Briefs

Graham-Cassidy
Why do some governors favor block grants even though their states will lose billions?  Given enough "flexibility," it lets them divert federal funds to influence peddling, pork barrel spending, and just plain theft.  The further the funds pass down the ladders from state to regional to local government, the greater the opportunities for corruption and abuse.

Tauntology
In the battle of the schoolyard bullies, "Rocket Man" pulled ahead when he called Our President "the mentally deranged US dotard."  To date, neither has referenced the other's mother.  Watch Twitter for further developments.

Kurdistan
When would be "the proper time" for the Iraqi Kurds to hold a referendum that will start them on the path toward statehood?  While the US might prefer to delay Iraqi, Turkish, and Iranian outrage, the Kurds represent the best chance for a secular state in the Middle East; ideologically, their strongest commitment is to capitalism.

What Happened?
I've heard enough interviews with Hillary so that I feel no need to read the book.  Could things have been done differently?  Maybe.  Would it have made a difference?  Probably not.

Puerto Rico
"Recovery" from Marilyn most likely will consist of privatizing anything that might turn a profit for off-island investors — essentially a vast, neoliberal social experiment.  I suggest that all boricuas left on the island move to Alabama, register to vote, and take over the state, thereby finally achieving the full rights of US citizens.

North Korea

How do you deal with a leader who is unstable, immoral, and incompetent?  For starters, you can do your best to keep him from being reelected in 2020.  In the meanwhile, you can hope that the people around him won't let him do anything too stupid.

As for Kim Jong-un, he certainly is immoral, but he is neither unstable nor incompetent — and even a far less competent Dear Leader would recognize that a viable nuclear deterrent is the only real guarantee of national survival given the regime-changing proclivities of the world's foremost military superpower.  Kim saw what became of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.

A nuclear deterrent works only if your adversaries know you have it; hence, the bomb and missile tests, and the pictures of Kim with that rocket-ready nuclear warhead.  When American experts conceded that the threat was real, our own Dear Leader and National Id reacted predictably.  Kim countered Tr*mp's dire warnings with a specific threat against the air base on Guam, demonstrating his superiority at the freak-em-out rhetoric game.

Having lived through decades of Mutually Assured Destruction, beginning with the times I hid from atom bombs under my elementary school desk, I find it hard to take the current situation all that seriously.  Rex Tillerson has been downplaying Tr*mp's bellicose pronouncements for all he's worth, and I'd like to think that even if Tr*mp did have a psychotic break and ordered a preemptive attack, "his" generals would not comply.  (You don't think they'd have given him the real nuclear suitcase, do you?)

Over the next couple of months, the world will settle down to a nuclear-armed North Korea, China will be ignoring the economic sanctions it approved last week, and the USofA will move on to its next crisis.  We all can put our old classroom desks back in storage.

Strongmen

Surprising his State Department, Our President got it into his head to invite the irrepressibly murderous Rodrigo Duterte for a White House sleepover.  To Tr*mp's surprise and chagrin, I'm certain, Duterte said he might be "too busy" to come over and play.

So what is it with Tr*mp and his passion for authoritarian bad boys like Duterte, al-Sisi, Ergogan and, of course, Vladimir Putin?  Hell, he was even saying nice things about North Korean meatball Kim Jong-un the other day!  Is it time for our Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to have a peek at the Presidential brain?

It's hard to believe there isn't something psycho-sexual involved in Tr*mp's bizarre infatuations, uncomfortable as it may be to entertain the imagery afflicts the imagination while entertaining such thoughts.  Fred Trump, one imagines, was the kind of father who could generate psychiatric fortunes over the generations — except that none of his sons ever could be so weak as to need a therapist.

I hope we don't have to bomb the Philippines.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *

More shit, quoted from the Times:
In a discussion last year about the cost of the Marines in Darwin, The Australians came in with a data-heavy presentation asserting that United States Marines eat more that typical Australian soldiers, and therefore strain sewage systems more, and argued that the Americans should pay more of the costs of improving wastewater lines on military bases.