What happened while I was at lunch? Let’s see. Jeffrey Lord got fired from CNN for tweeting “Sieg Heil” at someone. Scientists announced that pig-human transplants will be available soon. Other scientists have created mutant ants. And Donald Trump thanked Vladimir Putin for kicking out hundreds of American diplomats.

Wait. What?

“I want to thank him,” Trump said at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, “because we’re trying to cut down our payroll, and as far as I’m concerned I’m very thankful that he let go of a large number of people because now we have a smaller payroll.”

Ha ha ha. That’s a good one, Mr. President. A real thigh-slapper.

I suppose Trump was just trying to deflect a pesky question, but it hardly matters. The president of the United States publicly told a bunch of career diplomats that they weren’t doing anything worthwhile and he’s happy to have an excuse to fire them. He won’t, of course, but that doesn’t matter either. What matters is that we have a president who thinks it’s funny to say stuff like this. I wonder how he’d feel if someone said something similar about our overseas troops?

Yesterday’s photo was taken on the way to Silverado Canyon. Today’s was taken in the canyon itself.

This was one of those things where I could barely see what I was taking a picture of. I was standing awkwardly and shoving the camera out in front of myself, shooting almost blind. That’s why this picture is a little less sharp than usual. But the color is fabulous, and I can’t figure out where it came from. I haven’t shopped it (just the background, which I darkened), and in real life I sure didn’t notice this fluorescent pink color. The leaves looked sort of deep red, I thought. Of course, I wasn’t looking closely, was I?

Anyway, very strange. This looks more like a teenager’s lipstick color than the color of a leaf, but a leaf it is.

Hey, remember that meeting last year between Don Jr. and the Russian attorney? The one that was set up because the attorney promised some dirt on Hillary Clinton? Sure you do. But how did anyone find out about that, anyway? Bloomberg tells us today that Paul Manafort was the snitch:

Manafort had alerted authorities to a controversial meeting on June 9, 2016, involving Trump’s son Donald Jr., other campaign representatives and a Russian lawyer promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton, according to people familiar with the matter. The president and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were dragged into the matter as details repeatedly emerged that contradicted the initial accounts of that meeting.

Hmmm. Isn’t that interesting? Maybe it explains why Donald Trump’s pals at the National Enquirer have suddenly decided to go after Manafort:

This is the kind of revenge that happens in movies but not in real life. In the Trump Era, however, reality TV is real life.

By the way, it’s worth noting that Trump’s connection to the Enquirer is yet another way for him to talk to his base. DC reporters don’t read the Enquirer, after all, nor do they take it seriously. But Trump’s fans do. Between Twitter, Trump’s rallies, Fox News, Drudge, the Enquirer, and talk radio, Trump supporters are fed a full media spectrum of alternate reality. There’s probably about a quarter of the country that’s literally as out of touch with the real world as any North Korean peasant.

Breitbart writer John Carney is unhappy:

We’re going to have to create a full #MAGA shadow cultural industry because the Opposition Media can’t even do fashion without attacking us pic.twitter.com/NRPf2JUfsy

— John Carney (@carney) August 10, 2017

My Twitter feed is full of snark about this. But it’s also full of puzzlement. How is this Vogue cover attacking conservatives? It’s got Jennifer Lawrence, it’s got the Statue of Liberty, and it’s got “love, liberty, and the freedom to be herself.” Those all seem pretty nonpartisan. But Carney explains:

That Miller-Acosta scuffle in the White House press room over Emma Lazarus’s poem happened a week ago. I wonder when Carney thinks Vogue did this photo shoot? I wonder when he thinks they picked this particular shot for their September cover? I wonder when he thinks it went to press?

I’m pretty sure the answer to all these questions is “before August 2nd.” I’m also pretty sure that about 100 percent of Vogue’s readers would miss the supposed reference anyway, which is only understandable to the most obsessed of political obsessives. And I don’t see how this shot takes one side or the other of Miller and Acosta’s famous successor to the Lincoln-Douglas debates. But maybe I’m wrong. Someone should ask Anna Wintour, I guess.

Ting Shen/Xinhua via ZUMA

Yesterday Donald Trump tweeted this:

My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 9, 2017

This is, obviously, wrong. The modernization of our nuclear arsenal has been in progress for years, and it will continue for many more. The only thing Trump has done is to issue an executive order that states: “The Secretary shall initiate a new Nuclear Posture Review to ensure that the United States nuclear deterrent is modern, robust, flexible, resilient, ready, and appropriately tailored to deter 21st-century threats and reassure our allies.” Needless to say, “initiating a review” does nothing to renovate or modernize anything. That requires actual plans and actual money.

That, however, is not the point of this post. The point is this: was Trump lying? I’m prompted to ask this by a headline in the LA Times today:

Trump makes false claims about U.S. nuclear arsenal

The article itself makes it clear just how wrong Trump is. But was it just a “false claim,” or was it a lie? The difference, obviously, is state of mind: Did Trump know he was saying something false? Let’s consider the possibilities:

• Trump knew it was false, but he said it anyway. He lied.
• Trump literally doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He continues to consider his lies to be “truthful hyperbole,” the term he applied to generalized puffery during his real estate career.
• Trump is delusional. He thinks that ordering a review magically makes things happen.
• Trump is surrounded by sycophants who have assured him that the US nuclear arsenal is stronger than it was six months ago. He believes them.
• Trump is losing control of his faculties. He vaguely remembers some kind of nuclear order and figures it must mean that our nukes have gotten better.

I think this mostly covers the bases. There’s literally nothing that’s actually happened to our nuclear arsenal since January that he could have misunderstood as modernization. So that’s not an option. He was either lying or else the explanation is something worse.

Personally, I think it’s some of both. He was lying, but he’s also starting to lose control of his faculties. Not a lot, maybe, but enough to make him kinda sorta believe his own lies. This is not good. This is something to take seriously.

He’s either lying or else his mind is declining. We’d best figure out soon which it is is.

Here’s something interesting that’s not related to North Korea. Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman have turned their analytical eyes toward Russia. Here’s what income trends look like there:

This is a stunningly fast rise of the oligarchy. Communism fell between 1989 and 1991, and in the ten years after that the rich in Russia increased their income share from 6 percent to 24 percent. Has any oligarchy made that kind of progress that fast in modern history?

But before you get too smug, here’s a second chart:

The Russian oligarchy overshot the US by a little bit, but then lost some ground when oil prices crashed in 2008. For the past decade, their income share has been around 20 percent, exactly the same as the top 1 percent in America.

Bottom line: there are, needless to say, some differences in how income is allocated in Russia vs. the US. That said, if Russia is an oligarchy, then so are we.

So what’s up with James Damore, the Google dude who wrote that diversity memo and then got fired? The New York Times had this yesterday:

“I have a legal right to express my concerns about the terms and conditions of my working environment and to bring up potentially illegal behavior, which is what my document does,” Mr. Damore said.

That’s a strikingly precise phrase, isn’t it? And it just happens to be precisely one of the grounds for declaring a termination illegal. I don’t imagine most software engineers are aware of that. Then today the Guardian had this:

As mainstream journalists across the globe reached out to him for interviews this week, Damore largely ignored the queries and instead selected two rightwing YouTube personalities to make his first, expansive comments on the international firestorm he has ignited. Damore — who argued in his memo that “biological” differences between men and women contribute to the gender gap in the tech industry — gave lengthy video interviews to Stefan Molyneux and Jordan B Peterson, who both have large followings on YouTube and have espoused anti-feminist views.

Huh. It’s almost as if he’s more interested in stirring up the right than in facing even the most modest challenge. That’s a little odd considering what he told Peterson in his interview today. Here is Damore explaining why his memo suddenly went viral even though he wrote it a month ago after attending a Google diversity program:

I just wanted to clarify my thoughts on this, and I really just wanted to be proven wrong, because if what I was saying was right then something bad is happening. And so about a month ago I submitted feedback to that program. And I saw that people looked at it, but no one actually said anything.

….There’s a group at Google called Skeptics, and so I was like, maybe they’ll be able to prove me wrong in some way. They’re skeptical about things, right? I was naive, I guess. And so I sent them a message, like, OK, what do you think about this? Is Google in some sort of echo chamber, or am I in an echo chamber? And then it just exploded after that.

I dunno. Did Damore really write a lengthy paper just because he was hoping against hope that someone might tell him why he was wrong? Anything is possible. But if that was his goal, it’s peculiar that when he finally got some attention he did his best to avoid talking to anyone who might do exactly that.

All very strange, isn’t it?

Robert Jeffress, a follower of the Lamb of God¹ and a loving shepherd of His flock—and one of Donald Trump’s favorite pastors—is apparently pretty stoked at the idea of launching hellfire on North Korea:

When it comes to how we should deal with evil doers, the Bible, in the book of Romans, is very clear: God has endowed rulers full power to use whatever means necessary — including war — to stop evil. In the case of North Korea, God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un.

The book of Romans, huh? It turns out that Jeffress is talking about Romans 13:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God….Would you have no fear of him who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.

I always learn something interesting when I ask about Bible passages, so let’s ask about this one. Its meaning seems pretty obvious: Paul is talking about obeying the civil authority under which you live. I, for example, am required to obey the laws of the city of Irvine, the state of California, and the United States of America. But I don’t have to obey the laws of, say, Brazil, because I don’t live there and they aren’t my “governing authority.”

Jeffress, however, is suggesting that this passage is not just about the power of a governing authority over those it governs, but also over anyone it thinks is evil. I’m sure this is ridiculous, but it often turns out there’s some arcane but longstanding theological debate behind this kind of thing. So school me. Is there an interesting story to tell here? Or is Jeffress just a lone crackpot?

¹And you know he’s for real because he’s called Islam “evil,” Catholicism “satanic,” and Mormonism “a cult.”

Dave Weigel is attending some Republican town halls today to see what’s on the minds of real Americans in the heartland:

Also I’m finding that by FAR the biggest “what we’ve done this year” applause line for Rs is VA reform.

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) August 9, 2017

This is a pretty good example of people believing whatever they’re told. Republicans say that they’ve reformed the VA, and everyone cheers. Promise made, promise kept!

So what have Republicans done? You might have missed this, but Congress actually did pass a VA bill a couple of months ago. It allows the head of the VA more latitude in firing workers. Donald Trump, naturally, called it “one of the largest reforms of the VA in its history,” because that’s what Trump calls everything he does, but it was actually a pretty modest and bipartisan bill.

What else have Republicans done? Well, after every other cabinet position had been filled and he had to appoint someone, Trump finally nominated a VA head in January. Was it some toughminded general? Someone who promised to take the place apart brick by brick and put it back together? Nope. It was David Shulkin, who was appointed to the #2 position at the VA two years ago by Barack Obama. Democrats and Republicans both approved him unanimously.

So that’s it. Republicans agreed to promote Obama’s guy at the VA and then wrote a minor reform bill. This is, roughly speaking, nothing. But they say they’ve reformed the VA, so they must have reformed the VA. Who cares if anything actually happened?

I’m a fan of all kinds of landscape photography, and one of my favorites is a picture of hills or mountains receding into the hazy distance, with the colors getting foggier and more washed out the farther away they are. Here’s an example if you don’t know what I’m talking about.

I’ve tried taking pictures like this all my life, but they’re never any good. The photo never captures what the scene looks like in real life. On Saturday I was seduced once again as I was driving out to Silverado Canyon. There they were: our local foothills, receding into the distance. I felt like a bit of a chump, but I stopped and took some pictures. Then some more a mile later. Then some more. And some more. Finally I gave up and headed to the canyon.

When I got home, I was shocked: several of the pictures turned out pretty well. The best of the lot shows eight different shades counting the sky. And it required no manipulation at all except for some exposure compensation (the original was overexposed). I’d like to capture something even better, so I can’t quite check this photo cliche off my bucket list. But I almost can.