Who was more of a quack in that situation? Teller for dreaming up sci-fi bullshit powered by nukes, or Reagan for not even thinking to ask questions before buying into it?
I saw something interesting recently, some short propaganda films in the style of news broadcasts created by the CIA specifically for consumption by Reagan. Apparently the man was a half-wit who disliked reading and easily mesmerized by video; a typical TV-watching zombie.
He repeatedly gave multiple speeches where he confused reality with roles he played, or movies he saw. Most famously, he repeated told the story of a B-17 pilot that was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for staying with the plane to comfort a trapped ball turret gunner until it crashed.
This was climax of the film, “A Wing and a Prayer”.
I wonder whether the same problem would occur with enough focus on what any one of us says?
If we recorded your words over a period of a few years and then had thousands of people looking for errors in the transcripts, what errors would be found in your memory or thinking patterns?
It is certainly common enough to see some doozy mistakes from smart people within the comments on HN.
Well, he did have Alzheimer’s, a degenerative brain disease that affects memory. And we’re supposed to believe that he had no symptoms of until January 21, 1989.
As a person that had a grandmother and aunt that developed it, that’s… mighty suspicious.
>Trump avoids mention of his father’s Alzheimer’s disease as he lashes Biden for being ‘cognitively impaired’
>Donald Trump invited his extended family to Mar-a-Lago in the mid-1990s. As the clan gathered at the palatial Florida estate, though, his father was badly struggling, according to Mary L. Trump, Donald’s niece.
>Fred Trump Sr., the pugnacious developer then in his late 80s, didn’t recognize two of his children at the party, recalled Mary L. Trump, who attended the gathering. And when he did recognize Donald, the family patriarch approached his son with a picture of a Cadillac that he wanted to buy — as if he needed his son’s permission.
>The incident, Mary L. Trump said, left Donald Trump visibly upset at his father’s descent into dementia, which medical records show had been diagnosed several years earlier. Trump reflected his anguish in an interview around that time, with Playboy in 1997 reporting that seeing his father “addled with Alzheimer’s” had left him wondering “out loud about the senselessness of life.”
>“Turning 50 does make you think about mortality, or immortality, or whatever,” Trump, who had recently reached that milestone, told the magazine. “It does hit you.” [...]
>...Apparently the man was a half-wit who disliked reading and easily mesmerized by video; a typical TV-watching zombie.
Your source says:
>...While Reagan found the videos helpful and asked for more, the original idea for the televised briefings was the CIA’s. The president still received regular written and in-person briefings, Dujmovic writes.
JFK at least was reputed to be an extremely proficient reader. His reported speed reading is probably somewhat exaggerated but conservative estimates would have him reading the script of one of those CIA brief videos in a small fraction of the time it took for Reagan to watch them. Being good at reading obviously isn't a sufficient qualification to make somebody a good president, but I think it's a necessary prerequisite.
I saw something interesting recently, some short propaganda films in the style of news broadcasts created by the CIA specifically for consumption by Reagan. Apparently the man was a half-wit who disliked reading and easily mesmerized by video; a typical TV-watching zombie.
https://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/03/ronald-reagan-cia-...