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You asked for more face time with The Founders®, and here it is: our first Question Time show of 2020 (there will be more!). We cover some Ricochet history, get into a feisty debate about abortion, take a brief break with Henry Olsen, host of our new Horse Race podcast to make some hay (see what we did there?) on impeachment and some key Senate races. Also, Lileks opines on the new Star Trek series, and the hosts pick a historical moment they’d like to visit once we achieve a critical mass of members (what are YOU waiting for? Join today!).
Thanks for all the great questions, Ricochet members!
Music from this week’s show: Happy Feet by The Manhattan Rythm Kings
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Arguably, LBJ was the closest thing we ever had to a real “Manchurian candidate“.
His bloody-minded bungling of the Vietnam war disillusioned the American people about resisting Communist aggression, while his social programs, all designed without spending ceilings of any kind, continue to squeeze out other forms of government spending, and threaten to bankrupt the country.
Democrats do foreign policy for domestic political considerations. That’s why they spent the Cold War passing treaties that couldn’t be verified, but sounded good to the American public. (See also: the Iran Deal.)
A prime example of this is Harry Truman, who was content to sit on his hands while our allies in the war against Japan, the Chinese Nationalists, were overrun by the Communists, who mostly sat out the war.
But then he found that the Democrats were being blamed for the loss of China; so, in the spirit of locking the door after the horse has bolted, he belatedly went to war to keep tiny South Korea from following suit.
My favorite comment about this is, “You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to go through it again, and you couldn’t pay me a million dollars to erase it from my memory.”
Reportedly the amount of gear and ships, and so forth is just beyond imagination.
I’m with James on going back in time. I often stand somewhere (a street corner, or a country road, or in the woods) and wonder what I would see at that spot 300 years ago.
I think you would be disappointed. You wouldn’t be able to see anything because of all the crowds of time travelers.
There is not enough discussion about this. The lies and the recklessness are killing us.
We never should have done Medicare and Social Security without brutal built-in actuarial stabilizers.
Is there any refuting what I just said?
LBJ was a disaster.
In most places in the US, not much.
Something a lot of companies do badly is sell to their “internal market”.
Ricochet.com should make it easy and convenient to upgrade one’s membership.
N.B.: That’s “easy and convenient”, not just “possible”.
The last time I looked, the screen told me I would be canceling my current membership and opening a new one. Which thirty years experience in systems programming made me nervous about.
Supposedly trade and prosperity really only took off around 1840. Using coal for energy started at 1750. All of your ancestors before that probably lived brutal hand to mouth existences. I wonder what that was like. Even then all of my ancestors had to bail from Europe by around 1870 because it sucked so much.
There’s a fast food chain in some of the plains states that has a plaque in each restaurant that reads ‘On this spot in 17XX nothing happened’. I forget exactly which year they picked.
James Lileks and friends in a speakeasy at the end of the day, June 1, 1926. James is the first to recognize the flatfoots are raiding the joint. Suddenly he wishes he had gone to Buckingham Palace as originally planned to attend the christening of the Princess Elizabeth.
Stad, make that you, your wife–and me. My father was at Okinawa, on a Coast Guard Cutter that was being used as a minesweeper. He spoke very little about the War, but he was certain that he and his shipmates would have participated in the invasion of Japan that would have taken place if Truman hadn’t dropped the bombs. After seeing the resistance the Japanese put up on Okinawa, he felt certain any battle over the home islands would have represented a bloodbath. Truman, he always believed, saved tens of thousands of American lives, including his.
There’s a great book I read a few years ago, “The Fleet at Flood Tide” by James D Hornfischer.
It’s primarily about the battles of Saipan and Okinawa, but what it really is is a brief for why the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not just justified but necessary.
No, it’s Michael Chabon on Picard.
I too was dismayed. I can see where one might glean that from some issues mentioned in the first ep, but it’s so oblique it’s hardly analogous to specific modern politics – and besides, Trek has always skewed towards the sort of utopian progressivism of a post-scarcity society.
That wasn’t in the first ep, which dealt with whether androids are life forms. You know, like Data. At the time Picard is set, they’ve been banned.
Already been covered in Voyager, which had a magic mobile holoemitter, and they explored the issue of sentience and personality development over the course of 7 years.
Matter of opinion, but it did free up Trek from dragging around so much canon it couldn’t do anything new.
That was the “bafflingly bad” review I referenced, and it’s a steaming heap.
Estimates ran as high as a million casualties if the US had to invade the Japanese mainland.
One thing I read contrary to popular myth is Truman did not agonize over the decision to drop the bombs. He was more than willing to use the new weapon on a fierce enemy. The real question was whether or not to demonstrate the weapon first and give Japan a chance to surrender. With only two bombs left after the Trinity test, he chose to drop both with the implied threat more would quickly follow. It worked.
Have Kanye do the audio book. That will generate buzz.
There would be a good argument for demonstrating to the Japanese the horror of a nuclear bomb if they surrendered after Hiroshima. The generals told the Emperor that the Americans only had one bomb and that Hiroshima was an anomaly. It took Nagasaki to convince them to surrender and even then, Imperial Japan might have persisted if they had known that America was out of nukes.
My “etc” included androids. I don’t believe androids like Data are alive/sentient either. And the doubletalk mobile holo-emitter didn’t make The Doctor alive or sentient, just… portable.
What a great episode!
I have a fundraising idea. One of the best aspects of owning stock in the Green Bay Packers or Playboy Magazine are their stock certificates. I understand that of the prized possessions of many homes in Wisconsin are framed Green Bay Packers Certificates. They have never paid any cash dividends but the psychic dividend for owning their stock is the opportunity to have an NFL team in a city of only 105,000 people, with the third largest NFL stadium of over 80,000..
As for Playboy, the stock certificate has a naked woman on the stock certificate. Perhaps not something to frame in your office.
My suggestion is that you have a Class B Stock Offering where the owners of the Class B cannot vote, but pay $X to have their own stock certificate for Ricochet. Since your losses in the last year were only in the four figures, such a stock offering could lead to you making a profit this year.
One last question. You indicated that the Blue Yeti is the CEO of Ricochet. What is his email address?
Now that one was pretty obvious to me, because James’ complexion is so different from the others.
My Cod, Gary! We don’t don’t don’t want to see Peter and Rob nekkid on those stock certificates! 😜
I was thinking of a picture of the Greatest President of the Twentieth Century, Ronald Reagan, being on the stock certificate. Or just the “R>” symbol.
Whew! Okay, that’s not so bad.
Sometimes there are. But I guess the usually rather low numbers are a direct or indirect result of the small membership. I would have figured that 50-60,000 would be the MINIMUM, but to hear that it actually hovers around 5,000 was very surprising. To me that sounds more like Bulwark numbers. And I would expect – or maybe just hope – that I could count the paying Dispatch members just on both hands, without needing to use my toes too.
Perhaps the problem comes down to the name. “Ricochet” just doesn’t seem like much of a grabber. And for right or wrong, the name does make a difference.
Dilbert – The Name
Or we could have the greatest Presidents of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries together.
Capital idea.
I would not buy stock with Trump’s image on the stock certificate. But how about the picture of Speechwriter Peter Robinson with the Gipper? Are there any pictures of Rob with the Gipper?
Peter stated or seemed to imply that National Review did not normally make endorsements. He specifically mentioned their endorsement of Mitt Romney. The subject was their never Trump issue (published before the nomination). According to Wikipedia, these are the Republican nomination endorsements they have made (not to be confused with the general election endorsements):
Some comments. National Review was very critical of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950’s. Their endorsement surprises me. Their 1960 no endorsement of Richard Nixon (he overwhelmingly won the nomination, including the primaries) was interesting, but policy wise, there wasn’t much difference between him and Kennedy (though again the no endorsement was before nomination process was completed).
They declined to endorse 4 Republican presidential incumbents, Richard Nixon (1972), Gerald Ford (1976), George H.W. Bush (1992), and George W. Bush (2004). Their endorsement of Mitt Romney occurred when he lost the Republican nomination to John McCain, not the year he won the nomination and ran against Obama.
Note their 2016 endorsement of Ted Cruz. As a candidate, he positioned himself as Trump lite, as a more civilized version of him. So they still endorsed a populist candidate.
Great, leaves more for the rest of us!
Gary, I just love this idea. Will forward to His Serene Highness the Blue Yeti instanter.