North Korea and the US

If I consider Pres. Kim to be rational, this is what I imagine his ultimate goals/wishes would be, in no particular priority:

• security guarantees from the US
• nuclear weapons and missiles
• peaceful unification of the peninsula under his leadership, being an autocracy like China's Xi
• economic aid from South Korea and where ever.

For the US, our goals would be:

• no nukes or missiles
• no unification or unification under the South's system
• no proliferation or transfer of nuclear or missile technologies.

I suspect the minimax solution, assuming both sides are rational is trading NK aid and security for verified agreements on nonproliferation, and kicking the unification question down the road.  

It's possible that Trump's clownish antics will provide enough cover and distraction for the US to give up its, and his, proclaimed goals denuclearization. 

Trump Records Management II

Some more thoughts on the Politico piece describing how Trump tears up documents when he's through with them, requiring employees to tape these official records back together.  (See yesterday's post.)

1. Who knew our President actually handled any documents--the impression the media gives is he operates in meetings and by tweets?  That's an exaggeration, of course.
2. Presumably these are briefing papers, not decision memos.
3. Ann Althouse commented this morning, making one valid point: Scotch tape isn't the right choice for archival materials (which anything seen by POTUS likely would be). Can't say much for the rest of her post.
4. The employees who spoke to the reporter were likely GS-11 or below in pay grade.  Perhaps they're in the same category as Clinton's Filegate employees--people who usually carry on from one adminstration to the next, but who aren't permanent civil service so don't have the usual job protections.

Records Management in the Trump White House

This is--I lack the words.

The management of official records is a serious business, but one can only laugh.

Import Brains (Continued)

Via Marginal Revolution an article on the amazing success of Nigerian-Americans. 

Some points which occur to me:

• importing immigrants who succeed is good foreign aid--they tend to return to the country of origin and/or send remittances.
• I wonder what happens to the children.  There's research, mostly I think on Hispanic immigrants, which show the children as losing the advantages of immigrants and gain the disadvantages of American children (obesity, crime, etc.)
• such success is complicating the task of American racism in finding support for their stereotypes.
• I write all this despite having had negative feelings towards African/Caribbean immigrants in FSA some 25 years ago--there were a couple with whom I had some interactions.  It was easy to doubt their ability to contribute when they had no background in US agriculture (though looking back on it I suspect I was being unfair.)

Trump and God Bless America

As an independent-minded liberal, or so I like to think, I must occasionally give our president the benefit of the doubt. One such occasion has arisen.

When he disinvited the Eagles to the White House, his substitute ceremony included "God Bless America".  During the song, Trump seemed not to know all the words, a fact which has attracted attention and some derision.

The Post has an article on the history of the song which is very good.  Its popularity is relatively recent, that is, within my lifetime.

I don't know about Trump, or the rest of you, but the way I learned our patriotic songs was in music class in elementary school.  Anchors Aweigh, etc.  I'm sure I can no longer remember the words to any of them, even our national anthem, in the sense that I could sit down and write out the song.  But, get me standing with a group of people and a band playing and somehow muscle memory takes over and I can produce what stands as singing of the words, good enough for government work anyway. 

But I'm sure "God Bless America" is not a song I learned. I'm aware of it, having heard it enough, but I've no muscle memory to count on.  Now Trump, being younger than I, may have learned the song in his elementary school, may have if he wasn't talking or disrupting the class (on his way to military school).  If so, let's criticize away.

Time to Check Farmers.gov

Why?

USDA just got $10 million for it, one of three agencies to get the first awards from OMB's Modernization Technology Fund, according to this article.

Personally I wonder about two things:

1. what is the management and organizational structure supporting the effort?  Dedicated resources or detailed from the agencies? Full-time managers and programmers, or part-time?
2. what metrics do they have, and how are they fed back into the management structure?   

In other words, how is the bureaucracy organized.

Trump and the Harshaw Rule

My Harshaw Rule says you don't do things right the first time. 

The Trump Administration provides abundant proof of the rule.  Starting with the man at the top, the administration has been filled with people who lack previous background in their posts.  And their various blunders and flouting of ethical standards are the result.  The unprecedented turnover in Trump appointees is an indicator of the strength of the Harshaw rule.

All this means, however, that in the Mueller investigation there will be no conclusion of a "corrupt intent" for the simple reason Trump had no ability to form a coherent intent. 

Starbucks and Casual Fridays

One of the big changes in American culture since my youth is clothing.  Back in the day jeans and overalls were working class clothes.  Sailors for example wore jeans and white t-shirts.  Veterans home from the war maybe wore their khaki dress uniforms, or parts thereof, and the style migrated to others. My father, for example, wore overalls and blue work shirts on the farm, while when he headed to Greene for the weekly shopping trip and to pick up cow and chicken feed at the GLF store he would wear khaki, or gray twill styled something like a uniform. And hats.

When I went off to college in '59 my older sister was consulted about proper attire, resulting in a trip to Robert Hall, a now long-defunct clothing chain that might have been just a hair above Sears or Monkey Wards. Sports coats, dress pants and shirts were the uniform, or so I was told.

Meanwhile office workers wore dress clothes, suits and such.  Housewives wore house dresses, while secretaries dressed up.  Bottom line: you could make reasonable guesses about the class of any person by seeing how they dressed.  You could get a confirmation by looking at their car, always American and with distinct steps up the ladder.

Today those distinctions have faded, and I think in most cases have been obliterated.

That brings me to the Philadelphia Starbucks incident where the manager called the cops because two African-American men were waiting there without buying.  My intuition is the situation would never have arisen back in 1958.  Not only did we have no Starbucks, but if we'd had one most African-Americans would likely not have patronized it, out of financial concerns.  But, and I come to my point, hypothetical African-Americans in a 1958 Starbucks would have been well-dressed.  Their clothes would have said to the manager: we abide by your norms and conventions, we're "good Negroes", and don't be concerned.    Because of the fading of signals of social class, there's less certainty today, meaning more tension, and tension, IMHO, triggers racist thoughts and actions.

Tracing the Thread: Connections Via the Internet

There seems to be much debate over the impact of the Internet and the web on society.  Some say we're absorbed in our cellphones and shrinking from face to face interactions.  Some disagree.

A story:

My extended family was small; I had six living first cousins, all of whom were several years older than me.  They lived in distant places, and we didn't have family reunions.   The closest we came in recent years was when two cousins came to my mother's funeral.

Then came the internet and PC's.  A cousin, Marjorie Harshaw Robie, got a hand-me-down PC from her son, and started to get into genealogy, becoming very interested in and familiar with the Harshaw and the Robies.  Through connections she made there, a remote cousin got in touch with her, offering a set of original diaries written by James Harshaw in County Down in the middle of the 19th century.  My cousin got them microfilmed and took them back to Ireland to the Public Records (archives) Office.   Her work with the diaries attracted enough attention that PBS, which was doing a TV series on the Irish in America, did an interview, excerpts of which actually got aired.  My sister, who had been into genealogy before the advent of PC's, noticed and mentioned to me. 

Another few years passed and I looked my cousin up on the Internet and got her email address (this was before Facebook).  We made connections, first through email, then through AOL instant messaging (and now Facebook).   She's now putting the finishing touches on her second book, Dueling Dragons (expect to see more on it here).

Meanwhile, as a retiree I got involved in blogging and in following bloggers.  One of the bloggers I began to follow, probably about 2008, was TaNehisi Coates.  At that time he had one of the best sets of people commenting on his posts, including a number of regulars.   One of the regulars was Andy Hall, who had his own blog: Dead Confederates, a blog which I added to my RSS feed.

On the occasion of Memorial Day, Andy posted about three Civil War veterans, one of whom was George Frank Robie, a Union Medal of Honor winner who's buried in Galveston, Andy's hometown.

Naturally, when I saw the post, I passed the url to my cousin in case he was new to her.  This is real life, not fiction, so George Frank did not turn out to be an ancestor of her husband, but only a relative.

What lessons do I take from this?  I think the Internet does enable, though not force, new connections following existing paths of relationship and interests. 

Don't Dial the Dash

One of my pet ideas deals with the need to learn new things and the fact people do so, gradually incorporating what we've learned into a series of layers.  One example: learning to drive.

I remember my long and difficult process of learning to drive (don't ask how many times I flunked the driving test). But gradually I became confident.  Some 60 years later I barely notice how automatic some of my driving processes; I realize with a start that I did something now which would have terrified me years ago.  We don't have children, so there's no one watching me drive who's going to absorb lessons from me, but that happens all around the world.  People often make claims about the virtues or vices of drivers in different areas: "drivers here are aggressive and don't allow people to merge"--that sort of thing. I suspect part of this is people constructing narratives out of thin air, but a little bit might be the unconscious learning passed from parents to children on how to drive.

Another example: dialing the telephone.  Kottke has a training film from the 1920's, training on how to use a dial phone.  It's interesting, but what struck me was the instruction which serves as the title for this post.  We don't think about it now, but when people made the transition from a telephone where you used a crank to ring the bell (remember "Ma Bell") to dialing numbers, they needed to be told the dash wasn't dialed.  That knowledge rapidly sank into the culture, babies absorbing it with their mothers' milk,  No one today needs to be told not to dial the dash.