Oh, the Sanctimony

The world is awash is sanctimony right now.  In the 80’s, almost all of the sanctimony came from the right, particularly from evangelical Christian Republicans.  Their sanctimony, led by folks like Jerry Falwell, freaked liberals out.  A mere 13 years ago, Kevin Phillips wrote American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21^st Century.   Fast forward to today, only the peril of borrowed money remains.  Radical evangelicalism and dependence on foreign energy have mostly faded into the background.  Today’s self-righteousness comes mostly from the left.

The current icon of individual sanctimony is Jim Comey, former head of the F.B.I.  He is full bore into his book promotion/bash Trump tour that is mostly rationalizing and justifying the handling of his investigation of Hillary Clinton and alternatively smearing Trump directly or through innuendo (“I can’t say whether prostitutes peed on a mattress in front of Trump.  It might have happened.”).  

The entire tiresome tour is an attempt to vault himself onto a higher moral plane, and, indeed, the title of his book—A Higher Loyalty—hits you over the head with the purpose of his publicity tour (which the MSM is more than happy to oblige).  Along with his book tour, Comey has announced that he intends to teach ethics and leadership to further cement himself as a self-appointed authority in the subject.  But let’s take a step back and take a true measure of his authority.  How did the F.B.I. has actually perform under his leadership?  Putting aside his contempt for Donald Trump for a moment, how did the agency do and how did the people under him perform when it mattered?   Is the agency more esteemed, more respected, more effective today because of his leadership?

The answer is pretty obvious. 

Law enforcement generally has a dual mandate: (1) Protect us, and (2) Play it straight.   Comey’s F.B.I. failed miserably on both fronts.  Its actions with respect to the Pulse nightclub shooting was noteworthy because the shooter’s father was an F.B.I. informant, the shooter, Omar Mateen, was known to the F.B.I., and they permitted his wife to leave the country after the shooting occurred (although she was subsequently acquitted of being an accessory).  None of this smells quite right.  Similarly, at Parkland High School, Nikolas Cruz was known to the F.B.I., was waiving red flags and self-identifying as a school shooter on social media.  The agency admitted that it “failed to follow protocol,” in responding to the threat represented by Cruz.  The Las Vegas shooting was yet another fumble by the F.B.I. and months later, we still have no clarity on the incident.  Inexplicably, the F.B.I. left the shooter’s house unguarded the night after the incident and it was broken into with the thieves possibly removing evidence relevant to the deadliest mass murder in U.S. history.  The F.B.I. did not acquit itself well in any of these high profile cases.

The McCabe fiasco has now deteriorated into a cat fight among Comey, McCabe and Loretta Lynch, with each one accusing the other of being untruthful.   And McCabe is now suing Donald Trump for defamation.  Of course, you still have the mess with Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the anti-Trump lovers who left an entire trail of unbecoming emails that destroyed any notion that they were playing it straight.

No matter what your views of Trump and no matter how this plays out, the head of the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world should not be picking sides in a political fight.  Last week, Comey (whose entire family marched in the Women’s March) came out and said he wasn’t a Republican anymore, a revelation about as surprising as Barry Manilow’s announcement last year that he was gay.  Who could have guessed?

Comey’s shameless self-promotion now make it difficult to distinguish him from Stormy Daniels.  And if you consider the performance of the agency he led and its people in the areas that count—stopping bad guys and playing it straight—Comey’s better option would be to lay low and box up the sanctimony. 

On the corporate side, preachy Starbucks also did a pratfall last week.   Starbucks has held itself out as a progressive paragon in the corporate world, and you now routinely get a little social justice with your latte.   It took a stand on immigration, defiantly announcing that it would hire illegal aliens (prompting a social media outcry –what about veterans).    CEO Howard Schultz jumped into race relations a few years ago with its RaceTogether initiative (in response to the narrative around Michael Brown) and actively encouraged its employees to talk to its customers about race.   The company has piously incorporated all of the social justice/sustainability talking points  into its corporate mission.   The company that fastidiously tailors your coffee drink and wouldn’t dream of putting artificial sweetener in it without your permission routinely serves up a dose of virtue signaling whether or not you have asked for it.  Sometimes you just want a cup o’ jo.

So it’s hard not to smirk a little to see Starbucks get hoisted on its own petard.   Last week when two young African Americans were asked to leave a store and then arrested when they would not, the heads at the executive offices of the virtuous Seattle based company nearly exploded.  Howard Schultz was immediately on the news accusing his manager of at least “unconscious bias,” and terminated her even though it appears that she followed company policy with respect to loitering patrons that don’t buy coffee.

And on top of this, a leader of the women’s march is trying to organize a boycott of Starbucks due to a partnership with a Jewish group.  When it rains social justice, it pours.

In response, Starbucks is closing ALL of its stores for a day for mandatory training.   Think about that for a second.  It is 2018 and a major national restaurant chain is shutting down to teach its people how to treat African Americans.  Excuse me, but I thought our society had settled this out about half  a century ago.

Not that I am a little sympathetic to Starbucks’s plight.  With 8,200 locations in the U.S., it was inevitable that some newsworthy incident somewhere someday would crop up.  Somebody somewhere would find something icky in their drink.   Some Starbucks manager would be caught selling drugs out of the back.   Some supplier would be found breaking the law.  But Starbucks got caught in the crosshairs of the very issue it was impliedly lecturing us all about.

To be sure, Starbucks has a difficult line to walk.   As a place that is known as a business meeting and hangout place, it’s difficult judgment call to know when to weed out “free riders” that are simply loitering without buying coffee.   Public libraries have an analogous problem with unkempt, smelly homeless people that nearly take up residence and by their presence dissuade other patrons from coming in.  The trick is to enforce policies uniformly across stores and especially ensure that rules aren’t enforced differently ever based on race.  Ever.  One the other hand, you don’t want to get played either by people that demand special treatment or exempt from policies BECAUSE THEY ARE BLACK.  Of course, as of today, protesters are griping that Starbucks isn’t going far enough—it will never be enough once you start playing the corporate identity politics game.

The company that moralizes, preaches, and is so inclusive that it has banished any hint of Christmas from its holiday cups has to take a time out to train its people on how to treat blacks.  Not Chick-Fil-A.  Not Hobby Lobby.  Not even Cracker Barrel or any of the other companies that progressives are contemptuous of.   The virtuous Starbucks is now being devoured by black activists and the Women’s March. 

One of the most openly socially self- congratulating progressive companies is tangled up in how it treats black customers and the former head of the top law enforcement agency in the world who is teaching ethics is himself being investigated.

Sanctimony often bites back.

At the Movies

If you are tired of the news cycle and this never ending winter.  If you have had it with Syria, Michael Cohen, Paul Ryan’s retirement, Stormy Daniels, James Comey sanctimony and living with the anxiety that we could wake up and find we are engaged in WWIII, you might try a little escape and there are a few noteworthy films are in theaters at the moment that are very much worth seeing.   I highly recommend A Quiet Place and Chappaquiddick, along with The Death of Stalin (with some reservations).   Obviously, Chappaquiddick doesn’t quite take you away from the political overload but it is nonetheless a good reminder of what Deep State looked like before it metastasized into its present form.  While spring baseball and golf are being held in abeyance by this awful spring weather, fortunately there are some good films to drag you away from current events.

A QUIET PLACE

I have been hungry for a new and interesting sci-fi film for some time.  Terminator and Alien are classics but those franchises have run out of gas, with Alien Covenant falling to new depths in this series that should have ended in 1986 with Aliens.  Likewise, Star Wars and Star Trek have also petered out, in my view and I even snoozed a bit during the last Star Trek film.  The remakes of Bladerunner and Planet of the Apes were mediocre.  Interstellar didn’t wow me, and neither did Arrival.  Frankly, Annihilation should have been annihilated. 

But A Quiet Place is a cut above.   It represents a fresh concept, and doesn’t try to overwhelm you with special effects.   A Quiet Place follows a post-apocalyptic family redoubting in a farm house in upstate New York.   Disconnected from whatever remains of civilization, the countryside is populated  by predatory creatures that have superlative hearing and use it to hunt down their human prey.   A snap of a twig could alert them to your presence and have them descend upon you.  The family has figured out how to survive by using sign language, nods and gestures, but the the extreme quiet and isolation of the family keep stress levels high.  The awful cliché ridden, stilted dialogue that sinks most sci-fi movies is completely absent by design in this film.  In fact, the actress that stands out is young (14 or 15) deaf actress Millicent Simmonds, who already gets my nod as best supporting actress.  The film is able to keep a high level of tension throughout.

To be sure, there are a few minor weaknesses.   The creatures borrow heavily from Alien and Predator and are kind of a hybrid of the two.  There is one short scene that appears to be plagiarized from Jurassic Park.  But overall, the acting is quite good, and its novel approach—making you aware of subtle sounds and noises—is refreshing, especially in an industry that most often tries to overload us with special effects.  I only recommend that you see this film on a sparsely attended Sunday or Monday night so that you won’t be distracted by people munching on popcorn and sipping on soda.

A Quiet Place is the best sci-fi/horror movie of the last couple of decades.  Even its title is unusual and subdued for a film of its genre, giving no clue as to what the film is about.  I have often held that sci-fi horror movies are often allegorical and reflect the fear and anxiety that pervades society at the time.  The Godzilla films in Japan and the B movies in the U.S. of the 50’s (Them, Attack of the Giant Spiders) echoed the fear of nuclear war.   Terminator reflected the fear that robots would annihilate humanity and, of course, the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey of 50 years ago was ahead of its time, predicting the hazards of AI (“Open the pod bay doors, Hal.” “I’m sorry, Dave.  I’m afraid I can’t do that”).  A Quiet Place melds our independent frontier past with a post-apocalyptic dystopian future—our lives have become an endless stream of cacophony inputs, bombarding us from sun up to sun down.  Our phones beep and buzz at us.  Films blare at us.  Urban life assaults our auditory systems every day.  A Quiet Place flips it.   The family is forced to be perfectly still, turn off all techno things that beep, ring, or chime or face immediate death.   A Quiet Place may earn a spot as one of the best sci-fi films of the decade.

CHAPPAQUIDDICK

Chappaquiddick is also noteworthy for not being overacted.  Jason Clark was excellent as young Ted Kennedy.  It was a role that would have been easy to overdo, and while Clark looks remarkably like Kennedy, he did not overreach with the Boston accent.   As we all know by now, Chappaquiddick recounts that fateful evening when Ted Kennedy left a party with Mary Jo Kopechne, then 28.  The exact details of what happened that night remain murky, and were intended to remain so.  Kennedy (who likely was drinking) drove off of a bridge and flipped the car and while he escaped, Mary Jo remained trapped inside.   Kennedy waited a full 10 hours to report the accident, claiming he was suffering from physical and emotional shock.  But Joe Gargan and Paul Markham didn’t report it either, and left the matter to Kennedy to report, even though they returned to try to get Mary Jo out of the car after Kennedy walked back to the cabin where the family had been partying with a group of female staffers.  

Kennedy pled guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and received a suspended sentence.  The DA, who tried to reopen the case was stymied when Mary Jo’s parents denied him the ability to exhume her body and perform an autopsy.   The diver that retrieved her body reported that there was an air bubble in the car that would have permitted her to live for up to three hours.  Kopechne likely would have lived if Kennedy had responded quickly.   The accident and the delay in reporting prompted charges of a cover up, and even during the Watergate investigation, comments such as, “At least no one drowned at Watergate.”

As we all know, Kennedy went on to become know as the Lion of the Senate, and was a chief architect of our hyper divisive politics, derailing the nomination of Bork to the Supreme Court (despite the fact that Bork was highly qualified and had no skeletons in his closet)—a tactic that became known as Borking).   He led the charge against Clarence Thomas and was a supporter of chain migration.   While he never got to be president (he lost a primary challenge to Jimmy Carter in 1980, which may have cost Carter the election to Reagan, so perhaps we should be grateful).

Chappaquiddick does for the  Kennedy family what Spotlight did for the Boston Archdiocese.   Those films show us the measures that will be taken to protect the inner circle of powerful institutions, even when those institutions commit heinous acts.   The organization and those around it will close ranks, and so will the press, unless it has individuals courageous enough to risk their careers as they did at the Boston Globe with the Boston Archdiocese sex abuse scandal.   We can see the same forces at work today with Peter Strzok, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, and Jim Comey as they whitewash Hillary Clinton’s email and money laundering scandals.   Chappaquiddick, like Spotlight, highlights just how a person can be sheltered from accountability for horrendous behavior if you have enough friends in the right places.  I ordinarily reject the concept of “white privilege” in its entirety, but the Kennedy clan breathes substance into the term.

THE DEATH OF STALIN

I vacillated greatly on recommending this film.   The Death of Stalin is a farce around the death of Joseph Stalin and the subsequent power struggle in the Soviet Union.  The film has a lot going for it.  Its Monty Pythonesque silliness and one-liners are sometimes very good.   It is laden with some excellent acting talent.   Steve Buscemi does a masterful job as Nikita Khrushchev.   Jason Isaacs turns in a solid performance as Georgy Zhukov.  And Monty Python veteran Michael Palin kills it with his portrayal of Vyacheslav Molotov.  As a fan of dark comedy, there were times that this film was uproariously funny.  The writing and acting talent combined to make this film—like A Quiet Place—a truly interesting and different work.   But it is difficult to make a farce involving the Stalin terror work.   I remember some controversy around the T.V. show Hogan’s Heroes at the time.  It was a little too close to the end of WWII and the brutality of Nazi POW camps for comfort (1965).  I felt a bit the same about The Death of Stalin.  As someone that grew up with Eastern Europeans and Ukrainians that escaped the Stalin terror, I have at least second-hand knowledge of the repressiveness of the Soviet regime.   A dark comedy about the Holocaust would certainly draw criticism in the press and the Stalin’s Soviet Union was not far behind Hitler’s Nazi Germany in the scale and scope of its terror, and if you go by body count, it exceeded it.   Still, it is a film worth seeing if you have a hankering for off-beat dark comedy.

ITZHAK

I saved perhaps the best for last.  A few years ago, I began to be drawn to the documentary film genre.   If it is well done, a documentary film can provide an insight into a person or a situation in a way that even a well written and well documented book cannot.  And on my blog, I have reviewed several outstanding documentaries such as Jane (Jane Goodall), Austerlitz, and Finding Vivian Maier.   The 2011 and 2012 Oscar winners, Undefeated and Searching for Sugar Man were two outstanding and moving films.

Music lovers especially will love Itzhak, a refreshingly complete and fulfilling documentary on this gift to humanity – Itzhak Perlman.  I am at a disadvantage because I am musically illiterate, but Itzhak is a moving portrayal of this extraordinarily gifted musician.  Like his scientific counterpart, Stephen Hawking, Perlman had to overcome a crippling disability (polio) to become one of the finest violinists of our lifetime.   Harkening from modest beginnings, Itzhak struggled against his affliction, transcended his very modest beginnings and overbearing teachers to become a master of his realm.  And unlike so many top performers in so many fields, Perlman did not fall prey to drug or alcohol abuse, philandering, or idiosyncratic quirks that would make him unlikeable.  Indeed, he stayed married to the same woman during the course of his life.  His slight cantankerousness is in line with almost every aging man on the planet.

This wonderful film brings together snippets from his youth and middle age, with his national launch at age 13 on the Ed Sullivan Show.  It neatly weaves in his day to day existence, overcoming snow and ice in his electric wheelchair and the impediments to such mundane tasks as boarding an airplane or going to the bathroom.  This film is at its best when it shows this extraordinary man in ordinary moments.  He is at his best in the film in candid moments with his wife, drinking wine with friend Alan Alda and sprinkling Jewish humor throughout.

This is a man that LIVES.  His passion for all things—his music, people, and the sensory pleasures of life—above all music, but also baseball, food and wine.

An important part of the film is his relationship with his wife, Toby, who is also a classically trained musician.  Part of the film’s charm is exploring Toby’s big personality and her importance to his success.  The strength and durability of their long and mutually respectful marriage is something to be admired.

Of course, the film would not be complete without a full complement of snippets of his performances, but the filmmakers are careful not to overdo things and provide us instead with shortened samples.  Appropriately, the most moving and most complete is his performance of the theme from Schindler’s List, a score which is nearly impossible not to come away from misty eyed.

I recommend any one of these fine films, and hope you see all of them, but if you want to have your faith in humanity restored and only have time to see one, see Itzhak.   This man, his music, his marriage, his life is one to be admired.

All Zucked Up

The Man Who Would Be King will be testifying before Congress this week.  Mark Zuckerberg’s digital empire seems to have scraped an iceberg and is taking on water.   The Cambridge Analytica fiasco has ripped open a wide gash in Facebook’s business model and exposed fundamental flaws inherent in it.

Thus far, the Facebook team looks quite amateurish in its response.   Zuckerberg sent representatives to Europe to meet with European regulators instead of traveling in person.  His prepared comments yesterday were platitudinous and were capped off with his outlandish claim that “advertisers and developers will never take priority as long as I’m running Facebook,” which prompted knee slapping comments all around social media yesterday.  Likewise, Sheryl Sandberg’s apology tour has been full of platitudes, claims of making innocent adolescent mistakes, and attempts to elevate Facebook above it the fray.  “We were way too idealistic,” Sandberg spouted, as if Facebook’s aspirations to achieve a higher purpose was sufficient to wash away their sins.   She further asserted that the company was in compliance with all FTC regulations, which may not be true—Facebook may face FTC fines in the billions.  Zuckerberg, in concert with Sandberg keeps repeating lofty, grandiose statements of purpose for his company that are sounding flatter every day.  In fact, they are beginning to echo of fraudster Elizabeth Holmes’s claims of, “We’re here to change the world.”   As if that were enough to insulate Zuckerberg and Facebook.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Zuckerberg will not be Chairman of Facebook by this time next year and that Facebook, while it will still exist, will be a great deal less relevant than it is today.  Facebook faces multiple material issues that go to the heart of its existence. 

• ·        Facebook’s business model is broken.  I have to admit that I was wrong about Facebook in my blog post a couple of years ago.   I wrote that Facebook met an inherent human need—to connect with people, and that is was essentially free.   While it does permit us to easily connect with friends and family, the price may turn out to be unacceptably high for many people—a total forfeiture of your privacy.  For us Android users, the cost to privacy was very high indeed.  Facebook apparently has scraped text messages and call data from phones.

• ·        Facebook’s failure to curtail fake news has implications for our democracy.  While the integrity of all of media has broken down into hyperpartisan advocates, rather than news reporting, Facebook’s platform has been most egregious.  And one of the biggest problems is that Facebook itself has allowed itself to become hyperpartisan.   It allowed Russian agents to propagate disinformation.   But it also likely permitted the Clinton campaign to harvest data from millions.

• ·     Facebook’s political bias is now beyond the pale.   There have been suspicions that Facebook suppresses conservative viewpoints but now it is out in the open.  Just a few days before Zuckerberg’s testimony, Facebook banished Diamond and Silk, two conservative pro-Trump black women as being “dangerous to the community.”  Diamond and Silk are no more dangerous to the community than Jimmy Kimmel.   And at the same time, Facebook permits Antifa and its members to post.   Facebook’s bias is at the front end of this battle as Twitter has also shadowbanned people and otherwise banned or suppressed politically conservative commentators.

Zuckerberg said that his company is more like a government than a company.  The problem for Zuckerberg is that nobody elected him and this country has a long history of pushing back on the power and reach of government.   But I have to hand it to Zuckerberg, the young, brash lad got me to rethink my position on an issue.   As a small government advocate, my default position is to let markets alone to sort out behavior.   I have reacted negatively to every push by the government to regulate the internet.

The behavior of Facebook and the rest of Big Tech has caused me to reconsider.  Perhaps we do need a Digital Protection Agency.  We have had an Environmental Protection Agency to make sure corporate America acts responsibly when it comes to the environment.  The CFPB issues thousands of pages of regulations on terms and conditions of mortgages and other consumer lending.  But social media trading on our personal data has almost no rules.  I need to think through some of the contours of regulation, especially since it would come so close to touching freedom of speech issues, but I at least am now willing to consider some level of regulatory scheme.

I have written this all before hearing Zuckerberg’s testimony but I do not suspect his testimony to change my views much.

One thing I know for sure.  Alexa will not be taking up residence in my home anytime soon.

What the He___?

The mainstream media along with more prestigious publications such as Foreign Affairs have lambasted Donald Trump for upsetting the “world order,” pulling out of TPP, threatening to pull out of NAFTA, and calling into question military alliances such as NATO.   Respected “experts” such as Adam Posen have attacked the Trumpian “America First” doctrine in trade relations (see The Post-American World Economy; April 1 Foreign Affairs) and Richard Haass has been critical of Trump in foreign policy.   They argue that, while not perfect, these relationships have, on balance, served us well and have strengthened us economically and have kept us more secure.  Trump has threatened to disrupt the “world order.”

But not to be outdone,  Pope Francis,  apparently and without warning that the issue was even under consideration, abolished Hell during Holy Week.  Now the Vatican and other archdiocese are scurrying around, claiming that it is not true, that Pope Francis was misquoted in an interview, and that the official Vatican position is that Hell does, in fact, exist.   But the fact that other Catholic authorities had to make clarifying remarks about the existence of Hell, tells us something.  Either Francis was careless or imprecise in his remarks, was injudicious in who he will grant an interview with, or was materially misquoted.  None of these possible explanations for this episode is good and the episode lit up social media for a day or two.  If true, Francis’s position may represent a major concession to Jean-Paul Satre (“Hell is other people.”).

The hubbub over this is…..well….positively Trumpian and echoes of Trump’s comment about “shithole countries” last month.   It's almost karma that Pope Francis would step into a very Trump-like controversy.   Francis apparently made the reference to Hell in an interview with Eugenio Scalfari, a friend of the pontiff not always known for his fastidiousness.  But the Vatican claimed that Scalfari’s comments were a “reconstruction” but has not yet issued a direct denial.   But what gives the story some legs is that Francis has made some surprising moves—most recently he advocated a revision to the wording of the Lord’s Prayer.  Who would have thought that the Lord’s Prayer needed editing?

We heard about Stormy Daniels for weeks in the mainstream media, but the controversy over Hell seems to me to be vastly more important.   Hell is a basic concept in Christianity.  Its existence has lurked in the background and in some measure may have guided the behavior of Catholics for a couple of millenia.

If the Pope, who is infallible on matters of faith, simply erased Hell, I’m not sure how I feel about that.  In one sense it is a relief, because according the Catholic doctrine, there are a myriad of sins that may qualify you for that horrible place and eternity is a very long time.  It would be easy to trip over the rules (like missing Mass on Sunday) without going to confession and end up in eternal torment.  On the other hand, eliminating Hell would leave open a lot of questions.  Where, then, does Satan reside?   What about souls that really do belong there, like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Jeffrey Dahmer?   Going forward, would eliminating Hell change behavior of people?   If Hell did not exist, doesn’t that bring us closer to atheists, who believe that your soul simply ceases to exist when you die?   Do we purge Dante from library shelves like we have been tearing down statues of Confederate generals? 

It’s hard to imagine two world leaders with such divergent views.  Unlike Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, who together faced down the Soviet Union, Trump and Francis appear to be on the opposite ends of on a range of substantive and important issues: immigration, climate change, borders, the role of capitalism in modern society. 

Still, these two leaders have more in common than you might think.  Both Trump and Francis are disrupters.   They represent discontinuities and are attempting to make changes in their respective organizations that have an entrenched establishment fighting hard to resist that change.   Both, for instance,  are attempting to deal with an emerging China in their own way while Francis appears to be seeking some sort of an accommodation with the Chinese regime.  Trump appears to be taking a somewhat more confrontational approach to Chinese economic and military power.  But both realize that a relationship with China needs to be managed.    Both Trump and the pontiff have also taken a bolder stance in matters of foreign affairs.  Francis has not hesitated to leap into political matters.   Trump has also moved aggressively on several fronts:  Making a visionary speech in the Middle East last summer, recognizing Israel’s capital as Jerusalem, agreeing to meet with Kim Jung-Un, and taking concrete action against Chinese trade practices and intellectual property theft and coercion.  

I look forward to reading Ross Douthat’s new book, To Change the Church:  Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism.    Regardless of Douthat’s assessment, I believe that Francis has more in common with Trump than either would admit.   Neither man is a caretaker leader.  Both have a higher toleration for risk taking than their immediate predecessors, and the organizations that they lead will look much different at the end of their tenure as a result.  Both are out to reshuffle the existing order and are willing to buck the establishment.

Pope Francis apparent challenge to the existence of Hell and Trump tweeting out to Kim Jung-Un, “Why would Kim Jung-Un call me “old” when I would NEVER call him “short and fat?”  Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend- and maybe someday that will happen!”  and then agreeing to meet with him without conditions tells you that both men are committed to a break with the past. Neither is a guardian of the status quo.  Like them or not, they are the new disrupters.

The Men (and Women) Who Fell to Earth

It’s been a wild week in Washington.  I could write about any number of important events.  March for Our Lives and David Hogg.  John Bolton.  Trade wars.  The Omnibus budget.  Putin poisoning Any one of these topics could fill a post or column.

But I’m going to skip all of the shenanigans in Washington this week and instead turn my attention to the private sector.  And this week was a week in which the mighty have stumbled.

Elizabeth Holmes, the young darling of biotech, who some compared to Steve Jobs, was accused by the SEC of a “massive fraud,” and reached a settlement with the agency (a separate DOJ investigation may be ongoing).  Holmes raised more than $700 million from private investors for her company, Theranos, a  biotech company which purportedly developed blood testing equipment.   Holmes at one time had such board members as George P. Shultz, David Boies, and General Mattis, all of whom will acquire some taint as a result of this crash (Shultz in particular will suffer a black eye as he actively promoted Holmes and her company).   The young, blonde and attractive Holmes headed a technology company in a male dominated sector, so the SEC charges were a shock to a world regularly coming under criticism for not fostering enough women in leadership positions.  Not only did she defraud investors with resulting job loss, the Holmes story is even more appalling because of the cold, inhuman way in which Holmes treated the family of Ian Gibbons, Theranos’s chief scientist who committed suicide when he though he would be fired for challenging the accuracy of the test results by the company. 

The SEC charges against Holmes trigger a flurry of issues.  Is the desperate desire for more women in STEM causing standards to be lowered?   Did investors go easy in due diligence because of her gender? Holmes raised hundreds of millions without having to provide investors audited financial statements.  Holmes settlement required her to pay a $500,000 fine, divest her stock, and refrain from being a director of an officer or director of public company for 10 years.  Given that petty drug dealers on the South Side of Chicago, the consequences of her fraud seem paltry given the harm she inflicted (including the death of her chief scientist) and could have inflicted.    A massive fraud committed with respect to results around diagnostic equipment could have put the lives of thousands at risk.   That Holmes will skate without jail time is a massive miscarriage of justice to go along with the massive fraud.

The Holmes fraud is even more interesting because it was perpetrated by a woman.  In his book on white collar crime, Why They Do It, Eugene Soltes  of Harvard University asserts that white collar crime is almost always the purview of men.   This is simply not true. Kelly Richmond Pope, an accounting professor at DePaul University, produced the film All the Queen’s Horses, which recounted the story of the fraud perpetrated against the backwater town of Dixon, Illinois by a female controller.   Rita Crundwell drained over $50 million from the town over a period of years to finance her lavish lifestyle.  Crundwell’s fraud was amazingly uncomplicated.    Like Holmes, Crundwell was able to get away with this massive fraud simply because no one was asking critical questions.   In the last few years of her fraud, Crundwell was able to pilfer $5 million in each year out of a city with a budget of $9 million.  The fraud of Holmes and Crundwell along with smaller frauds perpetrated by women like Patricia Lapinski at Chicago based law firm Vedder Price ($7 million)  demonstrate that Soltes is not correct in his assessment (another female entrepreneur Lynn Tilton beat back a multi-year SEC fraud claim last year, although her fund is now in bankruptcy).  Fraud is no longer a boys only game. 

  

Then there was Bill Voge, managing partner of Latham & Watkins.   Lathan & Watkins, for a time was the largest billing law firm in the country (now surpassed by Kirkland & Ellis).   Voge was forced to step down as managing partner and retire after an electronic extramarital relationship went sour.  Voge and this woman evidently got connected through a Christian group, New Canaan Society.  Their communications became sexual, but then apparently went south after Voge invited her to his hotel room.   The rancor escalated when she engaged in cyberstalking and Voge threatened her and her husband with jail.   The mess ended a Horatio Alger career of a man that went from Iowa farm boy to leading one of the most successful and powerful law firms in the world.

The Voge story is a puzzling one and one full of ironies and twists.   There is the obvious irony of meeting this woman through a Christian group dedicated to Christian reconciliation.   Voge’s downfall as a pious Christian echoes of Upton Sinclair’s Elmer Gantry.  Still, Voge committed no crime.  The woman was not connected to the firm in any way.  She was not a client or an employee.  He never met her in person; his interactions were all electronic.    You can’t help but think that if every partner in every major law firm that had a messy personal life and/or was discovered to have engaged in extra-marital relationship was forced to step down, probably about 25% of the nation’s lawyers would be out of work.  Voge’s scandal  raises a number of serious questions.   Can one commit an act of infidelity if the act is solely electronic?  If there has been no coercion and the other person has no relationship to the firm, should it cost you your job?  Would this ugly dispute have cost him his job if it involved a property dispute or a debtor/creditor dispute, or some other disagreement?  Would Voge have lost his job 25 years or so ago under similar circumstances, before electronic communications preserved a record of it, if he had met her in person, whether or not the relationship had been physically consummated?  

Then there was Facebook.   A few months ago Mark Zuckerberg’s star had risen so far that some were even throwing his name around as a presidential contender.  What began as a platform for college kids connect blossomed into a $9 billion enterprise with 2.2 billion users across the globe.  

We’ve all grown accustomed to sharing personal information on social media, lulled into a false sense of security about our private information.   The risks first came to light a few years with the Ashley Madison hack a few years ago, which as I predicted, receded from the news pretty quickly.  The Yahoo hack affected all 3 billion email accounts.   Then came the hack of Equifax, which impacted almost 150 million Americans.

And now comes Facebook and the disclosure that Cambridge Analytica had improperly obtained information on Facebook users.  Zuckerberg’s response was viewed by many as inadequate, slow and tepid, and has triggered an FTC investigation into the matter.  Now we are learning that Facebook scraped text and call data from certain phones.  He will be hauled up to congress for hearings on the matter.   Zuckerberg and his other star Sheryl Sandberg disappeared from view for days after the disclosure and are now engaged, prompting headlines such as “Sandberg Leans Out.  “We didn’t realize the gravity of the data issue,” Sandberg said.  Whoaa!   Data is your product, Ms. Sandberg.

The Facebook crisis is only the beginning of a serious review of privacy issues.   The readers of my posts know that lighter government regulation is my default setting, but the latest Facebook crisis, taken together with some of the other massive breaches, the proliferation of fake news, and the potential distortions of information and the effect that it may have on our political system lead me to believe that the establishment of a Digital Protection Agency is worth considering.   I need to think about how an agency such as that would operate, but I’m coming around in my thinking on this.

As these stars come crashing to earth, they have raised many questions and many issues as we move into the digital age and how untoward human behavior, lust, greed and fraud interfaces with technology. 

Sanity and Chaos

Although the markets seemed to settle down from the volatility in February, this week seemed like another week of chaos and instability in the public sphere.  I felt overloaded from political narrative this week and was in dire need of some serious discussion of the current state of the economy and where it is likely to head from a respected observer of the economy that doesn’t necessarily have an axe to grind, so I signed up to hear Martin Feldstein speak this week at the Chicago Counsel of Global Affairs.  I felt that attending a Feldstein talk might be a good tonic when you are desperately seeking sanity.

Feldstein painted a pretty rosy picture of the economy at the moment, terming it “picture perfect” but fragile.  Unemployment is at 4.1%, with college grads at 2.3%.  Inflation is only at 2.2% and excluding food and energy is at 1.8%.  Consumers are in a pretty happy place.  

Yet, Feldstein says that this happy equilibrium is very fragile.  He cites abnormally high asset prices caused by unusually easy monetary policy for a decade as a source of fragility.  Investors have bid up share prices so that the PE ratio is 70% higher than the historical norm.  Long term bond prices and short term rates are abnormally low.  If PE ratios reverted to the historical average we would have a reduction in share prices by 40% and the subsequent reduction in consumer demand would take 2% off GDP.   Feldstein asserted that the Fed should have started raising rates three years ago.

If and when we do get a downturn, the Fed will be constrained in its ability to pull us out of it.  With interest rates so low, it will not be able to cut rates much further.  It can buy bonds but the effect of bond buying is small.  Our ability to apply fiscal stimulus will also be constrained.  The debt/GDP ratio was 35% ten years ago.  It is now 75% and headed to 100% by the end of the decade, so Congress may not want to increase debt or cut taxes to stimulate the economy. 

In addition, Feldstein said that Social Security is in trouble.  Lifespans have increased by 3 years since it was last reformed in 1983, and we should do it again and raise the age at which full benefits are available to 70.   Our budget is 2/3 entitlements and we need to slow the growth of benefits—for instance, people with high incomes currently pay nothing and that aspect should be reformed.

Feldstein also commented on two distorted perceptions about the economy.  First is his belief that income and GDP are higher and faster than the official statistics imply.  He said that we should “stop crying that there is no middle income growth,” because that assessment is not correct.  Our economic data cannot take into account and measure betterments in services and products, but he admits that he does not know how to measure that, despite many efforts over the years.  The second distortion is regarding wealth inequality.  Wealth is really providing for retirement.  Because the data do not take into account social security payments, claims of worsening wealth inequality are misleading, and overstate its effect.

He spoke about tariffs as well and said that the tariffs are a slight negative but he believes they aimed mainly at the Chinese and are mostly about technology transfer.  The Chinese had been engaged in overt cybertheft but were caught by the Obama administration and confronted with it.   China has shifted tactics and makes transferring technology to them a condition to doing business.  Since it is “voluntary,” the practice cannot be raised with the WTO.  The tariffs, Feldstein believes, are a poke at the Chinese and an attempt to get them to stop this practice.

Feldstein’s talk was refreshing, if anything because it was largely devoid of politics.   You may agree or disagree with the emphasis of his discussion, but he steered clear of taking any political positions, other than to heap praise on income economic advisor Larry Kudlow.

Unfortunately, despite that little breather,  the political madness continued last week:

Hillary Clinton continued on her 1000 Points of Excuses tour last week, with her assertion that white women voted for Trump because their husbands, bosses, and sons pressured them to (how many sexist comments can you pack in).  She called states that didn’t vote for her “backwards” (read: deplorables) and that Trump voters “don’t want blacks to have any rights.”  Now, before you write that last comment off to Clinton, remember that Nancy Pelosi recently commented that “Trump wants to make American white again,” and in 2012 Joe Biden asserted that “[Romney] is going to put y’all in chains.”  You have to assume that this is the divisive message that Democrats are going to run on in the midterms and 2020. 

Then there is Stormy Daniels, seeking to void the nondisclosure agreement with Trump.   Aside from the fact that Ms. Daniels is being represented by a Democratic operative, the Daniels issue is a play straight out of the Democratic playbook.  Recall that Barack Obama won the senator race in Illinois when he went public with Jack Ryan’s divorce records which claimed that Ryan tried to talk his wife into going to a sex club.  Democrats now see scandalizing consensual sex as a political strategy.

Jerry Brown, in yet another act that demonstrating that California really doesn’t want to be part of the union anymore, appointed an illegal alien to a government post.  If Trump was really bold, he would send ICE to his office during his first week on the job and deport him.

The killer of Kate Steinle, backed by ACLU lawyers, is suing the government for “malicious prosecution.”  The ACLU has gone from being a defender of free speech to a defender of illegal aliens and those that wish to practice female genital mutilation (the ACLU fought anti-FGM legislation in Maine).

Rex Tillerson was apparently fired while he was in the latrine, prompting a tweetstorm about getting canned.   There are some details of Washington personnel changes that we really do not need to know.

Andrew McCabe was fired hours before becoming eligible for his pension for leaking sensitive information and lying about it.  His firing prompted a response from Democratic strategist David Axelrod, who immediately attacked Trump’s tweet about McCabe’s dismissal but not the behavior of McCabe.   Axelrod, it will be remembered heaped praise on disgraced CPS chief Forrest Claypool after Claypool also lied repeatedly during their internal investigation.  Apparently, in Axelrod’s view there is a professional ethics exemption if you’re on the right political team.

Last week saw the nationwide student walkout and young David Hogg, the new media darling, protesting guns.  I predict that Mr. Hogg will have a prominent speaking position at the next Democratic convention, especially now that he is tying gun control to white privilege.   With universities now clamping down on free speech, and the Left pushing high schoolers to protest gun rights, you should be very nervous about the long term prospects for the 1^st and 2^nd Amendments.

Then of course, there was Marco Rubio, who whined about McCabe’s firing (without seeing the IG report), “I don’t like the way it happened.  He should have been allowed to finish through the weekend.” Rubio was steamrolled by the “Gang of 8” on immigration, allowed himself to be bludgeoned in a CNN debate by a 17 year old, and now is leaping to the defense of a corrupt law enforcement officer.   His latest proposal is to do away with Daylight Savings Time which seems to me to be a safer project for Rubio than having him involved in immigration or 2^nd Amendment issues.  “Li’l Marco keeps getting li’ler all the time.

Former UN Ambassador and champion unmasker Samantha Power leveled a not so veiled threat at Trump, “Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan,” which elicited a wave of responses such as, “or what, Samantha?”  So a former UN Ambassador is using language of a gangster, and directed it not at a rogue nation, but at a duly elected president of the U.S.  Let that sink in.

Toys R Us is liquidating.   It came to the attention of several commentators that the company was a large contributor to Planned Parenthood and its troubles were due, in part, to not selling enough baby clothing and toys.  Talk about a snake eating its tail.

Lastly, The College of the Holy Cross, a Catholic school, which has decided to do away with its mascot, the “Crusader” because it connoted violence and religious wars and was deemed to be offensive to Muslims.   Has anyone heard of a single instance of an Islamic school, organization or political entity that changed its symbol or slogan because it was offensive to Christians or Jews?   Shouldn’t Holy Cross go all in, then, and change the name of its school?   If a society is pressured to change its culture to fit someone else’s culture, doesn’t that look more like invasion than immigration? Just wondering.

It really was quite a week.

Despite a more or less happy economic assessment from Mr. Feldstein, I fell into despair later in the week, until Sister Jean showed up trending in my Twitter feed.   Sister Jean is the 98 year old chaplain of the Loyola University basketball team (who was around for their 1963 national championship team.  Sister Jean scouts for the team and almost acts as an assistant coach.  She has been cast in the spotlight since underdog Loyola has won games in the first two rounds with miraculous shots at the buzzer.  This spry and energetic woman says that “God is on their side,” and that she “prays for the other team, too, but not as hard.”   Sister Jean also played basketball in her youth.  Imagine that?  A Catholic school being Catholic and having fun at that.

In times like these, it’s good to have folks like Martin Feldstein and Sister Jean to hang on to.

Not A Beer Summit

After 8 years of “strategic patience” (Marie Harf speak for doing absolutely nothing), while North Korea tested and refined its nuclear arsenal and missile capabilities, threatened the U.S. and its allies, murdered one of our citizens, the brutal dictator of the hermit kingdom has invited Donald Trump to a summit and, through the South Koreans,  has indicated its willingness to discuss denuclearization. Donald Trump immediately accepted the invitation. 

Trump’s acceptance prompted immediate reactions from the Left and the MSM and as well as the Right.  First, they are both howling because they claim that a meeting with Kim Jung Un is a major concession, a recognition that other presidents have not been willing to grant.  Second, the meeting carries a great deal of risk since there has not been sufficient preparatory work at lower diplomatic levels to achieve real substantial agreement.  Most other “summits” are capstones after months of pre-negotiation work, not as an opening move.  Third, as the New York Times noted today, Trump accepted on the spot without really consulting with his advisors or other key players such as China and Japan.

While all there is some validity to these concerns and they should not be dismissed, meeting with Kim Jung Un is a risk worth taking.

Why the summit makes sense.

First, we are on the brink of war anyway, and the consensus among military planners is that a war on the Korean peninsula would be catastrophic, would involve millions of casualties and would likely spread beyond the peninsula and go nuclear very quickly.   We have played out other options and the North Koreans have demonstrated that they can either withstand or evade sanctions.  With each tick of the clock, the choice has devolved into a binary one--- a deal or all out war.

Unlike Islamists that are apparently willing to die for the cause, the North Korean regime does not appear to be suicidal.   Kim Jung Un knows that an attempted nuclear strike would end his regime.  A single nuclear armed submarine carries 25 or so warheads and there are two patrolling in his neighborhood.  This is in addition to our B2 bombers and other ICBM’s which are trained on Pyongyang and other targets.  We have 3 carrier groups in position and the North Koreans have little in the way of a navy or air force that can match us.  The U. S. has been war gaming this scenario for decades.  With the addition of even a small number of ICBMs able to reach the US mainland soon (if not now), our military leverage over North Korea will never be as great as it is today.   While we would be in for a difficult and costly fight (our last 3 wars in Asia have been difficult ones—1 win, 1 loss, and 1 tie), we would certainly prevail, but the calculus would change once it was certain that North Korea could hit any spot on the continental U.S. with some reliability.

The second important reason to go forward is that North Korea’s arsenal is much more than about North Korea.  It is more about Iran.  North Korea does not seem to have great regional expansionist desires.  Iran does.  The incomplete and poorly negotiated JPCOA not only permitted Iran to continue to develop its missile systems, it gave them cash to do so as well as to sow chaos in the region.  Nuclear arms capability must be viewed as a SYSTEM—a warhead and the means to deliver it.  JPCOA merely limited the warhead aspect of its system, leaving it free to move forward on with the delivery system.   There is confirmed evidence that Iran and North Korea have cooperated on missile and nuclear technology.  And North Korea has already demonstrated its willingness to be a purveyor of WMD.  It has helped the Assad regime with its chemical weapons manufacturing equipment.    A cash starved North Korea would have every incentive to sell Iran a warhead to place on an Iranian missile.  This risk that North Korea would get into the nuclear wholesale business is precisely why calls for a containment strategy (most notably, Susan Rice) must not be heeded, and its nuclear programs must either be negotiated away or stopped by force.

Third, partially as a result of pushback from liberal Democrats (starting with Ted Kennedy and continuing on to Obama), our missile defense is not reliable enough to defend against a North Korean attack.  The tests that have been successful have occurred under very controlled conditions.  And our warning systems are really designed to detect a Soviet style massive attack, not a limited nuclear attack of a single or a handful of missiles.   We already experienced an embarrassing false positive alarm this year in Hawaii.   Further, we have not yet hardened our electrical grid, so even a single warhead detonated over the continental U.S. could have devastating consequences due to the EMP (electromagnetic pulse).  Some estimates have warned that 90% of the U.S. population could perish in the months after a single detonation that fries all of the electrical systems in the U.S. 

Fourth, Trump himself is an advantage at the moment.  Trump’s presence (his action on tariffs offers immediate evidence) causes a recalibration and recalculation of the odds of military action.  His “America First” doctrine means that he will weigh America’s interests ahead of that of others.   Prior to Trump, the North Korean regime could proceed with real confidence that the U.S. would not risk heavy civilian casualties in Seoul to eliminate the North Korea threat.  Kim Jung Un may be calculating that that this may no longer be the case, and that a war with the U.S. would almost certainly end his regime and that Trump may weigh the citizens of Los Angeles more heavily than the citizens of Seoul. 

We are now out of time.   While a meeting with Kim Jung Un carries risks, I see those risks as minimal compared to the possible upside.    It is important to recall that many of President Reagan’s advisors (even the sober George Shultz) strenuously advised Reagan not to give the “Tear Down This Wall” speech at the Berlin Wall as “unnecessarily provocative” and it turned out to be as meaningful as Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech.   The recent film The Darkest Hour reminds us that there are times when it is appropriate to take a bold but risky stand.

Why you should be skeptical

Of course, I am skeptical and wary of this is a well-worn path.  We have seen this movie before, several times.   North Korea goes into bellicose mode, then launches a charm offensive to play for time and concessions, pockets the concessions and then cheats.   Seventy years of experience have told us that it is not likely that Kim Jung Un has had a sudden epiphany.  The first question you need to ask is why one would think this time might be different.  

Second, the world has learned a couple of things over the past couple of decades.  The Iraq and Libya regime changes taught North Korea that a tyrant without a nuke ends up dead.  The lesson of Qaddafi might even be a worse message than that of Hussein because Qaddafi voluntarily submitted to denuclearization and the West facilitated his demise anyway.  The second lesson that Kim Jung Un learned is that if you pretend to cooperate, at least partially, you will receive cash and goodies.  It worked for his father in 1994 and it worked for Iran under JPCOA.    Feigning compliance pays well.

Third,  while we have limited experience in Trump actually getting deals done in the public sphere,  Trump has tended to give up too much in his opening bid.  He offered the prospect of citizenship for 1.8 million illegal aliens to the Democrats (something not even Obama put on the table).  He is threatening executive action on guns and is showing a willingness to nibble away at the 2^nd Amendment (including raising the minimum age to buy a rifle).   In a highly technical world of de-nuclearization and verification procedures, it is a legitimate concern that Trump will concede too much without thinking through the technical details.

Why I have a glimmer of hope.

Trump is a disrupter.   He defies the status quo and adherence to the status quo tor decades is what got us here.   Because Trump does not follow an ideological line, there is a chance—even if small--- that he can create a combination of inducements that will both be acceptable to North Korea and to the U.S. and its allies.  The deadlock in North Korea is one situation in which only a negotiator that is willing to break with ideology might be able to come up with an acceptable outcome.   Scott Adams even thought it might be a good idea to bring Dennis Rodman along to break the ice and make introductions since he is the one person who has personal experience with Trump and Kim Jung Un. 

Also don’t underestimate the pressure that Kim Jung Un is under from inside North Korea.  The fact that he murdered his brother shows that he has little trust of anyone, even in his own family.  Beneath that chubby smiling face and brimming confidence is the knowledge that all it takes is one slip up in the security apparatus.   And Trump has been putting more pressure on the regime than the prior administration.

What to look for.

What should Trump do.

This is a go big or go home moment.   Trump need to ambush Kim Jung Un in these negotiations and not the other way around.   We have had decades of Lucy, Charlie Brown and the football negotiations, only to have the North Koreans pocket concessions and then not live up to their side of the bargain.   Therefore, these negotiations should go beyond denuclearization.  It is not simply the nuclear threat that presents a problem, although that is the threat that is most pressing.  But even if de-nuclearization is achieved (and the definition of de-nuclearization is itself a big issue), the problem doesn’t go away unless you solve for the North Korean artillery.   The North Koreans have some 12,000 artillery tubes and another 2,300 multiple rocket launchers ready to devastate Seoul.  Trump needs to go further, and press on a wind down of conventional forces as well and that may hold the key to Kim’s desire to remove U.S. troops from the peninsula. 

We will know pretty quickly what the North Koreans are up to.   Trump and his team should constantly ask themselves “what’s different” this time and if Trump gets the sense that Kim Jung Un is simply repeating the pattern—playing for time, he should not hesitate to get up and leave the room.   As we learned from Reagan’s negotiations with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, it is likely that we will only be able to get to a deal if we demonstrate that we are willing to walk from it.  If that happens, I would immediately ramp up military preparations, and perhaps contemplate a limited strike to show that we mean business.

What Trump should not do.

The liberal press, along with some other detractors are carping about Trump giving the North Koreans recognition by meeting with them.  That is a red herring.   Achieving nuclear capability that threatens the homeland means that we have to deal with them, one way or another.   Unlike the Castro regime, where there was no compelling reason to normalize relations, the North Korean situation needs to come to some climax during Trump’s first term. 

What Kim Jung Un will likely seek is money and time.   Trump needs to make very clear that there will be no more money (directly or indirectly) and no more time.   The ONLY concession Trump should make on this point is to dangle out sanctions relief at some point in the future when certain verifiable benchmarks are met.   We are maintaining our carrier groups in the area and will proceed with our annual military exercises with South Korea as planned and that is a good start.  

While North Korea and Iran have learned something from the Iraq and Libya experience with respect to WMD, we have learned a few things, too.  We have been through arms negotiations with the Soviets, Iran, and several failed rounds with North Korea.  We have learned that delegating enforcement to China or Russia is a bad move.  Within a short period of time of John Kerry and Susan Rice guaranteeing that their deal with Russia solved the chemical weapons problem in Syria, sickening videos of Syrian children gasping their last breaths emerged.   Similarly, Obama negotiated away our participation in the inspection process of JPCOA and granted long warning times, and I remain skeptical that Iran remains compliant.   And we have undoubtedly learned a number of technical things as well.  This is institutional knowledge and goes beyond the personal negotiating skill of Donald Trump.  He will certainly have extensive briefing sessions prior to the meeting.  Trump also has a unique skill of being able to mock and speak with hyperbole, then let bygones be bygones as he did with Ted Cruz.   In an odd way, I suspect that Kim Jung Un knows that and respects that because he engages in similar tactics.

Yes, this is a high risk meeting.  But the risks of continuing down this path without something to break the logjam are even greater, in my view because Iran looms large in the background, and Tehran may be the ultimate end customer for North Korean production of nuclear warheads.  If there is a chance that this meeting could turn into something positive, Trump is the guy to do it.