- Donald Trump’s first 100 days (Economist) "...Mr Trump helpfully issued a '100-day action plan to make America great again'. These 18 actions and ten congressional bills spelt out Mr Trump’s priorities for his presidency. They included construction of a wall on the Mexican border... ...efforts have not begun on 12 of the issues in his action plan."
- President Trump: In my first 100 days, I kept my promise to Americans (WaPo) "No longer will we listen to the same failed voices of the past who brought us nothing but war overseas, poverty at home and the loss of companies, jobs and our wealth to countries that have taken total advantage of the United States. The White House is once again the People’s House. And I will do everything in my power to be the People’s President — to faithfully, loyally and proudly champion the incredible citizens who love this nation and who call this God-blessed land their home."
- We set a low bar for Trump. He still failed to meet it. (WaPo) "Ultimately, Trump is failing because he has little knowledge of the world and no guiding star of moral principle. The best of our leaders — think Abraham Lincoln — have been sure about the truth and uncertain about themselves. Trump is the opposite."
- Trump has already started building a legacy. It’s highly negative (WaPo) "At the 100-day mark, it seems clear that the system is working properly and that Trump is more likely to go down in history as a weak and ineffective president than as an American tyrant. There are multiple sources of this weakness. Most immediate is Trump’s own ignorance of the workings of the U.S. government and the inexperience of the advisers he chose to surround himself with. Trump’s second weakness is structural. To be a powerful president, he would have had to reach out beyond the narrow base that brought him victory in the electoral college, just as President Ronald Reagan succeeded in doing. His main legacy will be a highly negative one: the first president to undermine a whole series of informal norms about American government. The second negative legacy has to do with government service. The Trump administration has done nothing but express contempt for the public servants who run the government. Third, Trump is the first president in living memory who has not paid even lip service to the importance of democracy or human rights around the world."
- Lessons From 100 Days of President Trump (NYT) "Here are a dozen things we have learned in President Trump’s first 100 days. Trump has had the worst beginning of any president since, oh, perhaps William Henry Harrison (who died a month after his inauguration). Trump distinguishes himself in one area: incompetence. New presidents typically grow into the job, but Trump remains a bully and a charlatan. The opposition to Trump has been ineffective in reaching Trump voters, and he remains deeply popular with his base. Trump systematically betrays his supporters. Trump has built a colossal swamp in Washington, hiring lobbyists to craft policies governing the very companies that previously paid them. Bless the American people: Scapegoating and bigotry carry a political price. After initially tussling with allies like Australia and Mexico, and apparently refusing to shake Angela Merkel’s hand for a photo, Trump has partially adapted to reality on foreign policy... Perhaps the greatest single risk of a Trump presidency is what he calls a “major, major conflict” erupting on the Korean Peninsula. Democrats should be careful to avoid Trump Derangement Syndrome. Let’s avoid the temptation to chase the latest shiny thing. The Republic stands."
NEWS:
- Trump on North Korea: Tactic? ‘Madman Theory’? Or Just Mixed Messages? (NYT) "Mr. Trump’s negotiating strategy has often involved the taking of an extreme position, hoping that the other actor in a test of wills will be thrown off enough to move in his direction. That’s one thing when it means threatening to pull out of Nafta, the gambit Mr. Trump floated, then retreated from, earlier in the week. But it can be a far riskier bet when exchanging signals with Mr. Kim, who has survived so far – like his father and grandfather before him – by employing a similar playbook of extreme rhetoric, often followed by acts of violence."
- Charles Koch: Trump’s policies must not benefit only big businesses like mine (WaPo) "...here are a few policy changes I believe are vital — and genuinely achievable, by this president, at this moment — to improving well-being and opportunity for all Americans: Comprehensive tax reform is long overdue. The health-care debate has been a mess... ...there are actions the administration can take in the meantime, such as reforming the Food and Drug Administration and granting discretion to states to innovate within the constructs of Obamacare and Medicaid. As a candidate, the president spoke passionately about the need to reduce crime rates and improve safety, particularly in urban areas. The president can...work[ing] with lawmakers who stand ready to reform our criminal-justice system."
- How Trump Blew Up the Conservative Media (Politico) "...Trump’s nomination and subsequent election scrambled the pecking order across the conservative media landscape in ways its leaders are still grappling with. His rise has fractured the once-powerful editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and elevated Breitbart—which enjoys a direct line to the White House, with Bannon perched in the West Wing, and is now struggling with how to wield its newfound power. Meanwhile, Fox News, the network with which Trump feuded bitterly during the campaign, has developed the closest relationship with the new administration of any television network. The result of this overall shift is, in essence, a new branch of the Fourth Estate in which the elites have lost their power, and some of the most central outlets are more closely intertwined with the executive branch than ever before. ...for the first time ever, traditionally conservative journalists find themselves out of sync with their audience. They’ve found that standing athwart the Trump presidency, yelling stop, to paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr., is a lonely place to be."
- Trump Discovers the Trouble with Being President (National Review) "Donald Trump, the wealthy heir to a real-estate empire and complete political neophyte, was, compared to any of his predecessors, uniquely unprepared for what is quite possibly the most difficult job on Planet Earth. And after 100 days in office, he’s beginning — at least, in his more introspective moments — to appreciate just how difficult that job is."
- Michael Flynn’s fall tells a much bigger story (WaPo) "Senior command is a world unto itself. The tribal culture that envelops all our military and intelligence personnel is especially tight for our most secret warriors. They sometimes miss the signals that life outside will be different."
- The Pond-Skater Presidency (NYT) "The Trump threat has become smaller in three ways. First, it is increasingly clear that everything about Trump is less substantial than it appears. Second, Trump’s competency level has risen from catastrophic to merely inadequate. Third, Trump has detached himself from the only truly revolutionary movement of our time. ...Trump has mostly switched from being a subversive populist to being a conventional corporatist."
READ THIS:
- The Inevitable (Kevin Kelly) "...this book...looks at what the future has for us in the next 30 years, with each of the 12 forces described being a broad theme (i.e. Sharing, Screening, Accessing, etc.) that we can easily recognize today as happening but he explains in a broader context and outlines where it will take us."
TECHNOLOGY:
- An Obscure App Flaw Creates Backdoors In Millions of Smartphones (Wired) "They found that 1,632 applications created open ports on smartphones, mostly intended to allow users to connect to them from PCs to send text messages, transfer files, or use the phone as a proxy to connect to the rest of the internet."
WATCH THIS:
- Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo (Gravitas Ventures) "At the heart of the Apollo program was the special team in Mission Control who put a man on the moon and helped create the future." and The Untold Story of the Back-Room Team That Saved Apollo 13 (Wired) "Besides Apollo 13, the film recounts the tragedy of the first mission in 1967, when three astronauts were killed in a preflight test, and the success of the moon landings—all from the perspective of those key individuals back on Earth. Usually, nobody remembers these engineers who took men to the moon, and brought them back. They were just that good."
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- The race to build the world’s first sex robot (Guardian) "The major breakthrough of McMullen’s prototype is artificial intelligence that allows it to learn what its owner wants and likes. It will be able to fill a niche that no other product in the sex industry currently can: by talking, learning and responding to her owner’s voice, Harmony is designed to be as much a substitute partner as a sex toy."
TODAY'S SONG:
- California (The Lagoons)
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- We set a low bar for Trump. He still failed to meet it. (WaPo) "Ultimately, Trump is failing because he has little knowledge of the world and no guiding star of moral principle. The best of our leaders — think Abraham Lincoln — have been sure about the truth and uncertain about themselves. Trump is the opposite."
- Trump has already started building a legacy. It’s highly negative (WaPo) "At the 100-day mark, it seems clear that the system is working properly and that Trump is more likely to go down in history as a weak and ineffective president than as an American tyrant. There are multiple sources of this weakness. Most immediate is Trump’s own ignorance of the workings of the U.S. government and the inexperience of the advisers he chose to surround himself with. Trump’s second weakness is structural. To be a powerful president, he would have had to reach out beyond the narrow base that brought him victory in the electoral college, just as President Ronald Reagan succeeded in doing. His main legacy will be a highly negative one: the first president to undermine a whole series of informal norms about American government. The second negative legacy has to do with government service. The Trump administration has done nothing but express contempt for the public servants who run the government. Third, Trump is the first president in living memory who has not paid even lip service to the importance of democracy or human rights around the world."
- Lessons From 100 Days of President Trump (NYT) "Here are a dozen things we have learned in President Trump’s first 100 days. Trump has had the worst beginning of any president since, oh, perhaps William Henry Harrison (who died a month after his inauguration). Trump distinguishes himself in one area: incompetence. New presidents typically grow into the job, but Trump remains a bully and a charlatan. The opposition to Trump has been ineffective in reaching Trump voters, and he remains deeply popular with his base. Trump systematically betrays his supporters. Trump has built a colossal swamp in Washington, hiring lobbyists to craft policies governing the very companies that previously paid them. Bless the American people: Scapegoating and bigotry carry a political price. After initially tussling with allies like Australia and Mexico, and apparently refusing to shake Angela Merkel’s hand for a photo, Trump has partially adapted to reality on foreign policy... Perhaps the greatest single risk of a Trump presidency is what he calls a “major, major conflict” erupting on the Korean Peninsula. Democrats should be careful to avoid Trump Derangement Syndrome. Let’s avoid the temptation to chase the latest shiny thing. The Republic stands."
NEWS:
- Trump on North Korea: Tactic? ‘Madman Theory’? Or Just Mixed Messages? (NYT) "Mr. Trump’s negotiating strategy has often involved the taking of an extreme position, hoping that the other actor in a test of wills will be thrown off enough to move in his direction. That’s one thing when it means threatening to pull out of Nafta, the gambit Mr. Trump floated, then retreated from, earlier in the week. But it can be a far riskier bet when exchanging signals with Mr. Kim, who has survived so far – like his father and grandfather before him – by employing a similar playbook of extreme rhetoric, often followed by acts of violence."
- Charles Koch: Trump’s policies must not benefit only big businesses like mine (WaPo) "...here are a few policy changes I believe are vital — and genuinely achievable, by this president, at this moment — to improving well-being and opportunity for all Americans: Comprehensive tax reform is long overdue. The health-care debate has been a mess... ...there are actions the administration can take in the meantime, such as reforming the Food and Drug Administration and granting discretion to states to innovate within the constructs of Obamacare and Medicaid. As a candidate, the president spoke passionately about the need to reduce crime rates and improve safety, particularly in urban areas. The president can...work[ing] with lawmakers who stand ready to reform our criminal-justice system."
- How Trump Blew Up the Conservative Media (Politico) "...Trump’s nomination and subsequent election scrambled the pecking order across the conservative media landscape in ways its leaders are still grappling with. His rise has fractured the once-powerful editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and elevated Breitbart—which enjoys a direct line to the White House, with Bannon perched in the West Wing, and is now struggling with how to wield its newfound power. Meanwhile, Fox News, the network with which Trump feuded bitterly during the campaign, has developed the closest relationship with the new administration of any television network. The result of this overall shift is, in essence, a new branch of the Fourth Estate in which the elites have lost their power, and some of the most central outlets are more closely intertwined with the executive branch than ever before. ...for the first time ever, traditionally conservative journalists find themselves out of sync with their audience. They’ve found that standing athwart the Trump presidency, yelling stop, to paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr., is a lonely place to be."
- Trump Discovers the Trouble with Being President (National Review) "Donald Trump, the wealthy heir to a real-estate empire and complete political neophyte, was, compared to any of his predecessors, uniquely unprepared for what is quite possibly the most difficult job on Planet Earth. And after 100 days in office, he’s beginning — at least, in his more introspective moments — to appreciate just how difficult that job is."
- Michael Flynn’s fall tells a much bigger story (WaPo) "Senior command is a world unto itself. The tribal culture that envelops all our military and intelligence personnel is especially tight for our most secret warriors. They sometimes miss the signals that life outside will be different."
- The Pond-Skater Presidency (NYT) "The Trump threat has become smaller in three ways. First, it is increasingly clear that everything about Trump is less substantial than it appears. Second, Trump’s competency level has risen from catastrophic to merely inadequate. Third, Trump has detached himself from the only truly revolutionary movement of our time. ...Trump has mostly switched from being a subversive populist to being a conventional corporatist."
READ THIS:
- The Inevitable (Kevin Kelly) "...this book...looks at what the future has for us in the next 30 years, with each of the 12 forces described being a broad theme (i.e. Sharing, Screening, Accessing, etc.) that we can easily recognize today as happening but he explains in a broader context and outlines where it will take us."
TECHNOLOGY:
- An Obscure App Flaw Creates Backdoors In Millions of Smartphones (Wired) "They found that 1,632 applications created open ports on smartphones, mostly intended to allow users to connect to them from PCs to send text messages, transfer files, or use the phone as a proxy to connect to the rest of the internet."
WATCH THIS:
- Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo (Gravitas Ventures) "At the heart of the Apollo program was the special team in Mission Control who put a man on the moon and helped create the future." and The Untold Story of the Back-Room Team That Saved Apollo 13 (Wired) "Besides Apollo 13, the film recounts the tragedy of the first mission in 1967, when three astronauts were killed in a preflight test, and the success of the moon landings—all from the perspective of those key individuals back on Earth. Usually, nobody remembers these engineers who took men to the moon, and brought them back. They were just that good."
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- The race to build the world’s first sex robot (Guardian) "The major breakthrough of McMullen’s prototype is artificial intelligence that allows it to learn what its owner wants and likes. It will be able to fill a niche that no other product in the sex industry currently can: by talking, learning and responding to her owner’s voice, Harmony is designed to be as much a substitute partner as a sex toy."
TODAY'S SONG:
- California (The Lagoons)
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