North Korea

[superbeets]

+8

US Forces oversee trucks carrying parts required to set up the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system that had arrived at the Osan Air Base on March 6, 2017 in Pyeongtaek, South Korea

+8

The THAAD anti-missile defence system (pictured) was allegedly targeted by Chinese hackers

 

[superbeets]

Trump warns 'major, major' conflict with North Korea is 'absolutely' possible: President says he hopes Kim Jong-un is 'rational' and would love to 'solve things diplomatically but it's very difficult'

President Donald Trump said on Thursday a major conflict with North Korea is possible in the standoff over its nuclear and missile programs, but he would prefer a diplomatic outcome to the dispute. 'There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely,' Trump said ahead of his 100th day in office on Saturday. Nonetheless, he said he wanted to peacefully resolve the crisis, a path that he and his administration are emphasizing by preparing a variety of new economic sanctions while not taking the military option off the table. 'We'd love to solve things diplomatically but it's very difficult,' he said. Asked about whether Kim (pictured top-right) could be reasoned with, he responded: ‘I hope he's rational.’ Pictured bottom-right are ballistic missiles photographed on an unknown date by the North Korean government.

 

[superbeets]

'The North Korean crisis is the worst I've ever seen': Pacific's top US Navy officer says the world must assume Kim Jong-un WILL nuke America if given the chance

The North Korean crisis is real, the Navy's top officer in the Pacific has warned - and the US must assume that Kim Jong Un (pictured inset) has the intention to launch nuclear attacks on America and its allies. Admiral Harry B Harris Jr (pictured top), Commander of US Pacific Command, said on Thursday that the crisis in the Korean Peninsula is the worst he'd since he began serving in 1978. 'There is some doubt within the intelligence community whether Kim Jong Un has that capability today or whether he will soon, but I have to assume he has it, the capability is real, and that he’s moving towards it,' Harris said, according to Fox News. Pictured bottom is a North Korea training exercise conducted on Tuesday.

 

[superbeets]

[h=1]Leaders Brief Congress on Review of North Korea Policy[/h][FONT=&quot]DoD News, Defense Media Activity[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]

[/FONT]​

[FONT=&quot]PRINT | E-MAIL | CONTACT AUTHOR[/FONT][FONT=&quot][/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]WASHINGTON, April 26, 2017 — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed members of Congress at the White House today on the review President Donald J. Trump ordered of U.S. policy toward North Korea.


South Korean marines carry a roll of concertina wire across Dogu Beach near the South Korean port city of Pohang as they help prepare for the Operation Pacific Reach exercise, April 6, 2017. The exercise is a bilateral training event designed to ensure readiness and sustain the capabilities that strengthen the South Korean-U.S. alliance. Combined Forces Command photo by Army Sgt. 1st Class John Queen

After the briefing, Tillerson, Mattis and Coats released a joint statement.
“Past efforts have failed to halt North Korea’s unlawful weapons programs and nuclear and ballistic missile tests,” the statement said. “With each provocation, North Korea jeopardizes stability in Northeast Asia and poses a growing threat to our allies and the U.S. homeland.”
Urgent Threat, Top Priority
North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is an urgent national security threat and a top foreign policy priority, the statement said.
The president’s approach aims to pressure North Korea into dismantling its nuclear, ballistic missile and proliferation programs by tightening economic sanctions and pursuing diplomatic measures with allies and regional partners, the government leaders said.
“We are engaging responsible members of the international community to increase pressure on [North Korea] in order to convince the regime to de-escalate and return to the path of dialogue,” the statement said. “We will maintain our close coordination and cooperation with our allies, especially [South Korea] and Japan, as we work together to preserve stability and prosperity in the region.”
The United States seeks stability and the peaceful denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, the leaders said. “We remain open to negotiations towards that goal. However, we remain prepared to defend ourselves and our allies,” they added.
[/FONT]

 

[superbeets]

Vice President Mike Pence signs the "VIP" brick wall at the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)

 

[superbeets]

Vice President Mike Pence and Mrs. Karen Pence pose for a photo with U.S. and Republic of Korea soldiers in the Mess Hall at the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ),

 

[919]

(Reuters photo: Kevin Lamarque)



[h=1]Trump Does Not Know What It Is to Know[/h]*

by George WillMay 3, 2017 8:00 PM *
@GeorgeWill

[h=2]He lacks a sense of American history and its presence with us today.[/h]It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about Donald Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.


In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Because Trump is syntactically challenged, it was possible and tempting to see this not as a historical howler about a man who died 122 years ago, but as just another of Trump’s verbal fender benders, this one involving verb tenses.


Now, however, he has instructed us that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War that began 16 years after Jackson’s death. Having, let us fancifully imagine, considered and found unconvincing William Seward’s 1858 judgment that the approaching Civil War was “an irrepressible conflict,” Trump says:

People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?


​

Library shelves groan beneath the weight of books asking questions about that war’s origins, so who, one wonders, are these “people” who don’t ask the questions that Trump evidently thinks have occurred to him uniquely? Presumably they are not the astute “lot of,” or at least “some,” people Trump referred to when speaking about his February address to a joint session of Congress: “A lot of people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber.” Which demotes Winston Churchill, among many others.
*


What is most alarming (and mortifying to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated) is not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation’s history. As this column has said before, the problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.


The United States is rightly worried that a strange and callow leader controls North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. North Korea should reciprocate this worry. Yes, a 70-year-old can be callow if he speaks as sophomorically as Trump did when explaining his solution to Middle Eastern terrorism: “I would bomb the s*** out of them. . . . I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there would be nothing left.”

He lacks what T. S. Eliot called a sense “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”​

As a candidate, Trump did not know what the nuclear triad is. Asked about it, he said: “We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame.” Invited to elaborate, he said: “I think — I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.” Someone Trump deemed fit to be a spokesman for him appeared on television to put a tasty dressing on her employer’s word salad: “What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?” To which a retired Army colonel appearing on the same program replied with amazed asperity: “The point of the nuclear triad is to be afraid to use the damn thing.”


*


As president-elect, Trump did not know the pedigree and importance of the “one China” policy. About such things he can be, if he is willing to be, tutored. It is, however, too late to rectify this defect: He lacks what T. S. Eliot called a sense “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” His fathomless lack of interest in America’s path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.


Americans have placed vast military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances. So, it is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by insistently communicating to its elected representatives a steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict.


— George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist. © 2017 Washington Post Writers Group
*

 

[superbeets]

(Reuters photo: Kevin Lamarque)



Trump Does Not Know What It Is to Know

*

by George WillMay 3, 2017 8:00 PM *
@GeorgeWill

He lacks a sense of American history and its presence with us today.

It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about Donald Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.


In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Because Trump is syntactically challenged, it was possible and tempting to see this not as a historical howler about a man who died 122 years ago, but as just another of Trump’s verbal fender benders, this one involving verb tenses.


Now, however, he has instructed us that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War that began 16 years after Jackson’s death. Having, let us fancifully imagine, considered and found unconvincing William Seward’s 1858 judgment that the approaching Civil War was “an irrepressible conflict,” Trump says:

People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?


​

Library shelves groan beneath the weight of books asking questions about that war’s origins, so who, one wonders, are these “people” who don’t ask the questions that Trump evidently thinks have occurred to him uniquely? Presumably they are not the astute “lot of,” or at least “some,” people Trump referred to when speaking about his February address to a joint session of Congress: “A lot of people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber.” Which demotes Winston Churchill, among many others.
*


What is most alarming (and mortifying to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated) is not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation’s history. As this column has said before, the problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.


The United States is rightly worried that a strange and callow leader controls North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. North Korea should reciprocate this worry. Yes, a 70-year-old can be callow if he speaks as sophomorically as Trump did when explaining his solution to Middle Eastern terrorism: “I would bomb the s*** out of them. . . . I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there would be nothing left.”

He lacks what T. S. Eliot called a sense “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”​

As a candidate, Trump did not know what the nuclear triad is. Asked about it, he said: “We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame.” Invited to elaborate, he said: “I think — I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.” Someone Trump deemed fit to be a spokesman for him appeared on television to put a tasty dressing on her employer’s word salad: “What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?” To which a retired Army colonel appearing on the same program replied with amazed asperity: “The point of the nuclear triad is to be afraid to use the damn thing.”


*


As president-elect, Trump did not know the pedigree and importance of the “one China” policy. About such things he can be, if he is willing to be, tutored. It is, however, too late to rectify this defect: He lacks what T. S. Eliot called a sense “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” His fathomless lack of interest in America’s path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.


Americans have placed vast military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances. So, it is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by insistently communicating to its elected representatives a steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict.


— George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist. © 2017 Washington Post Writers Group
*

 

[919]

So George Will is a "nutter"? Not surprised by your response.

 

[ScottL]

SB you know I've always said you're the greatest. No need to troll 919. Let him do his thing and don't ever stop doing yours. You're the best content provider on this site over several years. But Will's article is spot-on so there's no reason for the "Nutter" bumper sticker.

 

[Dave007inVegas]

SB you know I've always said you're the greatest. No need to troll 919. Let him do his thing and don't ever stop doing yours. You're the best content provider on this site over several years. But Will's article is spot-on so there's no reason for the "Nutter" bumper sticker.

Scott you should see what's going on before you advise how one
should or shouldn't respond. Will stated his opinion. 919 liked
his opinion so he posted it. If Will had a positive opinion of
Trump 919 wouldn't have posted it. Kim Jong Un could have written
that article and 919 would applaud.

beets on the other hand is a Trump man so naturally he's going to
give 919 the shit. And what makes you think the "Nutter" reference
was directed at Will?

Opinions are only that, opinions. If you don't want to hear both
sides move to the Berkeley.

 

[superbeets]

SB you know I've always said you're the greatest. No need to troll 919. Let him do his thing and don't ever stop doing yours. You're the best content provider on this site over several years. But Will's article is spot-on so there's no reason for the "Nutter" bumper sticker.

 

[superbeets]

Originally Posted by 919
(Reuters photo: Kevin Lamarque)



Trump Does Not Know What It Is to Know RUBBISH

*

by George WillMay 3, 2017 8:00 PM *
@GeorgeWill

He lacks a sense of American history and its presence with us today. RUBBISH

It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about Donald Trump’s inability to do either.RUBBISH This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability.RUBBISHIt is not merely the result of intellectual slothRUBBISHbut of an untrained mind RUBBISHbereft of informationRUBBISHand married to stratospheric self-confidence.RUBBISH


In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Because Trump is syntactically challenged, it was possible and tempting to see this not as a historical howler about a man who died 122 years ago, but as just another of Trump’s verbal fender bendersRUBBISH, this one involving verb tenses.RUBBISH


Now, however, he has instructed us that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War that began 16 years after Jackson’s death. Having, let us fancifully imagine, considered and found unconvincing William Seward’s 1858 judgment that the approaching Civil War was “an irrepressible conflict,” Trump says:

People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?


Library shelves groan beneath the weight of books asking questions about that war’s origins, so who, one wonders, are these “people” who don’t ask the questions that Trump evidently thinks have occurred to him uniquely? Presumably they are not the astute “lot of,” or at least “some,” people Trump referred to when speaking about his February address to a joint session of Congress: “A lot of people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber.” Which demotes Winston Churchill, among many others.
*


What is most alarming (and mortifying to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated) is not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation’s history.RUBBISHAs this column has said before, the problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.RUBBISH


The United States is rightly worried that a strange and callow leader controls North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. North Korea should reciprocate this worry. Yes, a 70-year-old can be callow if he speaks as sophomorically as Trump did when explaining his solution to Middle Eastern terrorismRUBBISH: “I would bomb the s*** out of them. . . . I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there would be nothing left.”SHIT POT OBAMA LEFT THE OIL AND LET ISIS FINANCE THEIR WAR THROUGH OIL

He lacks what T. S. Eliot called a sense “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”RUBBISH

As a candidate, Trump did not know what the nuclear triad is. Asked about it, he said: “We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame.” Invited to elaborate, he said: “I think — I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.” Someone Trump deemed fit to be a spokesman for him appeared on television to put a tasty dressing on her employer’s word salad: “What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?” To which a retired Army colonel appearing on the same program replied with amazed asperity: “The point of the nuclear triad is to be afraid to use the damn thing.”


*


As president-elect, Trump did not know the pedigree and importance of the “one China” policy.RUBBISHAbout such things he can be, if he is willing to be, tutored. It is, however, too late to rectify this defect: He lacks what T. S. Eliot called a sense “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” His fathomless lack of interest in America’s path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.


Americans have placed vast military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances. So, it is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by insistently communicating to its elected representatives a steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict.RUBBISH


— George Will is RUBBISHa Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist. © 2017 Washington Post Writers Group
*

 

[ScottL]

I get it SB. You have a mild disagreement with me

 

[ScottL]

Scott you should see what's going on before you advise how one
should or shouldn't respond. Will stated his opinion. 919 liked
his opinion so he posted it. If Will had a positive opinion of
Trump 919 wouldn't have posted it. Kim Jong Un could have written
that article and 919 would applaud.

beets on the other hand is a Trump man so naturally he's going to
give 919 the shit. And what makes you think the "Nutter" reference
was directed at Will?

Opinions are only that, opinions. If you don't want to hear both
sides move to the Berkeley.

I'm paying attention Dave (believe me)

I think you're exaggerating a bit for emphasis. 919 wouldn't clap for the NK Nutter. I can't speak for him but if I were to see an article about Trump I'd post it positive or negative if I thought it would inspire discussion here. We're getting away from the purpose of a forum here. It is to agree or disagree on content, not to bash those with whom we disagree. 919 is not Vit yet everyone is taking their anti-Vit vitriol out on him. To his credit he mostly laughs it off.


"It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about Donald Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence."

"In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Because Trump is syntactically challenged, it was possible and tempting to see this not as a historical howler about a man who died 122 years ago, but as just another of Trump’s verbal fender benders, this one involving verb tenses."

COULD NOT HAVE SAID IT BETTER MYSELF!!!

 

[superbeets]

I get it SB. You have a mild disagreement with me

 

[superbeets]

I'm paying attention Dave (believe me)

I think you're exaggerating a bit for emphasis. 919 wouldn't clap for the NK Nutter. I can't speak for him but if I were to see an article about Trump I'd post it positive or negative if I thought it would inspire discussion here. We're getting away from the purpose of a forum here. It is to agree or disagree on content, not to bash those with whom we disagree. 919 is not Vit yet everyone is taking their anti-Vit vitriol out on him. To his credit he mostly laughs it off.


"It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about Donald Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence."

"In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Because Trump is syntactically challenged, it was possible and tempting to see this not as a historical howler about a man who died 122 years ago, but as just another of Trump’s verbal fender benders, this one involving verb tenses."

COULD NOT HAVE SAID IT BETTER MYSELF!!!

February 2, 2017
Sean Spicer, asked about Trump's comment on Wednesday, sought to clear up how Trump thinks Douglass will be recognized "more and more."


"I think he wants to highlight the contributions that he has made and I think through a lot of the actions and statements that he's going to make, I think the contributions of Frederick Douglass will become more and more," Spicer said.

COULD NOT HAVE SAID IT BETTER MYSELF!!!


Honoring Douglass at the start of Black History Month is common for both Democratic and Republican presidents. In 2002, President George W. Bush lauded Douglass' relationship with President Abraham Lincoln, describing them as "two men, very different, who together ended slavery."
And then-President Bill Clinton urged people to visit Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington.

 

[superbeets]

February 2, 2017
Sean Spicer, asked about Trump's comment on Wednesday, sought to clear up how Trump thinks Douglass will be recognized "more and more."


"I think he wants to highlight the contributions that he has made and I think through a lot of the actions and statements that he's going to make, I think the contributions of Frederick Douglass will become more and more," Spicer said.

COULD NOT HAVE SAID IT BETTER MYSELF!!!


Honoring Douglass at the start of Black History Month is common for both Democratic and Republican presidents. In 2002, President George W. Bush lauded Douglass' relationship with President Abraham Lincoln, describing them as "two men, very different, who together ended slavery."
And then-President Bill Clinton urged people to visit Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington.

The family released a statement on the Huffington Post on that Wednesday.
“Like the President, we use the present tense when referencing Douglass’s accomplishments because his spirit and legacy are still very much alive, not just during Black History Month, but every month,” the family wrote.

 

[ScottL]

Nothing beats a nice tall glass of beer to wash down all the RUBBISH
:toast:

 

[ScottL]

February 2, 2017
Sean Spicer, asked about Trump's comment on Wednesday, sought to clear up how Trump thinks Douglass will be recognized "more and more."


"I think he wants to highlight the contributions that he has made and I think through a lot of the actions and statements that he's going to make, I think the contributions of Frederick Douglass will become more and more," Spicer said.

COULD NOT HAVE SAID IT BETTER MYSELF!!!


Honoring Douglass at the start of Black History Month is common for both Democratic and Republican presidents. In 2002, President George W. Bush lauded Douglass' relationship with President Abraham Lincoln, describing them as "two men, very different, who together ended slavery."
And then-President Bill Clinton urged people to visit Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington.

Just please don't anybody ask Trump who Paul Robeson is. We don't need this mess again until next February, the next Black History Month.