A toddler in a car
By Anne Applebaum
August 10 at 4:20 PM
Imagine a 3-year-old sitting in a parked car. Think of all the things she can do! Flip the switches. Turn on the lights. Turn on the windshield wipers. Turn on the radio. Everything, in fact — except make the car take her somewhere. For that she needs gas in the tank, legs long enough to reach the accelerator and above all to know how to drive.
Now think about how President Trump is running U.S. foreign policy. Think of all the things he can do! Make statements on Twitter. Issue fearsome threats from his golf resort. Serve chocolate cake to foreign leaders at Mar-a-Lago. Everything, in fact — except achieve tangible success. For that, he needs real tools: planning, processes, diplomats and allies. Without those, nothing happens ...
There aren’t any simple military solutions to the problem of North Korea. All unilateral, first-strike plans have unacceptably large risks. Pyongyang’s missiles, buried beneath mountains or loaded onto mobile launchers, are not easy to find; even if we could strike them, metropolitan Seoul, which contains about 25 million people, is well within range of a massive conventional reprisal. The city would be no less endangered by radioactive fallout, just in case someone was thinking of a surprise nuclear attack instead.
Deterrence — the same policy that worked against the Soviet Union for about 45 years — along with sanctions, diplomacy and a renewed human rights campaign directed at the North Koreans, remains the only realistic option. But a human rights campaign requires a State Department that believes in human rights, and under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, this one doesn’t. Diplomacy requires diplomats, and with no ambassador to South Korea and no assistant secretaries of state for arms control or Asian affairs, this State Department doesn’t have those, either ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trumps-toothless-threats-endanger-us-all/2017/08/10/86785d04-7de3-11e7-83c7-5bd5460f0d7e_story.html?utm_term=.d9a83f56e4f6
= new reply since forum marked as read
in the middle of a temper tantrum, and waaaaaayyyyy back when such things were possible, I yanked down the gear shift in my mom's car (she had gone inside already), managed to get it into neutral, and the car rolled backward down our slightly inclined driveway and into our neighbor's tree.
Toddlers may not to be able to *drive* the car, but that doesn't mean they can't do real damage all by themselves.
The person who was the most upset was my best friend's father, and owner of the tree I hit. I did some serious damage to that tree.
God knows, though, that I've done other stupid stuff in my life that my family has NEVER forgotten. 
