Uriel238 [all pronouns]

The thing is, where Putin has oligarchs that would dump him in a hot second if he dropped a bomb, Trump is absolutely eager to blow shit up and doesn’t care / can’t process the consequences of dropping the first nuclear bomb in hostility^† and breaking the black ice.

In Trump’s first term no-one in the Department of Energy or the Department of Defense brass were MAGA loyalists, even though many considered themselves Republican, conservative and endorsed US military interventionism and adventurism. So when they were told (for instance) to nuke the snot out of North Korea to give them what for, Mattis was there to say no. None of the later secretaries of defense under Trump (Shanahan, Esper, Spencer, and Miller) would have authorized a nuclear strike either. And if one of them did, the generals under them were likely to resign than carry out such an order.

Enter Project 2025’s Schedule F plan, which is going to retire all the old brass US loyalists that are sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States (and mean it) and replace them with Trump loyalists, who, when asked to launch a nuclear strike against somewhere in the other side of the world will say Yes Sir! (or By Your Command ) or ( With Pleasure ) whatever the going evil-empire affirmative salute is.

So it is a likely possibility non-zero not-insignificant possibility President Donald J. Trump will order a nuclear strike during his second term, and it will be carried out by the department of defense. He still really wants to express his fire and fury and show the world his dick is absolutely the biggest.

I thought about this during Trump’s first term (and pondering the possibility of Hope, Montana getting nuked – three times! – at the end of Far Cry 5 ), imagining that unlike Greg Stillson in The Dead Zone bullying his principals to launch a first strike, Mattis would be there, steak-knife in hand to save the world from a rogue president. He actually did, just without the confrontation or the need of a steak-knife. But it means the Heritage Foundation is forewarned this time.

† Yes, technically two atomic bombs have been dropped in hostility, but after Castle Bravo / Bikini Atoll we quietly shifted from the atomic age to the nuclear age. It’s a significant difference. Hiroshima had about a 15KT yield (12-18KT estimated) while Bikini Atoll had a 15MT yield (that’s 1000x Hiroshima). US Peacekeeper missles carry ten MIRV 0.5MT warheads and bombs dropped from airplanes are 2.1MT. So yeah, we’ve had atomic war, but not nuclear war.

Because of course it did?

This was super-expected.

This was actually cultivated in the aughts. George W. Bush endorsed multiple secret units of Christian soldiers from the US Army and USMC to serve as Chosen do perform missions for God, which is why Spiritual Readiness was figured into the CSFF readiness assessment.

Spiritual readiness was about being a Christian Evangelical loyalist (that is the white Christian nationalist movement we’re facing today). Commanders were reassigned in the Obama era, and Spiritual Readiness was revised to become more inclusive (they’d still really rather you believe in some higher power), but the units of commandos for God are still around.

I dunno what happened during Trump or since, but since Flynn is still doing Flynn things, I assume they’re standing back and standing by.

I bet he’d have volunteers, and would feel better if he gave it an actual try.

But he appears too homophobic to kiss a pretty boy that loves him.

So inside Mr. O’Neill’s mind, he feels too femmy to be a Linux Catgirl, and while he hoped becoming a Navy SEAL and even shooting Osama Bin Laden for FBI and for the President of the United States would assure him of his manhood, he still feels his inner princess inside him growing like a kudzu and strangling out his masculinity.

And this is why he, again, a fucking Navy SEAL who has performed real operations for the United States, has to pick on civilians for who they voted for, even though defending that right IS HIS FUCKING JOB AND OATH.

O’Neill is an asshole and a bully, and I pity him for his gender dysmorphia, but there is help out there if he wants it.

The alternative to communism is drift towards monarchy.

This smacks of the hyperloop, a false product offered to suppress support of other competing products.

Id est, a high-capital entity using their power to suppress competiton for smaller (more sincere) interests.

Obvously Facebook- and Zuckerberg-mocking AI content must continue until morale improves.

The original thought experiment had to do with playing around with infinity, which is a whole field of mathematics with a lot of crossover. It raises questions like whether we can assume any fixed-length sequence of digits can be found somewhere in the mantissa of a given irrational number (say, π).

In a company as blue-chip as Disney, the discontinuation of access and privileges and security clearance are indicators of imminent repositioning, likely firing if you’ve engaged in mischief (such as voicing your opinion or comparing salaries).

It’s why you give sweet Christmas presents to the awkward guy in HR and invite him to all your socials. Blow him if he’s into it. He’s your intel source regarding who is in danger of discharge, and if the boss doesn’t like you.

This disgruntled guy had to be lower rank than the mailroom if HR wasn’t given notice, and his access was super low priority. No-one cared.

(Yes, I’m bitter.)

So the secret to this thought experiment is to understand that infinite is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is…

The lifespan of the universe from big bang to heat death (the longest scenario) is a blink of an eye to eternity. The breadth and size of the universe – not just what we can see, but how big it is with all the inflation bits, even as its expanding faster than the speed of light – just a mote in a sunbeam compared to infinity.

Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. And thus we don’t imagine just how vast and literally impossible infinity is.

With an infinite number of monkeys, not only will you get one that will write out a Hamlet script perfectly the first time, formatted exactly as you need it, but you’ll have an infinite number of them. Yes, the percentage of the total will be very small (though not infinitesimally so), and even if you do a partial search you’re going to get a lot of false hits. But 0.000001% of ∞ is still ∞. ∞ / [Graham’s Number] = ∞

It’s a lot of monkeys.

Now, because the monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare thought experiment isn’t super useful unless you’re dealing with angels and devils (they get to play with infinities. The real world is all normal numbers) the model has been paired down in Dawkin’s Weasel ( on Wikipedia ) and Weasel Programs which demonstrate how evolution (specifically biological evolution) isn’t random rather has random features, but natural selection is informed by, well, selection. Specifically survivability in a harsh environment. When slow rabbits fail to breed, the rabbits will mutate to be faster over generations.

Feds are wrong, or would be if copyright continued to serve its original purpose (according to the Constitution of the United States) to create a robust public domain.

All media should be accessible through public libraries, and arguments by federal courts presumes that the public does not have vested interest in content. It presumes the government isn’t there to serve the public, which raises questions as to why we have government in the first place.

The US Supreme Court has had an antagonistic relationship to the forth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States since before I was a kid in the 1970s since they often interfered with efforts to round up nonwhites. But after the 9/11 attacks and the PATRIOT ACT, SCOTUS has been shredding both amendments with carve-out exceptions.

Then Law Enforcement uses tech without revealing it in court, often lying ( parallel reconstruction ) to conceal questionable use, and the courts give them the benefit of the doubt.

Sadly, I don’t know enough about it to give you advice. Every time I switched phones or services, I had to twaddle with the settings until I could get features (commonly MMS, or SMS with media) so that they worked properly. If AT&T is actually blocking you out for refusing to use an AT&T phone, the trick would be to get the phone to pretend it’s an AT&T phone, then way Firefox can pretend it’s Chrome when it needs to.

But I don’t know the specifics.

If you get phones from the manufacturer they’re not labeled compatible with AT&T so much as that they have access to specific radio ranges and are controlled either by soft-stored codes or by a SIM card, and I’d buy the sim card from the service, and then stick it in my phone. The Sony I had for a while was compatible with both the T-Mobile and AT&T ranges, and I used a third party service that was an el-cheapo front for T-Mobile.

T-Mobile wanted me to pay extra for hot-spot use, but I got around that with software, which is like hacking the subscription seat warmers on your BMW.

Curiously, Apple phones will lock themselves (or did for a while… is it better now?) based on what service you initially connected them to, and you have to (had to, I hope) get their permission and pay fees to unlock it again.

The telecommunication companies are an oligopoly, so like a legal cartel, so they pull a lot of bullshit that we end users have to suffer. But it means I feel not a jot of guilt when I hack the hell out of it to extract services I didn’t pay for, since it’s all a grift anyway.

The logic is that if we should be able to detect orbital teapots but can’t find any that it may indicate time travel is not possible, or at least never readily available for MIT students to engage in practical jokes. Because they totally would.

Like Roko’s Baskilisk it relies on a lot of presumptions that we cannot immediately make. We still struggle to detect teapot-sized satellites in the inner solar system. Time travel may exist but may never be freely accessible. There may even have been a task force to intercept all the teapot-placement missions before they launched, or a good reason not to frivolously drop objects into the past such as teapots. We might even have evolved to where we just don’t consider trolling each other as appropriate behavior.

As with many of my hypotheses, it’s more of a thought experiment than an actual conjecture of the real world.

Locked phones are what led me into the rabbit hole of purchasing phones from manufacturer, since the carriers not only lock phones but hobble the OS.

It did mean understanding what was necessary for a phone to qualify for given carriers, but I can tech when I need to, and I tech for my friends when they need it.

In 2024, T Mobile and AT&T (and Verizon) have all demonstrated they do not engage in good faith commerce, and so right now they’re being sniveling little shits (quote me please) because the FCC and DoC are escaping regulatory capture.

That is to say, the end users are tired of their shit. Apple and Google, too.

It may be related to all the trolling we do to each other, such as deckpeckers, left-handed smoke shifters, snipe hunting and soft-punching contests.

It may not make reasonable sense at all, but humans are silly muppets.

It’s why I hypothesize that teapots in space (between the Earth and Mars, orbiting the sun) would be almost certain evidence that time travel to the past becomes possible and cheap, and if we ever attain the capacity to detect distant teapots and don’t find any, that may be evidence that time travel is not possible, or at least cannot be made cheap enough to be used for practical jokes.

As a society, for instance, we tend to think that telling kids that Santa Claus exists is unproblematic, because doing so protects certain values – such as children’s innocence and imagination.

Santa Clause may be a fun myth, especially if kids receive presents from Santa for Christmas. But it does not protect children’s innocence and imagination.

Though this raises a question if kids received mischief-enabling presents from Jesus (A Red Ryder BB Gun comes to mind) that might improve their take on their personal Jesus.

This tells me they are less interested in the well being of the students as they are in intercepting the trajedy and drama that become symptoms of students in dysfunctional circumstances.