Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how big Musk or Bezos's security teams are?
Nowhere near as large, or influential, as the Secret Service. If you’ve ever had to commute near airport, and the POTUS is flying in or out, you’re essentially screwed, for potentially hours. Musk or Bezos could request a place deny entry to other customers while they shop or eat. Secret Service can demand. It’s a whole different beast altogether.
My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)
171–180 of 228 posts
Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the federal government should be reduced in power, then why should state or local governments have any more power over individuals?
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.
Does that stop corruption in your city? (hint: The answer is 'No")
Or even abuses? (hint: The answer is "No")
In its final days, even slavery was a "more local" policy.
People should get their mindsets right on democratic vigilance. The problem is not ceding decision making to the federal government. The problem is ceding decision making to any government. That's why we need to not only be able to remove people from power, but actually do so from time to time. So that every one from the local sheriff and judge, all the way up to the president and chief justice never get too comfy.
Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)
#173Washington National doesn't have any runways that run perpendicular to the Potomac, so if the pilot maintained runway heading on takeoff, he should have already been more or less aligned with the river going north or south. The story says he landed on a 6000 foot runway. There are three runways on the field: 1/19 is 7169 feet, 15/33 is 5204 feet, and 4/22 is 5000 feet. It's possible the runways were configured differ…
I had the same skeptical reaction to this story. The runways may have changed numbers (I’m not sure how to confirm this), but if they were crossing the river taking off from what is now runway 19, they seriously deviated from their flight plan and deserved the call.
Agreed that the pilot definitely made a huge, and not really reasonable mistake. Even though it was pre-9/11, I'd expect a pilot who was going to fly in/around DC to know there's going to be restricted airspace and to take the time to understand it.
(if link doesn't work, go to the Wikipedia article for Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, and look at the bullets under "Expansion and restrictions")
Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 how do you plan to deal with the continuation of government and nuclear weapon problem?
https://www.aviationbusinessme.com/airports/airport-business...
Goes shopping in foreign supermarkets
https://greekreporter.com/2022/08/13/boris-johnson-spotted-s...
Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
MAD.
And what is it that presently restrains NATO? MAD.
Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
1. A Single vote in a smaller political division carries more weight than being diluted in a large nation like the US at the national level.
2. If the local rent seeking becomes too harmful it is far less costly to relocate to a new City, County, or State than it is to immigrate to a new nation
3. It is infinitely more costly for a large corporation to rent seek thousands of cities / counts, and/or 50 US States, than it is for them to rent seek 1 federal government.
I could add probably 5 more things. IMO Federalism is a more desirable system of governance, and provides ways to limit the damage the inevitable corruption can cause.
Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)
#177Earlier 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
Yet, despite the fact that one of the foundational principles of good governance is to avoid excessive concentrations of power, that does NOT mean that there can be no concentrations of power.
The sad fact is that, whether it is the neighborhood bully or the authoritarian state next door, anyone who wants to live a self-determined life, with a self-determining government, must be better armed, better prepared, and better allied than the abusers and autocrats, or they will be taken over in short order. This includes being able to make decisions quickly. This requires a concentration of power in something like an executive branch.
Similarly, regulating society requires making of laws, and again, by the time a society gets to tens or hundreds of millions of people, this will literally take forever without some kind of representative government; heck, just look at how long it takes to get a couple hundred congress or parliament members to get a basic majority something passed...
So, sure, when you have a tribe of several dozen or maybe the 150 of Dunbar's number [0], the leaders can be near-anonymous or completely unremarkable. Maybe even up to the size of a small town.
But once the size of organization, financing, and weilding of power just required to get anything done to maintain the society gets large, so must the concentrations of power.
The trick is not to pathologically avoid concentrations, it is to balance them.
This is the difference between a democracy and an autocracy. In a democracy, all of the institutions, the govt executive, legislative, judiciary, as well as the press, academy, industry, etc. are all independent, having their own will, centers of power, etc. In an autocracy, all of these govt and societal/economic institutions are bent to do the will of the executive. The trick is keeping those healthy, independent, and balanced.
Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The US Navy is the only constitutional branch of the DoD. How is that for being radical.
Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)
#179Of course the White House didn't want the same embarrassment as the Kremlin felt when some guy landed a sports airplane on the Red Square. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust
This flight is a whole series of extraordinary coincidences, but the fact that such a ridiculous event essentially cleared the way for Gorbachev to reform the entire Soviet military is astonishing. History is full of strange things.
Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
So how do you plan to deal with the continuation of government and nuclear weapon problem?
For many years the secret code to launch nuclear missiles was for a long time 00000000 https://sgs.princeton.edu/00000000 Now they claim they changed it, but be sure that if the president is dead the military have some workaround to launch the misiles.
... 00000001?