My new drawer pulls for the kitchen. They’ll be installed on white cabinets and drawers.
What’s up this evening?
by Betty Cracker| 199 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Open Threads
My new drawer pulls for the kitchen. They’ll be installed on white cabinets and drawers.
What’s up this evening?
This post is in: Dolt 45, Foreign Affairs, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Because Donald Trump does not provide reliable readouts of his meetings with Kim Jong Un, we must stitch together bits of information as they trickle out. There’s enough now to provide a picture of Trump’s negotiating style.
Jessica Tuchman Matthews summarizes that style in an excellent overview of the Hanoi meeting between Trump and Kim.
Shortly after the success of The Art of the Deal (1987) made Donald Trump a supposed expert on negotiation, he lobbied the George H.W. Bush administration to put him in charge of arms reduction talks with the Soviet Union. The position went instead to Richard Burt, an experienced diplomat and arms control expert. When the two men met at a New York social event, Trump pulled Burt aside to tell him what he would have done—and what Burt should do—to start off the negotiations. Greet the Soviets warmly, he said. Let the delegation get seated and open their papers. Then stand up, put your knuckles on the table, lean over, say “Fuck you,” and walk out of the room.
…Trump thinks that what works is the unexpected. His goal is to put people off balance, which allows him, he believes, to get his way. This explains his otherwise baffling calls for US policy to be “unpredictable.”
After the breakdown of the Hanoi summit, the United States and North Korea provided conflicting reports on the reasons for the breakdown. It appeared that one side or both asked for too much. The amount of time the two leaders spent together suggested that rejection had been rapid, with no effort at working through alternatives.
We now learn that
…Trump handed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a piece of paper that included a blunt call for the transfer of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and bomb fuel to the United States, according to the document seen by Reuters.
This is consistent with statements by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about North Korea’s obligations and by John Bolton about the “Libya Model” for North Korean denuclearization.
There has been a gulf between North Korea and the United States on the meaning of the word “denuclearization.” North Korea has long used it to indicate a state in which nuclear weapons and their threat have been removed from all of the Korean Peninsula and its environs. That includes American promises of nuclear defense to Japan and South Korea. The use of the word by the Trump administration means unilateral nuclear disarmament by North Korea.
The Trump administration seems to have made denuclearization a condition for any concessions at all on the American side. The North Koreans know well that their nuclear capability is the basis of any leverage they have.
Libya gave up its nuclear program, which mostly hadn’t ever been uncrated, and centrifuges and other equipment – no bombs – were sent to the United States. That is the model that Bolton has insisted on for North Korea, which has full manufacturing capability for bombs and missiles in several locations. To North Korea, the lesson of Libya is that giving up nuclear leverage means a vulnerability to American attack.
The United States has put this plan forward earlier, and North Korea has rejected it. To put it forth again, with no changes in American concessions, is insulting to North Korea.
In what may have been an attempt to walk back the excessive demand, or perhaps to provide more unpredictability, Trump tweeted
He apparently did this without the knowledge of any of his team. There was confusion for a while about which sanctions he was referring to, but the best information seems to be that they were sanctions that Bolton had earlier praised and had already been announced. It appears that Bolton’s approving tweet has been deleted. Revoking those sanctions would undercut Trump’s stated position of maximum pressure on North Korea. The sanctions seem to have remained in place.
Trump believes that international negotiations can be won with a show of force and bluster. He is ignorant of the substance that must go into a negotiation with North Korea and unwilling to depend on the experts. He believes that a “deal” can be arrived at like a real estate deal – one of the parties decides to give in and agree to terms.
That isn’t how this sort of negotiation is done, however. A million questions must be answered. In the unlikely event that North Korea were to give up its nuclear weapons program, those questions would include
And many sub-questions on timing, modes of transport for both people and materiel. On the American side, there are the questions of how sanctions would be lifted and so on. No country gives up an advantage for nothing.
Trump’s arrogance and ignorance allow him to be manipulated by those he negotiates with and those around him. He proclaimed the first meeting with Kim a success and that there was no longer a nuclear danger from North Korea. Kim probably understood that the photo ops and television ratings were enough for Trump. But now Kim expects reciprocity for his actions, as any negotiator would.
The request for all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program probably comes from Bolton, who has pushed the Libya scenario. His plan B is probably war. Trump’s desire for a big, instant solution probably made the demand seem plausible to him.
Trump seems not to learn from his mistakes. His idea of negotiation has little to do with how international agreements actually are negotiated.
Look at that top photo. That’s the man whom Trump expects to give up his nuclear arsenal.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner.
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Pet Rescue
From commentor & rescue angel Debit:
When I got home tonight, I saw two boys attempting to climb a tree in the park across the alley. Then I heard them calling “kitty kitty.” Then they saw me and asked if I was missing a cat. I was not.
I lured this little guy out the tree and brought him inside where he wolfed down a can of wet food and most of a bowl of dry. He looks about 6 month old, is probably not fixed and is the sweetest little lovebug. And with a household already full of pets I can’t keep him.
I have a call in to the local Humane Society to set up an appointment to surrender him, but if a local is looking for a cat I’d rather go that route.
He is such a sweetheart and was flirting like mad when he was in the tree, slow blinking back at me and me and rubbing his entire body along each branch.
I hope someone here can give him a home. Please, before my daughter convinces me that six cats is not madness.
Leave a comment below, or email me at AnneLaurie (dot) bj (at) gmail (dot) com, and I’ll forward your message to Debit.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It), Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All
@Yair_Rosenberg apparently, antivaccine activists are flaunting a yellow star and comparing themselves to holocaust victims at this point. pic.twitter.com/HQNzZGJfXl
— (((Dorit Reiss))) (@doritmi) March 29, 2019
When we talk about the anti-vaccine movement, we often discuss the clinical impact—the deadly danger that vaccine-preventable diseases pose to the unvaccinated or the immunocompromised. But the vaccine hesitancy also has a large shared financial cost https://t.co/iXU8836meq 1/
— WIRED (@WIRED) March 29, 2019
From the reliably excellent Maryn McKenna, at Wired:
… Every grave illness and death is an individual tragedy, but the cost of vaccine hesitancy also enforces a shared public toll.
Consider the ongoing measles outbreak in Washington State, which is centered in Clark County, on the Oregon border. In January, when it had racked up 26 cases, the state governor declared a public health emergency. Since then, the case count has almost tripled, to 74.
To figure out who might have been put at risk, the state health department has interviewed 4,652 people and closely monitored 812 of them. It has reassigned staff from across its divisions, borrowed public health workers from other states, sent people who would normally be at desks out into the field, performed hundreds of lab tests that would not normally be necessary. So far, it has spent $1.6 million…
The funding to support that work isn’t being conjured out of the air. It’s coming from the budgets of public agencies, which have already been facing years of cuts and have no secret stashes of discretionary money to spend.
“There are substantial public health responses that go into mitigating an outbreak, and we should pursue those, because they prevent larger outbreaks or broader social disruption,” says Saad Omer, a physician and epidemiologist at Emory University and the senior author of a recent paper on the “true cost” of measles outbreaks. “But it does result in a lot of costs that can be pretty substantial. And we don’t measure the further indirect costs to the community.”
In Washington State, those indirect costs include the other work that doesn’t get done while the outbreak proceeds. The state health department was forced to appropriate a portion of its poison control center’s work hours to handle the calls made by people worried they had been exposed to measles. In Clark County, the local health department reassigned to measles the home-visit nurses who take care of risky pregnancies, and also the investigators who track down victims of sexually transmitted diseases and foodborne illnesses…
Those costs are being paid by state governments, and by federal agencies such as the CDC that give states grants and loan them personnel. State and federal budgets are public money—which means those necessary bills for unnecessary outbreaks are being paid by all of us. The toll of illness may be confined to individuals, but the cost of responding to outbreaks related to vaccine refusal is a bill that we are all being compelled to pay.
And you know the privileged parents now telling each other, Really, it’s only measles, we all got them back in the day and *I* never had any problems will sue everyone from the suspected source to their local government to the FDA if their little darling has to so much as miss a school recital or family vacation because of a quarantine, too. Mah RIGHTS!!!
Sometimes I find myself wishing that this kind of stupidity physically hurt its possessors, and not just their victims, because that seems to be the only way to reach some people.
by TaMara| 34 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
This entire thread is epic. I wish I could embed the entire thing for you, but you’ll just have to click over to read the rest of the story (click on any tweet to get you there).
So, hey.
I somehow managed to book a creepy log cabin to do some intensive writing in for a few days…— Tom Taylor (@TomTaylorMade) March 25, 2019
Now, I’m just about to go to bed, but I’m not sleeping through annoying, spontaneous wind chimes, so I head out there…
— Tom Taylor (@TomTaylorMade) March 25, 2019
And I see the wind chimes hanging on a rusty hook. I figure I can reach them, and I walk out onto the porch in my socks.
And the door immediately slams shut behind me. Of course…— Tom Taylor (@TomTaylorMade) March 25, 2019
I don’t think much of it. There’s been possums running all over the roof all night (cute Australian possums, not those weird US ones). It’s the bush, things are allowed to move in bushes…
— Tom Taylor (@TomTaylorMade) March 25, 2019
Now I’m kind of giggling to myself because of how creeped out I’m feeling, so I grab my phone to take a photo of the murder cabin I’m writing in for a few days. Here it is… pic.twitter.com/M6iFVSJofI
— Tom Taylor (@TomTaylorMade) March 25, 2019
A few tweets later and now he knows he’s not alone….. (and of course, someone points out later that there is the shadow of a person in his window…INSIDE THE HOUSE).
And, at 5.30am, in the dark, outside the murder cabin, SOMEONE IS STANDING THERE…
— Tom Taylor (@TomTaylorMade) March 25, 2019
This is ONLY the beginning. Click on the first tweet to read the entire story. Tom is a comic book author, so is funny and suspenseful:
#1 NYT Bestselling writer-INJUSTICE, FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN, X-MEN: RED, DCEASED, BATMAN, WOLVERINE, STAR WARS comics. Creator/EP -THE DEEP on Netflix
And part of his story made it to TIME magazine – but they didn’t stick around for the end.
And I’m imagining all of this was a way for him to procrastinate on his latest project!
Open thread
by Betty Cracker| 102 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Assholes, General Stupidity
We’ve got a dishwasher again, hallelujah Jeebus. It’s not installed yet. It isn’t even upstairs where it will eventually live. But it’s here, and after washing dishes by hand for five months — including after holiday dinners for 18 people — I’m thrilled that it will be installed this weekend, even if installation will be a knuckle-scraping bitch.
It’s not that I mind washing dishes by hand all that much. Over the holidays, I cut down on the volume by serving meals on extra-fancy disposable plates and had plenty of help with washing up. But what I love most about dishwashers is that they give you a place to stash dirty plates, cups, utensils, etc., out of sight until you’re ready to run the appliance instead of either constantly washing dishes or enduring the nagging guilt of dirty dishes in the sink. Maybe it’s just me.
Anyhoo, when we moved here last fall and discovered that the dishwasher that came with the place was a piece of junk, I thought it would be a simple thing to have it replaced. The mister and I have installed a dishwasher or two in our day, cursing and nicking up countertops and mashing fingers along the way. But when we had to replace a dishwasher at our old house a few years ago, I called Home Depot, and they brought a new one, installed it and hauled the old one away. I enjoyed that experience more than the DIY approach, so I had hoped to replicate that here.
But I soon discovered that there’s a hidden dishwasher industrial complex that is intent on funneling customers to expensive machines if they want the full service treatment. Basically, you have to buy a top-of-the-line machine to have it delivered and installed, but the home improvement people won’t just tell you that. They employ devious cons to steer you toward the high-dollar merchandise, and they flat-out lie and make you question your own sanity.
Our local Lowe’s, the closest big-box, had a unique strategy; the woman I spoke to there simply pretended that there is no such thing as a dishwasher in the size I require (a weird size, to be fair) under $700. I knew this to be untrue since I’d Googled machines earlier and seen them listed for less than $400, but she brazenly told me to my face that the products I’d seen online did not exist. While the conversation quickly established that Lowe’s doesn’t carry them, I knew I’d seen them somewhere. I tried to use my phone, which was connected to the Lowe’s courtesy WiFi, to search Home Depot’s product line. But the fuckers block competitor websites, and cell service is non-existent inside the store. So, I left.
Once back home, I found the under-$400 dishwashers listed at Home Depot. Okay, I thought. It’s a little further, but they have the dishwasher I want. I tried to order it online and use the Home Services thingy to order installation and removal as well, but the page kept crashing. So I called Home Depot, and the person I spoke to there said it was because I was trying to order a dishwasher that didn’t exist. I got a glimpse of the Matrix in that moment, and it shook me to my core.
Wait, I said, to the Home Depot dude — here’s the SKU — I’m looking right at it on your website! I swear I am not crazy — it’s real! What’s the brand, he asked. I told him. Never heard of it, he replied. But-but-but the SKU, I remonstrated. I’ll look into it and call you back, he said. He did call back, and while he claimed he believed me when I told him this dishwasher existed on the customer-facing Home Depot site, he told me it did not exist on the internal Home Depot site.
I was given to understand that the product I was trying to acquire is an un-dishwasher that cannot be ordered by store personnel and paired with a delivery and installation package. I asked if I could order it to be delivered to my house and have someone from Home Depot meet the appliance here, install it and haul the old one away. Nope, he said. You’ll have to arrange your own handyman. Or order a $700 dishwasher, which we’ll be glad to deliver and install.
Well, fuck that noise. I ordered the damned dishwasher, which arrived yesterday via UPS. The UPS dude was kind enough to cart it to the downstairs storage room. This weekend, my husband and I will schlep the damned thing up the stairs even though we’re too goddamned old for that sort of thing, and then we will install it, cursing and nicking countertops and mashing fingers and hopefully not electrocuting ourselves or flooding the house. Then we’ll haul the old one off ourselves. Because that’s how the dishwasher industrial complex works.
Open thread!
Beware the Dishwasher Industrial Complex (Open Thread)Post + Comments (102)
This post is in: Music, Open Threads, All Too Normal, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All
"My wife is Pakistani & loves to watch hip hop dance. She asked me to dance to music from her culture…so last Sunday I got our 3 children together to perform to a song that I felt represented apart of my culture & her culture as well"- @ Manny_Cross
LOVE THIS
Retweet pic.twitter.com/bKelelY6Rg
— StanceGrounded (@_SJPeace_) March 29, 2019
So many important / amazing stories that I want to share and don’t, because there’s never a good time in the rush of events. Here’s a few from this week:
Heather Heyer’s killer has spared the people who loved her some further portion of horror reliving the event. Per the Washington Post, “Neo-Nazi sympathizer pleads guilty to federal hate crimes for plowing car into protesters at Charlottesville rally”:
… James Alex Fields Jr., 21, of Ohio admitted guilt to 29 of 30 counts in a federal indictment as part of a deal with prosecutors, who agreed they would not seek the death penalty in a case that has come to symbolize the violent resurgence of white supremacism in the United States. Fields is set to be sentenced July 3.
Late last year, Fields was convicted in state court of first-degree murder and other charges for killing Heather D. Heyer, 32, and injuring dozens at the chaotic Unite the Right rally on Aug. 12, 2017. The jury in that case recommended a life sentence, and a state judge is scheduled to formally impose it in mid-July…
Susan Bro, Heyer’s mother, said after the hearing she was satisfied with the result.
“There’s no point in killing him. It would not bring back Heather,” Bro said.
“It’s a relief to think we don’t have to go through another trial. It was exhausting the first time. I can get on with my life, and the other victims can, too.”…
******
The notion that there are no progressives in places like West Virginia is just something that comes from outsiders. There’s a lot of people suffering there, and there are a lot of people who want change
— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) March 28, 2019
******
Jamelle Bouie is now working for the NYTimes. I second his thesis here — “Oliver North Showed Republicans the Way Out. Belligerence, shamelessness and partisanship can take you far.”:
… The particular twists and turns of Iran-contra don’t mirror the Russia scandal’s. The politics, however, do. As with Trump and Russia, the White House itself was defiant. “Admiral Poindexter and Colonel North put their careers on the line to protect our country,” Pat Buchanan, then serving as White House communications director, said at a rally in Miami in December 1986. “If Colonel North broke any rules, he will stand up and take it as the Marine he is. But I say, if Colonel North ripped off the ayatollah and took some $30 million to give to the contras, God bless Colonel North.”
Saturday Morning Quick Hits Open ThreadPost + Comments (210)