Friday, January 5, 2018

Preparing people for nuclear war - CNN

wants to gently prepare people for (an unlikely) nuclear war

By AJ Willingham, CNN

Updated 1659 GMT (0059 HKT) January 5, 2018

















Trump to Kim Jong Un: My nuke button is bigger than yours 05:35
Story highlights
* The CDC is devoting one of its monthly meetings to nuclear preparedness
* Representatives say the topic was chosen long before recent US and North Korean escalations of nuclear rhetoric

(CNN)It is absolutely impossible to mention nuclear war without freaking people out, but the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is trying to gently prepare for the possibility.
The CDC is holding a session January 16 to discuss personal safety measures and the training of response teams "on a federal, state, and local level to prepare for nuclear detonation."
*

How to cope with fears of a nuclear disaster
The meeting, part of the agency's monthlyPublic Health Grand Rounds, will include presentations like "Preparing for the Unthinkable" and "Roadmap to Radiation Preparedness," and it will be held at the CDC's headquarters in Atlanta. "Grand rounds" are a type of meeting or symposium in which members of a public health community come together to discuss topics of interest or public importance.
This isn't the first time in recent months that official entities have informed the public about the consequences of a possible nuclear strike.
In August, amid escalating nuclear rhetoric from North Korea,  Guam's Homeland Security and Office of Civil Defense released a two-page fact sheet about what to do in the case of a nuclear event.

The fact sheets that officials in the territory of Guam gave residents in August.
And in December, Hawaii started monthly testing of a nuclear warning siren system -- the first such tests since the end of the Cold War.
The timing is sure to be uncomfortable for the more anxious among us, since just a few days ago, President Trump continued the nuclear staredown on Twitter.



Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!
11:49 AM - Jan 3, 2018
* 156,877 156,877 Replies
191,091 191,091 Retweets
486,504 486,504 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy
Plus, the CDC's online announcement of the meeting is accompanied by a very comforting photograph of a mushroom cloud.
However, the communications director for the Public Health Grand Rounds said the meeting is not out of the ordinary and is not related to recent tensions between the US and North Korea.
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"The bottom line is, (this is) not new," Susan K. Laird said. "The calendar is developed back in February or first part of March, and then the calendar is set up for the following season, which starts in December. This stuff is determined far in advance."
Kathryn Harben, chief of news medit the CDC, also sought to ease concerns.
"As part of its mission, CDC provides for the common defense of the country against all health threats," she said. "Planning for the Grand Rounds takes place regularly, and planning for this one began last April."
CNN's Sandee LaMotte contributed to this report.

The New Book about Trump - New York Times

NYT
MICHELLE GOLDBERG
Everyone in Trumpworld Knows He’s an Idiot
Image

President Trump is furious about a new book set for release Friday.
Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times



By Michelle Goldberg
Jan. 4, 2018
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One of the more alarming anecdotes in “Fire and Fury,” Michael Wolff’s incendiary new book about Donald Trump’s White House, involves the firing of James Comey, former director of the F.B.I. It’s not Trump’s motives that are scary; Wolff reports that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were “increasingly panicked” and “frenzied” about what Comey would find if he looked into the family finances, which is incriminating but unsurprising. The terrifying part is how, in Wolff’s telling, Trump sneaked around his aides, some of whom thought they’d contained him.
“For most of the day, almost no one would know that he had decided to take matters into his own hands,” Wolff writes. “In presidential annals, the firing of F.B.I. director James Comey may be the most consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his own.” Now imagine Trump taking the same approach toward ordering the bombing of North Korea.
Wolff’s scabrous book comes out on Friday — the publication date was moved up amid a media furor — but I was able to get an advance copy. It’s already a consequential work, having precipitated a furious rift between the president and his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who told Wolff that the meeting Donald Trump Jr. brokered with Russians in the hope of getting dirt on Hillary Clinton was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” On Thursday the president’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Wolff’s publisher, Henry Holt, demanding that it stop publication, claiming, among other things, defamation and invasion of privacy. This move would be fascistic if it weren’t so farcical. (While some have raised questions about Wolff’s methods, Axios reports that he has many hours of interviews recorded.)
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There are lots of arresting details in the book. We learn that the administration holds special animus for what it calls “D.O.J. women,” or women who work in the Justice Department. Wolff writes that after the white supremacist mayhem in Charlottesville, Va., Trump privately rationalized “why someone would be a member of the K.K.K.” The book recounts that after the political purge in Saudi Arabia, Trump boasted that he and Kushner engineered a coup: “We’ve put our man on top!”
But most of all, the book confirms what is already widely understood — not just that Trump is entirely unfit for the presidency, but that everyone around him knows it. One thread running through “Fire and Fury” is the way relatives, opportunists and officials try to manipulate and manage the president, and how they often fail. As Wolff wrote in a Hollywood Reporter essay based on the book, over the past year, the people around Trump, “all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.”
According to Wolff, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, the former chief of staff, called Trump an “idiot.” (So did the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, though he used an obscenity first.) Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, compares his boss’s intelligence to excrement. The national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, thinks he’s a “dope.” It has already been reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron,” which he has pointedly refused to deny.

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And yet these people continue to either prop up or defend this sick travesty of a presidency. Wolff takes a few stabs at the motives of Trump insiders. Ivanka Trump apparently nurtured the ghastly dream of following her father into the presidency. Others, Wolff writes, told themselves that they could help protect America from the president they serve: The “mess that might do serious damage to the nation, and, by association, to your own brand, might be transcended if you were seen as the person, by dint of competence and professional behavior, taking control of it.”
This is a delusion as wild, in its own way, as Trump’s claim that the “Access Hollywood” tape was faked. Some of the military men trying to steady American foreign policy amid Trump’s whims and tantrums might be doing something quietly decent, sacrificing their reputations for the greater good. But most members of Trump’s campaign and administration are simply traitors. They are willing, out of some complex mix of ambition, resentment, cynicism and rationalization, to endanger all of our lives — all of our children’s lives — by refusing to tell the country what they know about the senescent fool who boasts of the size of his “nuclear button” on Twitter.
Maybe, at the moment, people in the Trump orbit feel complacent because a year has passed without any epic disaster, unless you count an estimated 1,000 or so deaths in Puerto Rico, which they probably don’t. There’s an old joke, recently cited by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, that describes where we are right now: A guy falls from a 50-story building. As he flies by the 25th floor, someone asks how it’s going. “So far, so good!” he says.
Eventually, we’ll hit the ground, and assuming America survives, there should be a reckoning to dwarf the defenestration of Harvey Weinstein and his fellow ogres. Trump, Wolff’s reporting shows, has no executive function, no ability to process information or weigh consequences. Expecting him to act in the country’s interest is like demanding that your cat do the dishes. His enablers have no such excuse.

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