"Trump is simply not experienced enough or temperamentally inclined to handle the complexity of nuclear negotiations or issues as complex as those associated with the long history of the Koreas."

Said David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, quoted in "Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un likely to meet alone at Singapore summit" (USA Today).

Also, given the track record of North Korea and Trump to "dissemble," Rothkopf said that "it is a minimum best practice to have a witness to the conversation."

But if Trump brings in his witness, Kim will have his witness. And doesn't Trump know far more than Kim about how to deal one-on-one with another man? Trump has spent a lifetime doing that, but what has Kim had to do, given the adulation he's received and his propensity to resort to killing anyone who could challenge him? And, by the way, Kim is only 34 years old. In years alone, Trump has far more experience.

And yet the Peace scholar thinks Trump is "simply not experienced enough." Depends on what you mean by experience, but clearly Kim is far less experienced. Isn't it smart to put Kim at this immense disadvantage? Trump means to pull him in, to give him a big American hug and to warm up this young fan of America.

ADDED: I see in the comments, my phrase "this young fan of America" is being questioned. My source is Dennis Rodman:

Rodman, who brands Mr Kim a “friend of for life”, said... Mr Kim, who he dubs the “little guy”, was a massive fan of American music from the 1980's. “When he’s around his people, he’s just like anybody else. He jokes and loves playing basketball, table tennis, pool,” he told DuJour magazine. ...They love American ’80s music. They do karaoke to it. He has this 13-piece girls band with violins. He gets a mic and they play the whole time. He loves the Doors and Jimi Hendrix. Oldies. When I first went, the live band only played two songs for four hours: the theme songs from Rocky and Dallas.... He can’t say it enough. He wants to talk to him to try to open that door a little bit. He’s saying that he doesn’t want to bomb anybody. He said, ‘I don’t want to kill Americans.’ He loves Americans.”

ALSO: Look at where Trump and Kim are meeting, on a resort island, Sentosa, next to Singapore. One reason to choose that place is that it can be closed off for security, but it also vividly tantalizes with American-style attractions:

The island, which is nearly two square miles in size... features 17 hotels and luxury resorts, private beaches, two golf courses, a casino, a Madame Tussauds museum, a water theme park, Universal Studios Singapore, and the largest Merlion statue....

More about Sentosa at Wikipedia, with lots of pictures, a longer list of attractions. Here's the aerial view of the fun-packed place:


CC by Chensiyuan.

When I look at that picture, what I hear in my head is "Optimistic Voices" (from "The Wizard of Oz"), you know that song, perhaps not by its title. It's: “You're out of the woods/You're out of the dark/You're out of the night/Step into the sun/Step into the light/Keep straight ahead for the most glorious place/On the face of the earth or the sky/Hold onto your breath/Hold onto your heart/Hold onto your hope/March up to the gate and bid it open... OPEN."

"Fox & Friends" calls Trump a dictator...

Hahaha oops

That moment when a Fox & Friends host accidentally calls Trump a dictator and no one even bats an eye

Huntsman: "Regardless of what happens in that meeting between the two dictators, what we're seeing right now, this is history." pic.twitter.com/hB2jg2XCrJ

— Lis Power (@LisPower1) June 10, 2018

"Robert De Niro Says ‘F— Trump’ at Tony Awards, Gets Standing Ovation."

Variety reports.

“I’m going to say one thing, F— Trump,” De Niro said while pumping his fists in the air. “It’s no longer down with Trump. It’s f— Trump.”

"I've been rethinking my spirit animal. I'm not sure how souls are transpositioned when we pass over to the great beyond."

"Perhaps because of my primate heritage I've always been partial to tree dwelling animals. Bonobos look like they have a pretty good deal, but they're a little too hyper for me. Althouse in a previous blog post really blew the lid ofd squirrels. Nothing much to recommend their manic, futile lives...... Of all tree dwelling creatures I'm most enamored of the sloth. They show an economy of effort in their struggles with existence, and their sad eyes demonstrate a zen awareness of the underlying futility of those struggles. I don't know how much say you're given in your choice for the next manifestation, but I would be comfortable with reincarnation as a sloth. Why wait? The way that that Kafka guy became a cockroach, I have evolved into a sloth. I don't cling to a tree branch, but I spend a lot of time on my posturpedic mattress. You can changer the position of the bed without ever leaving it. In some ways it's slothier than a tree branch."

Wrote William in last night's café. What I said about squirrels — in the first post of the day yesterday — was:

Squirrels don't have the brainpower to think of committing suicide. They don't even have the wits to think of not bothering to get food and just to waste away because what is the point of all this skittering around collecting nuts? They don't even think of scampering to another spot on the globe to see if the nuts taste different somewhere out there. And they don't think of throwing themselves off a high limb and ending it all. I have seen from my window squirrels falling from high in a tree. They hit the ground and immediately get up and run. Run run run. Get get get. It never stops until death snatches them. They don't go hurling themselves into the arms of death. It's just not a squirrel concept. I know. I read their mind from my vantage point here at the computer in front of the big window looking out on the trees.

The post had been about how to use all the mesclun from the garden, the potential to make a smoothie, the related need for a frozen banana "squirreled... away in the freezer," and a video of an squirrel — a Viennese squirrel — getting fed a banana. I only brought up suicide in the comments because Loren W Laurent, dragging in the demise of Anthony Bourdain, said:

The squirrel doesn't need to travel the world, compulsively looking for new tastes to satiate the hole in the self of wanting more.

Respect the squirrel....

For the squirrel survival is enough.

The kindness of a banana is magic.

Appreciate magic; don't expect it.

Don't become addicted to it.

Failed junkie.

"I recommend Althouse devote a post to the funniest Trump news I read today. Apparently Trump continues a practice from his pre-POTUS days..."

"... of tearing up many documents after he's through with them. To keep in compliance with federal law after failing to get Trump to listen to reason, a team of archivists armed with scotch tape reassembles them from the waste paper baskets. Making jobs for Americans!"

Said readering in last night's open thread. Is it true? Should I check? I don't want to see that it's not true!

Oh, it's true: "Meet the guys who tape Trump's papers back together/The president's unofficial 'filing system' involves tearing up documents into pieces, even when they're supposed to be preserved."

Under the Presidential Records Act, the White House must preserve all memos, letters, emails and papers that the president touches, sending them to the National Archives for safekeeping as historical records.

But White House aides realized early on that they were unable to stop Trump from ripping up paper after he was done with it and throwing it in the trash or on the floor, according to people familiar with the practice. Instead, they chose to clean it up for him, in order to make sure that the president wasn’t violating the law.

Legal ideas:

1. He should be impeached for this violation of law.

2. The law operates merely as a guideline because, technically, it violates Article II of the Constitution (and the President cannot be deprived of the power to process documents in his own style).

3. Good scenario for a law school exam.

Back to the article:

“We got Scotch tape, the clear kind,” [Solomon] Lartey recalled in an interview. “You found pieces and taped them back together and then you gave it back to the supervisor.” The restored papers would then be sent to the National Archives to be properly filed away.

Non-legal ideas: 

1. Is Scotch tape the proper substance for use in archival work?

2. Aren't there computer programs that would assemble an image of the document from a scan of the disassembled paper scraps?

3. The system of tearing up papers after you've dealt with them is actually a good one, generally, even if it's a problem for Trump to be using this practice in his presidential gig.

4. If Trump is going to be criticized for this, let's remember all the documents in the form of email that Hillary Clinton recklessly extremely carelessly destroyed.

5. What's the most interesting story you have about tearing up paper?

Key fact from the end of the article: The 2 men interviewed for this story were both talking to the press about their complaint that they were unfairly terminated from the jobs they are describing.

"Most readers have spent time in Airportland. We know its particular wan light; the general flatness..."

"... that makes the incline of jetways such a shock; its salty, sugary, and alcohol-infused cuisine; its detached social ambiance; its modes of travel (the long slog down the moving walkway, the hum of the people-moving carts, the standing-room-only shuttles, the escalators, the diddly-dup diddly-dup of roller bags, and — oh, yes — the airplanes); its fauna (emotional-support animals) and flora (plastic ficus); its mysterious system of governance; its language.... [W]hy Gate? Well, apparently there once was an actual gate, which stayed closed until the propellers of the plane were safely tied down and the passengers were free to pass through and board from the tarmac.... Take concourse. It’s from the Latin, meaning 'flowing together,' and outside Airportland it generally refers to an open area where passageways meet and people gather. In French, concours means 'contest.' At the airport, the concourses are simply wide corridors, usually designated by letter, but if you like you can think of them as flowing, since they’re usually filled with a stream of humanity, and it often feels like a contest simply to reach the gate without incident....."

From "The Language of Airportland" by Lucy Ferriss (Lingua Franca).

At the Allium Café...

... talk about what you like.

And remember the Althouse Portal to Amazon

"The desire among his supporters for a liberal agenda was held hostage to Bill Clinton’s libertine appetites."

"Let Bill be regressive and transgressive with women he was attracted to, and he would be progressive for all women. You want enlightened policies for women and a record number of women in exalted posts? Then you must endure — and cover up.... His wife and other prominent feminists backed Bill back then, and he and Hillary always had henchmen who were willing to smear Bill’s girlfriends and victims as trailer trash, cash-for-trash, nutty and slutty... So it came as a surprise to him when he had no more skirts to hide behind when Craig Melvin asked on the 'Today' show whether his actions in the ’90s would fly in the #MeToo era. Bill went to his usual go-to: his excellent record on appointing women.... Bill Clinton tried his usual trick of scapegoating, as he and his co-author, James Patterson, evoked J.F.K. and L.B.J. to Melvin. That was an unpleasant echo of Clinton aides calling around to reporters during the 1998 spiral to say that J.F.K. had fooled around with young women at the White House. But by 1998, feminism had been flowering for 30 years. And J.F.K. was no role model in that regard.... And Bill Clinton has learned that his threadbare routine of maudlin self-pity and casting blame on everyone but himself doesn’t work anymore."

From "Bill’s Belated #MeToo Moment" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

"For years, an unwavering certitude of industry, think tanks, demographers, policy-makers and city planners everywhere has been that humanity is moving to the city."

"We just needed to figure out how to house, employ and feed everyone in a condensed space. Yes, but... in a mea culpa at Brookings, William Frey, a demographer, said that, based on new census data, he has changed his mind on what he thought was a mass urbanization trend. He still thinks that cities will attract 'young people — especially well-off, affluent millennials and post-millennials. But this won't be most cities... And, for this younger generation, what I see is more clustered developments within the suburbs, and smaller metros, greater reliance on public transportation and perhaps ride-hailing and self-driving cars.'... Self-driving cars will also make people more likely to perceive places as closer together, since they won't have to become aggravated driving there...."

From "Millennials are moving to the exurbs in droves" (Axios).

"I think within the first minute I’ll know. ... Just my touch, my feel. That’s what I do."

Trump re Kim Jong-un.

"One Hundred Anuses of Solitude."

Via Rex Parker's discussion of today's horrible Sunday crossword.

The letters "ano" are convenient for a crossword, and the NYT continually presents it as a Spanish word meaning "years," but the Spanish word is "año" with a tilde. It's been flagged as a problem for years, but today's reference to the great novel seems almost like an intentional effort to make fun of the idea that it's problem and to leap into hilarity.



How could crosswords take account of all the diacritical marks in foreign language words? Would you just exclude the possibility of using any word that needed a mark? Would you require the mark to be written in and work in both across and down directions? Does the software even support that? I know how to type an "n" with a tilde, but I bet most NYT crossword solvers do not. If you made a special case out of "ano," it would seem so prissy, and yet the NYT crossword does have a fairly prissy standard — avoiding material that seems inconsistent with the conventional picture of its subscribers enjoying escapist amusement at the breakfast table.

"In the 1780s, just to show that creative ridiculousness really knew no bounds, it became briefly fashionable to wear fake eyebrows made of mouse skin."

A line from Bill Bryson's "At Home: A Short History of Private Life" that sprang to mind this morning when I saw the tweeting about Justin Trudeau:

Justin Trudeau’s left eyebrow detached after meeting Trump — so what? These days, who doesn’t wear fake eyebrows? pic.twitter.com/EZTeYllCrH

— Mike (@Doranimated) June 10, 2018

Ooh! The eyebrows have their own Twitter feed:

To those who struggle with fake eyebrows everywhere. I am your leader and I will dance my way to acceptance. #SundayMorning

— Trudeau’s Eyebrows (@TrudeasE) June 10, 2018

ADDED: More seriously, via Yahoo:

Just minutes after a joint communique, approved by the leaders of the Group of Seven allies, was published in Canada's summit host city Quebec, US President Donald Trump launched a Twitter broadside, taking exception to comments made by Trudeau at a news conference.

"He really kinda stabbed us in the back," top US economic advisor Larry Kudlow said of Trudeau on CNN's "State of the Union." "He did a great disservice to the whole G7.... We went through it. We agreed. We compromised on the communique. We joined the communique in good faith," Kudlow said.

US trade advisor Peter Navarro, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," reinforced that message. "There's a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad-faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door," he said.

The eyebrows are symbolic.

I don't know about you, but...

I biked 48 miles yesterday. Yeah, it's an e-bike, but still...



We made it down to the Stewart Tunnel just south of Belleville. The quarter-mile tunnel has a curve that makes its center completely dark.



We biked through the tunnel and back twice — something I can do easily now! —  before heading home, via Paoli, where we got some Babcock ice cream at the Paoli Bread and Brat House.

As for the Stewart Tunnel:

"Kim Jong-un arrived in Singapore... on an Air China jet on Sunday afternoon, local time, after his longest trip overseas as head of state..."

"... amid huge security precautions on the city-state island. Two decoy flights were also dispatched. He was driven into the city-state in a convoy of more than 20 vehicles, including an ambulance, with North Korean television cameramen filming his progress through the sunroofs. A large limousine with a North Korean flag was seen surrounded by other black vehicles with tinted windows as it sped through the city's streets to the St. Regis Hotel... 'Welcomed Chairman Kim Jong Un, who has just arrived in Singapore,' [Singapore's Foreign Minister Vivian] Balakrishnan said on Twitter, alongside a picture of him shaking hands with Kim wearing glasses and a dark Maoist suit."

Reports The Daily Mail in "Bring it UN! Kim Jong-un arrives in Singapore on an Air China flight two days before historic summit with Trump - after North Korea dispatched his private jet on dummy flight as a security diversion."

Let me digress, because I'm feeling a little distanced from politics, though of course, I hope for the best at the big summit, and I do see the other Trump-and-foreign-policy story, "Trump Refuses to Sign G-7 Statement and Calls Trudeau ‘Weak.'"

I'm the sort of person who reads the passage quoted above and the first thing I want to talk about is "Vivian Balakrishnan... him..."... a man named Vivian... Vivian, the man's name:

Vivian... is a given name... derived from a Latin name of the Roman Empire period, masculine Vivianus and feminine Viviana, which survived into modern use because it is the name of two early Christian female martyrs as well as of a male saint and bishop....

The Latin name Vivianus is recorded from the 1st century. It is ultimately related to the adjective vivus "alive"... The latinate given name Vivianus was of limited popularity in the medieval period in reference to Saint Vivianus, a 5th-century bishop of Saintes...

The name was brought to England with the Norman invasion, and is occasionally recorded in England in the 12th and 13th centuries. The masculine given name appears with greater frequency in the early modern period. The spelling Vivian was historically used only as a masculine name, but in the 19th century was also given to girls and was a unisex name until the early part of the 20th century; since the mid 20th century, it has been almost exclusively given as a feminine name in the United States...

Here's a short article on Saint Vivianus:

Saint Vivianus (Vicratius) was one of the Holy Forty Martyrs of Sebaste who refused to sacrifice to pagan gods, and suffered for Christ around 320....

A company of forty Cappadocians.... was stationed in the Armenian city of Sebaste under the command of the pagan Agricola. When these soldiers refused to offer sacrifice to the pagan gods, Agricola locked them up in prison.... The holy soldiers were lined up and thrown into a [freezing cold] lake near the city, and a guard was stationed on the shore to prevent them from coming out of the water. In order to break the will of the martyrs, a warm bath house was set up on the shore...

In the morning, the torturers were surprised to see that the martyrs were still alive.... They led the soldiers out of the water and broke their legs.... They put the bodies of the martyrs on a cart and committed them to fire....

The Apple ringtone "Marimba” uses hemiola — "a specific type of syncopation, featuring three beats where you would intuitively expect two."

"It’s a fairly common musical technique, one that’s been around for centuries, featuring prominently in the work of 19th-century composers like Brahms, Schumann and Tchaikovsky. It also regularly crops up in popular music — from the opening riff of Led Zeppelin’s 'Kashmir'..."



"... to the chorus of Britney Spears’s 'Till the World Ends'..."



"In 'Marimba'..."



"... the accented upper line creates the hemiola with a group of three notes in syncopation against the groups of two. Further, the counterpoint of the two lines jumps dramatically in pitch range, with the upper line using higher pitches that stick out conspicuously because of the accents against the lower notes in the second line.... Like 'Marimba' and [another Apple ringtone] 'Xylophone'..."



"... Queen’s 'We Will Rock You'...



"... has two repeating strands of musical activity: the stomping and clapping line, followed by Freddie Mercury’s declamatory lyrics in a freer rhythmic pattern. It’s this combination of brevity, repeatability and layered complexity that makes both pop songs and ringtones so sticky. 'The catchiness arises from the chunked and sequential nature of tunes; once they interest an ear, they play themselves through to a point of rest,' music theorist and cognitive scientist Elizabeth Margulis..."

From "No, iPhone ringtones aren’t bad. They’re musically sophisticated" by Alyssa Barnes (in WaPo).

What to do with the garden's overflowing supply of mesclun.

I had the idea of making smoothies... but what else goes in it? And would it be any good? Googling, I found, "Creative Ways to Use Tender Greens, Because Salad Fatigue Is Real" in Bon Appetit. The first idea is my first idea, the smoothie:

If you put kale in your smoothies, you'd better believe you can add tender greens, too. In fact, greens like mesclun and soft lettuces are sweeter than kale, and combine well with fruits and herbs. We'd steer clear of arugula, though—it can be assertively peppery.

That linked to "The Greenest Smoothie," which is one of those too-many-ingredients recipes. And there's one ingredient — frozen banana — that I think takes over a week of prep time if you haven't already ripened bananas and squirreled them away in the freezer. But I do come away with the idea that ginger and frozen pineapple could go in there. Matcha? Hmm. Why? I suspect Bon Appetit of needing to be special, not normal, and I just want normal.

I think I'm going to blend all that mesclun with some fresh orange juice, because orange juice is what I happen to have in the house. Isn't that the point of smoothies — using up your leftovers? Thought of like that, the blender seems like a garbage disposal. Noisy manufacturers of sludge.