Monday roundup

The VSG's foreign policy failures continue apace; now he's dangling flattery of a "special relationship" and the promise of "tremendous economic potential" ( as if Kim gives a rat's ass about that) even as NK tests more missiles and insists on sanctions being lifted by the end of the year:

North Korea insulted U.S. President Donald Trump again on Monday, calling him a “heedless and erratic old man” after he tweeted that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un wouldn’t want to abandon a special relationship between the two leaders and affect the American presidential election by resuming hostile acts.
A senior North Korean official, former nuclear negotiator Kim Yong Chol, said in a statement that his country wouldn’t cave in to U.S. pressure because it has nothing to lose and accused the Trump administration of attempting to buy time ahead of an end-of-year deadline set by Kim Jong Un for Washington to salvage nuclear talks.

In a separate statement, former Foreign Minister Ri Su Yong said Trump’s comments were a “corroboration that he feels fear” about what North Korea might do when Kim’s deadline expires and warned Trump to think twice if he wants to avoid “bigger catastrophic consequences.” 

On Sunday, Trump tweeted: “Kim Jong Un is too smart and has far too much to lose, everything actually, if he acts in a hostile way ... North Korea, under the leadership of Kim Jong Un, has tremendous economic potential, but it must denuclearize as promised.”

He was referring to a vague statement issued by the two leaders during their first summit in Singapore in June last year that called for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula without describing when or how it would occur. 

Trump added that Kim “does not want to void his special relationship with the President of the United States or interfere with the U.S. Presidential Election in November.”
Kim Yong Chol said Trump’s tweets clearly show that he is an irritated old man “bereft of patience.”

“As (Trump) is such a heedless and erratic old man, the time when we cannot but call him a ‘dotard’ again may come,” Kim Yong Chol said. 

“Trump has too many things that he does not know about (North Korea). We have nothing more to lose. Though the U.S. may take away anything more from us, it can never remove the strong sense of self-respect, might and resentment against the U.S. from us.”Kim Yong Chol traveled to Washington and met with the U.S. president twice last year while setting up the summits with Kim Jong Un.
In his statement, Ri, currently a vice chairman of the ruling Workers’ Party’s Central Committee, said Trump would be well advised to stop using “abusive language” that may offend Kim.

“Trump might be in great jitters but he had better accept the status quo that as he sowed, so he should reap, and think twice if he does not want to see bigger catastrophic consequences,” Ri said. 

Elizabeth Warren's little truth problem, which has already manifested itself in ways ranging from saying she had Cherokee ancestry to saying her kids went to public schools to saying she lost a teaching job because she was pregnant to lying that Michael Brown was murdered, surfaces again:

Did Elizabeth Warren mislead voters about her outside income while at Harvard? Her campaign finally released more information about Warren’s work with corporations on bankruptcy actions over the past 25 years while she worked as a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and at Harvard. The income totaled more than $2 million, the Washington Post reports, and the descriptions of that work don’t quite match up with Warren’s earlier claims either:

Her work for some of the companies doesn’t fit neatly with her current presidential campaign brand as a crusader against corporate interests.

For instance, the documents released Sunday show that Warren made about $80,000 from work she did for creditors in the energy company Enron’s bankruptcy and $20,000 as a consultant for Dow Chemical, a company that was trying to limit the liability it faced from silicone breast implants that were made by a connected firm.

Earlier this year, Warren had released a list of about 50 cases that she worked on, but the descriptions of the work were at times misleading and the amount of income and dates for her work were not included.

While the cases released by Warren’s campaign stretch over more than three decades, the figures disclosed Sunday show that nearly all of the money was made from cases filed after she got her job at Harvard in 1995.

The timing of the release, on a Sunday, suggests that the Warren campaign was at the least not enthusiastic about getting the information out in the open. It came just hours after Warren excoriated Pete Buttigieg for not releasing the names of his clients while working as a consultant for McKinsey & Co, continuing a feud between the two leading Not Bidens of the 2020 Democratic primary. 

Good on ya, SCOTUS! Big step forward in protecting the lives of people who aren't born yet:

The Supreme Court won't hear an appeal over a Kentucky law that forces health providers to show pregnant women ultrasounds of their fetuses before having abortions.

The decision, issued Monday, means that the Supreme Court leaves intact a 2-1 ruling from the 6th Circuit that the law does not violate doctors' First Amendment rights to free speech, writing that the information gleaned from an ultrasound was "pertinent" to a woman's decision-making.

At least four justices must agree to hear a case for it to be taken up by the Supreme Court. Court observers have been closely watching the court, which now includes Republican-confirmed Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, to see whether they'll take up cases challengingRoe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide. Next year, the justices will hear arguments about a Louisiana law that requires doctors to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. 

The law in Kentucky, known as the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act, requires doctors who perform the ultrasound also to describe the images and to play the sound of the heartbeat. It allows women to look away from the ultrasound screen and to ask the doctor to turn off the sounds. Doctors who don't comply can be fined and referred to Kentucky's medical licensing board.

Proponents of the law, signed by Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, cite women's right to informed consent about the procedure.

The groundswell of internal Venezuelan as well as international opposition to the Maduro regime seems to have come to naught.

A consideration-worthy piece at The Atlantic by Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell on the dark turn the once-promising world of social media has taken:

Human beings evolved to gossip, preen, manipulate, and ostracize. We are easily lured into this new gladiatorial circus, even when we know that it can make us cruel and shallow. As the Yale psychologist Molly Crockett has argued, the normal forces that might stop us from joining an outrage mob—such as time to reflect and cool off, or feelings of empathy for a person being humiliated—are attenuated when we can’t see the person’s face, and when we are asked, many times a day, to take a side by publicly “liking” the condemnation.

In other words, social media turns many of our most politically engaged citizens into Madison’s nightmare: arsonists who compete to create the most inflammatory posts and images, which they can distribute across the country in an instant while their public sociometer displays how far their creations have traveled.

Some pretty substantive confirmation that US Afghanistan policy throughout various administrations has been ill-conceived, ill-executed and useless:

Today, the Washington Post unveils the “Pentagon Papers” of our era, unveiling confidential SIGAR [special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction] reports that show, “with most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.” The Post had to go through a lengthy legal battle with the SIGAR office to get the documents released, as the inspector general’s office contended they were privileged and that those who spoke freely about the shortcomings and failures of U.S. policy were entitled to whistleblower protections.

Judging from the report, the more the United States tried to fix Afghanistan, the more they complicated and worsened existing problems.

During the peak of the fighting, from 2009 to 2012, U.S. lawmakers and military commanders believed the more they spent on schools, bridges, canals and other civil-works projects, the faster security would improve. Aid workers told government interviewers it was a colossal misjudgment, akin to pumping kerosene on a dying campfire just to keep the flame alive . . .

In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for graft. But in the Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S. government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers — allies of Washington — plundered with impunity.

This is the odd sort of bombshell scoop that tells us something we already knew, or likely suspected. The people running our military efforts in Afghanistan are not stupid. They see what we see, and a whole lot more. Each year, we hoped that this would be the year that our efforts in that misbegotten country would “turn the corner,” and every year ended with the country in more or less the same mostly-bad situation it started. The expectations got ratcheted down a little more, hoping that the Afghan government would get a little closer to something resembling a functioning state that would not collapse the moment we left.

But everyone would be well-advised to hold off on the hot takes:

To the extent these SIGAR reports get noticed, they will be cited as a piece of evidence in the isolationist-interventionist policy battle. Those who want to withdraw from Afghanistan will point to this report and say that not only have our efforts not worked, but advocates in multiple administrations have lied to the public about how well the efforts were working. Interventionists will need to grapple with these difficult truths. Maybe we will witness the end to the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan in the coming years. But we had better be ready for what follows us; based upon the history of Afghanistan, it will be ugly, and it could well end up trading one threat to Americans for another. 

And here's an exciting development for cultural historians and those whose nostalgic impulses are aroused by new revelations about the Bay Area hippie scene of fifty-plus years ago:

Owsley Stanley was known as the foremost underground LSD chemist of the 1960s. But he was also an exacting pioneer of live concert sound, a man who helped invent both monitor systems and high-fidelity amplification. When he died in 2011 at the age of 76, Stanley left behind a breathtaking array of some 1,300 reels amassed between 1966 and 1982. Buried inside are lost concerts by legends like Johnny Cash, Fleetwood Mac, Tim Buckley, and dozens of others, alongside the San Francisco psychedelic bands Stanley is most often associated with, such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.

An ongoing project by the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Owsley Stanley Foundation aims to preserve the reels and release the best of what Stanley called his “sonic journals.” Available for preorder now is Dawn of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, a five-disc set capturing the Grateful Dead’s stoner-country offshoot during their formative years in 1969 and 1970. Formed as an outlet for Jerry Garcia to learn pedal-steel guitar, the New Riders would develop a life of their own as a successful proto–outlaw-country act.

Stanley's life trajectory was utterly fascinating. His grandfather had been governor of Kentucky, as well as a federal Senator from that state. Stanley was born in 1935, and as a young man in the 1950s, immersed himself briefly in military service, engineering studies and ballet studies. Had all that under his belt before establishing himself as the first street chemist to make LSD - as supplies of Sandoz-produced Delasid were drying up in the last days of the drug's legality - and sound engineer. Served a couple of years in the hoosegow. Later in life became an avid bodybuilder. An American original.