I don’t know what to say about this. Philando Castile had been pulled over because he and his girlfriend “looked like” people who had been involved in a robbery. Nevertheless, for the first minute it’s an ordinary traffic stop, with both officers able to get a good look at Castile and his girlfriend. Then Castile tells one of the two officers that he has a gun in the car:

Castile, calmly: Sir, I have to tell you I do have a firearm on me.

Officer, calmly: Okay, don’t reach for it then.

Officer loosens gun and pulls it halfway out of its holster.

Castile, calmly: I’m, I, I was reaching for…

Officer, deliberately: Don’t pull it out.

Castile, calmly: I’m not pulling it out.

Girlfriend: He’s not…

Officer, panicky: Don’t pull it out!

Officer fires seven gunshots in two seconds.

Officer, panicky, nearly in tears: Don’t pull it out. Don’t move. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Don’t move. Don’t move.

I’m not a cop. I don’t know what it’s like to be a cop. But it’s hard to believe this had to happen. It’s dusk, so there’s enough light to see by. The other officer on the scene is calm the entire time, with his hands up around his chest. He doesn’t seem to think Castile presents any threat. And even if the first officer was being overly cautious, surely having his gun drawn and ready to fire was sufficient. Nothing in this scene makes it look like he had a good reason to fire when he did.

Pres. Trump on death of Otto Warmbier: “It’s a disgrace…if he were brought home sooner, I think the result would have been a lot different” pic.twitter.com/0LXjjDzXPC

— ABC News (@ABC) June 20, 2017

Let’s see. So far President Obama has (a) wiretapped Trump, (b) deliberately planned the destruction of Obamacare for 2017, (c) caused the Mike Flynn debacle by failing to properly vet Flynn,¹ (d) personally organized anti-Trump protests around the country, and (e) caused the death of Otto Warmbier because he was too weak-kneed to stand up to North Korea.

It’s standard practice for new presidents to declare that “things are even worse than I thought,” usually offered up as an excuse for why the country hasn’t blossomed under new leadership within the first month.² It’s also standard to attack your predecessor’s policies. But it’s decidedly not standard to accuse your predecessor personally of illegal, unethical, and cowardly acts.

I suppose Obama will continue to stay quiet about this, partly because it’s tradition, partly because that’s who he is, and partly because speaking up might be counterproductive at the moment. But I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who wishes he’d toss tradition aside and just lay into Trump. I’d pay to see it.

¹For the record, Flynn was fired by Obama in 2014 because he had become deranged. Obama personally warned Trump about this.

²Also newly elected governors, mayors, district attorneys, sheriffs, dogcatchers, and PTA presidents.

The latest from our president:

While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out. At least I know China tried!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 20, 2017

It’s pretty obvious to everyone except Trump that China did not, in fact, try. They were just playing Trump for a patsy.

Here’s the score so far: Trump has been suckered by China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. He has pissed off Mexico, Canada, Germany, France, Britain, Australia, and most of our other traditional allies. Nobody knows what his policy toward Israel is. Or his policy in Afghanistan. Or his policy in Syria. Or his trade policy toward anyone. Or whether he ever bothers talking with his Secretary of State.

Welcome to our new foreign policy, ladies and gentlemen. Isn’t it great that we finally have a firm leader at the helm once again?

One of the beautiful people cycling and texting at Santa Monica beach shortly before sunset.

The latest from the State Department:

State spox: “The more time goes by, the more that doubt is raised about the actions taken by Saudi Arabia & the UAE” https://t.co/1rf5zH3hAW

— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) June 20, 2017

Oops. I think that Heather Nauert forgot to read a piece of her script. Let me fix it:

Now that it’s been more than two weeks since the embargo started, we are mystified that the Gulf states have not released to the public nor to the Qataris the details about the claims that they are making toward Qatar. The more time that goes by since President Trump incited this action that was apparently based on no evidence, the more doubt is raised about the actions taken by Saudi Arabia and the UAE and President Trump.

Better?

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal

The opioid epidemic is not like other drug fads, which are primarily limited to the young. Here’s a chart from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality:

Emergency room visits among the young (purple line) are much higher than among senior citizens (light blue line), but both are skyrocketing at about equal rates. Among the young, emergency room visits have increased 109 percent since 2005. Among senior citizens, visits have increased 112 percent. This is an equal opportunity destroyer of lives, possibly because it’s our first-ever drug epidemic with corporate backing and big marketing budgets.

Sure, computers can win a game of chess or do your accounting. But they’ll never have the social skills of—

Feeling sad? Soon your dolls will be able to tell. To demonstrate the power of a new chip that can run artificially intelligent algorithms, researchers have put it in a doll and programmed it to recognise emotions in facial images captured by a small camera.

The doll can recognise eight emotions in total, including surprise and happiness….Recent advances in AI mean we already have algorithms that can recognise objects, lip-read, make basic decisions and more. It’s only a matter of time before these abilities make their way on to little cheap chips like this one, and then put into consumer devices.

Oh. Maybe social skills aren’t going to save us after all. New Scientist has the rest of the story here.

Mario Guzman/EFE via ZUMA

President Trump’s plan to scare companies away from moving jobs to Mexico is working great:

Ford Motor Co. will begin importing Focus compact cars from China in the second half of 2019, scrapping earlier plans to build the small-car model in Mexico amid a push by President Donald Trump to drastically alter the North American Free Trade Agreement. The company said Tuesday the Focus, which is now built at an assembly plant in Michigan, will also be imported from Europe, but most new models sold in North American will initially come from China.

Nice work, Donald. Scrapping TPP was also great news for China. The big autocracies of the world thank you for your support.

Just this morning I was wondering how it is that there have been so few leaks from the Senate’s health care team. They’ve really got things buttoned up tight over there. But today The Hill revealed this little tidbit:

The proposal would start out the growth rate for a new cap on Medicaid spending at the same levels as the House bill, but then drop to a lower growth rate that would cut spending more, known as CPI-U, starting in 2025, the sources said. That proposal has been sent to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for analysis, a Senate GOP aide said.

Let’s translate this into English. Between 2000 and 2016, the ordinary inflation rate, CPI-U, has averaged 2.1 percent. However, medical inflation has risen more rapidly, at a rate of 3.7 percent. Using these rates as estimates for the future, it means the House bill stays even with inflation by increasing its spending cap 3.7 percent per year. The Senate does the same until 2025 but then switches to 2.1 percent. In other words, after 2025, when you adjust for medical inflation, spending declines about 1.6 percent per year. Here’s how that adds up over the years:

Look: Those tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to pay for themselves. Somebody has to pay for them. Why not the elderly, disabled, and poor who are on Medicaid?

It’s Technology Week at the White House! Jared Kushner is in charge:

Kushner is not a very impressive speaker. He’s reciting his speech like a sixth-grader, not like a White House aide who actually knows what he’s talking about.

But put that aside. It’s the content that’s appalling. Kushner burbles about heading up the Office of American Innovation, which has “empowered interagency teams” that are “analyzing and auditing current infrastructure.” They have discovered that the government operates 6,100 data centers, the “vast majority” of which can be migrated to the cloud.

That sounds like quite the audit! Of course, I was able to come up with the same information in about five minutes by hopping over to the GAO website:

The 24 agencies participating in the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) have made progress on their data center closure efforts. As of August 2016, the agencies collectively had identified a total of 9,995 data centers, of which they reported having closed 4,388 and having plans to close a total of 5,597 through fiscal year 2019.

Wait. They’ve already closed 4,388 data centers? Well yes. You see, the Obama administration began an initiative to do this several years ago. You can read GAO’s latest 144-page report here if you really want to. If Kushner himself has read it, he sure doesn’t act like it.

Later he mentions the 1980 Paperwork Reduction Act, “established before the government used computers.” I suppose I should give him a break since I know what he probably meant to say, but these were prepared remarks. He sounds like an idiot when he says stuff like this. And that’s not even counting the fact that the PRA was updated and amended in 1995.

Nor does Kushner seem to understand the purpose of the PRA or why it gives OMB centralized authority over government forms. It did this to reduce the number of forms from different agencies. OMB’s review of changes to forms does take time—and I don’t doubt that it could be streamlined—but it’s not because of fiddly clerks who want to make sure everyone is using approved fonts. It’s to make sure that agencies aren’t duplicating the work of other agencies and demanding too much information from the public.

This is kindergarten stuff, and Kushner doesn’t give the impression of knowing the first thing about any of it. I have a feeling that Technology Week is going to be about as boffo as Infrastructure Week was. Remember that? It was only two weeks ago.