Literary Corner: Enough to Make a Cat Laugh

Via The Niall Boylan Show, late night Irish talk radio.

But Not Me

by Donald J. Trump

North Korea
fired off some
small weapons, which
disturbed some of my people,
and others, but not me.

I have confidence
that Chairman Kim
will keep his promise to me,

& also smiled when he called
Swampman Joe Bidan a low
IQ individual, & worse.

Perhaps that’s sending
me a signal?

No, I think the missile tests were the signal to you. He's reminding you how much fun you could have breaking UNSC resolutions together. BTW what did he promise you? A resort property on Sea of Japan coast? You got robbed, summer's only two months long and it rains constantly.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 26, 2019

Literary Corner: New Republican Poetry

"We are already able to reach the notorious hamburgers of San Diego!" Via  Anita Pitsch, Australian National University Press.

Formal elegance meets wry surrealism in some of the new entries, like this Ionesco-like fantasy by Dr. Gorka, from the CPAC conference:

Joe Stalin's Dream

by Dr. Sebastian Gorka

They want
to take your pickup truck,
they want
to rebuild your home,
they want
to take away your hamburgers.

This is what Stalin dreamt
about but never achieved.

Strictly speaking, I don't believe Comrade Stalin had any interest in rebuilding my home at all. I think he would have relished the uncontrollable overheating, the poor ventilation in spite of gaps exploited by wind and rodent, the ceiling fan in which only one of the four light bulb sockets actually works because of some crazy fault in the wiring. He would have seen it as irrefragable evidence of the collapse of the decadent West, as the contradictions of capitalism become too gross to ignore. I don't have a pickup truck, but I doubt he'd be interested in the occasional hamburger I consume, beyond asserting (no doubt falsely) that Soviet hamburgers are much, much better. Just saying.

And for another point of view on the Singapore Summit

Hot take on the summit from blog SingaporeUncensored:

1. The US can’t pay because a nuclear yet cash-poor North Korea sees it as insulting: https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/776055ce-9745-439e-9ee4-c0…

2. The US hinted to Singapore to pay, source: Singapore defense minister quoted in WaPo link above. This is key because it means US “owes” us a favor even if it’s just a small logistical detail.

3. Safeguarding Singapore’s FTA (Free Trade Agreement) partner status with an infamously anti-free-trade Trump: priceless. Trump just left all his G7 “allies” in Canada threatening a trade war. Last thing Singapore should do is stay on the sidelines and wait for Trump to call us out for “unfair” trade deals. Singapore has to step up and be counted. Paying $20M helps? Imagine how many more jobs or companies may suffer if trade margins get jeopardized.

Source: https://ustr.gov/countries…/southeast-asia-pacific/singapore

Trump dumped Singapore and Malaysia under the bus when he abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership just when they thought they were getting a chance to become less cornered by Chinese expansion and forced into it, and the Singapore government, slavish and colonized as ever, is hoping to placate crazy Trump with friendly gestures. Business losses, I'm hearing, went well beyond the government's outlay as security closed down the whole of the downtown area from the Shangri-La Hotel where Trump was staying to the artificial island of Sentosa where Kim stayed and the summit was held.

Online Singapore, which is getting tougher and tougher, is not impressed. Things are happening in Southeast Asia, I haven't written anything about the astonishing events in Malaysia yet, and elsewhere.

The avant-garde art of the deal

Nothing Trump builds in North Korea is going to top this ship-hotel above the beach of Jeongdongjin on the Pacific coast in northeastern South Korea. Via Rough Guides.

Hi, it's Stupid to say Trump failed to wring any concessions out of North Korea. I mean it's true they only agreed that they would "work toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula" meaning, as you know, North and South and all the US troops and their nuclear-capable vessels and missiles and B-1 bombers, as opposed to the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of the North Korean nuclear weapons program, on which the US has long insisted as a sine qua non, and with no timetables, verification methods, or fucking any reason to think they will actually do it, in return for diplomatic recognition and on top of the photo op that we understand is what Kim Jong-un was really longing for and, in a gratuitous deal sweetener Trump apparently threw in orally after the document was signed, a cessation of the defensive joint exercises with the South Korean military that the US has conducted regularly since the cease-fire (like a guy closing the sale on his apartment who shakes hands with everyone after everything's signed and stamped and then says to the new owner, "Hey, why don't you take my girlfriend too?").

Plus China's already throwing the idea of sanctions relief out there, as a participation trophy:

The Buffalo Who Cried Wolf

A friendly picture. German Federal Government/Jesco Denzel via Associated Press. Not clear what Trump meant by saying it was "put out by us."

David Brooks, "Donald Trump Is Not Playing By Your Rules", praises Trump's approach to international politics:

The core issue in our politics is over how we establish relationship. You can either organize relationship at a high level — based on friendship, shared values, loyalty and affection — or you can organize relationship at a low level, based on mutual selfish interest and a brutal, ends-justify-the-means mentality.

Unlike beastly Nixon and Kissinger, who visited a monstrously murderous, nuclear-armed Asian dictator in a crassly selfish bazaar-haggling spirit, an army of experts at their sides facing off suspiciously over every detail, Trump is open, fresh, ready for anything, "We'll see what happens," and above all trusting, as he told Stephanopoulos:

Starting From a Very High Plane

Well, you know, over my lifetime
I've done a lot of deals
with a lot of people, and sometimes
the people that you most distrust
turn out to be the most honorable ones,
and the people that you do trust
they are not the honorable ones,
so we are starting from a very high plane,
we’re starting from a very good relationship.
This has been a very big day in terms of the world.
I think it’s been, maybe I --
a lot of people have been saying it’s historic.

Haha, just kidding. Brooks thinks Nixon and Kissinger are among the good guys of the happy past, who organized relationship on a high level in creating the postwar order:

Give Peace a Chance

Via.

It was tons of fun mocking New York Times's Mark Landler for his silly piece announcing that Emperor Trump has "thought long" about the North Korea issue and "been preparing for it all his adult life" by going to military school and retailing mythical tales about General MacArthur, but in today's reality-based reporting from Singapore, the very same Mark Landler does some really good service detailing the progression in which Trump is surrendering to Kim Jong-un in the hope of getting to a place where he can declare victory:

The statement is likely to have three sections — dealing with denuclearization, security guarantees for the North and steps to be taken by both sides — according to a person briefed on the talks. But it was not clear that the Americans would succeed in extracting a more detailed commitment to disarming than North Korea has already offered.

If anything, the White House moved closer to Pyongyang’s language, saying it sought complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization “on the Korean Peninsula” — a clause that North Korea interprets as potentially requiring the United States to scale back troop deployments there or to shrink its nuclear umbrella over two East Asian allies, South Korea and Japan.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted the administration’s policy had not changed. But he confirmed that the United States would offer security assurances that were different from what Washington had offered North Korea in negotiations under Presidents George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. He declined to outline them.

Couldn't stop listening to this

So I thought I'd post it.

Fox & Friends accidentally said this about the Singapore summit: "regardless of what happens in that meeting between the two dictators."

This gaffe is probably the most honest thing ever said in the program's history. pic.twitter.com/eooBanu9b2

— Adam Best (@adamcbest) June 10, 2018

It takes a thief

Green-headed tree agama, via San Diego Zoo.

David F. Brooks finally starting to give in to his inner sycophant, as he contemplates Donald Trump's and Michael Cohen's histories with organized crime. Maybe it's a feature-not-a bug! At least from the foreign policy perspective ("Donald Trump's Lizard Wisdom"):

I can’t help but wonder if that kind of background has provided a decent education for dealing with the sort of hopped-up mobsters running parts of the world today. There is growing reason to believe that Donald Trump understands the thug mind a whole lot better than the people who attended our prestigious Foreign Service academies.

"Hopped-up" (1920s slang for "maniacal in a drug-induced kind of way") makes it art.

The Brooks hypothesis is that just as it takes a thief to catch a thief, so it takes somebody who's practiced on Fat Tony Salerno to equip a chap to deal with Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Trumpian triumphs of recent weeks demonstrate that. Not that Brooks is advocating the Trump doctrine!

Please don’t take this as an endorsement of the Trump foreign policy. I’d feel a lot better if Trump showed some awareness of the complexity of the systems he’s disrupting, and the possibly cataclysmic unintended consequences. But there is some lizard wisdom here.

It's just the Douthat electric slide: "I'm not saying, I'm just saying."

I think there may be a couple of flaws in this argument, one being that none of these eggs are actually chickens at present, as in the North Korea case:

Guess who just found out the Korean War isn't over yet?

In the Demilitarized Zone,via CNN; can't find a name for the bird.

Yesterday's story in The Times:

But analysts said South Korea was aiming for a comprehensive deal, in which the North agreed to give up its weapons in return for a security guarantee, including a peace treaty. Mr. Trump’s comments suggested he backed that effort.

“They do have my blessing to discuss the end of the war,” he said. “People don’t realize that the Korean War has not ended. It’s going on right now. And they are discussing an end to war. Subject to a deal, they have my blessing.”

You know what he means when he says, "People don't realize". That's what he always says when he's gobsmacked by some revelation, like Lincoln having been a Republican

I'm not going to lie, I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself for prognostications since at least January as to what was going on from the "my button is bigger than your button" tweet through the Winter Olympics, which is that the South Korean government has realized that Trump's ignorance and mercuriality mean it can take over the 64-year-old peace process from the AWOL United States. Which may not be the way it looks to you, with these crazy events in which somebody with no more official status than Dennis Rodman, in between jobs as Director of Central Intelligence and Secretary of State (if he can get confirmed by the Senate, which has been looking very iffy), travels to negotiate with the Cute Leader or whatever they're calling him to arrange a meeting for him with Emperor Bigbutton. You may think that the US is not merely actively engaged but hyperactively engaged.

But that's my point, really: hyperactivity isn't coherently directed at anything. Trump doesn't know whether he wants a war or wants peace, or care, as long as he's acclaimed the winner of whatever it turns out to be. He's not in charge, and President Moon Jae-in is.

The news today that DPRK and ROK truly are talking about a peace treaty is just astonishing, though, and I'm not even sure what to think. The upshot may not turn out exactly the way Pompeo expects, but it sounds like progress from here for the moment.

In which I pitch Seth Rogen

Think The Great Impersonation meets Gung Ho. 

As I watched the trailers for The Interview, repeatedly—like a lot of us I'm not likely to be watching TV unless it's at 11:00 to midnight Monday through Thursday and they were advertising it constantly, in connection, I fear, with the interviews of the stars by Stewart and Colbert which I assume are the quid for the quo—I was really bothered by a lot of things about the movie, though concern with the possibility that it might hurt the feelings of First Secretary Kim Jong-un of the Workers' Party of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was not among them.

The week in the Persian Wars

Persian War, the hurdler, by Persian Gulf out of the Chanteur II mare, Warning, born 1964. The story of his brave and arduous life and more pictures are at TVG Community.

So, where were we? On the 21st, Netanyahu and Barak said General Dempsey was "serving Iranian interests" by having the chutzpah to disagree with them. On the 22nd, the IAEA announced that the current round of talks with Iran over weapons inspection had failed after their team was barred from inspecting the military plant at Parchin, where Iranians are suspected of working on trigger explosives for the nuclear weapon. On the 24th, US intelligence repeated what it has been saying since 2007, that there is as yet no evidence that Iran has decided to build one.

There's lots more, but I am more and more of the opinion that what is mainly happening is elections—Iran's first of all (this week!), Israel's likely next, (they don't have to come till 2013, but Netanyahu knows his chances of winning are more likely to get worse than [jump]

A brief sidetrack into speculative Kim Jong-il

Little Jurka (Jurij Irsenovič Kim) with his lovely Soviet parents, Il-sung and Jong-suk. His Shirley Temple smile presaged a movie career. The picture is not dated; I can't believe how beautiful they are, it doesn't seem right. In the shot below they look more North Korean and not so pretty; note Jong-il's remarkable ears:

Photos pillaged from yesterday's Daily Mail.