On 38 North, Aidan Foster-Carter ruminates on the strategic problems facing North and South Korean relations, with, I think, lessons for the United States:

A bad moment is a good time to return to first principles. [South Korean President] Moon’s administration, and all South Koreans, should indeed be thinking long-term. They also need to ponder what has gone wrong, and ask why, after almost half a century, North-South dialogue is still at first base. No Korean proverb has proved falser than Sijaki banida [“Starting is half the task”]. The first step is not half the journey—as shown by how many times Seoul and Pyongyang keep taking it and retaking it, over and over.

Thinking long-term is painful. It means jettisoning the collapsist illusions that used to seduce so many of us. At a robust age 71 or 75, depending on where you count from, the DPRK has not only outlived but outlasted its creator, the USSR. As much as one laments Korea’s division, this has become a fact of life. North Korea could be around for another 75 years—and Kim Jong Un may still be in charge half a century hence in 2069, that is, if he takes better care of his health.

Moon Jae-in, by contrast, is already a lame duck: one reason Kim has dumped him, though it only makes him more so. South Korea’s electoral calendar is remorseless. Moon still has three years left, and if Kim was strategic he would be nicer to the most simpatico ROK leader he is ever likely to face. But with grim economic figures (in part, due to perverse policies), and parliamentary elections due next year where the resurgent conservative opposition may well gain seats, Moon is no longer the commanding and popular figure he started out as.

Even if he were, and Kim were making nicer, three years hence his successor could well tear up Moon’s engagement approach. That’s what Lee Myung-bak did in 2008, simply ignoring the joint projects his predecessor Roh Moo-hyun (whom Moon served as chief of staff) had agreed with Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang months earlier. A lost decade followed, undoing the small start towards reconciliation made during the “Sunshine” era (1998-2007).

One of the problems afflicting the narcissist American President Trump is his desperate, even pathological desire, for fame and prestige, and the negation of North Korea, whether through conquest and persuasion, lures him into actions that may be designed to gain that for him, but instead fail because they are high-risk, and neither he nor most of his advisors understand the mind-set of a national leader who has no time limit on his powers.

But this is not a new situation for Americans. The Cold War, which was the sometimes violent conflict through proxies between the democracies of the West and the Soviet states of the East Bloc (which did not include China due to a rivalry between the two Communist states and a disputed border), began at the end of World War II, during the Truman Administration, and lasted to 1991, the Bush I Administration. If we decide that North Korea is unacceptable in its current form of bloody dictatorship, we need to come up with a strategy, probably of containment, which can be handed off to successive Administrations.

Sound familiar? We need to bring back the relay race which was used successfully before.

And we have to use Kim’s advantages against him. He brings continuity, which means moving away from barbaric practices will be very difficult for him. Exactly how to use that is not entirely clear, but then I’m not a specialist in bringing on the collapse of states. No doubt information projected into North Korea will be part of it.

But, as Aidan notes, thinking we’re going to destroy or convert North Korea at this juncture seems to be a fantasy.

And he’s Texas state Rep Jonathan Stickland. He’s attempting to bawl out epidemiologist Peter Hotez of Baylor, a developer of vaccines for neglected diseases, and looking like a guy who bought the “everything is private sector” bullshit from the libertarians, hook, line, and sinker:

Make the case for your sorcery to consumers on your own dime. Like every other business. Quit using the heavy hand of government to make your business profitable through mandates and immunity. It’s disgusting.

— Jonathan Stickland (@RepStickland) May 7, 2019

Not every man, woman, and child is an island; in fact, we’re closely interconnected via, of all things, our atmosphere, through which pathogens often travel, and that is not subject to the free market. If we desire public health, it’s not a matter of individual choice, with little or not impact on everyone else. It’s not like buying a hat. If you fail to buy this hat, then you may doom that new-born infant, or that neighbor who, for medical reasons, cannot take the vaccine, to an early and awful death.

As I noted earlier, this is symptomatic of a deeply flawed view of how societies should work. Not everything is subject to the whims of the free market, not if we’re to have a stable and prosperous society – and that’s the real point, isn’t it? The role of public health  – not just vaccines, but publicly available pathogen-free water, and other aspects of which I’m too sleepy to remember – in reaching the goal of a stable, happy, and prosperous society cannot be subject to the whims, paranoia, and flawed reasoning of the public, or it will fail in its role, and then we all pay for that failure, through death and misery. Or, if you really prefer financial measures, lower productivity.

I suspect that a truly effective return volley to Stickland’s view is contained in Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, or allied work. I must find the time to buy and read it someday.

But I do appreciate the use of the word sorcery. So rarely do you hear it in public discourse these days. Makes one long for the days of the Salem Witch Trials, doesn’t it?

Healthspan:

Yes, that’s right: longevity research is no longer about living longer. “The aim is to keep people healthier before they die,” says Linda Partridge, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Germany. “It is sometimes called compressing morbidity.”

To put it another way, it is about extending “healthspan”, the number of disease-free years towards the end of life. That means keeping life expectancy the same, which for children born in 2019 in developed countries is 85, but being healthy for 84 years rather than decrepit for the final 10. [“Anti-ageing drugs are coming that could keep you healthier for longer,” Graham Lawton, NewScientist (27 April 2019, paywall)]

The article felt like a tease. However, the concept is extremely important for developed nations, as otherwise the demographics would become quite burdensome for the young.

Marco Rubio on Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder:

Great statement by Marco Rubio. pic.twitter.com/F9CYk6P2ul

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) May 8, 2019

On current AG William Barr’s citation of contempt? Not so much.

The fight with Barr is a political stunt.

Real oversight was when House sought documents about #FastandFurious an Eric Holder program that allowed guns to reach drug cartels in Mexico.

Holder & Obama refused to give Congress information about it. https://t.co/3a5triWw36

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) May 9, 2019

Contempt is contempt, Senator, and AG Barr’s refusal to be questioned by those the House Committee feels are best equipped to get to the truth regarding what is potentially the most damaging scandal in the history of the United States is certainly worthy of it. AG Barr’s conduct after just a couple of months of service is terrifyingly bad.

I realize that the Republican Party and its leading members, such as yourself, are terrified of the unmasking of President Trump, because it will condemn the very culture of the Republican Party, its methods and attitudes, and all that has brought you to your prominent position, and it hurts to think that such a petty little man is the face of your Party – the petty little man who beat you and a bunch of pretenders to the 2016 Republican nomination.

But that’s one of the responsibilities of a Party leader, rooting out the pus and pestilence that inevitably comes with any human endeavour. This is your opportunity to be a leader. Don’t blow it.

I’ve been somewhat foggy on why the whole self-driving cars notion has bothered me. I knew it was beyond the technical challenges inherent in the concept, but after that I wasn’t sure. Then I came across an interview NewScientist (20 April 2019) did with novelist Ian McEwan, and just one Q&A cleared up my thinking:

Do you think we’re in trouble because we have become so reliant on these technologies?

With AI, we’re going to have that in spades. Already we’re having to think ethically about autonomous vehicles, and what kind of choices they’re going to make. Do they run over the granny, the dog, the child, or allow the “driver” just to kill themselves in a head-on crash?

We’re suddenly having to devolve these choices to someone else, to something else. The extent to which we devolve moral decisions to machines is going to be a very awkward and interesting ride. I’m sorry to be 70 and not see more of the story. The area where our interaction with machines enters the moral domain is going to be a field day for novelists.

See, we’re moral agents. I’ve never had formal training in this area, but, per usual, I’ll make some stuff up. Moral agency is about the knowledge that there’s right and wrong, and because we’re capable of understanding the concept of moral right and wrong, we’re responsible for offenses against the moral code we live under. Drinking and driving is a rather ironic example, as penalties for moral offenses carried out while drunk are often less than the same offenses without the “mitigating” factor of public intoxication. Indeed, it’s that intoxication’s effect on our reasoning capabilities which has led society to mistakenly “lift” the responsibility for moral offenses, recognizing that our ability to recognize moral questions is impaired by the alcohol. On the other hand, simply being drunk while driving is itself an offense, a recognition that a danger to members of society occurs when that drunk gets behind the wheel, so in that law there’s at least an attempt at balancing out the first mistake.

So let’s apply this to driving. As with most or all things humans do, driving is an activity in which we face moral decisions every time we undertake the activity. If we hadn’t driven to the store, been distracted by our phone, and hit that little old lady in the crosswalk, then we wouldn’t be guilty of her homicide, and we wouldn’t be full of regret.

But how about that self-driving car? We hop into it, tell it to take us to the store, and while we’re mucking about on our phone, it hits the little old lady and kills her. Again.

Do we feel guilty?

Some might argue ‘no,’ because we weren’t in control of the vehicle. It was the task, even the responsibility, of the entity driving the car.

But does that entity recognize the concept of moral right and wrong? Moral agency? No! At least, not yet.

The key is that without a moral agent actually controlling the car, the responsible party must then be that which motivated the original activity. You decided to go to the store, you decided to take a car rather than ride a bike, and your car hit the little old lady. You weren’t controlling it, but without some other entity to blame, you, rightfully, get it pinned on you.

Incidentally, the lack of a moral agent in actual control of the car is the meaningful separator between this example and, say, assignation of responsibility for an accident caused by a bus, or a military officer obeying an unlawful order from a superior.

So, if I’m going to take the blame for these accidents, I want to be the one in control. I am a competent, if not outstanding, driver, and I’m self-aware enough to know that I can’t daydream or talk on the phone while driving. Even talking to my wife while driving is sometimes a chancy business. And because there is no other moral agent involved in this scenario, I have to be the one driving, because then I can avoid hitting that little old lady with the annoying Pekingese and thus not feel guilt for the rest of my life. I must be the active agent.

Society may differ with me on this issue. Perhaps someday the safety levels and efficiencies allegedly achievable with self-driving cars will permit legislatures to mandate that self-driving cars actually be required to utilize that capability. I can see that happening. The devolvement of a moral question into a technical question is an interesting development, which I hope will get a thorough-going debate in public.

But that’s why I doubt I’ll let a self-driving car put me in danger.

And, thanks, Mr. McEwan. I’ve never read your novels, but that was a fab answer to a good question.

It may come as no surprise that there are a lot of characteristics of Joe Biden, now running for the Democratic Presidential nomination, that I like, and that many of them fall into the category of experience. After all, the one characteristic of every other Democratic candidate is they’ve never worked at a high level in the White House. True, some of candidates have executive experience at the city and/or state levels. However, in my view, this is only a taste of what the White House requires, and a very slight one.

Biden brings 8 years of experience as Vice-President, and a very busy Vice-President at that, a VP who became close friends with President Obama, and an integral member of the team. In short, he knows how the this branch of government works, and to me, that’s a valuable asset for Biden. I’ve not noticed any intolerable policy positions, and if he’s made some mistakes over the years, he seems to own up to them and correct them when he can. He’s apparently been an inveterate union champion, which on balance is a good thing.

My main objection is his age. I have to wonder about a guy who wants to be President in his late 70s. Vitiating this objection would be the selection of a VP candidate, of course, and so I shan’t belabor the point.

But if you want to know how he’ll match up with Trump, see Andrew Sullivan’s diary entry for this week. Sullivan goes against the received wisdom of the left side punditry and believes Biden may be the antidote to flush Trump right out of our system. He has details, and I found it enlightening.

And his strength is drawn from two contrasting bases: older, moderate whites, and African-Americans. Although his share is in the 30s overall, he has a whopping 50 percent share among nonwhite Democrats, according to the latest CNN poll. A Morning Consult poll found him with 43 percent of the black vote, including 47 percent support among African-American women. Biden’s deep association with Obama gives him a lift in the black vote no other white candidate can achieve. And so it turns out that the base of the Democrats has not been swept into the identity cult of the elite, wealthy, white left. As a brand-new CBS poll finds, Democrats may prefer a hypothetical female nominee over a male (59–41 percent), a black nominee over a white one (60–40 percent), and someone in their 40s to someone in their 70s. But that’s in the abstract. In reality, Biden seems to scramble these preferences.

He’s also been able to reach non-college-educated white men in ways few other candidates could. That’s a big fucking deal in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — and if Biden can carry those states, he’ll be the next president. He’s a union man, and always has been. In what was a brilliant ad-lib, Biden began a speech to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers by making a joke about the excesses of #MeToo — “I had permission to hug Lonnie,” the union leader, he quipped. Later, as he brought some kids onstage, he joked again, as he put his hands on the shoulders of a boy: “He gave me permission to touch him.” The crowd’s reaction both times was bellows of laughter.

Which is to say, as much as progressives would like to convert the country to their views in an instance instant, the truth of the matter is that these things can take time, and it appears Joe may understand that. It’ll be interesting to see if Biden fades down the stretch, or becomes the monster of the midway.

Enjoy!

Steve Benen expresses some anxiety concerning the possibility that President Trump is serious about getting a “do-over” just because he was being investigated by Special Counsel Mueller:

But at the heart of Trump’s tweets is something darker than just routine lies.

The amateur president with authoritarian instincts obviously hopes voters reward him with four more years in the White House, but Trump’s occasional talk about extra time in office is altogether scarier.

Indeed, the weekend’s tweets weren’t entirely unique. In March 2018, Trump praised China’s President Xi Jinping for extending his hold on power. “He’s now president for life,” the Republican said. “President for life… I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”

White House officials have said comments like these are intended to be funny. Perhaps. But Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University professor who studies authoritarian rulers, said something to the Washington Post that stood out for me: “Everything that he says is a trial balloon – even his, quote, jokes are trial balloons. But if you look at what he jokes about, it’s always things like this – it’s the extension of his rights, it’s the infringement of liberties. And authoritarians are continually testing the boundaries to see what they can get away with, and everything he does is a challenge to Democrats to mount some response against him.”

And if he tries to remain in the Oval Office? You take half a dozen Marines and tell them to clear the White House of Trump and his staff.

Sounds flippant? It isn’t, really. The Joint Chiefs of Staff – indeed, just about every serious military person – has expressed serious doubts concerning President Trump. If push comes to shove, I seriously doubt there’s more than a few loons in uniform who wouldn’t be just as happy upholding the loyalty oath they took to country and Constitution, and explicitly did NOT take to the President, and boot him out on his fanny.

Benen speculates that Trump would call for a march on Washington by his followers to preserve his position. The problem with this scenario is that such marches nearly always happen during times of economic desperation, and, according to both President Trump and independent evaluations, that just isn’t happening – we’re chugging along just fine, although of course that could change between now and the next election.

It would be a sudden and humiliating ending for a Trump Presidency marked by ineptitude, incompetence, and sheer bad behavior – as the latter is documented by the motivating force for this entire ridiculous suggestion, the Mueller Report. If you’ve heard Trump was “exonerated” by that Report, just remember your good sense: President Trump has been busy proclaiming same, would benefit if that were the same, and, hey, we all know better than to believe the party that would benefit if it were true. That’s why Andrew Napolitano’s evaluation of the Mueller Report is so important. as well as the former Federal prosecutors of various political stripes who believe the President is guilty of obstruction.

So if you do run across a hair-on-fire true Trump believer who wants to abrogate the Constitution because of the terrible, terrible imposition of the investigation, just suggest to him that you’ll consider it if, first, the Gorsuch seat on SCOTUS is returned to President Obama, who can make the selection, and have it honestly debated by the Senate.

Margaret Sullivan’s headline tells you the first half of what you need to know:

Mark Zuckerberg claims that, at Facebook, ‘the future is private.’ Don’t believe him.

She fills in the blank:

Last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used the company’s annual Silicon Valley confab to announce that “the future is private.”

In one of the most awkward moments I’ve ever seen captured on video, he smiled broadly as he tried to joke about the supposed change of direction.

“I know that we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly,” he said.

No, Zuck, you don’t. Facebook is facing more than a dozen international investigations into its history of privacy violations, Wired magazine has reported — “from its years of willy-nilly data sharing to several recent data breaches.”

But she doesn’t complete the thought. She should have suggested that someone ask Zuckerberg this simple question:

Mark, how will you make money off ‘the future is private?’

Because that’s all Facebook is about.

They sent a representative to negotiate the yearly fee.

That’s him, trotting away with the fee.

Don’t be alarmed by the latest headline from CNN:

Trump warns presidency is being stolen amid Mueller angst

After all, President Trump’s first half-term featured a Congress controlled by the Republican Party. He’s nominated and confirmed two SCOTUS justices in those two years, not to mention a horde of Federal judiciary nominees, some of quite dubious pedigree. He had a chance to trash the ACA, which he fatally mishandled, and managed to push through a tax reform bill that enriches the top 1% of Americans – which, if we’re to believe his remarks about himself, includes himself – while saddling the nation with an amazingly accelerating bout of debt, brought on by a fatal belief in the fallacious Laffer Curve.

And while the Mueller Report, despite Trump’s frenzied Tweets claiming complete exoneration, suggests otherwise and brings dishonor and distrust down upon an Administration which has already proven to be unusually lacking in ethical behavior, it’s had little effect on the potential efficiency of an Administration that could have accomplished a lot. So let’s just all laugh off that charlatan Franklin Graham’s suggestion that Trump get two more years. Not even GOP members of Congress would dare to rupture the Constitution in such a manner.

So what’s going on?

President Trump knows his base very well. He’s studied them, ingratiated himself with them, and thinks he knows which buttons to push, which experiences to claim he shares with them, in order to guarantee their votes, even as he indulges in trade wars which only endanger the interests of those very voters who helped put him in power in the first place.

The key here is victimization. Fox News and allied organizations have spent enormous amounts of time teaching their audience that they are victims, victims of crime, immigrants, Big Government, what have you. It’s the shared mythos, the soup they all drink. Why are times tough? Because someone’s out to get them.

And so now President Trump joins his base in being a victim. Never mind that any objective view of his situation refutes it absolutely. If he lacks in accomplishments, he can only blame his own ineptitude. If things go wrong, he can only blame his flawed ideology. If he’s honest. Given the evaluation of third party fact-checkers, he’s not.

He’s a victim. Because, well, he says he is.

Perhaps the worst of this, the most galling part of this, the abyss he’s desperately skirting, is that President Obama, whose party also controlled Congress for his first two years in office, managed to pass the ACA; and after losing control of Congress, he admitted he had made mistakes in campaigning, and then spent six years trying to work with an intransigent GOP majority with little, if any, complaints about being victimized.

That’s not to say he didn’t push his agenda in other ways. According to Constitutional experts, his unilateral action to care for the children of illegal immigrants, the DREAMERS, may have been an overstep of his Constitutional powers. It’s also true that, under his leadership, illegal immigrant counts plunged, at least to the extent that they can be measured. But it’s important, and fair, to remember that President Obama pushed the envelope of power, just as his predecessors have been observed to do, to produce results on his agenda. And Trump, much to the consternation of pundits on the left and right, has continued to do the same, but at a more accelerated rate, as I’ve occasionally discussed.

The real question is whether the American voter will tolerate Trump’s blatant incompetence, lies, etc etc, or if the GOP primary voter will deny him the nomination, replacing him with someone of more, shall we say, gravitas?

My Arts Editor directs my attention to the new Corvette:

Corvette’s supercharged small block V8 engine had always been positioned up in the front, giving the 66-year-old classic American sports car its signature “wedge shape.” Even as Corvette engineers tweaked the engine’s acceleration and horsepower, competitors that have offered mid-engine cars for years were setting new performance records and powering ahead of Chevrolet in sales.

“To be truly world class, you have to be mid-engine,” Jonny Lieberman, Motor Trend’s senior features editor, told ABC News. He broke the story in 2014 that a mid-engine Corvette was in production.

Motor Trend editors keep a database of sports car and supercar lap times they record at various race tracks around the world. Over the years, the only cars to beat the 755 horsepower ZR1, the fastest and most powerful Corvette ever built, were its mid-engine rivals. [ABC News]

Which is all more or less fascinating, except that this isn’t really so good for the climate, now is it? Granted, it’s a low production run, but it really seems to me General Motors has missed a bet on becoming a leading car manufacturer by doing something truly innovative with their car engine – making it climate friendly.

And we might have even bit on this idea. A much classier presentation than this new hulk of a car.

Disfluency:

Based on previous research, psycholinguist Hans Rutger Bosker and his team already knew that people sprinkle their speech with so-called disfluencies, the um’s, ah’s, uh’s and pauses that we often unwittingly slip into conversation. They also knew that these disfluencies usually cropped up before someone said a word that wasn’t in their everyday vernacular. [“There’s A Good Reason for Why We ‘Uh’ and ‘Um’ When We Talk,” Lacy Schley, D-brief]

From a NewScientist (26 April 2019, paywall) sidebar:

Bedrock of democracy

The impact of the planet’s geology is even visible in how people vote. Running through the staunchly Republican south-eastern US states, for example, is a distinct crescent of Democrat-voting counties (see graphic, below). This curve closely follows an exposed band of 75-million-year-old rocks laid down during the Cretaceous period. These have produced a very rich, fertile soil, which was found to be perfect for growing cotton. In the mid-1800s, cultivation of this crop led to a boom in slave labour. A high proportion of African-Americans still remain in these areas, where they favour the more liberal policies of the Democratic party, and continue to vote for its presidential candidates.

Fascinating stuff. I wonder if Professor Turchin has ever considered this sort of cultural influence during his demographics research. The geographic movements of a specific group of people, based their source of origin, might or might not perturb the cycles of prosperity/poverty in interesting ways that make them more predictable.

They say, Never miff Mother. Personally, that sounds a trifle obscene to me.

Shadow of Suspicion (1944) has a tension between its plot and its characters. The former is intriguing, while the latter are irritating. A man comes to Chicago, establishes an account and deposits a check at a local bank, to be drawn on a New York bank, giving his name as Adams. Then it’s off to the local branch of Cartell & Co, a diamond broker recently robbed of a magnificent necklace.

He is intent on a $1500 ring (roughly $21,000 today), but the manager of this branch of Cartell notes his local funds are not yet available, and denies the sale. Adams then announces his name is Northrup, and this was a a test. The home office is concerned as there’s another valuable necklace on its way to the branch. The manager, suspicions aroused, suspects a double-cross, and calls the home office to see if there’s really a Northrup there, as he’s never heard of him. But there is a Northrup at the home office.

A yarn-spinning, old dude who comes to the phone, and soon is offering to come to Chicago to help entrap Adams / Northrup, who seems to be up to no good.

The machinations continue, and soon it seems as if only the pretty young secretary, a continual distraction to Adams / Northrup, has nothing to hide. Well, except her irritation with this persistent young man of many names.

The plot, taken on its own, is a lot of fun, if perhaps a trifle superficial. But the characters themselves tend to be an annoyance, in some ways caricatures of who they probably should have been. The plot keeps moving along, and while sometimes I was grinding my teeth, I was just a little too intrigued to not finish watching this admirably short movie (just over an hour).

But perhaps I was just stubborn.

I haven’t been paying much attention to the Keystone XL debacle recently, as it hadn’t been on my radar, but now the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council has forced it back to the forefront:

The Oglala Sioux Tribal Council voted to ban Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R) from its Pine Ridge Reservation on Wednesday and sent her a sharply-worded letter on Thursday.

“If you do not honor this directive,” wrote the tribe’s president, Julian Bear Runner, “… we will have no choice but to banish you.” …

Bear Runner pledged that the ban would last until Noem rescinds her support for a pair of laws the state passed in response to promised demonstrations against the Keystone XL pipeline project. The laws, which codify “riot boosting,” are designed to prevent protests that may disrupt pipeline construction.

Critics say the legislation was designed to prevent the sort of large-scale, high-profile protests that unfolded over the Dakota Access pipeline in neighboring North Dakota, which began in 2016 and lasted for months. Demonstrations there led to more than 750 arrests, and the policing effort cost the state $38 million.

Noem announced the bills in the waning days of the year’s legislative session, and the state’s Republican majorities pushed them through the House and Senate in just 72 hours.

“My pipeline bills make clear that we will not let rioters control our economic development,” Noem said in a statement after she signed the bills into law in late March.

I don’t have much more to add, other than to note that it’s inappropriate for a governor of a state to be so blatantly on the side of “economic development,” especially that which could prove disastrous for the state – and then push the poorest members of the state (yeah, it may not be accurate to suggest tribe members are also South Dakotans, but you take my point) to take the biggest risk for the lowest payback. Frankly, her misunderstanding of the state’s role is both dishonorable and goes against the ideological principles most GOP members hold, which is that the state should get out of the way and let the free market do what it will.

Politico notes, in the wake of the Stephen Moore debacle’s termination, how poorly the Trump Administration has done in vetting candidates for important positions:

In total, Trump has withdrawn 62 nominees since taking office, according to data provided to POLITICO by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that tracks federal vacancies. At this point in his presidency, Barack Obama had withdrawn 30 nominees. The figures include only people who were formally nominated, so Moore and others who took themselves out of consideration before their official paperwork was sent to the Senate aren’t counted.

The context is weak, since numbers for Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II are not provided, nor how many such total positions needed to be filled for those Administrations, nor how many positions have not even had a nominee advanced, a Trump specialty. Still, stuff like this is eye-catching.

In the past three months alone, two high-profile candidates for top administration jobs have pulled themselves out of consideration, in addition to Moore. Trump announced last month that he would not nominate Herman Cain, a former pizza executive, to the Fed amid opposition from some Senate Republicans. And in February, Heather Nauert removed herself from consideration to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations after learning that she had employed a nanny without the correct work authorization.

Current and former administration officials insist that they’ve made strides in professionalizing the White House’s internal vetting operation. But they say the president himself sometimes undermines that process by making major staffing decisions on his own, with little consultation and with little notice.

It’s easy enough to laugh at the assertion in the last paragraph, but that may be a mistake. Let’s make a contrarian assumption that this is nothing to laugh at – and not because of the incompetence of an amateur President is showing through, as does Steve Benen.

Instead, we know that President Trump likes to work with “acting” Secretaries and the like, because he’s told us so. Putting forth nominees sure to be rejected is one way to slow down the process, leaving Trump in a position where he thinks he holds more power than he would otherwise. (One has to wonder how much less likely it is that an “acting Secretary” will tell him No than will a confirmed Secretary.)

But we can take this a step further and recall there’s a common assumption that doesn’t often come out in the open concerning, and that’s happens to be the belief that all these positions are necessary and must be filled. Out on the right-wing of the GOP, there is a philosophical disagreement with this ideas, as this conflicts with the ideological position of ‘small government.’

Watchdog groups also remain alarmed by the sheer number of positions for which Trump has neglected to nominate anybody. At the State Department, more than 30 senior positions are vacant. There are more than a dozen senior-level vacancies at the Justice and Defense departments.

Of course, an argument could be made that there really shouldn’t be 30 senior positions at State, because, by golly, the world’s not that big. I can hear Trump professing such sentiments. However, given our position in the world, and the many philosophical positions we take in order to push a better civilization on the rest of the world, State is probably severely understaffed.

So when Trump fails to nominate anyone for a position, or advances ludicrous choices for nominee, he, or more likely his puppet-masters, may be making a strategic choice that advantages their position on the global chessboard. It may not be Trump being an impulsive man-child.

Protean:

(Adjective)

1. : of or resembling Proteus in having a varied nature or ability to assume different forms
2. : displaying great diversity or variety : VERSATILE [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Robert Mueller’s Take Care Clause,” Quinta Jurecic, Lawfare:

The Take Care Clause plays a central role in Mueller’s constitutional argument. Jack Goldsmith and John Manning have studied the “protean” nature of the clause and the many contradictory interpretations that courts have adopted; here, Mueller’s analysis has some resemblance to the understanding set out by Andrew Kent, Ethan Leib and Jed Shugerman, who argue that the Take Care Clause imposes a “duty of fidelity” on the president. Mueller does adhere to well-established readings of the clause as empowering the president to exercise prosecutorial discretion and to remove officers. But he also reads it as constraining presidential action, writing that “the concept of ‘faithful execution’ connotes the use of power in the interest of the public, not in the office-holder’s personal interests.” The duty to “take care” can also be, as Kent, Leib and Shugerman write, a limitation on discretion.

Kevin Drum worries about the very recent action by Facebook removing Louis Farrakhan, InfoWars‘ Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and others from their platform:

Do we want a few faceless committees at Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram deciding on these things? If Facebook had been around in the 60s, would Huey Newton have been banned? David Duke in the 80s? Pat Buchanan in the 90s? Ayaan Hirsi Ali today? Should they? Once you start banning people, you’re inviting public pressure to ban even more people, and profit-seeking companies are pretty sensitive to public pressure.

We’ll see how this plays out, but I’m not sure that banning high-profile nutballs is the right way to go here. It invites endless trouble and it’s really not the biggest problem that social media has anyway. It’s the armies of flamers and trolls that really need to be brought under control.

In any case where speech is curtailed, the question to answer is: Who decides? This doesn’t mean that speech is never curtailed. We already do in some ways. But you should always ask: Who decides?

Let’s ask newspaper editors for the last couple of centuries. Previous to the Web, if you wanted mass communications, you had to go through newspaper editors, TV owners, or magazine editors. The First Amendment doesn’t guarantee your views will be made available, only that the government cannot, with some exceptions, repress your personal expression of them. So those who had taken the time to build mass communications exercised the gatekeeper function, and because they had to satisfy their audiences, who generally had conventional, orthodox tastes by definition, the bulgy-eyed set was shut out.

That said, let’s talk about the difficulties of yesterday vs today for your typical bulgy-eyed maniac. Since the invention of the printing press, the guy with an irrepressible urge to spit out alarming opinions has always had the option to buy or build a printing press analog. Fifty years ago, it was the mimeograph, and I recall receiving the mimeographed, or something similar, Richard Geis newsletter on a quarterly basis, until Geis’ health gave out, and that was followed (to fulfill the subscription requirements) by a subscription to something called The Utilitarian, or somesuch, a libertarian rag of dubious intellectual worth.

Today? Hey, all those banned from FB have web sites, they can advertise on friendly sites, people know how to get to them, and quite frankly, while FB and its ilk are a bit of a new beast on the scene^[1], it’s not as if these folks are being shut up, not in the least. The value of social media sites is not in the advertising, it’s in the person-to-person communications. Perhaps we’ll soon see an FB analog in the Conservapedia.

Nothing to see here, move along.

¹ Think of a camel with a fifth leg.

Many letters of this sort have been written over the last couple of years, mostly by disaffected Republicans, but Patti Davis, daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, brings a little more firepower to the pen in this Op-Ed for WaPo:

You [Republicans] have claimed [President Reagan’s] legacy, exalted him as an icon of conservatism and used the quotes of his that serve your purpose at any given moment. Yet at this moment in America’s history when the democracy to which my father pledged himself and the Constitution that he swore to uphold, and did faithfully uphold, are being degraded and chipped away at by a sneering, irreverent man who traffics in bullying and dishonesty, you stay silent.

You stay silent when President Trump speaks of immigrants as if they are trash, rips children from the arms of their parents and puts them in cages. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that my father said America was home “for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness.”

You stayed silent when this president fawned over Kim Jong Un and took Vladimir Putin’s word over America’s security experts. You stood mutely by when one of his spokesmen, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said there is nothing wrong with getting information from Russians. And now you do not act when Trump openly defies legitimate requests from Congress, showing his utter contempt for one of the branches of our government.

It’s worth remembering that, at one time, Reagan, a former Democrat turned Republican, claimed that the Democrats left him, he had not left the Democrats. I think these days, if he were still around and cogent, he’d be an Independent, railing against the moral cowardice of the current crop of GOP members of Congress.

But do you know what I’d really like to see? A reporter hand a copy of Davis’ letter to Senator Graham (R-SC) and ask him for his thoughts, and when Graham responded with the scorn and spittle he’s recently developed since coming in contact with President Trump, ask him why he’s not weeping in shame at his moral depravity.

Yeah, that’s posturing – but it would also be a way to show Senator Graham the road to redemption.

Former Special Counsel Mueller is angry at Attorney Toady General Barr:

New questions hang over the integrity and motives of William Barr after it emerged Tuesday night that Robert Mueller expressed concerns about the attorney general’s initial letter to Congress summarizing his special counsel report.

The bombshell revelations detonated hours before Barr was due to testify Wednesday on Capitol Hill, an appearance that was already likely to be a political cauldron with suspicion intense among Democrats over his framing and interpretation of the Mueller investigation.

In a letter to Barr last month, Mueller expressed concerns that the attorney general’s four page letter to Congress summarizing his principal conclusions did not fully capture their context. He believed his report was more nuanced on the issue of whether President Donald Trump had obstructed justice and he wanted more of his findings to be released, officials told CNN.

Mueller did not believe the summary was inaccurate but was frustrated with media coverage based on Barr’s letter, officials said. The Washington Post first reported on the letter. [CNN]

And you have to love this:

Phil Mudd, a former FBI agent who once worked with Mueller at the bureau and is now a CNN commentator, said Tuesday on “Cuomo Prime Time” that it was “stunning” that someone as dutiful and restrained as his former boss had written to Barr to question his summary of the special counsel’s principal findings.

“This is a baseball bat wake-up call. … You cannot underestimate what he is saying,” Mudd said.

This has the flavor of an event that’ll pop up in history and political textbooks as an important event on the timeline of the Trump Presidency.

It’ll also be used to illustrate the importance of an Attorney General who is independent of the President, and a President who has at least a clue as to how to run the circus. Indeed, it may provide fodder for debates during the upcoming campaign.

I wonder if there’s ever been a movement to make the Attorney General an elective position.

Watching the Republicans stutter over this should be entertaining.

Clickjack:

Clickjacking (classified as a User Interface redress attack, UI redress attack, UI redressing) is a malicious technique of tricking a user into clicking on something different from what the user perceives, thus potentially revealing confidential information or allowing others to take control of their computer while clicking on seemingly innocuous objects, including web pages.^[1][2][3][4]

In web browsers, clickjacking is a browser security issue that is a vulnerability across a variety of browsers and platforms. Clickjacking can also take place outside of web browsers, including applications.^[5]

A clickjack takes the form of embedded code or a script that can execute without the user’s knowledge, such as clicking on a buttonthat appears to perform another function.^[6]

Clickjacking is an instance of the confused deputy problem, wherein a computer is innocently fooled into misusing its authority. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “How hackers use tricks to make money from your clicks,” Donna Lu, NewScientist (20 April 2019, paywall):

So certain websites contain tricks to get people to click. For example, an apparent link to a news story may actually take users to an advertising site earning the owner ad money, invisible objects that cover parts of a page could register as ad clicks when clicked, and hyperlinks that open an ad first before redirecting to the intended website also result in stolen clicks without the clicker realising.

The team scoured the internet’s top 250,000 most popular websites and found 613 sites with so-called clickjacking code. Though this totalled less than 1 per cent of the websites they looked at, it amounted to a total daily traffic of 43 million visits. On these pages, more than 3000 hyperlinks had been secretly inserted.

Just a random thought: Is this going to be like cancer? The Web so thoroughly ruined by the unprincipled that, one day, the whole thing just collapses as people stop using it?