*The Art of the Steal | Thucydides & Intelligence | Where is Syria’s Guernica?

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“Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.” – Thucydides

“In general, the men of lower intelligence won out. Afraid of their own shortcomings and of the intelligence of their opponents, so that they would not lose out in reasoned argument or be taken by surprise by their quick-witted opponents, they boldly moved into action. Their enemies, on the contrary, contemptuous and confident in their ability to anticipate, thought there was no need to take by action what they could win by their brains.” – Ibid.

Trump’s “Deal” Might Become North Korea’s Art of the Steal: According to President Trump, after his June 12 summit with Kim Jong-un America no longer had a nuclear threat from North Korea. Two and a half weeks later, new US intelligence reports say the threat is apparently back on. Not surprisingly, US officials are concluding that North Korea does not intend to fully surrender its nuclear stockpile; furthermore, it appears to be considering ways to conceal the number of nuclear warheads and missiles it has, as well as locations of secret production facilities.

The Washington Post reported last year that the North Koreans could have up to 60 nuclear warheads. Kim has acknowledged a lone uranium-enrichment site in Yongbyon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang, which is estimated to have produced fissile material for perhaps two dozen warheads. But as the Post first reported in May, North Koreans also have operated a secret underground uranium enrichment site known as Kangson, which is thought to have twice the enrichment capacity of Yongbyon. Defense Intelligence Agency officials, who spoke Friday on condition of anonymity, said the new intelligence assessments determined North Korean officials believe they can deceive Washington because the US is unaware of the full range of their activities.

While President Trump views his diplomacy as a great triumph, one expert pointed out: “North Korea has made no new commitments to denuclearization… (it) remains free to manufacture more nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and other weapons of mass destruction…There is no deadline for them to eliminate their illegal capabilities, or even freeze their continued production.”

One day after Saturday’s reports that Pyongyang has increased its production of enriched uranium at secret sites, President Trump told Fox News it was “possible” the deal he claimed ended the nuclear threat posed by North Korea would not “work out”. Regardless, Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, insisted North Korea’s nuclear program could still be dismantled within a year.

– Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, better known as AMLO, has won a decisive victory in the 2018 Mexican presidential election. The end of corruption, violence, and poverty were promises made by the newly elected leftist president, but many are wondering just how he will put an end to the raging drug wars and massive political corruption all the while dealing with the country’s faltering economy. (NYT)

– Follow this link to learn how, in May, the deadly Nipah virus, which attacks the brain and has the potential to send a young, healthy person into a coma within 24 hours, stuck in a small village in India, but thanks to the health officer who led a task force determined to stop the spread of the virus, it was eradicated quickly and even became the subject of a singing, dancing Bollywood-style music video. (NPR)

– Syrian forces have driven 160,000 people from their homes in several towns in eastern Dara’a Province over the past week. The assault violates the cease-fire negotiated last year by Russia, Jordan and the US, which was the Trump administration’s main peacekeeping achievement in Syria. Pressure is mounting on Jordan to admit what could be hundreds of thousands more refugees than the 1.3 million it already took in, a heightened risk of destabilization of that country. Several thousand refugees are sheltering in tents along the border of the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. The Israeli military said the refugees lacked “access to water, electricity, sources of food or other basic necessities.” Dara’a was where the uprising to topple President Bashar al-Assad began seven years ago. The resulting civil war has so far taken thousands of lives and displaced 12 million people. This conflict has seemingly morphed into our modern day version of our Spanish Civil War. All we need is a Guernica. (NYT)

– A lawyer for President Trump, Rudy Giuliani, spoke at a rally staged by an extreme Iranian opposition group in Paris on Saturday, calling for regime change in Tehran. The group, National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), is an umbrella coalition largely controlled by the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MeK) and was once listed as a terrorist organization in the US and Europe. It is still widely viewed as a Marxist-Islamist cult built around the personality of its leader, Maryam Rajavi. Giuliani, addressing about 4,000 people of whom many were refugees and young eastern Europeans bussed in to attend the rally in return for a weekend trip to Paris, said: “The mullahs must go, the ayatollah must go, and they must be replaced by a democratic government which Madam Rajavi represents.” (The Guardian)

American Ambassadors Quit: A US ambassador who has served under six presidents and 11 secretaries of state have called it quits. James D. Melville Jr. abruptly resigned Friday as America’s ambassador to Estonia, a small NATO ally bordering Russia. Melville reportedly told friends that he could no longer abide President Trump’s apparent hostility toward institutions that have stabilized Europe since the end of the Cold War, adding: “For the President to say the [European Union] was ‘set up to take advantage of the United States, to attack our piggy bank,’ or that ‘NATO is as bad as NAFTA’ is not only factually wrong but proves to me that it’s time to go.”

Ambassador Melville is not the only ambassador who can’t abide with the Trump administration: “The Diplomat Who Quit the Trump Administration: For John Feeley, the Ambassador to Panama, moral failings at home seemed to compound tactical failings abroad.” All of this seems to have confirmed the prophetic words of  “The French Ambassador, Gérard Araud, [who] had tweeted after the [2016] election, “A world is collapsing before our eyes. Vertigo.” (Washington Post & New Yorker)

– The Judicial Crisis Network is a conservative non-profit that pledged $10 million to win confirmation for President Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch. Now that Justice Anthony Kennedy has announced his retirement effective July 31, it’s gearing up again, along with other groups like the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, which said it’s “prepared to commit seven figures”, the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony Fund, Heritage Action, and others. In particular, peril is the 1973 decision Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion nationwide. Trump has vowed to nominate judges who will overturn Roe. (NPR)

– Fox News has given Donald Trump a bully pulpit. Now the line between the network and the White House is about to blur even further. Former Fox News co-president Bill Shine, who helped create the look and feel of the channel’s conservative programming, is about to become the president’s new deputy chief of staff, overseeing communications. (NYT)

– Not only does it seem like people are arguing more (NFL, Congress, Supreme Court, anything Trump-related, Brexit, Facebook, Twitter, etc…) but it seems like people can’t even agree on how to argue. The Atlantic on “Five Features of Better Arguments: A former Clinton administration official studied how to facilitate more constructive arguments among Americans. These are his conclusions.” The Washington Post covers “Democrats’ civility rift is the latest intraparty problem. And they can’t agree on how to resolve it.” And the New York Times (not Eminem) says “White America’s Age-Old, Misguided Obsession With Civility.”

– White America is a subject that has become an arguing point for many writers of late and undoubtedly will be for the next few years to decades. One African-American woman who is a Washington Post opinions editor writes “I no longer have hope in white America.” And another women writer from New York Magazine shares this sentiment “Summer of Rage: White men are the minority in the United States — no wonder they get uncomfortable when their power is challenged.” Meanwhile, in the New York Times another essayist explored “White Extinction Anxiety” and “Trump is president and is beloved by his base in part because he is unapologetically defending whiteness from anything that threatens it, or at least that’s the image he wants to project. It is no more complicated than that.”

– At Daily Pnut we have come to the realization that America is as much Barack Obama as it is Donald Trump. As much a white country as it is a non-white country. It is as much a history of slavery and segregation as it is of civil rights. It is a country that carelessly sends its service members to combat and also claims to venerate them when they return home broken. It is not just represented by the Statue of Liberty. It is a colossus of contradictions. Here’s an excellent quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald about not just the nature of arguments but also contradictions: “Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

LAST MORSELS

“They whose minds are least sensitive to calamity, and whose hands are most quick to meet it, are the greatest men and the greatest communities.” – Thucydides

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