Take a DEEP BREATH people.
The âAgenciesâ do this ALL THE TIME.
It is one of their reasons for existence after all.
Hell, they have âassessed the reactionâ of ENGLAND to a first strike by the US on them, and Canada, and Russian, and China, and France, and India, and Pakistan, and just about everybody else in the world.
The scary part is what the Orange ShitGibbon will DO with this information.
I am not sure what its supposed to be disturbing here. This is precisely what the CIA is supposed to do. Perform analysis on multiple scenarios.
Pompeo refusing material compromising Trump howeverâŚor inviting the three top Russian intelligence agents to come share information, ahead of the 2018 electionâŚTHOSE are troubling events involving Pompeo.
âHas the intelligence community assessed how the North Korean regime would react to a preventive United States attack?â
âYes. It is the assessment and consensus of the intelligence community that North Korea would be, in technical terms, âreally pissed offâ and would most definitely react with more than an insulting tweet.â
Years ago, cartoonist/satarist Jules Feifer once ran a strip that read roughly as follows:
And so the scientists invented a weapon so powerfulâŚ
That if detonated, it could destroy the entire world.
But first, they had to test it.
âŚand it worked!
Dr. Strangelove clip:
Iâm gonna go with, âTrump is the Commander-in-Chief.â
Trump is the kind of psychopathic maniac who makes other psychopathic maniacs sit up and sayâŚ
âNow thereâs a psychopathic maniac!â
The best ever reality show
Happy to be beaten to the punch. You have no idea how pleased I am that this is the first comment on this article, rather than ill-considered fear-mongering or freakout.
The US intelligence community has been continuously evaluating how the North Koreans would respond to a US first strike since about ten minutes after there was a North Korea.
It is not really hard analysis.
A unprovoked or surprise âpreventative strikeâ or âblooding their nose attackâ is an act of war.
Think December 7, 1941.
Report: Dommyluc Has Assessed That Mike Pompeo Is, Always Has Been, And Always Will Be An Asshole, No Matter What Political Position He Holds.
Or March 20, 2003.
Donât know if all the scenarios WOPR tested in the movie War Games were real but reports of that era make it clear there were literally hundreds, every one given deep, full analysis and accepted as possible if not probable.
Fortunately no one was crazy enough to try one and, even in the movies, a computer demonstrated it could learn.
Would that we could be more certain of this administration and its enablers in that regard.
âBut have you assessed how President Trump would react if Kim Jong-Un tweeted that he was a fat dotard with bad hair and short fingers?â
âHas the intelligence community assessed how the North Korean regime would react to a preventive United States attack?â
What they would do seems pretty obvious: They would retaliate militarily.
I was in one of those last generations of high school students, back before zero tolerance and awareness that every head injury is life-threatening, when schools in many places were insanely tolerant of fighting between boys, and, indeed, implicitly endorsed âstanding up for yourselfâ when bullied rather than come whining to educators and administrators as if it was their problem or responsibility. And in that milieu, I learned important lessons in the efficacy and limits of violence as a response to bullying in the worst possible way.
Specifically, I learned that some bullies are cowardly poseurs and some bullies are psychotic because their own lives made them that way and that it is critical to know the difference when contemplating starting up some shit. What I learned was that if you were being bullied by a cowardly poseur, striking the first blow worked like a charm. They wonât even fight back. Theyâll collapse and sob and actually make you feel sorry for them and then leave you alone, though only to find someone they perceive as weaker than them to bully. The psychotic bullies however, will go bugshit crazy on you and responding to their bullying with violence, at best, results in both of you beating each other to a bloody pulp and, at worst ends up with you beaten to a bloody pulp.
That seems to be true of leaders and nations generally. The problem is that most nations, and non-state or rogue state actors particularly, and us not least among them, are mostly all kind of psychotic.
And the idea that you can get nations to do what you want by inflicting a limited amount of violence against them is one of the most stubbornly persistent delusions afflicting mankind. Thatâs what the Serbian intelligence officers who funded the assassination plot against Franz Ferdinand thought they were doing. Itâs what the Japanese thought they were doing at Pearl Harbor, what Saddam though he was doing to Iran, what Bin Laden thought he was doing to us on 9/11. Itâs a delusion thatâs buried tens of millions. Itâs a subset of the larger, even more dangerous delusion that itâs possible for a party committing an act of war to control the enemyâs responses.
And itâs precisely the kind of stupidity that made it disastrous to even think about letting innately stupid people such as, just for example, a Donald Trump, or, for that matter, a George W. Bush, become president of the United States. Back during the Cold War, when we lived day to day with the knowledge that we perpetually walked on the brink of the abyss, having the character, intelligence, judgment, and sanity to be trusted with the power to initiate acts of war was the first, threshold test a presidential candidate had to pass with voters. And then the Berlin Wall fell and we got two generations of voters who never knew the constant low grade anxiety that came with knowing were were just one fuck-up away from annihilation and now here we are.
They have done so repeatedly over the years, of course. However: if the CinC has instructed them to do so in this particular case then we are in different territory. I do not claim to know if Donald, wanting to know how easy and safe a âpreventative actionâ might be, asked them to find out. But I do know enough about that ratâs nest of a mind of his, for me to be concerned.
WaitâŚhold it folksâŚwhen did the US intelligence agencies emerge from their role of bumbling incompetent bullshitters to trustworthy purveyors of intelligence and vital informationâŚwas it a mere two weeks ago that the Don exposed them as anti American? Deep state manipulators? What a swift redemption!
Can you be President Steve?
Please?
Your discussion is absolutely correct. Itâs why we have eroded our negotiating standing in the middle east, in Afghanistan, and so on, because we keep killing people, may of them blameless and/or innocent, and expect to be given a free pass because weâre the bastion of Freedom and Democracy.
And then add to that Trump and his fascist stupidity, and itâs a wonder if anyone will ever listen to us again.
A rather pompeous asshole, I would venture to add.
MegaloDon is a specific kind of maniac, even.