are more aware of the outside wor ld, but they pick and choose what they take seriously on the basis of how well it lines up with their own pr ejudices, which is essentially krw's strategy.

s, but he's more of a propaganda robot than an actual person.

hological_projection

d I tell? The problem with James Arthur is that he has clearly read a lot, but he endorse such lunatic nonse nse - such as the US second amendment being a force fo r political stability - that he equally clearly doesn' t process what he reads.

As I recall the story as a kid JA crossed some East German line of demarca tion with a sign that said something to the effect of "Do Not Cross or You'll Be Shot." And then the guard s didn't shoot him. But instead of being thankful th at he didn't get his head blown off for doing someth ing a Bostonian might say was "wicked fahkin' retahded " he was pissed off at them instead

Reply to
bitrex

So what? The US economy has a lot of aspects. You make a good living out of providing vanity electronics for physicists who can't work out how to do what they need done with hardware they can buy off the shelf.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Kim is headed to Beijing. This gets interesting.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
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Reply to
John Larkin

Particularly if he's flying Air Koryo. I read the pilots like to come out of the cockpit and have a few drinks with the passengers during the flight

Reply to
bitrex

Two publicity-hungry clowns get to posture on the world stage?

Not all that interesting, unless they screw up big-time, as Trump's string of bankruptcies suggests is possible.

Kim Jong-il is still alive (unlike his uncle, whom he seems to have had assassinated) so he may be more competent, but international negotiations are more complex than office politics.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Apparently he has a private train.

The sequence might be

Bomb Assad to demonstrate bad-assedness

Leak about giving the norks a "bloody nose"

Hit China with trade sanctions

Hire Bolton

Hope they all get the hint.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

Out of all the sanctions one could levy to protect American industries worth protecting I definitely don't get washing machines; Whirlpools have been serious junk for a long time. LG and Samsung make really good washing machines, why not find a way to sanction their phones? Nothing of value would be lost.

There's still an old-fashioned Mom & Pop appliance store in downtown Providence, like something out of the 1950s. I doubt it's going to help them very much, Whirlpool is just one of a dozen brands they sell.

Reply to
bitrex

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