Downward spiral roundup

I'm having a bracing cocktail to kick off my Friday evening, and not a minute too soon.

I have a major case of disconnect to process.

I had a great day on a personal level.  Just about ideal, actually. Sat here at my desk working on a truly enjoyable article for a local lifestyle magazine. I kept my Uber app on and occasionally got a ride request, upon getting which I'd close up my file and head out. No real interruptions to speak of. A satisfying day of work, an activity essential to human fulfillment.

But, jeez, was there ever a grim backdrop to it.

There is, of course, the Munich McDonald's / Olympia mall mass shooting. Conflicting reports re: whether it was jihad, but this Daily Mail report says witnesses say that's what it was.

And in case there was any question as to whether the NBA was an agent of cultural rot - it has had a "green" program for a few years now, among other signals - such doubt was laid to rest today when it announced it was pulling its 2017 all-star game out of Charlotte, North Carolina in response to that state's law that says that just because you resent the DNA you were born with, you don't get to use the other gender's restroom.

And your tax dollars continue to pay the salary of this purveyor of dog vomit:

Air conditioners and refrigerators pose as big a threat to "life on the planet" as the threat of terrorism, Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday.

Kerry was in Vienna negotiating a global climate deal to phase out chemicals used as refrigerants in basic household and commercial appliances such as air conditioning and refrigerators, called hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs. The chemicals are a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions that many scientists blame for contributing to global warming.

Kerry made the remarks as part of a pep talk for negotiators working through the weekend to amend a 1987 treaty called the Montreal Protocol to deal with the chemicals.

"Yesterday, I met in Washington with 45 nations — defense ministers and foreign ministers — as we were working together on the challenge of [the Islamic State], and terrorism," he said. "It's hard for some people to grasp it, but what we — you — are doing here right now is of equal importance because it has the ability to literally save life on the planet itself."

The EPA's Gina McCarthy is keen on codifying an international agreement on hydrofluorocarbons by the end of the year.

And once again, I am in a position where I must issue a dare to the Squirrel-Hair-Bots to spin this:

For the Trump supporters reading this, back a long, long time ago, there was this big country called the USSR. And they were ruled pretty much the way Donald Trump wants to rule the United States. I mean they were YUGE and awesome. But, for reasons that aren't clear, the losers who ran the United States and Western Europe didn't like the USSR and decided to be mean to them. In 1949, that is Year 3 in The Year Of Trump, they created this thing called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.  On of the main features of the NATO Charter is Article V, not unlike Article XII of the US Constitution it is the most important, which states, approximately, that an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all.

Let me end the sarcasm here.

The NATO alliance has proven to be a useful tool not only for the common defense of Europe but as a mechanism for integrating many former Soviet client states into the political and economic framework of Western Europe. In fact, in 2004, three former captive republics of the USSR, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, became actual NATO members.

Yesterday, however, Donald Trump threw NATO into a panic by stating that a Trump Administration might very well refuse to honor its mutual defense obligations under the NATO charter.
SANGER: Since your time is limited, let me ask you about Russia. You’ve been very complimentary of Putin himself.
 TRUMP: No! No, I haven’t.
SANGER: You said you respected his strength.
TRUMP: He’s been complimentary of me. I think Putin and I will get along very well.
SANGER: So I was just in ——
TRUMP: But he’s been complimentary of me.
SANGER: I was just in the Baltic States. They are very concerned obviously about this new Russian activism, they are seeing submarines off their coasts, they are seeing airplanes they haven’t seen since the Cold War coming, bombers doing test runs. If Russia came over the border into Estonia or Latvia, Lithuania, places that Americans don’t think about all that often, would you come to their immediate military aid?
 TRUMP: I don’t want to tell you what I’d do because I don’t want Putin to know what I’d do. I have a serious chance of becoming president and I’m not like Obama, that every time they send some troops into Iraq or anyplace else, he has a news conference to announce it.
SANGER: They are NATO members, and we are treaty-obligated ——
TRUMP: We have many NATO members that aren’t paying their bills.
 SANGER: That’s true, but we are treaty-obligated under NATO, forget the bills part.
TRUMP: You can’t forget the bills. They have an obligation to make payments. Many NATO nations are not making payments, are not making what they’re supposed to make. That’s a big thing. You can’t say forget that.
 SANGER: My point here is, Can the members of NATO, including the new members in the Baltics, count on the United States to come to their military aid if they were attacked by Russia? And count on us fulfilling our obligations ——
 TRUMP: Have they fulfilled their obligations to us? If they fulfill their obligations to us, the answer is yes.
HABERMAN: And if not?
TRUMP: Well, I’m not saying if not. I’m saying, right now there are many countries that have not fulfilled their obligations to us.

Excuse me. I see that my glass is empty.