I have not been writing that much about the administration of Donald Trump with its daily diet of outrageous and contradictory things that he and members of his administration say on the record (usually via Twitter), and the news reports based on leaks from anonymous sources within the administration about all the dubious activities that he and his family members and others have been engaged in. It seems to be better to wait for actual facts to emerge rather than try to follow the twists and turns of rumors and speculations.
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Marcus Ranum looks at the chaos that the US has unleashed in Libya as a result of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s ‘liberal interventionist’ strategy. This is an old strategy that involves asserting US military power to overthrow leaders whom the US no longer finds useful for its purposes but dressed up in the guise of trying to save the people from a despot. But once the leader is overthrown, the US walks away and the media treats the resulting situation as if it were the working out of local factors and not as a consequence of US actions.

The net result is that people who at one point lived in a modern functioning society suddenly find themselves in utter misery and despair. We now see Libya as the source of many refuges fleeing the devastation with some of them seeking revenge through groups like ISIS at those who did this to them, and the country itself the source of weaponry throughout the region.

At one of the G20 meetings currently going on in Hamburg, Germany that dealt with the important question of how to improve the conditions in some African countries in order to stem the tide of refugees fleeing awful conditions, who do you think represented the US among the other 19 heads of state and sat between Germany’s president Angela Merkel and China’s president Xi Jinping? Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, or National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, all of whom are present as part of the US delegation?
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Donald Trump seems intent on making childish belligerent noises over North Korea and this is concerning because bellicose rhetoric (such as considering doing some “very severe things”) has the effect of raising the stakes and expectations. This can create its own dynamic and lead to Trump doing something rash because to not take action after talking tough would make him (at least in his own eyes and those of his supporters) look weak, and for such weak-minded people that is something to be avoided at all costs.
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On this Independence Day holiday, I am repeating a post on what to me is one of the most intriguing phrases in the US Declaration of Independence. It is contained in the famous sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I have always found the inclusion of “the pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable right to be appealing. One does not expect to see such a quaint sentiment in a revolutionary political document, and its presence sheds an interesting and positive light on the minds and aspirations of the people who drafted it. [Read more…]

Jayanthi Kuru Utumpala became the first Sri Lankan to climb Mount Everest. In an article, she recounts the difficulties that she had to overcome in order to make it. Only three other countries (Poland, South Africa, and Croatia) have had women as the first summiteers.
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