No, wait. And then he said he really likes french fries but not German chocolate cake. And he loves the Eiffel Tower but thinks it would look better in gold. No, seriously, that's what he said. And he thinks you should smile more. I swear.

Let’s count up our ruined relationships around the world:

• We’re in a trade war with China and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says talks have “broken down.”
• The North Korea summit was obviously a joke. Kim Jong Un blew off Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during last week’s follow-up, which participants said was a complete waste of time. North Korean negotiators failed to even show up for yesterday’s talks about POW remains.
• NATO is in shambles after Trump spent his time in Brussels slamming everyone and everything in sight.
• The EU writ large is none too happy about Trump’s love affair with the likes of Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen, nor with his notion that the whole point of the EU is to oppose the United States.
• Our relationship with Britain is in the deep freeze after Trump kicked off his state visit with an incendiary interview in the Sun in which he blasted Theresa May and suggested Boris Johnson would make a great prime minister.
• Ditto for Germany after Trump accused Angela Merkel of being in Vladimir Putin’s pocket.
• Canada and Mexico are both infuriated too, partly over Trump’s insulting trade theatrics and partly over his wall.

So who do we still have good relations with? Israel, I suppose. Saudi Arabia. Russia, if we’re stretching the meaning of good. And I guess the new Five Star bros in Rome are sort of sympatico with Trump.

Anyone else?

Focus Films

Andrew Sullivan ticks through the ongoing Brexit disaster and then offers up a doomsday scenario:

Among the immediate doomsday possibilities the government itself is worried about in a crash exit are the effective, immediate collapse of the port of Dover — grinding trade to a halt — and the dispatch of thousands of electricity generators on barges in the Irish Sea to keep Northern Ireland’s lights on, because the province’s ability to share a single electricity market with the whole island of Ireland would end with an E.U. exit.

Northern Ireland itself could explode in sectarian violence again if a hard border is erected between north and south, as it would have to be. Scotland would move toward independence. Critical shortages of food, fuel, and medicine would open up within two weeks, by the government’s own estimation. The military would have to be deployed to ensure transportation of essentials. Stocks and the pound would plummet. A steep recession at home, and maybe also abroad, could follow. It would be one of the most harmful things a democratic country ever did to itself, or to its neighbors.

Well. That sounds bad, doesn’t it? But Sullivan’s always been a worrier. My Blue Team analysis suggests that it would take three or four weeks before Britain suffered food shortages and perhaps a full couple of months until NHS hospitals ran out of critical medicines and Vladimir Putin offered to airlift supplies via military aircraft. And Americans are always good for a clothing drive. Things aren’t as hopeless as they seem.

On a more serious note, it’s remarkable how much hay the Brexiteers have made out of a 52-48 vote. The people have spoken! Brexit means Brexit! Total withdrawal or nothing! All this over 2 percent of a nonbinding vote that we now know was heavily sponsored and funded by Russia.

Ditto for the United States, which has gone haywire thanks to 1 percent of the vote in an archaic institution specifically designed to rein in majority rule. And yet, Donald Trump is practically a cult figure on the right and the tiny little Freedom Caucus utterly controls Congress.

The answer in both cases is an election. We’ll get our chance to toss out Trump’s Republican sycophants in November, and if Theresa May has any sense she’ll call for a follow-up Brexit vote for around the same time. It’s insane for Britain to lash itself to a sinking ship because of a razor-thin vote sponsored by a foreign power and based on lies that even the Brexiteers themselves have fessed up to.

Would that require some kind of deal with Jeremy Corbyn? Maybe. But them’s the breaks. Country first, mates.

Donald Trump is in England:

Trump: “I don’t take questions from CNN. Fake news. Let’s go to John Roberts of Fox. A real network.” pic.twitter.com/j1WdTK4tok

— Christina Wilkie (@christinawilkie) July 13, 2018

Does the rest of the press corps have any objection to this? Or are they OK with the president blackballing any network whose coverage annoys him?

According to the Wall Street Journal, all the big banks except Wells Fargo are reporting great results for the second quarter. So naturally here’s what happened:

I’m sure this all makes sense to the literati. The bottom line, I guess, is not just that big banks are raking in money, but they’re raking in even more money than analysts expected. However, they aren’t raking in stratospheric amounts of money, so their stock prices are down.

Or something. This article says bank stocks are anemic because of fears about the flattening of the yield curve. Sure. Whatever. I’ll bet that Wall Street won’t let that interfere with bonus season.

Cultura via ZUMA

What in the everlasting fuck?

The Trump Administration is planning to eliminate a vast trove of medical guidelines that for nearly 20 years has been a critical resource for doctors, researchers and others in the medical community. Maintained by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality [AHRQ], part of the Department of Health and Human Services, the database is known as the National Guideline Clearinghouse [NGC], and it’s scheduled to “go dark,” in the words of an official there, on July 16.

….“Guideline.gov was our go-to source, and there is nothing else like it in the world,” [Valerie] King said, referring to the URL at which the database is hosted, which the agency says receives about 200,000 visitors per month. “It is a singular resource,” King added.

AHRQ said it’s looking for a partner that can carry on the work of NGC, but that effort hasn’t panned out yet….The operating budget for the NGC last year was $1.2 million, Hunt said, and reductions in funding forced the agency’s hand.

“Reductions in funding.” The federal government—2018 budget: $4.09 trillion—can’t manage to find $0.00000012 trillion to keep this going. Sure. Alternatively, a lot of powerful players in the health care industry hate this database and have been trying to shut it down for years because sometimes it demonstrates that their pricy treatments don’t work. Here is Kevin M.D. a few months ago on the agency that maintains this database:

In 1994, the agency (then known as the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research) dared to publish a back pain guideline that suggested that there was little role for surgery in most patients. As later documented in Health Affairs, this act raised the hackles of back surgeons with powerful allies in Congress who were already annoyed by the agency’s association with the failed Clinton health-reform plan. The agency’s budget was zeroed out by the House of Representatives and narrowly restored by the Senate in 1995, after a 21% cut and a name change to emphasize that its mission would be to produce evidence to inform policy, rather than attempt to actively shape policy.

Despite this deliberately circumscribed mandate — I lost count of the number of times during my tenure as an AHRQ medical officer from 2006 to 2010 that I was told, “We don’t make guidelines, we make evidence that other groups use to make guidelines” — the passage of the Affordable Care Act made AHRQ a target again when in 2012 a House appropriations subcommittee voted to zero out its budget again. AHRQ survived that episode, only to be zeroed out by the House once again in 2015, when the danger to the agency’s survival seemed real enough that former Senate majority leader Bill Frist and former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services director Gail Wilensky both penned op-eds urging their Republican colleagues to reconsider — they eventually did.

There’s only one reason for such a sustained assault on an agency that’s literally a rounding error in the HHS budget: because people with money don’t want it around. And it looks like this time they finally won.

Just in case you’re interested, NATO releases updated figures for defense spending before each of its annual summit meetings. Here’s the 2018 edition:

As you can see, NATO countries have been increasing their defense expenditures every year since 2014, and this has nothing to do with Donald Trump.

But if Trump wants something to gripe about, it’s worth noting that at the current rate of increase the non-US contingent isn’t going to reach 2 percent of GDP anytime soon. They’ve gone from a miserable 1.40 percent to a miserable 1.47 percent since 2014, and by 2024 they’ll be at a miserable 1.59 percent unless they shake a leg. And I can’t say that I’ve seen much evidence of any leg shaking lately.

Alexander Pohl/NurPhoto via ZUMA

Facebook is bringing in some experts to advise it on bias against conservative voices:

The conservative bias advising partnership will be led by former Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl, along with his team at Covington and Burling, a Washington law firm. Kyl will examine concerns about alleged liberal bias on Facebook, internally and on its services. They will get feedback directly from conservative groups and advise Facebook on the best way to work with these groups moving forward.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank, will convene meetings on these issues with Facebook executives. Last week the group brought in tech policy expert Klon Kitchen to host an event with Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert.

Bias against conservatives. Sure. That’s what Facebook needs to be concerned about. Here is Facebook’s own video about its fight against fake news:

There are five specific examples of fake news that are mentioned in this video:

• Russian troll farms.
• Pizzagate.
• Hate speech by white nationalists.
• An undocumented immigrant supposedly responsible for starting a California wildfire.
• A photoshopped picture of the Seattle Seahawks burning an American flag in their locker room.

But yes: let’s focus our attention on bias against conservatives. This is surely one of the most spectacular examples of working the refs ever. It’s right up there with James Comey making Donald Trump president because he was afraid Republicans would get mad if he followed normal FBI policy.

A couple of weeks ago I wanted to take a picture of the moon rising over the Pacific Ocean. The only place you can do that around here is San Pedro, so off I went. As it happens, the pictures I took while the moon was barely over the horizon turned out sort of iffy, though I may post one of them here someday anyway. In the meantime here’s a different one. This is about half an hour later down at Cabrillo Beach, and I really like the contrast of the purple sky and the bright golden moon. This only lasted for a short while: within a few minutes the sky was nearly black and the moon was nearly white.

This picture would have been impossible without Photoshop. I exposed it properly for the moon, which made the rest of the frame so dark that hardly anything showed. But playing around with the histograms and a few other controls brought out the trees and the color of the background very nicely. What’s interesting is that this approximates real life better than the raw photograph does. The human brain acts as sort of a real-time Photoshop in cases like this, interpreting different parts of the scene differently and effectively extending the dynamic range that you can sense. In real life, I don’t recall seeing so much purple in the sky, but in terms of how much I could see of the moon, sky, and trees, this is a pretty faithful representation.

While we’re on the subject of inflation, here is today’s update of the Consumer Price Index for June:

The CPI is up 2.8 percent over the past year while core CPI (excluding food and energy) is up 2.2 percent. It’s starting to look like there’s finally some inflationary pressure building, though it’s hard to tell yet whether it will continue. Gasoline is up 24 percent over the past 12 months, and that might moderate or even decline if OPEC follows through on its promise to increase production in order to make up for the Iran embargo. Wait and see.

A couple of days ago I posted a chart showing the real increase in wages for American workers over the past year. Unfortunately, I could only draw the chart through May because we didn’t yet have the CPI inflation numbers for June. But today they’re out, so here’s an updated version of the wage chart:

The American worker has really been kicking ass over the past year! It’s no wonder so many companies are having a hard time filling all their positions. They’ve obviously done everything they conceivably can to attract workers off the sidelines, but for some reason workers just aren’t responding. What more can the business community possibly do?

POSTSCRIPT: I just know that some smart-aleck is going to complain that I’m showing only wages, and we really need to look at total compensation. Fine. Here it is through the first quarter of 2018:

I guess that shows me. The ECI is up a whopping 0.5 percent over the past year. Employers are really taking it in the shorts, aren’t they?