For his Energy Secretaries, President Obama chose physicists. Asked if his background in science helped him make decisions as Secretary of Energy, Stephen Chu said “All the time.” That won’t be an option for Donald Trump’s nominee, former Texas governor Rick Perry, whose education is limited to a Bachelors degree in Animal Science from Texas A&M where he received ‘D’s’ in classes as varied as Veterinary Anatomy, Feeds & Feeding, Writing for Professional Men, and “Meats.”
And that could be a problem when it comes time to set policy for our nuclear arsenal.
“There’s no end of mischief they could cause for the stockpile,” Mr. [John] Pike, [the director of the think tank GlobalSecurity.org and one of the most experienced security analysts in the field] said, referring to Mr. Trump and Mr. Perry, and pointing to the confusion and concern that followed the Twitter post by the president-elect.
Mr. Pike was withering in his criticism of Mr. Perry’s ability to act as a knowledgeable counterweight to Mr. Trump. “Perry’s got no idea which end the bullet comes out of,” he said. “He’s not somebody who’s going to say no to the president.”
One major concern is that Perry will come under pressure to resume underground testing of our nuclear weapons for the first time since 1992.
“If people are talking to a nonscientist, there might be a temptation to BS him,” Mr. Chu said. One advantage of being a scientist in those meetings, he said, was that “I refuse to be BS’ed.”
There are people, mostly conservatives, who are concerned that we can’t verify that our nuclear bombs will actually work using supercomputers, inspections and simulations alone. And they will use the cost of this program to argue for setting off nuclear bombs as the only sure way to assure their reliability.
But they won’t go unrebutted.
“It would be unbelievably stupid of us to start testing again,” said Burton Richter, a physics Nobel laureate and emeritus professor at Stanford who has advised presidential administrations since the 1970s.
If the United States resumes underground testing, other nations will likely follow suit.
Some experts fear that if the United States began testing again, it would risk a new arms race by opening the door to testing for many other countries that want to improve or develop nuclear arsenals.
When he was a presidential candidate in 2012, Rick Perry famously forgot which cabinet departments he wanted to shutter, including the Department of Energy. He probably didn’t even realize at that time that most of the department’s budget is dedicated to our nuclear weapons, and now he is expected to head that agency despite having zero familiarity with the relevant issues.
He’s in no position to question what scientists tell him, and his record of taking his studies seriously is not strong.
Here’s a reminder of what Rick Perry said about the candidacy of Donald Trump:
“[Trump] offers a barking carnival act that can best be described as Trumpism: a toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued…”
“Let no one be mistaken Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded. It cannot be pacified or ignored for it will destroy a set of principles that has lifted more people out of poverty than any force in the history of the civilized world and that is the cause of conservatism.”
Somehow, Trump has managed to overlook those insults and put this man in charge of our nuclear weapons. What’s amazing is that this decision is proof that Perry wasn’t too far off.
Based on this choice as well as the other picks trump has made, it’s clear that he wants to do what every Republican politician has wanted for ages: demolish government. They want to replace regulations and rules with lax oversight, if any. They don’t want to pay taxes of any kind and they pretend, when Dems are in power, that the deficit is a big deal.
The religious Conservatives completely overlooked trump’s terrible history of cheating, lying, and stealing, that he bragged that he hasn’t attended church in three years. A Democrat with that history? toast.
Now that trump will be in charge, the deficit is likely to triple, but no one is screeching from the Right. Everyone he has nominated for his Cabinet is the exact opposite of whomever should be there. The bottom line is, our government will be one giant run-for-personal-profit organization.
Worst of all, the trump loyalists will lick their chops in glee, even as they lose insurance coverage and jobs and see the skies darken with pollution. They won, they won! And they’ll be thrilled when people are walking the streets with guns and living like the Old West.
So maybe it’s good that yet another moron has the nuclear shopping list in his hot little hand. It will make the end of the world a welcome relief.
What we’re getting is the worst of both worlds: A Pence presidency combined with a Trump Twitter account.
Cheetoh Donnie’s all about the grift and the con. As long as he can do that, he doesn’t care about the rest. And the rest of the GOP will gladly let him loot the Treasury as long as he leaves them be to enact the final killing of 20th century liberal legislation. That latter bit being done under Pence’s auspices.
Nuclear war in the Middle East would be gravy for a Dominionist like Pence as it would bring him that closer to the Rapture.
I’m still upset that we never got the FEMA reeducation camps for conservative white Christians that Obama promised us. This Iron Age tribal apocalyptic death cult that grew out of an older Bronze Age goatherd tradition will be the death of us all if Dense has his way.
Yes and there is no end to the story about taxes and deficits. We need to give everyone a break and lower taxes. It will be great for the economy. But hold on now. The deficit is too large. We need to cut back on spending, Now about Medicare and social security and food stamps and such, how about we cut those back a little and maybe give you a voucher for Medicare. Everyone’s gotta pitch in you know. And we can probably do away with a few of these departments like Energy and HUD. Who needs them? No one even knows what they do.
And on it goes and the very people who need those things and Obamacare and more voted for DerTrumpster. Ryan seems to be pissing himself in anticipation of all the fun he will have.
It seems that the strategy is to put incompetents in charge of government agencies, run them into the ground, then use the resulting chaos as an excuse to shrink or shutter them.
That might even work too.
“heckuva job, Brownie”?
Conservative males are frequently not very intelligent and have very poor judgement. They are not wise people, or they wouldn’t have taken in this failed ideology hook, line and sinker. This is how we know that even their stars (like Cruz) are not actually “intelligent”.
Obviously Perry (like Rmoney) hasn’t the courage of his (pretended?) convictions vis-a-vis Der Trumper. It’s certainly not any kind of benefit to have this inexperienced lamebrain heading up Energy, so this can’t seen as some laudable personal sacrifice for the good of the nation. It does seem that Gruppenfuhrer Bannon has little understanding (or concern) that Energy is a nuclear agency. But the incompetent white electorate has ushered in the Age of Incompetence and this is what the electoral college voted for. The foolish electorate sowed the whirlwind and these are the results.
So to what level will Dems denounce and flay numbskull Perry alive at his confirmation hearings? Ask him how he presumes he is qualified for the position? Ask him the most simple questions about the duties of the agency, which he surely will flub? Start the meme that the most unqualified prez in the nation’s history obviously needs to have the most unqualified cabinet in history as well.
I guess one could say there will be a target rich environment, in more ways than one…
himself his blatantly obvious ambition that is simultaneously blatantly obviously way out of proportion to his minimal abilities and attainments (that transcript makes C- Augustus dubya look positively accomplished).
Under ground testing. Where in the US can you under ground test that will not effect fracking? The corporate fossil fuel extraction plans do not included nuke testing.
Interesting. Not much fracking going on around the test site in Southern Nevada, as far as I can tell. Most of the oil is apparently in the northern part of the state
Don’t give them any ideas.
I doubt that the tweeter in chief to be had any idea that the Energy department is responsible for nuclear weapons when he appointed Perry as head. I’m sure the calculation was as simple as Perry=Texas=oil=good.
The other sad fact is, and this applies to just about all his appointments- who does he have to choose from? Who’s willing to server in his administration? The answer of course, is by and large has-beens, grifters and ideologues. I’d put Perry firmly in the has-been category.
preferred mode of communication or . . . er . . . no, make that “communication”)
“Some experts fear that if the United States began testing again, it would risk a new arms race…”
Giving Trump reason to add to the nuclear arsenal, as he has tweeted, and starting a vicious cycle.
As Europeans, we are, uniquely, at the center of history. We are, as Hegel recognized, the concept of world history. No one will honor us for losing gracefully. No one mourns the great crimes committed against us. For us, it is conquer or die. This is a unique burden for the white man, that our fate is entirely in our hands. And it is appropriate because within us, within the very blood in our veins as children of the sun lies the potential for greatness.
That is the great struggle we are called to. We were not meant to live in shame and weakness and disgrace. We were not meant to beg for moral validation from some of the most despicable creatures to pollute the soil of this planet. We were meant to overcome-overcome all of it. Because that’s natural for us.
Because for us, as Europeans, it’s only normal again, when we are great again.
Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!
Sounded better in German; needs more banners.
Since when is South Carolina in Europe?
Nazi troll. Downrated.
How clever …
RBS logo with 4 tyr runes made in the shape of the union flag of the United Kingdom.
Your first comment here … good bye … good riddens. 🙂
Trump idiots don’t know what they don’t know and have no interest in knowing,
This doesn’t seem helpful to me. Just a variation on the basket of deplorables that objective observers recognize as not having been helpful to the Clinton campaign.
I admit that I don’t have a practical prescription for a way forward for rational opponents of the rightwingers now/soon to be in control of the federal and most state governments, but I can recognize that when people are in the grip of a defiant adolescent brain. Therefore, challenging, mocking, etc. them is contraindicated. It only pushes them further into defiance. This is doubly difficult at this point in time because the domestic natural powerful opponents of the GOP are using FakeNews was their weapon:
And this isn’t limited to ordinary non-conservatives. The Intercept – The Guardian’s Summary of Julian Assange’s Interview Went Viral and Was Completely False.