Month: December 2016

It was nice of E.J. Dionne to valiantly try to find some silver linings in the election of Donald Trump. I wouldn’t have bothered.

It got me thinking, though.

We haven’t had a president in Trump’s position since John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960. That’s the last time we had a president
leave office after two terms who was unambiguously popular but nonetheless replaced by someone from the opposing party.

There are other similarities, too …

My response to BooMan’s fp story – How Trump and JFK are Alike.

Brussels Treaty was decided upon in 1948 to contain Germany and prohibit a renewed militarization and threat for a new devastation across Europe. Under Truman, after the Berlin blockade and famous airlift, NATO was founded and soon it was redirected to oppose the threat of communism from the Soviet Union. See also the build-up of the atomic bomb and the powerful hydrogen bomb with the immense fall-out in the upper atmosphere. See also US intelligence employing former Nazis – Operation Paperclip and the Gehlen Project, remnants of which NATO uses for its expansion to the Russian border (see Ukraine).

Eisenhower criticized the UK, France and Israel for the Suez crisis. I applaud him for that. Obama failed miserably in the entanglement of the Middle East. Both of Obama’s nemisis have gotten the full blast of his anger in the last few weeks. Netanyahu for opposing each and every effort by Obama on the Palestinian issue  and Putin for Russia’s reoccupation of Crimea with its crucial naval base Sevastopol in the Black Sea. Same for the Russia naval base in the Mediterranean Sea in Tartus and his unrelenting support for the christians and Alawites under the Assad regime. In 18 months, Putin managed to silence the guns in Syria and bring a (momentary) truce. The talks will start between Russia, Iran, Turkey and the opposing political forces in Syria without interference of western powers (UK, France and the US) and the UN.

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Netanyahu hasn't criticised Putin for his antics in the Ukraine after the Maidan revolt

Under Eisenhower, VP Nixon, actor Reagan and McCarthyism … how well was Ike liked in history?

There are plenty of American politicians who have an incentive to demonstrate strong support for Israel, but only a small handful who have much, if any, incentive to support the settler movement there. So, it doesn’t surprise me that some politicians get upset (or pretend to, anyway) when the United States government acts in ways that displease the Israeli government, but it seems like the specifics are almost wholly irrelevant. Over in Europe, our allies loved John Kerry’s speech condemning Benjamin Netanyahu for his cowardice and lack of leadership in confronting the settlers.

In France, Britain and Germany, Mr. Kerry’s speech was greeted with more full-throated support. Senator Nathalie Goulet, vice president of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the French Senate, said Mr. Kerry “is right, he is absolutely right.”

“The more there are settlements,” she said, “the less it is likely there will be a two-state solution. But nobody ever dares condemn Israel. There is a double standard that nourishes the propaganda of the terrorists.”

In a statement, the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, praised Mr. Kerry’s speech as a “passionate and deeply convincing” defense of “the only credible way” to solve the issue: a two-state solution.

British officials said they regarded Mr. Kerry’s speech as a thoughtful summary of longstanding British and European concerns about the direction of Israeli politics.

Here at home, however, the reaction was mostly negative.

I’m not exactly sure why American politics is so stupid about Israel. But it is.

You can oppose the settlers precisely because you support Israel and don’t want to see it end in ruin, as neither secure, nor prosperous, nor democratic, nor Jewish. This possibility isn’t really considered in our discourse, though, even when the president and Secretary of State come right out and articulate it.

It was nice of E.J. Dionne to valiantly try to find some silver linings in the election of Donald Trump. I wouldn’t have bothered.

It got me thinking, though.

We haven’t had a president in Trump’s position since John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960. That’s the last time we had a president leave office after two terms who was unambiguously popular but nonetheless replaced by someone from the opposing party.

There are other similarities, too. Eisenhower enjoyed a Republican Congress in his first two years but thereafter had to negotiate with the Democrats. This is a mirror image of Obama’s experience. Like Kennedy, Trump will be taking over with the benefit of congressional majorities.

In truth, I don’t see many commonalities between JFK and Trump, but Eisenhower and Obama strike me as birds of a feather. In both cases, I think E.J Dione is right to evoke Joni Mitchell’s lyric that we don’t know what we have until it’s gone.

The presidency has chewed up most of our postwar presidents, and it’s impossible to envision any besides Obama serving a third term with credibility and support. By 1988, Reagan was staggering to the finish line, and the country was exhausted by Clinton and his scandals. George W. Bush might as well have carpet-bombed our country on the way out the door.

I do see some shadows from 2000, with the winner this time having lost the popular vote and lacking legitimacy in the eyes of many, and one party taking over completely for another. But there’s a big difference between seeing Clinton go and seeing Obama go.

Democrats fiercely defended Clinton against impeachment, but most of them resented it and we’re ready for Al Gore to replace him. In other words, we have to go back to Ike to find a situation where so many people are unenthusiastic about the current occupant of the White House having to leave.

Of course, there was a real charisma and excitement about Kennedy and his family. It was certainly different in kind from the charisma of Trump and his family, and the admirers are from different planets. The biggest difference between Trump and JFK is that Trump is not being embraced by the Washington Establishment.

But don’t forget that the Bay of Pigs was a plan hatched under Eisenhower that a young president didn’t have the self-confidence to cancel. It matters when someone lacking status and experience has to replace someone who is accomplished and popular.

Lastly, JFK walked into some some really stressed fault lines along race and the Cold War that created really intense opposition within his government and throughout the country. Aside from immigration policy, it seems to me that Trump is largely going to create the fault lines that bring him down.

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.

Over at the National Security Archive you can peruse some recently declassified papers related to briefings and nuclear war exercises that Ronald Reagan participated in during his first term in office. The experience, I warn you, will be disturbing.

For starters, it’s alarming to realize how slowly the new president was brought up to speed. It’s true that even before he was sworn in he received some vital information. For example, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman David Jones had a discussion with the president-elect on “our nuclear forces and their relationship to the Single Integrated Operation Plan (SlOP)” and a White House military aide named Major John Kline, USMC, provided “an overview of the White House Emergency Plans (WHEP) and described some of the communications procedures that we would use in the event of an attack.”

But, when Reagan was shot by John Hinckley on March 30th, 1981, he still hadn’t been fully briefed on what his options would be in the event that the Russians launched a surprise nuclear attack on our country.

The attempted assassination and Reagan’s physical recovery may have delayed further briefings, but in mid-November 1981 the president took what amounted to an accelerated course in command-and-control. On 15 November, on his way back from Texas, he flew on the National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP) and received a briefing by General Philip Gast (J-3) on the National Military Command System (NMCCS). The following day, Major Kline provided him with additional detail concerning the “black bag” (or “suitcase” as the “football” was also known). Finally, on 17 November, Reagan met with JCS Chairman Jones at the National Military Command Center (NMCC) for a briefing on U.S. Strategic Forces and a run-through of a simulated missile attack conference.

That this didn’t occur until a year after Reagan was elected is disturbing, especially when you realize that less than two years later, in early November 1983, we came close to instigating a first-strike reaction from the Soviets with a provocative series of military exercises in Europe called Able Archer.

Here’s something else you probably don’t want to know:

Sharper understanding at high levels of the grave danger of nuclear war was one consequence of a Defense Department nuclear war game that occurred in mid-1983. In the “Proud Prophet” game, among the lead players were JCS Chairman John W. Vessey and Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger. According to Paul Bracken’s account, during the game Vessey and Weinberger followed standard policies constructed for crises; as a U.S.-Soviet conflict escalated, their actions initiated a major nuclear war. “The result was a catastrophe” in which “a half billion human beings were killed in the initial exchanges and at least that many more would have died from radiation and starvation.” Bracken argues that Proud Prophet had a chastening and moderating impact on the Reagan administration’s rhetoric and thinking about nuclear war, but much needs to be learned about the game and its impact. The Product Prophet report remains massively excised and it is unknown even if or when Weinberger briefed Reagan on it.

It would be nice to know if Casper Weinberger did or did not brief the president on the fact that their war games had resulted in a billion people dying.

During the recent presidential campaign, the prospect of Donald Trump having responsibility for the nuclear codes was a recurring theme, since that’s an absurdly ridiculous risk that no one should have countenanced. Many people felt the same way about Ronald Reagan, since his rhetoric was unnaturally bellicose. However, Reagan was never a fan of nuclear weapons and he grew to fear them with real urgency once he saw how he was expected to use them and came to understand how close we had come to a nuclear exchange in 1983. He made nuclear disarmament a priority.

Donald Trump, at least so far, is more interested in boosting our nuclear arsenal. His comments on nuclear weapons have been incoherent and terrifying, ranging from a lack of familiarity with the term “nuclear triad,” to a stated preference that countries as varied as Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia develop their own nuclear weapons programs, to expressing a willingness to use them against ISIS, to a recent tweet calling for the United States to “greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability.”

There’s probably a little bit of Alex Jones in each of us, but I don’t think it’s entirely crazy to worry that Vladimir Putin might conclude that our country would be helpless to retaliate against a nuclear first strike with a captured buffoon like Donald Trump on the other end of the strike response. In 1982, when it was determined that Reagan was woefully under-informed about how to conduct a retaliatory response, it was his National Security Adviser who addressed it.

Reagan’s aides did not believe that he knew enough about the SIOP and related procedures in a nuclear crisis, so during February 1982 the new national security adviser, William Clark, made arrangements for the president to receive a fuller briefing. In addition, the dates for a high level nuclear command post exercise, IVY LEAGUE 82, were approaching (1-5 March 1982) and national security officials believed that Reagan needed more information on the SIOP so he could better understand the exercise when he sat in on some of the sessions.

But, in this case, the National Security Adviser is a man who was recently on Putin’s payroll and sat at his right hand during a dinner celebrating the anniversary of the launch of Russia Today or RT, the Kremlin’s propaganda news agency.

I don’t think Putin wants to blow up the United States, but he’s arranged things so that he might be able to do so with impunity. Let’s just say that the mutually assured part of mutually assured destruction is looking a little frayed around the edges.

We’re seriously about to give the nuclear football to a narcissistic and revenge-minded simpleton, whose disposition and top advisers are more aligned with Russia’s interests than our own.

So, yeah, you probably don’t want to look too closely at those newly classified documents at the National Security Archives. Not if you want to sleep, anyway.

More to come as Secretary of State John Kerry is about to unleash his outline for a peaceful settlement of the Israëli occupation of Palestinian land.

Update-3 :: Secretary John Kerry @state.gov [VIDEO]

Settlements are not the cause of the
conflict, but no one can ignore the
reality of the threat they pose to peace.
— Secretary @JohnKerry

Update-2 :: Kerry: ‘The settler agenda is defining the future of Israel

An historically right-wing government in Israel is pushing their nation toward annexation of the West Bank, intentionally eroding the viability of a Palestinian state through its settlement enterprise with the goal of creating a “permanent one-state reality,” US Secretary of State John Kerry said.

In a speech billed by US officials as the secretary’s comprehensive vision for peace between the two peoples, Kerry spoke for over an hour from the State Department of his commitment to Israel’s long-term security as a Jewish and democratic state. As he has stated in the past, Kerry warned that the future is in grave jeopardy.

“There really is no viable alternative,” Kerry said. “We can only encourage them to take this path. We cannot walk down it for them.”

“The settler agenda is defining the future of Israel,” he declared. “Separate and unequal is what you would have, and no one can explain how that works.”

…

He specifically criticized a bill under consideration in the Knesset that would effectively legalize settlement outposts in the West Bank, applying Israeli civilian law in the territory for the first time— a “major step toward annexation,” he warned.

He slammed Israel’s approval of settlements closer to the Jordanian border than to its own, and the government’s failure to offer the PA reciprocal rights to build on land that, under any scheme, would be Palestinian territory under a two-state solution.

Fearing reprisals, Israel delays vote on building permits in eastern Jerusalem | Ynet News |

Update-1 :: changed link from Australian website to The Guardian …

Netanyahu blasts New Zealand for backing UN vote | The Guardian |

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu phoned New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Murray McCully to warn him a UN resolution co-sponsored by the country was a “declaration of war”, according to a leading Israeli newspaper.

The Israeli daily Haaretz, citing unnamed Western diplomats, reported that a “harsh” phone call took place between Mr Netanyahu and Mr McCully on the day of the vote. “This is a scandalous decision. I’m asking that you not support it and not promote it,” Mr Netanyahu reportedly told Mr McCully.

Netanyahu’s phone call to McCully was almost his last attempt to prevent the vote, or at least to postpone it and buy a little time. Western diplomats say the conversation was harsh and very tense and Netanyahu let loose with sharp threats, perhaps unprecedented in relations between Israel and another Western country.

“This is a scandalous decision. I’m asking that you not support it and not promote it,” Netanyahu told McCully, according to the Western diplomats, who asked to remain unnamed due to the sensitivity of the matter. “If you continue to promote this resolution from our point of view it will be a declaration of war. It will rupture the relations and there will be consequences. We’ll recall our ambassador to Jerusalem.” McCully refused to back down from the vote. “This resolution conforms to our policy and we will move it forward,” he told Netanyahu.

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PM Netanyahu with New Zealand FM McCully. Photo: GPO/Amos Ben Gershom

Just one month earlier, when McCully visited Israel and met with Netanyahu, he found the latter an entirely different man. Netanyahu was pleasant, friendly and overflowing with warmth. He showed McCully the famous PowerPoint presentation that he had shown in a round of background briefings for the media last summer. Laser pointer in hand, Netanyahu told McCully that Israel was expanding its foreign relations, breaking through in the region and making friends in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Israel has withdrawn its ambassador to New Zealand, Itzhak Gerberg, and barred New Zealand’s ambassador to Israel. Mr Gerberg will meet Mr Netanyahu today to discuss whether further sanctions against New Zealand are appropriate.

New Zealand was the only Western nation to co-sponsor the UN resolution, with Senegal, Malaysia, and Venezuela.  

○ Diplomatic bantam New Zealand takes on peace process | The Times of Israel – June 2015 |

Chris Christie is back in New Jersey and badly wounded. He just failed to convince the legislature to relax ethics laws to allow him to profit from writing a book. Gonorrhea and chlamydia are more popular than he is in the Garden State, and the series of public humiliations he’s endured from the Trump camp since the election have been enough to make the Cleveland Browns blush.

At one time, he was in charge of the Trump transition team, but that plum position was yanked and his loyalists were largely purged from the lists. It was a predictable end if you knew that Christie had gone out of his way to humiliate the father of Trump’s son-in-law when he prosecuted him in 2005. The experience was traumatic enough for Jared Kushner, who was then working in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, that he gave up his aspirations to become a prosecutor himself.

“My dad’s arrest made me realize I didn’t want to be a prosecutor anymore,” he said. “The law is so nuanced. If you’re convicting murderers, it’s one thing. It’s often fairly clear. When you get into things like white-collar crime, there are often a lot of nuances. Seeing my father’s situation, I felt what happened was obviously unjust in terms of the way they pursued him. I just never wanted to be on the other side of that and cause pain to the families I was doing that to, whether right or wrong.’’

When Christie announced he was running for president, the elder Kushners held a fundraiser at their Long Branch, New Jersey home for Donald Trump. When Christie’s campaign fizzled in New Hampshire, there wasn’t any good reason for Trump to turn down his endorsement and use him as a prop and gofer, but revenge was inevitable, and best served cold.

Trump is on the record in numerous places, including his books, talking about the importance of screwing your enemies harder than they ever screwed you. It’s a core belief for him. That made it easy to predict that Christie would eventually get dumped in the most painful and public way possible.

Yet, Christie is still in deep denial about what has happened to him, and why.

Mr. Christie still believes he has a political future nationally. He wants to write a book and his friends have been telling people in New Jersey that the governor expects Mr. Trump to eventually come around to him. According to their scenario, the White House management team of Jared Kushner, Stephen K. Bannon and Reince Priebus will be a disaster and Mr. Christie will be tapped as the skilled manager, like David Gergen, the former aide to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan who swooped in to steady Bill Clinton’s administration after a raucous first year.

It could very well be that Trump’s first team is a disaster and that he’ll be looking to bring in some savior to rescue his presidency, but his son-in-law is not going to get dumped for the guy who put his father in prison and held a press conference to make it as brutal as he could make it.

“It is incredibly humiliating for a man of Mr. Kushner’s power and prestige to say in an open court, to say three times, guilty as charged,” Christie said during a news conference at the time.

I would not be shocked in the least to see Attorney General Jeff Sessions overseeing the prosecution of Christie for Bridgegate or some other transgression. I definitely see it as more likely than Christie ever getting invited into Trump’s inner circle or to become his chief of staff.

If you don’t believe me, just watch this video of Trump explaining his philosophy of revenge:

Here’s the relevant part:

“One of the things you should do in terms of success: If somebody hits you, you’ve got to hit ’em back five times harder than they ever thought possible. You’ve got to get even. Get even. And the reason, the reason you do, is so important…The reason you do, you have to do it, because if they do that to you, you have to leave a telltale sign that they just can’t take advantage of you. It’s not so much for the person, which does make you feel good, to be honest with you, I’ve done it many times. But other people watch and you know they say, ‘Well, let’s leave Trump alone,’ or ‘Let’s leave this one,’ or ‘Doris, let’s leave her alone. They fight too hard.’ I say it, and it’s so important. You have to, you have to hit back. You have to hit back.”

There’s just no way that Trump would fail to hit Christie back for going after his in-laws, and Christie still doesn’t get it.

The guy would be named Boris.

Donald Trump’s inaugural committee is having no problems finding celebrities to attend his inauguration because that’s not who the committee is looking for, Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn said Tuesday.

“Not at all,” Epshteyn, the inaugural committee communications director, told CNN. “You know, this is not Woodstock. It’s not Summer Jam. It’s not a concert. It’s not about celebrities. As Donald Trump tweeted himself, it’s about the people. That’s what we’re concentrated on.”

I suggest that we adopt “This Is Not Woodstock” as the unofficial name of Trump’s inauguration and associated balls. It works on every level that we need it to work on, and you can probably make a killing if you print up a bunch of hats, pins, and t-shirts and sell them in D.C. during the festivities.

The mouth-breathers will embrace it for its explicit rejection of patchouli and Birkenstocks and all the values associated with modernism. The rest of us will get the joke that this will be the unhippest, uncoolest, least worthy celebratory gathering in national history.

The joke will still be on us, unfortunately, but at least we’ll get a laugh out of it.

It no more matters that celebrities aren’t lining up to win the Charles Lindbergh prize than it did that virtually no newspapers were willing to endorse Trump for the presidency.

Analytical reasoning and artistry are signifiers of talent, and talent is suspect in Trumpland. Talent rises to the top. It moves up and out of town, rarely to return. This is an anti-elitist movement, and that goes for meritocratic elites as much as those born into wealth and comfort.

Our truly meritocratic systems, sports, entertainment, academic excellence, are also where pluralism and tolerance and anti-racism excel. It’s our elites who enjoy their positions through circumstance rather than merit who lead the nationalistic and racist and anti-pluralistic movements. They are guarding their privileges.

What’s the opposite of the Trump inauguration?

This.

Unfortunately, the bums seem to have lost.

It’s a good thing most Saudi citizens cannot read the New York Times or they might go all Marie Antoinette on some folks.

While members of the family have been investing overseas for decades, the pace of buying homes abroad has quickened in the last two years, according to Ardavan Amir-Aslani, a business lawyer who has advised Saudi princes on real estate acquisitions in France. “In the event the situation becomes dire for them, they want to have an option, and a place to go to live, a place to have assets,” he said.

“They’re not only securing their capital,” he added, “but also their future lives.”

After Ramadan ended in July, many royals traveled to the Mediterranean. Prince Abdulaziz, the son of the late King Fahd, rode a Jet Ski this past summer off the Spanish island of Formentera within sight of his nearly 500-foot yacht.

Nicole Pollard Bayme, the founder and chief executive of the LalaLuxe fashion styling firm in Los Angeles, said her Saudi royal clients last summer bought Hermès Himalayan Birkin bags made of crocodile skin with diamond and gold hardware and couture gowns for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Saudi economy “is in some kind of a crisis, but they are still spending,” she said.

Eventually, there will be a reckoning. Looks like the Royals are stepping up plans for that as we speak.

We should probably debate this more as a society.

>The United States again ranked first in global weapons sales last year, signing deals for about $40 billion, or half of all agreements in the worldwide arms bazaar, and far ahead of France, the No. 2 weapons dealer with $15 billion in sales, according to a new congressional study.

Developing nations continued to be the largest buyers of arms in 2015, with Qatar signing deals for more than $17 billion in weapons last year, followed by Egypt, which agreed to buy almost $12 billion in arms, and Saudi Arabia, with over $8 billion in weapons purchases.

Although global tensions and terrorist threats have shown few signs of diminishing, the total size of the global arms trade dropped to around $80 billion in 2015 from the 2014 total of $89 billion, the study found. Developing nations bought $65 billion in weapons in 2015, substantially lower than the previous year’s total of $79 billion.

The United States and France increased their overseas weapons sales in 2015, as purchases of American weapons grew by around $4 billion and France’s deals increased by well over $9 billion.

I know that some of these weapons help provide stability and peace, but I have a very hard time believing that the net effect of pumping $40 billion worth of weapons into the world in a single year can possibly be to reduce the level of global violence and or avoid increasing the lethality of conflict.

I also know that you can’t erase $40 billion of economic activity and foreign exports without it having a negative effect on the national economy.

I don’t know what the correct balance is, but what I really don’t like is the sense I have that we’re economically dependent on the maintenance a huge market for our arms manufacturers.

But, then I’m just an aging Deadhead, so what do I know?