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My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

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Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#161

Post by tylergetsay »

donatj wrote: post #160
jamesmoroni wrote: post #158

I had a similar experience in 2008. I was an Air Force helicopter pilot stationed at Andrews Air Force Base just outside DC. I got a last-minute assignment to show a new copilot some of our operating sites on the north side of DC. One of those sites was Camp David. I read through the NOTAMS but didn't notice that the large restricted area around Camp David was active that day because the president was there. So we to…

Can you explain for the layman what it means to lose your wings?

lose the ability to fly

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#162

Post by phpisthebest »

dctoedt wrote: post #155
phpisthebest wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>how do you plan to deal with the continuation of government Federalism. The Federal Government does far too much and most of its function should be left to State and Local governments. >>and nuclear weapon problem? MAD is a terrible strategy, and I dont think our Nuclear weapons serve the function many believe they do.

> The Federal Government does far too much and most of its function should be left to State and Local governments. Except that state and local governments are more vulnerable to capture by rent-seekers and other special-interest groups bent on shaping public policy to suit their desires.

Aside from that not actually being true. To the extent it is, the impact of that is far less than when Large Multi-National corporations use comparatively less money to capture the federal government.

This idea that Federal Government is opposition to rent seeking is laughably absurd given the context of the last 50+ years where ever single omnibus spending bill that is passed is littered with pork to rent seekers.

As Joe Biden says.... Come On Man....

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#163

Post by shkkmo »

prottog wrote: post #151
jancsika wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that we continually shift more power from Local / State government, then from Congress to the Executive is the exact reason the president is a "Symbol of Power" This is all rank and dubious speculation wrt your general rule about POTUS needing a dedicated security team. Hell, Duane Johnson needs a dedicated security team. If you are positing a federal government so weak that POTUS is not widely known withi…

What part of GP's take on the American federalist system are you describing as radical? Seems to me that the truly radical thing is what the federal government has morphed into over the years, its founding constitutional document notwithstanding.

Reducing the federal government to that scale would involve getting ride or the DOD and almost every federal agency. It is "radical" because that position is completely unacceptable to the vast majority, while parts of that plan might appeal to parts of the political spectrum, taken as a whole it is a plan thay has miniscule support. Thus, it is considered a radical view point.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#164

Post by ufmace »

phpisthebest wrote: post #38
thepasswordis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The book makes it clear that the Secret Service is constantly underfunded and sorely lacking in modern technology, with agents sometimes having to use their personal car to transport the people they're protecting because their official cars aren't working. Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. Isn't that the job of the police? And a…

General rule for me is If any person has soooo much power we need a dedicated team of people to protect them continuously, that person has too much power and the solution is not ever-increasing amount of security, but ever decreasing amount of power to that individual

So I sympathize with the idea of this in a sense. But it feels like we're so very far removed from that point that there's hardly any point in talking about it.

Also, maybe the US President and other super high level individuals are too powerful. But then if we make them much less powerful, who keeps other bad actors like Russia and China from stomping on whoever they want - ask the Ukrainians or the Uyghurs.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#165

Post by munificent »

thepasswordis wrote: post #23
pivo wrote: post #18

I've just finished reading, "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" by Carol Leonnig [0]. In that book the author describes an incident on September 12, 1994 [1] in which a pilot landed a small plane in front of the white house. Secret Service members she interviewed were dumfounded that they were asked there to run to the white house roof with rifles to protect the building, and that there were no such…

>The book makes it clear that the Secret Service is constantly underfunded and sorely lacking in modern technology, with agents sometimes having to use their personal car to transport the people they're protecting because their official cars aren't working. Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. Isn't that the job of the police? And a…

> Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details.

It's just a numbers game. Some very small fraction of people are mentally broken and may develop a psychotic fixation on a particular person. The more publicly known you are, the greater the chances that a crazy person will pick you.

You and I don't need security people because only a few hundred other humans know we exist. The odds of one of them being a murderous psychopath are vanishingly small. Millions of people knew who John Lennon, Ronald Reagan, and Rebecca Schaeffer were, so they rolled the dice enough and lost.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#166

Post by shkkmo »

LarryMullins wrote: post #132
phpisthebest wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>how do you plan to deal with the continuation of government Federalism. The Federal Government does far too much and most of its function should be left to State and Local governments. >>and nuclear weapon problem? MAD is a terrible strategy, and I dont think our Nuclear weapons serve the function many believe they do.

What, besides MAD, has prevented Putin from using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine? inb4 "they don't work anymore" , Russia has a mature nuclear industry and huge stockpiles of nuclear material. They're more than capable of making nuclear bombs which work.

The risk of further global isolation and the loss of any military restraint from NATO.

I could foresee a wide range of of responses to Russia using a nuke in Ukraine. I highly doubt the US would respond by dropping a nuke on Russia. That just wouldn't accomplish anything useful.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#167

Post by mschuster91 »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #94
mschuster91 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, that is increasingly changing. The covid pandemic, for example, has led to a massive increase in threats to everyone advocating for containment measures, and so do the advocates of other political issues impacted by conspiracy myth spreaders and/or the far-right (e.g. 5G rollouts, single-payer healthcare, gun control, immigration). Having been the target of about five dozen death threats myself as a po…

That's a problem with a different solution, though. Loads of people in other countries issue the same threats, but because they don't readily have access to ranged weapons, and specifically firearms (and every legal firearm that they do have are registered with the police), those threats are just that: threats. Of course, we know the problem there, and everyone knows the solution, and everyone knows that solution can…

> Loads of people in other countries issue the same threats, but because they don't readily have access to ranged weapons, and specifically firearms (and every legal firearm that they do have are registered with the police), those threats are just that: threats.

All my examples were from Germany, a country with very strict gun control. And yet, Drachenlord got haters literally every single day shouting at or vandalizing his property, attacking him physically, swatting him (the first conviction of swatting in Germany was for a Drachenlord hater). LGBT people or people "looking foreign" routinely get beaten up with fists.

Gun control is a relevant issue, yes, but it's only a very small part.

>If you want to walk into a lion's den, expect lions. If you don't like that, maybe consider that you don't need to rile people up

That's pure victim blaming with a healthy dose of "chilling effect" applied and I'm sad to see such a take on this site. Speaking the truth, advocating for democracy must be protected at all costs.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#168

Post by dctoedt »

phpisthebest wrote: post #162
dctoedt wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Federal Government does far too much and most of its function should be left to State and Local governments. Except that state and local governments are more vulnerable to capture by rent-seekers and other special-interest groups bent on shaping public policy to suit their desires.

Aside from that not actually being true. To the extent it is, the impact of that is far less than when Large Multi-National corporations use comparatively less money to capture the federal government. This idea that Federal Government is opposition to rent seeking is laughably absurd given the context of the last 50+ years where ever single omnibus spending bill that is passed is littered with pork to rent seekers. A…

I certainly don't dispute that the federal government is vulnerable to regulatory capture by rent-seekers. But if you imagine that state- and local governments are any different, you must live in a laudably-different place than do most of us.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#169

Post by int_19h »

dctoedt wrote: post #156
mulmen wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I have more power as a voter and constituent to influence policies that affect me. At a national level I am 1 of 331,900,000. At a state level I am 1 of 7,739,000. At a county level I am one of 2,252,000. At a city level I am one of 733,919. At a neighborhood level I am one of 82,123. I have four orders of magnitude more influence over my city council rep than I do over my president.

> Because I have more power as a voter and constituent to influence policies that affect me. If only things actually worked that way. The vast majority of voters don't exercise that power. Moreover, state and local governments are more vulnerable to capture by rent-seekers and other special-interest groups bent on shaping public policy to suit their desires.

That's not an inherent state of affairs, though. We've been consciously pushing as much of our politics to the federal level as possible, from both left and right, for several decades now. Why is it a surprise then that voters don't engage much with local governments? After all, even if they do it, the states and the feds tend to override if it's an important "wedge issue" (i.e. the voters have been riled up about it) on the higher level.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#170

Post by int_19h »

petsfed wrote: post #113
safety1st wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares? The perennial mistake is believing that if any of these guys get capped, it's some irreparable loss to society. It's not. Let them play the odds of life like the rest of us do. A society that depends on strongmen isn't a free society.

I think there's merit to at least forestalling rule-by-assassination. Like, yes, I would not mourn a lot of people who end up having protective details. But I absolutely don't want to live in a world where all it takes to change a policy is one particularly motivated sociopath. Keep in mind that John Hinckley Jr's assassination attempt on Reagan wasn't out of disagreement with Reagan's policies, it was to impress Jod…

I think that was kind of OP's point - if one person has so much power that a major change in policy can be achieved solely by assassinating them, then they probably have too much power in general.
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