CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

We're conveniently forgetting Chicago, Portland, Houston, Charlotte now?

The fact that he's President. Twice. He maneouvred himself into the most powerful seat in the world. Twice. I'm tremendously sceptical that someone stupid can wind up there like that. (Again, not necessarily intelligent. You don't need to be intelligent to clear the Republican field in 2016. You do need to be crafty.)

It's entirely possible that you can be on the stupid side of Chesterton's fence (to abuse the metaphor) and take it down, causing all the expected havok, and then claim you're excelling at your goals because you just have a sociopathic approach to the world.

Sure, picking up Maduro was well executed... and then he has been replaced with (checks notes... ) "the Maduro Regime".

Yeah, that -screams- competence.

No, it's not. He's smart. His political instincts are well honed. And he's good at surrounding himself with strategists.

I'm not sure he's wickedly intelligent. And he's getting old, which cuts into his cleverness and memory. But his wit is quick (recall the Republican debates), retention used to be spectacular and has achieved things which you simply cannot do by being the bumbling dope he's sometimes characterised as.

In any case, all you have to do is listen to the man talk. If you can hit stop before your brains start leaking onto the floor, the conclusion is inescapable.

For most of his life he did nothing that would require any sort of smarts. Becoming POTUS was quite an accomplishment, but he lucked into it. He happened to have a style and set of opinions that appealed to a large group of voters. He's charismatic in an empty sort of way that still works on a lot of people. He had a pretty pathetic set of opponents both in the primaries and the general. And he just barely won. Nothing in his campaign was shrewdly designed, he was just doing what he does, and it happened to work.

Birth him into an ordinary family instead of a rich one and he's going to be a used car salesman griping about getting bumped into the next tax bracket when he makes too many sales.

It could happen. The world is dedollarizing as a direct consequence of the trade war.

I get the impression that Trump is pretty negative on nuclear weapons and I don't think he'd do something that could provoke nuclear retaliation. But I doubt he'll be our last mad king. I think the odds are pretty high of at least a small nuclear war within my lifetime. Even if the US keeps it together, proliferation means much higher odds of some idiot leader somewhere pressing the Button.

I am not sure that even if they could minority report their way into killing off all the future Fred Hamptons, they have either the man power to do it or the mental ability to define an ontology for their little scrye to even tell them who they -should- target.

It is easy to confuse these folks with the mostly competent neoliberal technocrats they replaced, but that's the whole point of this thread, no? Patel and Bongino were more interested in how to win twitter points after Kirk was killed than, like, going and playing g-man, after all.

Also, one of the nice things about living in a panopticon is that it gives the folks running it the idea that they actually know what's going on. I'll take the long bet on the over-confidence and under-competence of these WWF wrestlers.

That page does not seem to support the claim that 1984 is about or relates to his time at BBC.

For those reading who are curious on which comment is accurate, I would encourage you to read up on it to confirm for yourself. It's a highly fascinating subject to read about.

Another thing the Spanish Civil War did make Orwell was a hardcore realist.

"Half a loaf of bread is better than no loaf."

Nothing wrong with that I suppose but the second someone implies it has something to say about real life capitalists or social welfare or anything else then it gets weird; that makes as much sense as any of the marvel movies helping you decide how to vote for exactly the same reason.

I expect it's for this reason you're being downvoted - these books are often used as a motte and baily to imply something about real life (or often to ironically excuse their own selfish/bad behavior) and they just don't hold up for that in my opinion.

If you want an official government source to outright say "it was inconveniencing our mass deportation efforts," I don't know what to tell you.

You could say that one of the elements of religion is having faith in something that is not provable via the scientific method and I'd agree. But then you'd lose generals, managers, politicians, etc... from the list above in which case the comment has lost its meaning.

It's definitely not the worst that can happen. Happens fairly often - google: CIA lying to congress. Getting audited is the worst that thing that happens to the CIA. ie The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) last actively audited the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the early 1960s, specifically discontinuing such work around 1962.