The 27 other leaders of the EU offered the UK’s prime minister Theresa May, and she accepted, a new deadline of October 31, 2019 to pass a Brexit plan. She has told parliament that if they pass a plan earlier, they can withdraw earlier. She also had to face the humiliation of promising “sincere cooperation” while still in the EU and imploring the EU to ignore the threats from some of her backbenchers that while in the EU, they would disrupt its workings, threats that resulted in France urging language that would summarily expel Britain if they misbehaved. The French proposal was deemed to be illegal but that it was raised showed how fed up some countries are with the UK.
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I suspect that many readers of this blog also read Marcus Ranum over at stderr but just in case you don’t, I want to refer you to a post he made today that deals with something I too have been mulling over, and that is whether we are dealing with a president who is slowly, before our very eyes, showing signs of a cognitive degeneration and if so how best we should respond to it.

It is not recommended even for professionals in the field of mental health to make remote diagnoses of the cognitive state of people. It is hard to say when a person’s brain is malfunctioning because that would imply that we know what ‘normal’ brain functioning looks like. How do we distinguish between words and actions that are deliberately malevolent and those that are inadvertent, since all actions are the result of brain functions? This is the problem that confronts judges and juries when a defendant raises the insanity defense.

And of course, even if Trump has degenerative brain problem, it should not prevent us from harshly criticizing and mocking the actual policies he is setting in motion. But as Marcus says, it perhaps should make us more cautious about mocking his verbal misstatements. This is not easy to do since his actions are so hateful that one wants to throw the kitchen sink at him.

I do not listen to Donald Trump’s speeches or even his press conferences. The only glimpses I have of his speech are when short clips of them appear on the news or the comedy shows so the disturbing patterns that Marcus describes were not noticed by me.

Today is the day that British prime minister Theresa May is to go to Brussels to present the UK’s plan for withdrawing from the EU. But of course she has no plan. The EU is rejecting her appeal for a short extension until June 30 to arrive at a plan, rightly concluding that she will not be able to do so within that time frame. The EU has the option of rejecting any extension, causing the UK to crash out with no deal on Friday. But they are not likely to be that hard-nosed and are insisting on a longer deadline, until the end of this year or until the end of March 2020. That seems reasonable, except of course that it will make the hard-core Brexiters apoplectic since it will involve the UK staying in the EU longer and also taking part in the EU elections for the European parliament. If the UK does not hold EU elections between May 23-26, they will be automatically ejected from the EU on June 1.
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The departing head of the Department of Homeland Security, who oversaw and implemented the cruel policy that separated children from their parents and placed them in cages, is following the familiar dual-track path of all fired Trump administration employees: publicly sucking up to Trump so as not to anger his base while leaking to the media that she was actually a restraining force that opposed his vicious policies. She is undoubtedly hoping that the latter will result in her reputation being recovered from the gutter where it currently is.
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The US government feels that it has the right to intervene in the affairs of other countries to the extent of destabilizing them, supporting insurgent groups, creating coups, and even invading them. But it denounces anyone that fights back. For example, Afghans who attack US troops in that country are accused of being terrorists and charged as such. But if a foreign country were to ever invade the US, would Americans who take up arms against the invaders be called terrorists? And what of countries that provide support to Americans fighting the foreign invaders? Would those countries be labeled as state supporters of terrorism? To ask the question is to reveal the hypocrisy.
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The radio program On The Media this week had an absolutely gripping interview with Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. It begins at the 3:30 mark and lasts for about 50 minutes, laying out in great detail the hypocrisy of claiming to be a republic while actually being an empire that denied rights to the large populations under its control.
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Via a commenter, I received this news item of how the US has denied the entry visa of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court because she had the quaint notion that Americans were subject to the same international laws as people of other countries, especially pertaining to war crimes. She vows to carry on regardless.

US authorities revoked International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s entry visa to the United States, her office and the US State Department confirmed Friday.

“It is our understanding that should not have an impact on the Prosecutor’s travel to the US to meet her obligations to the UN, including regular briefings before the UN Security Council,” her office said in a statement.

“The Office of the Prosecutor has an independent and impartial mandate under the Rome Statute of the ICC. The Prosecutor and her Office will continue to undertake that statutory duty with utmost commitment and professionalism, without fear or favor,” it said.

A State Department spokesperson reiterated that the US would “take the necessary steps to protect its sovereignty and to protect our people from unjust investigation and prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC).”

UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said Friday that they “expect the United States to live up to the agreement to allow for the travel of ICC staff members to do their work at the United Nations.”

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