"I can't be doing so badly, because I'm President and you're not."

Larkin is a bit of an idiot-savant when it comes to politics. His intelligence in engineering has literally no overlap to areas involving people. It's always a shame when someone who is good at one thing thinks that justifies them to espouse about everything.

Such is the failure of our political system. To be elected requires an entirely different set of skills than running a government. But that can largely be blamed on the flock of sheep we have as an electorate. Funny that the sheep don't seem to like being led around by our current shepherd-in-chief.

The news media here said that the Tomahawk missile strike destroyed 20% of their airforce.

Dan

I am confused. Are you saying the Democrats are sheep and do not like Trump as president? Certainly you do not believe all of the electorate do not like Trump as a leader.

Dan

Eight years as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. You can look it up.

What is Trump's approval rating? The latest number I've seen is 39% and that is UP from recent numbers. His approval rating started low at the inauguration and gone down since then. He has gotten a small uptick in the last week, but the key word is "small".

From the news a week ago,

President Trump?s job approval, the lowest of any commander in chief since Gallup began tracking the initial months of a president?s term in

But then I suppose that is just "fake news" and Trump is very popular among the voters.

How much of the fighting is done by their airforce? I seem to recall the Russians fly a lot of sorties.

The Tomahawk is fairly old, non-stealth. May as well get some use out of them.

Time served in the White House, with field deployment to various golf courses. Tough duty.

Are you talking about Trump?

Quite a few of the electorate have doubts about Trump's leadership capacity - even the Republicans in congress balked at his scheme for getting rid of Obamacare.

If you haven't worked out by now that Trump is not the kind of person the US should have as president, you are terminally confused, and need to report to the nearest centre for looking after the cognitively challenged.

So does Trump, but his personality defects mean that he will have to be dragged there, kicking and screaming all the way. The same personality defects mean that it should happen sooner rather than later.

It flies low enough that stealth would probably be a waste of effort.

An AWACs plane flying above the route to the target might be able to see them with Doppler radar, but guiding in an interceptor would be time consuming.

Knocking out both the AWAC's plane and the interceptor wouldn't be all that difficult.

them with Doppler radar, but guiding in an interceptor would be time consum ing.

at difficult.

All conjecture. And obviously not thought out logically.

First statement is that stealth would probably not be worth the effort. F ollowed by a statement that knocking out the interceptor would not be all that dificult. But it is more logical to think that if knocking out the in terceptor is easy, than stealth would be worthwhile.

Huh? If you can knock out the interceptor easily, why do you care about stealth? Stealth helps to minimize the threat from the interceptor. Knocking it out eliminates the threat so you don't need stealth. What am I missing?

The real fallacy in John's thinking is that if we use up the Tomahawks we won't buy more. We always buy more. To paraphrase an old car commercial, "If they weren't so good why would we use so many?"

. Followed by a statement that knocking out the interceptor would not be all that dificult. But it is more logical to think that if knocking out th e interceptor is easy, than stealth would be worthwhile.

It comes from not being able to do joined up logic.

But when we buy more, they will either be a later model or the non reoccurr ing engineering cost will be zero.

Dan

Is there a point in there somewhere?

Not entirely. I used to read Aviation Week.

Dan has a problem with logical thinking. The fact that he can't follow the implied logic reflects his incapacity to recognise implications.

rt. Followed by a statement that knocking out the interceptor would not b e all that difficult.

Granting that the hypothetical AWACs plane is going to be perfectly obvious to the people who launched the cruise missiles, even a low-flying (thus sl ow) interceptor is going to be equally obvious. It would take a specialised interceptor missile to take out a low-flying interceptor, but they do exis t (though you aren't security cleared to receive information about them).

asy, than stealth would be worthwhile.

For certain values of "logical". Ill-informed logic might well come to that conclusion.

Rare to find Dan being honest about his deficiencies

rring engineering cost will be zero.

In neither case will they be cheap. US military spending is regularly descr ibed as welfare for the military industrial complex - not that "pork barrel s" doesn't capture the essential part of the transaction.

Some billionaire will be very happy that Trump chose to vent his disquiet i n that particular way. Quite how he will reward Trump for his generosity re mains to be revealed, but the Trump administration isn't a subtle structure , so we will probably get to find out.

He had a 5% chance of winning the election, according to all those scientific polls.