Stan Brock, The People’s Champ | America Pivots to India | The United States of Separation

“The future depends on what you do today.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Indo-US Security Agreement Shifts Geopolitical Tectonic Plates: The heads of the US defense and state departments, Jim Mattis and Mike Pompeo, met with their Indian counterparts in New Delhi this week. On Thursday they signed the Communication Compatibility and Security Agreement, a joint pact aimed at strengthening military partnership between the two powers. India is critical to the new US “Indo-Pacific” strategy, which hopes to curb China’s rising naval influence in the Pacific by elevating New Delhi as a cornerstone of future military cooperation. The agreement means India will move forward with purchasing advanced American weaponry. In return the US will transfer high-tech communications platforms to India; the countries have been communicating over open radio channels.

A senior lecturer at King’s College, London, said the defense secretaries had pulled off a “huge deal…at a time the Trump White House remains committed to undermining the United States’ global partnerships.” That could be read, in part, as a subtle reference to President Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, his reimposition of sanctions against Tehran, and his threatening allies to stop trading with Iran by November or face similar sanctions. Indian officials said earlier they would ignore the threats and continue buying Iranian oil. They also intend on ignoring Congress’s sanctions against Russia by moving ahead with a $6 billion deal to buy a Russian anti-aircraft missile system, the S-400 Triumf. But as India’s defense minister confirmed at a press conference Thursday: “The defense cooperation has emerged as the most significant dimension of our strategic partnership and as a key driver of our overall bilateral relationship.”

Gay Rights In India: After decades of uncertainty, India has officially voted to decriminalize gay intercourse. The vote, which took place on Thursday, ruled that the 160 year-old law was “against the order of nature.” Celebrations and parties broke out across the country (and the world) as soon as the news was announced. One of the judges who voted, Indu Malhotra, said: “History owes an apology to members of the community for the delay in ensuring their rights.” (Guardian)

Big Brother Russia: Wednesday’s arrest of two Russian intelligence officers for the attempted murder poisonings of Sergei Skripal and his daughter is the result of an investigative technique Britain has pioneered: accumulating mounds of visual data and methodically sifting through it. The country has cutting edge surveillance technology everywhere, with software so sensitive it can scan an airport for a tattoo or a pinkie ring. Then there’s the team of gifted “super-recognizers” who do the grunt work of pouring through all that data. (NYT)

Additional read: “The Detectives Who Never Forget a Face: London’s new squad of “super-recognizers” could inspire a revolution in policing.” (New Yorker)

Stan Brock, The People’s Champ: His is not a household name, but perhaps it should be. Stan Brock had many adventures in his 82 years, the most important of which was founding in 1985 a volunteer mobile medical service for uninsured Americans and poor people in underdeveloped countries. It is estimated his non-profit organization, the Remote Area Medical clinic service, or RAM, has provided medical, vision, and dental care to more than 700,000 patients since its founding, in areas from Appalachia to New York City, Guyana to Puerto Rico. Brock was profiled in a documentary film last year about his life entitled “Medicine Man: The Stan Brock Story.” Brock died August 29 at RAM’s offices in Rockford, Tennessee. (NYT)

Pulling The Plug On Hackers: The Justice Department has filed criminal charges against a North Korean man, accusing him of a series of infamous cyberattacks, including the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment and the WannaCry ransomware that paralyzed computers across the globe. Park Jin Hyok is alleged to have been part of a hacking group known as the “Lazarus Group” that conducted some of the world’s most destructive recent online attacks, including the cybertheft of $81 million from the Bangladesh Bank, at the behest of the North Korean government. It is unclear what effect the charges might have on diplomatic efforts to convince Kim Jong-un to end his nuclear program. (NPR)

– “Earthquake buries homes under landslides in Hokkaido, Japan: Yet another natural disaster has struck part of Japan, continuing a summer of chaos that has seen the country weather deadly floods, typhoons, earthquakes, landslides and heatwaves.” (CNN)

Protests In Iraq: Nearly four months after national elections, Iraq’s floundering political system has failed to name a new government. Protests began last July over continuing unemployment and failure to deliver basic services like electricity and clean drinking water. More violence erupted Wednesday after security forces killed six demonstrators in two days during angry marches in Basra, the largest city in Iraq’s southern Shiite heartland. The UN special representative for Iraq urged authorities to avoid using “disproportionate lethal force against the demonstrators” and appealed to Iraq’s newly elected lawmakers to set aside differences and quickly work toward forming a new government. (WaPo)

Additional read: “Blackwater Guard’s 2nd Murder Trial Ends Without A Verdict: The second murder trial of Nicholas Slatten, the former Blackwater contractor accused of firing the first shots in a shooting that killed more than a dozen unarmed civilians, has ended in a mistrial.” (NPR)

Additional read: Tim from Daily Pnut wrote an op-ed in the LA Times after the Blackwater incident in Iraq: “The outsourced war: The Romans found mercenaries to be a quick-fix solution. However, a temporary fix became a more permanent force that the Romans used when they found their own legions had become too expensive — economically and politically. Let us hope that the United States does not follow the fate of the Roman Empire in this regard.”

Et Tu, Pence?: An opinion piece was published in the New York Times Wednesday that was written by an anonymous senior Trump official who claims to be part of a resistance group of “adults in the room” trying to protect America from its Caligula-like president. The extraordinary column appeared one day after the first excerpts from Bob Woodward’s soon-to-be-released book “Fear” were being quoted. Together the pronouncements describe a “crazytown” atmosphere inside the White House, and portray a commander in chief whose top advisers believe is a danger to the country. Trump reacted to the op-ed with “volcanic” anger and was “absolutely livid” over what he considered a treasonous act of disloyalty. Amid frenzied speculation over who penned the piece more than two dozen senior officials came forward Thursday to deny their authorship. (WaPo)

Additional read: “NYT Trump column: Linguistic clues to White House insider?: We all have our own distinctive style of writing and speaking. Trying to hide those quirks is like trying to repress a part of our character.” Well, they spelled everything right…so this rules out some people. (BBC)

The United States of Separation: The Trump administration took steps Thursday to withdraw from a 21-year-old agreement limiting the government’s ability to hold minors in immigration jails. Among changes sought by the administration are to allow US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to expand its three family detention facilities, with a combined 3,000 beds, to additional facilities with space for up to 12,000 beds, and for the authority to hold migrant children and their parents until their cases have been adjudicated, a process that could take months. The current amount of time migrant children can be held in immigration jails is 20 days. (WaPo)

– “Why time management so often fails: Productivity hacks promise a better, less stressful life. Why do they deliver the exact opposite to many people?” You should always leave yourself time to do your work, especially if your job is to think of an actual reaction to this article. (BBC)

– “Watch your step: why the 10,000 daily goal is built on bad science: An entire industry has been built on the claim that 10,000 steps a day were necessary to be healthy. But where did the figure come from?” Sorry proud walkers who loudly announce when they hit their goal. Every. Single. Day. (Guardian)

– “What I learned about weight loss from spending a day inside a metabolic chamber: One of science’s best tools for understanding obesity is debunking myths about metabolism.” (Vox)

– “What Happens When A.I. Takes The Wheel?: For many, if not most Americans, the idea of a world in which we don’t drive cars is a distant and possibly unlikely future.” Skynet started in a 2017 Honda Civic. (NPR)

– “Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards character is officially dead: Frank Underwood is officially dead, a trailer for the sixth and final series of House of Cards has revealed.” Ding dong the creep is dead! Which creep? Seriously. There are so many. (BBC)

– “Every Generation Gets the Beach Villain It Deserves: Aggressive, shameless, obsessive and optimistic, the tech billionaire Vinod Khosla is willing to litigate the California coast for the rest of his life.” (NYT)

– “Watch What You Say, A Teacher Made A Hitler Joke In The Classroom. It Tore The School Apart.” (NYT Mag)

– “Children’s Book Authors Are Selling More Than Books. They’re Taking a Stand: Ms. de la Cruz and Ms. Stohl drafted a statement of protest called ‘Kidlit Says No Kids in Cages,’ denouncing “practices that should be restricted to the pages of dystopian novels.” (NYT)

– “Dark Clouds Gather as Tech Stockpiles Hit Pre-Crisis Levels: Weaker turnover, rising inventories. Something’s gotta give.” (Bloomberg)

– “The mystery of Tucker Carlson: Tucker Carlson is shouting when he tells me he isn’t shouting. The barrage of his voice has been relentless throughout the interview.” (CJR)

– “$75K, The alleged cost of one negative review posted by a high-level beauty influencer: Inside the drama that’s taking the beauty influencer industry by storm.” (Outline)

– “The Crazy Inside Story of Al Gore’s ‘Trump Tower Moment’: Al Gore’s campaign was sent a cheat sheet to the most important event of the 2000 election—and they turned it over to the FBI.” The truth was too inconvenient for him. (Daily Beast)

– “Change the world, not yourself, or how Arendt called out Thoreau.” (Aeon)

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” – Hannah Arendt

Please consider making a donation to Daily Pnut, an independently operated and bootstrapped publication. Many thanks to everyone who already supports us!