<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div><span></span></div><div><span>On Thursday, June 29, 2017 2:48 PM spike <<a href="mailto:spike66@att.net">spike66@att.net</a>> wrote:</span><br><blockquote type="cite"><span>Presidents come and go, but the military stays long-term. If a</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>president demands a ship be retrofitted with a steam catapult,</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>you can be sure the military will do something, even if not</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>exactly what he had in mind, such as create an EM cat which</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>blows off steam during the launch. Meanwhile the bad guys</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>think the USNavy is investing its resources in retrofitting</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>carriers with 1950s-era steam catapults. Once that president</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>is gone, the admirals order the removal of the steam bottles</span><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><span>mounted underneath the deck, toss them overboard, life goes on.</span><br></blockquote><span></span><br><span>This actually fits into my earlier point about a radical critique of power* rather than focusing purely or mainly on who sits behind the desk. Much of government -- in other words, much of the abusive system of power -- steams on regardless of who's at the helm. Here, in my mind, people who merely want to put a different person behind the desk are not going to fundamentally change things. At best, we'll just see saw back and forth between bad and worse. And given the chance of a turnkey authoritarian state, that's a much bigger risk now. (Still, I'm optimistic. The Soviet empire really did fall. Our nightmares might be different today, but we can always decide to wake up.)</span><br><span></span><br><span>Regards,</span><br><span></span><br><span>Dan</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span><div style="line-height: normal;"><div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> Sample my Kindle books via:</span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><font color="#000000" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><a href="http://author.to/DanUst" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">http://author.to/DanUst</a></font></div></div></div><span></span><br><span>* Which is to say to abolish it as much as possible in society -- not to merely argue over who would marginally less appalling decisions as supreme leader.</span><br></div></body></html>