Topics for this week include: vacation notes; Russia; Donald Trump; home rule (for D.C.); tax reform; Korea; gerrymandering; energy in the western US; book burning; Jim Crow.

Vacation notes: Yours truly is back after a vacation that included short visits to Cork (Ireland), Falmouth  (England), Le Havre (France), Southampton (England), and a 5-day stay in London. While in England, there were four plays: "Wonderland," (in Southampton) an update of Lewis Carroll's Alice; "42nd Street," "School of Rock," and "The Wipers Times."
     The first three are probably familiar, but not the last. "The Wipers Times" is set amid the chaos and horror of the trench warfare on the Western Front during WW I. One British unit finds a workable printing press and decides that one way to ameliorate their circumstances was a front line spoof, modeled on Punch. "Wipers" was their take of the hard to pronounce name of the nearby Belgian village, Ypres.  

Russia, now Islamist's #1 target? Story here.

Trump and the Romanov dynasty. Story here.

Trump's emerging foreign policy.  Fareed Zakaria points out that "Trump’s bluster and bravado on North Korea will only make the U.S. look weak... [The] administration’s basic foreign policy is coming into view, and it is not a reassuring sight — bellicose rhetoric, hollow threats, contradictory voices and little coordination with allies. The approach is being tested on the most difficult foreign policy problem of all: North Korea."
     In the Asian theater, America was on the "winning side" in WW II, accepted a stalemate in Korea, then declared victory before abandoning South Vietnam to the stronger, communist, North. Now the Korean peninsula has returned to haunt us. The "undying" Kim dynasty has dominated North Korea since 1948 and now the founder's ruling grandson has nuclear weapons that threaten its immediate neighbors and, in the near future, the US and, by extension, the world.
     This young, cruel, bellicose, nuclear-armed dictator faces an American president and secretary of state who are, at best, neophytes in foreign affairs, operating with an under-staffed State Department and National Security Council. Unsettling to say the least.

The less-than-clued-in, directionless, "never mind" president. Now about those campaign promises? George Will relates that, more often than not, the president's response is, "On, never mind." More importantly "[i]n foreign policy, the nature of an action is a function of what the actor says about it." Here, too, the president is neither terribly articulate or concise. Lacking firm statement of purpose, his attack on Syria was less effective than it might have been.
     Especially since the raid "... did not do much damage to anything the Assad regime cares about. . . . An effective, destructive attack — that is, one that would worry the Assad regime — would have killed skilled personnel, military and political leaders, and elite fighters. Blowing up some installations is not, in fact, ‘proportionate’ to the massacre of children.” 
     One long-time writer on national security matters believes that [f]oreigners understand that you can’t stand by anything Trump says....Instead, the world is learning to “watch what he does, not what he says — and watch what his underlings do."
     Apparently, it took more than four days for the White House to realize that the president's announced USN carrier task force was not headed towards the Korean peninsula; they were headed for the Indian Ocean and had to be re-directed northward. "Amelia Earhart, where are you?"

Home Rule. For the District of Columbia, that is. With all the unusualness afoot, more and more residents of D. C. were hoping for their ultimate: home rule. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the past chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee worked very hard against Home Rule. Now that he has announced his retirement, hope again springs eternal.  

The "new"America. Opinion writer Richard Cohen's latest on line column was titled: "Young men in devastated countries used to dream of America. Not anymore." A friend of Cohen, a world traveler who has helped the destitute around the world, reported that some young men in strife-torn Yemen were not looking to America for salvation, a safe harbor, a new beginning. Their view of America had changed. “America is not a friendly place.”
      Cohen commented, "Never mind the loss of tourist dollars and never mind, too, lost tax revenue. What matters more is the loss of the image we used to have as a nation." Nevertheless, when tourism revenues are down, something is amiss. Is the cause the visage of President Trump as the uncaring, the unwelcoming, the "ugly American?" The crass, blame-shifting star of "The Apprentice," who has been visible for years, is now in charge.
     Having just returned from England and Ireland, I can report that the mood there about America has changed. Once again, the favored T-shirt is Canadian.

Tax reform? Washington Post writer Catherine Rampell notes what might/might not happen if the Trump tax plan is passed in its present form. She theorizes about how many individuals with smaller incomes might opt for a change in legal status to benefit from lower tax rates in the proposed plan.

The Korean Peninsula. This is from Foreign Policy's Friday morning briefing.

Top news: In an interview with Reuters on Thursday, President Donald Trump warned of the possibility of a “major, major” conflict with North Korea, although he said that a diplomatic solution would be preferable. “We’d love to solve things diplomatically but it’s very difficult,” he said.
     He also said that he wanted South Korea to pay for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system that the United States is installing, although its political popularity among South Korean voters has come into question. In addition, he called for the renegotiation of a trade deal with Seoul.
      The remarks were poorly received in South Korea, where a May 9 presidential election is approaching.
      In an interview with NPR on Friday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson clarified: “We have been very clear as to what our objectives are. And equally clear what our objectives are not. And we do not seek regime change, we do not seek a collapse of the regime, we do not seek an accelerated reunification of the peninsula. We seek a denuclearized Korean Peninsula.”
      Tillerson is set to run a special U.N. Security Council meeting on North Korea on Friday, with the goal of achieving more sanctions.

     At least his last tweet was repetitively duo-syllabic, "major, major." Though wonders when Secretary of State Tillerson will tire of having to continually "clarify" his president's tweets? (Could the president's moniker be "the tweeting president?") Obviously, President Trump was unaware that Seoul, South Korea's large, heavily populated capital, was well within range of the North's massive -- and well dispersed -- artillery forces. No need to rely on aircraft -- and artillery means there would be literally thousands of targets to attack.

In his Friday column, Michael Gerson notes. "In his first meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the American president got his first glimpse of the Chinese perspective and was transformed. On North Korea: 'After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy.' ” This comment says volumes about what the president does not know about foreign affairs. In the movie, "A League of Their Own,"  Tom Hanks said baseball was supposed to be hard. "It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it."
     The same can be said of foreign affairs which, as the president is rapidly finding out, is not as easy as firing mere TV apprentices. Kim Jong Un's nuclear weapons are a real world problem.

Geometry and Gerrymandering. The concept of a tortured (gerrymandered) legislative district has been around for a very long time. Courts have used words like "compact," and "contiguous," but applying these words to the actual configurations has not always been easy. Contiguous is relatively simple, but what is "compact?" Today, modern geometers and mathematicians are looking at districts.

Too much $$$?  Someone collects $60M for a book deal; someone pays multiple millions to an as-yet-untested college football star; a very wealthy grown man grudgingly admit his new job is much harder than he expected. All say much about America's current ills. (Respectively, President Obama and any one of the many instant millionaires in the NFL draft and President Trump.)
     Given the job's importance, a close reading of Mr. Milbank's column about President Trump makes for startling, troubling reading and causes one to ponder the nation's future.

Energy in the West. With President Trump's initiatives at the Energy Department and the EPA, the coal miners (east and west) have been hoping for a new good times. An article in a recent edition of the High Country News asks "What's really killing King Coal?" Today's major culprit is one over which neither Energy or EPA have much leverage: natural gas.
     In the past week's natural gas news, it was reported that Anadarko Petroleum has temporarily shut down 3,000+ wells in northeastern CO after a home near Firestone exploded killing two workmen. The house was located just 178 feet from a natural gas well (drilled in 1993) belonging to Anadarko. Multiple agencies are working to determine what caused the explosion. There is concern for regulations and inspectioons relating to both wells and transmission lines.

21st century electronic book burning. Down through the ages civilizations have "burned books," i.e. attempted to set the record straight by destroying "false" information. Sometimes material was just banned, e.g. the Catholic church's Librorum Prohibitorum, sometimes burned or otherwise destroyed, e.g. burnings by German university students on May 10, 1933. Sometimes heretics were put to death.  Of late, radical Islamists have been in the news destroying sacred texts and objects of less militant Moslem groups.  A hundred years before the advent of Hitler, the German-Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, had declared: "Wherever books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too."
     Now various US government agencies/departments are cleansing their websites of material deemed unacceptable, especially relating to climate change. Thankfully, to date no offending authors have been physically burned.

The New Jim Crow. This article from the London Review of Books explores the status of race in a post-Obama world. All is not yet well; the past remains a nightmare with which we have to deal.

Thank you for reading. May the sunshine on your area.