Submitted by theotherbogart t3_yr2pva in todayilearned
First Bush kills JFK, then Reagan!
I thought it was the second Bush! Holy smokes I gotta get to Panama
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The Soviets actually had their entire naval command die in a plane crash around the same time. There were so many wild conspiracy theories even the CIA thought there was going to be a coup.
Nope turns out the admirals loaded up an airplane with too much furniture for their wives and mistresses.
Might have been the improperly stored giant rolls of paper that broke loose and shifted to the back on takeoff, but the loading of the plane was mostly goods the admirals were bringing back home from foreign trade
I was listening to startalk radio with guest Michael Shermer about conspiracy theories, and he made the great point that conspiracy theories only catch on when they are “successful”, and brought up how Reagan’s failed assassination attempt didn’t garner any, but you can be sure if he died they would run wild. >50% of people don’t think Oswald acted alone, but theories about Reagan’s attempt aren’t popular at all. Something about the proportionality of the event, and our refusal to accept that one person can do something to cause such drastic change.
Gravillo Princip was only a 19yo kid and his act of assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand caused WW1 to happen. One person can cause everything to change forever.
Ehhh….. that was a pretext. Everyone was already itching for a fight before then.
Damn it Zeus, you're getting slow.
How different would things be.
One can dream.
Very real chance you'd have gotten 9 years of Bush 1 instead of 4. Even as a democrat I'd take Reagan
Idk, Bush called Reagan's infamously bad fiscal policy "voodoo economics". I think I'd take Bush over Reagan. Bush was bad, but I still believe Reagan had the most damaging presidency in US history. I think without Reagan, you never get Trump.
Nixon.
Yeah Reagan was just Nixon in a more appealing package. Nixon went too hard and too fast, and people weren’t ready to just accept it yet. Reagan put a nicer face on it so it was accepted, the W made it more flagrant without pushback, and then Trump came along and just ripped the mask off completely and out-Nixoned Nixon, but this time, the asshole brigade had such a committed fanbase that none of it mattered.
Nixon expanded welfare, proposed Obamacare in 1971, and made incredible progress in protecting the environment. Reagan burnt it down.
For real people say Nixon was so bad but like by modern American government standards he was practically a liberal. If it wasn’t for the war on drugs and the watergate scandal he’d be one of the better presidents throughout history like the dude had his faults but everyone just hangs on to how the media paints him without knowing anything about his actual policies.
Let’s not forget that Nixon was a crook.
If Henry Kissinger wasn’t around and he didn’t launch the War On Drugs, I could tolerate Nixon crookedness.
I mean the Kissinger thing is huge. He escaped the Nazis….only to commit genocide himself. I mean the QAnon folks should be looking at him if anyone. I don’t see how that man isn’t a lich or something surviving on the blood of virgins he killed in war crimes.
Let me guess, you’re a Republican?
Look at my username.
I like baseball and communism. The 1970’s Cincinnati Reds were the “Big Red Machine”. Communists are also know as Reds. Hence BigCommieMachine.
Then why would you tolerate what Nixon did?
They are all crooks. Nixon just got caught.
>they are all crooks
What a validly stupid thing to say.
Pretty hard to argue against Jackson, who did his damnedest to undo Reconstruction
I guess that's fair. I would argue for Reagan, but that could be recency bias. It's hard for me to objectively judge a presidency from so long ago.
I don't think you can make the case for anyone worse than Reagan from WWII on though.
that was the start of killing us softly
Idk. I was young, but I still remember zombie Reygun more. It may have to do with seeing my city deviated by poverty and property loss.
Bush was just sort of there to murder people for oil.
They're talking about Daddy Bush, who didn't do that. He was President when the UN stopped Saddam from doing that.
Hell, he specifically decided not to push into Iraq to take advantage because it'd be an endless quagmire of guerilla warfare.
His faults were financial and economic, in regards to deregulation and NAFTA, not naked imperialism.
NAFTA was Clinton, tho. Otherwise, yes
Negotiations did begin under Bush, fwiw
Yes, it took five years of negotiating. Doubtless wasn't helped by the change of administration, but it was, at the end of day, basically trading one neoliberal for another.
Oh for fucks sake.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bush-orders-operation-desert-shield
I may have been young, but I’m not fucking stupid.
Yes, that's the point they made. That operation was to stop Saddam from killing people for money, it was actually a justified war on America's end.
Except, that is entirely subjective and I think I just stepped on someone nostalgia.
Motivating for even getting involved was motivation by “resource protection” not people protecting as he bombed civilians and civilian infrastructure intentionally. Especially when we are talking about: food processing, electrical facilities, water treatment plants.
Which obviously led to a break down of being able to care for the population properly; which in turn led to disease, instability and even more death. 158,000 dead. 13,000 immediate civilian deaths with 70,000 following due to disease, hunger and squalor.
That’s not “helping people”; it’s also not “stopping the bad guy” especially because said bad guy was in power until Baby Bush decided to use 9/11 to finish what Daddy Bush started.
A war in which we are still in.
And then! There is also his involvement in the Iran Contra affair which facilitated selling arms to Iran. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure that was intentional destabilization of the area in an attempt to justify starting a war seeing as Bush Sr covered it up, pardoned collaborators, and refused to cooperate with investigations.
There is also his deep ties to big oil.
Both wars were started with the aim of seizing control of oil fields; justification for starting either was never “naked imperialism”; the outcome, however, was.
Operation Iraqi Liberation
Just how many years of influence did that one Bush have? Most of Reagan's time in office, his own time in office, and his son's 2 terms?
If it's true that Bush was involved in JFK's assassination, can we add LBJ's time to the tally?
There is very little evidence that H.W. Bush had any major influence over the Reagan administration. Reagan had his own circle of insiders and military men that he leaned on.
Bush and Reagan didn't necessarily dislike each other, but their wives hated each other. Bush was likely selected by Reagan as a running mate due to his popularity with those who previously endorsed Ford in the 76 election and because Bush was so popular in the Republican primaries.
Bush actually openly disagreed with Reagonmics, but shut up about it and played "party politics" when he joined Reagan's ticket in 1980.
He was really the last WASP President. His son maybe started out that way, but 9/11 took everything in a very different direction and then after two failed bids for the White House, Trump came out of nowhere and remade the Republicans as a working-class populist party.
I would argue that Trump didn't come out of nowhere, but was more so a symptom of a perfect storm.
An angry white industrial working-class that was knocked down by Reagonmics, and finally killed off NAFTA, the tech industry, and globalization. The final bit was killed of by the 2008 Recession.
The other side of the equation were white supremacists that were aside themselves that black people lived in the Whitehouse for eight years. Add in the 9-11-era fear mongering (South Asians and non-christians are out to get us), spliced with the growing fear over population projections for the next fifty years (latins and asians are growing to challenge the WASP in population numbers).
I think these two things left the door wide open for someone like Trump who simply promised "it all" to scared and angry white voters.
I think it's a lot more complicated than that though. Trump massively gained with Hispanic voters and probably blacks and Asians too in the 2020 election, groups. So even though he may have heavily relied on non-Hispanic white voters in the Midwest, in his four years, he really started to rebuild the Republican Party as a working-class populist party.
The number of "white supremacists" in the US is vanishingly tiny, and the "progressive" left's attempt to associate Trump voters with this small group probably ended up doing more harm than good, tarring the entire Democratic Party, which previously had represented working class-whites as late as Obama's reelection in 2012, as being a party that despised the working class whites as "white supremacist". It also apparently didn't impress black, Asian, and Latino voters, who didn't appear to become more Democratic-leaning after Trump's election. Rather, it appears to have only been well-received among the Democrats growing "progressive", white collar base that's concentrated in a few, mostly coastal metropolitan areas. And that's likely why, if trends continue, Republicans are headed toward a supermajority in the Senate. That's probably one reason why McConnel has no interest in getting rid of the filibuster. Within the next decade, there's a good chance that Republicans will have enough Senators to pass legislation no matter what the opposition party thinks.
I've been in a microburst before and it is the most insane thing ever. Would no recommend for anyone else to experience.
I was picking up my kids from school when one hit a few years ago. Couldn't see 2 feet in front of my car. I had to pull over and wait for it to pass. Got home and our power was out for the first time in almost 15 years.
I was playing catch with the dog when I got pushed to the ground by one and looked up to see the trees tops in the back yard nearly touching the ground.
I wish Reagan would have experienced it.
That’s a pretty close call, and microbursts are still one of the perils of flying today, unfortunately. That being said, it’s still by far the safest form of travel.
Modern planes are well equipped to detect and avoid microbursts. Only a handful of crashes are attributed to microburst where pilot error wasn’t a contributing factor.
Actually was going to say that if there ever is a problem in the air, it’s likely pilot error is the cause, or at least involved. Just didn’t want to sound morbid
I get that too. It’s nice to know that, while tragic, pilot error can be learned from and corrected for the future IMO
If you get caught in a microburst there's literally nothing you can do
That’s why you don’t fly through thunderstorms, especially at low altitude.
Train.
Yes, airline pilots train extensively. That and modern equipment are two big reasons why commercial aviation are so safe.
I'm p sure he meant trains are the safest form of travel.
Then he's wrong.
The rate of Amtrak accidents per million train miles traveled grew from 41.1 in 2008 to nearly 58.8 by November 2017
Large commercial airplanes had 0.27 fatal accidents per million flights in 2020, or one fatal crash every 3.7 million flights -- up from 0.18 fatal accidents per million flights in 2019.
So even if each flight was a single mile, they'd still be far safer than trains. Adjusting to passenger miles, trains are death traps compared to commercial flights.
Note that Amtrak has substantially higher fatalities than elsewhere. European trains have 0.85 fatalities per billion KM (source). If my math is right, that's 1.37 per million freedom units.
So yes, still worse than airplanes, but Amtrak sucks. That's what happens when suffering from years of neglect and sharing rail with coal haulers.
IMO It should be noted that people falling/hopping in front or getting caught on a grade crossing by a train is massively dominating the fatality statistics.
Fatalities from derailments and train on train crashes are minuscle in comparison at least in Japan.
I knew flying was the safest form but seeing it in actual numbers in mind-boggling. 0.27 fatal accidents per MILLION flights. Damn.
Whilst you are right, even fatal train accidents generally lead to far fewer casualties than fatal plane crashes, because a 'fatal plane crash' quite often means everybody in the plane dies, whereas a 'fatal train crash' may merely be 1-2 wagons being crashed, multiple deaths occuring, but still having a majority of the passengers surviving the crash.
Besides that, your amount of Amtrak accidents per 1m train miles also includes non-fatal accidents, and even accidents without any injuries.
Besides that, planes are a lot faster, so whilst the fatality rate per 'unit of distance of your choice' are far lower for planes (0.05 (plane) VS 0.6 deaths per 1 billion kilometers, thus making trains seem 12x more deadly), your odds of dying per 'amount of time spent traveling' are almost equal, but slightly higher for planes (30.8 (plane) VS 30 (train) deaths per 1 billiion hours spent traveling by mode of transport)
So yeah, it depends on your perspective, but looking at time spent air travel would be more dangerous than travelling by train - counteracted by the fact that people generally spend way more time in their lives commuting by train, rather than by plane
People riding normal trains is lower, though.
If you go by deaths per passenger miles, I imagine cruise ships are crushing it too. 3000-5000 people per ship, and there are ~100 or so ships that size (conservatively, could be slightly higher), travelling say, 1500 nautical miles per week (again that's very conservative), 52 weeks a year. Puts you in the neighbourhood of 27-30 billion passenger miles per year (much more if you include the crew of said ships), with astonishingly few deaths. (We're talking deaths due to the fact that they travelled by ship, as opposed to people who roll up and have a heart attack or choke or something.) Big cruise ships don't sink, as a rule.*
*unless you're showing off and run one up on the rocks in Italy for example. And technically still didn't "sink."
There are three kind of accident statistics: per mile, per trip and per hours travelled. All meaningful in the right context. Airlines like to emphasize per mile statistics because it favours them. Comparing forms of travel using the other two methods shows different results.
>Airlines like to emphasize per mile statistics because it favours them.
And yet the stats I reported were per flight. The results of any comparison will show air travel to be safer than train travel, unless you are abusing methodologies.
I love trains, but yeah, wrong.
r/fuckcars and their ignorance is leaking…
Nah, trains rule and are way safer and more sustainable than cars. This person just seems misinformed.
Of course they are, but they are not safer than air travel, which is what the comment was about.
Also, being misinformed is a form of ignorance
Normal trains are marginally safer than planes, at least for those riding them and not including bystanders on the tracks etc being lumped into the death stats. But it's a pointless debate either way you want to nitpick it; both are similarly safe
A voice was heard from Heaven,. "Damn,missed again.'
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Trickle-down was tried in the US in the 1890s, but it had a better name: horse-and-sparrow economics. If you feed a horse enough grain, the sparrows will have more shit to eat.
The ironic thing about the debate is that there is a legitimate argument for low taxes that was proven by Andrew Mellon. He argued that high taxes encouraged tax fraud/abuse, and that lowering tax rates could increase overall tax revenue. The theory being that at lower rates, rich people have less incentive to engage in exotic accounting practices. He was proven correct when the US lowered taxes on the very rich and saw greater total tax receipts.
Unfortunately, neither the Republicans or Democrats will embrace this idea because it involves lowering tax rates on the rich AND the govt attempting to collect more taxes.
This theory is one reason that both Democrats and Republicans supported lowering the corporate tax rate from 30%. Trump didn't really understand or articulate the idea, but it was the underlying argument.
TIL nobody knows anything about Ronald Reagan.
The actor?!
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We should all know he implemented “trickle down economics”. Which was a big ass joke.
Edit: coined to implemented
Will Rogers actually coin the phrase trickle down economics.
It’s just not properly employed. It makes sense in the way that the strength of our economy should help everyone, but the people at the top abuse the system.
Trickle up economics makes much more sense. Healthy middle class boasts a healthy upper class. It creates competition, which is the basics of capitalism.
Oh? They can't be relied on to distribute their wealth? I wonder if anyone's had the idea of some sort of federal authority to collect a pre-established percentage from each of them to be pooled for use by the public.
Everybody scoffed at Herman Cain’s 10/10/10 idea, but it would work just fine.
Who?
Huh? The record on Mt Washington (231 mph) was recorded with an anemometer in 1934.
Microburst last for a few seconds and are inconsistent with surrounding wind speeds. They also go top to bottom rather than side to side like wind. That’s why they’re dangerous, they push planes down. I believe mt Washingtons was fastest sustained/recorded winds in the US. New record is Australia at 253mph. As a former pilot, they are scary as fuck. Thank god we have new warning systems. But they only buy you a minute or two of warning.
The fastest measured wind speed (using Doppler) was 302 mph on May 3rd, 1999 in Moore Oklahoma.
That was a tornado
That caused me pause too. Perhaps the article was referring to a stereotypical anemometer with spinning cups, versus Mt Wash’s hot wire anemometer.
Unsurprisingly, Reagan did not believe in karmic intervention
In the spirit of TIL, another fact for you: Air Force One is the name for whatever plane the president is on at that moment, it's not a specific plane. So, you don't have to say " with Reagan aboard", it's only called Air Force One when the president is on it.
I bet he spilled his jelly beans.
With this and Greg Abbot getting almost killed by lightning, you gotta wonder whose protecting these Republicans from acts of god.
Satan if we're using biblical terms.
For republicans I prefer the image of a vengeful god, thank you very much.
Kissinger with his rituals.
Six minutes and the world would’ve been saved
Shame.
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So close
Missed him by 🤏
Six minutes later and George H W Bush may have been a two term president
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A microburst at the air force academy airfield some years ago, tow planes and gliders getting tossed around:
I wonder what instrument they used to measure the windspeed of Hurricane Camille at 174mph in 1969?
(local legend says the anemometer at the Biloxi weather station measured 205mph until it succumbed to the windspeed and broke)
Damn, almost got the fucker.
Microbursts were pretty much an obscure phenomenon at that time, only known by certain scientists and meteorological experts. Only after a microburst took down a Delta L-1011 a couple of years later that microbursts were studied rigorously. Today all modern planes have a system that could predict an incoming microburst.
three dozen comments wishing death on a man and it’s completely ok, damn. never seen something like that on reddit besides with mass murders like Cruz or Hitler
But it's OK to wish death because he's on the other side of the aisle from them. Truly classy people
I mean, if you view someone as having caused mass suffering for generations due to failed policies that they popularized and lied about, I'd say wanting them dead really ain't that fuckin' crazy.
I want to live in the timeline where they were delayed landing.
Oh, wouldn’t that be nice? We could literally be spared this insanity of Republicans now. Imagine.
Unfortunate
aka divine fart
Six minutes later and we wouldn't be double-taxed on social security benefits.
Almost.
This was back when Dick Cheneys weather machine was in its beta testing phase. A rare miss.
Reagan was protected on high by the Devil himself.
God, was just a little too late. Damn
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That sounds about right.
God fucked up with the trick shot and instead got it by giving the bastard Dementia.
Maybe that would have prevented Trickle Down Economics?
Imagine how many people wouldn’t have been imprisoned for minor drug violations and how much better off so many families would have been…
>Imagine how many people wouldn’t have been imprisoned for minor drug violations and how much better off so many families would have been…
None.
The Anti Drug legislation wasn't created by Reagan, it wasn't submitted by Reagan, and it wasn't written by Reagan. It was designed and implemented by House Democrats and Republicans. All 3 major bills were submitted by Democrats. Jim Wright (D-TX) as the major author of the 1986 mandatory minimum laws and Jamie Whitten (D-MS) did the 1984 bill.
That storm was 6 minutes late from saving the US economy
Fuck, Hinckley misses AND a storm almost got him? Fuck, so close
It wasn’t wind it was an alien chasing them
God was trying to take the bastard out and spare us our TODAY. Dang.
Damn God was 6 minutes late!
Stupid microburst couldn't have been since minutes earlier
Nice try, God! Next time give it your A-game!
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Negative. My Washington
God really needs to start bringing his A-Game.
wish it killed him
PurpEL t1_ivs67t4 wrote
Imagine the shitshow that would have caused if crashed it. Conspiracies forever