At RealClearWorld Dylan Loh says that Chinese President Xi has been upstaged by events on the Korean peninsula:

The latest nuclear test was conducted just as Xi was busy hosting a BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) nations conference in Xiamen. This was supposed to be the latest feather in Xi’s cap, a chance to show off his diplomatic finesse after resolving the Doklam border dispute with India just before the summit. But then came the nuclear test, and the attention Xi dearly wanted immediately evaporated.

This act of upstaging is a serious matter. The importance of the BRICS summit should not be understated; this was the last major international event for Xi before the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, China’s most important domestic political event, which kicks off on October 18.

Unlike the standard agenda of previous meetings, this year’s national congress is immensely personally important to Xi. He is trying to install allies in the Politburo Standing Committee, to push through wide-ranging social, economic and military reforms, and possibly aiming to stay on in some capacity beyond the normal 10-year term.

Let me explain that terminology a bit. Old-fashioned stages were “raked”, i.e. they slanted—higher in the area away from the audience than in the area nearest the audience. “Upstage” means “towards the back of the stage”. It was literally upstage. You “upstaged” another actor by forcing the actor to turn his or her back on the audience.

To whatever extent Xi and by extension China have been upstaged, they have upstaged themselves. China’s problem is that like Buridan’s ass, they are frozen into inaction by contradictory objectives. They shouldn’t feel too alone. The United States has the same problem.

Maybe I’m misreading Bernard-Henri Lévy’s op-ed in Foreign Policy on the upcoming Kurdish independence referendum but it seems to me that it expresses a peculiarly even bizarrely European pattern of thought:

The timidity of the international community in the face of the Sept. 25 referendum on an independent Kurdistan is a trifecta of shame, absurdity, and historic miscalculation.

We are talking about a people who have been deported, Arabized by force, gassed, and pushed into the mountains where, for a century, they have mounted an exemplary resistance to the tyranny their Baghdad masters successively imposed on them in defiance of geography and of the Kurds’ thousand years of history.

Theirs is a region that finally gained autonomy with the fall of Saddam Hussein — a region that, when the tsunami of the Islamic State crashed over Mesopotamia in 2014 and the Iraqi Army took flight, was the first to organize a counteroffensive. Since then, over a front 600 miles long, the Iraqi Kurds held off the barbarians and thus saved Kurdistan, Iraq, and our shared civilization.

And it is the Kurds again who, in the run-up to the battle of Mosul, went on the offensive on the Plains of Nineveh, opened the gates to the city, and, through their courage, enabled the coalition to strike at the heart of the Islamic State.

But now that the time has come to settle up, the United States remains stubbornly opposed to the referendum, urging the Kurds to put off their aspirations for independence to an indeterminate date in the future. Instead of thanking the Kurds, the world is telling them, with thinly veiled cynicism, “Sorry, Kurdish friends, you were so useful in confronting Islamic terror, but, uh, your timing is not so good. We don’t need you anymore, so why don’t you just go on home? Thanks, again — see you next time.”

Let’s cut if off there. In the history of the world can anyone think of an instance in which a people were given a country? I can’t. What I see is people seizing their countries by force.

The Kurds’ problem is that they’re divided among Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Armenia and don’t have enough power in any one country to seize control from a country that isn’t interested in having a chunk of itself carved out.

Our European cousins imagine a world governed by a civil code and popular sovereignty. Might that world exist someday? Perhaps. It doesn’t exist now.

In the particular case of the Iraqi Kurds I strongly suspect that the Shi’ite majority in Iraq would welcome the Kurds’ departure and don’t let the door hit you as you go out as long as they didn’t intend to take Mosul or oil-rich Kirkuk with them.

In the pre-Saddam days the area of Iraq where the Kurds live was called the “Kurdish Autonomous Region”. That’s probably about as good as it gets and it’s what the Kurds—and the international community such as it is—should be striving for.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s remarks in interrogating judicial nominee Amy Barret, reproduced below:

Why is it that so many of us on this side have this very uncomfortable feeling that — you know, dogma and law are two different things. And I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for years in this country.

are clearly improper given the provision of Article VI, Section 3 of the Constitution—”…no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”. A proper question might have been “Would your religious beliefs prevent you from providing fair, honest, and just opinions in accordance withe the laws of the United States?”

The “no religious Test” prohibition is only enforceable against the executive branch. Congressional immunity protects the members of Congress from prosecution.

I think Sen. Feinstein’s remarks are just the latest example of open bigotry being expressed in the increasingly Marcusist strain of thought that’s become fashionable lately. But it’s nothing new. I’ve been exposed to anti-Catholic bigotry incidentally since I was a child. But it does look as though either bigotry were increasing in this country or it may just be more openly expressed.

The editors of the Washington Post articulate the threat and risks of a cyberattack on the power grid well enough but they fall far short in proposing no solution. I’ll remedy the deficit.

Resiliency comes from high levels of maintenance, strict adherence to standards, decentralization, and redundancy. Private operators won’t implement and provide those on their own. They add costs, provide them with few benefits, and, frankly, the operators bear few risks. It’s their customers who bear the risks. I suggest applying two words to change that calculus: strict liability.

The reflex of the federal bureaucracy and those who see it as the solution to every problem is a top-down solution. As should be obvious from the experience with computing and networks over the last 30 years, a bottom-up solution will be more effective.

In his column at the Washington Post Michael Gerson proposes what he characterizes as a “compromise” on a legislative approach to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival ukase:

There is little question that the president can prioritize immigration enforcement in a variety of ways — say, to focus on deporting convicted felons rather than dreamers. This is the manner in which the law was generally enforced before DACA, and in which it could still be enforced without DACA.

At some point, however, the systematic organization of this discretion into a new legal status, bringing a series of public benefits, becomes the equivalent of legislating. And the courts might focus particular scrutiny on forms of executive action that Congress could have legislated but didn’t. Given the more conservative composition of the Supreme Court, it is likely that DACA would have been struck down.

Whatever the merits of the constitutional case on DACA, the dreamers should now be protected by law. For the past few decades, Congress has pliantly surrendered a number of roles — particularly on social policy and national security — to the courts and the president. A shortage of institutional ambition is a problem that America’s founders did not even contemplate. This is an opportunity for Congress to reclaim its proper constitutional role.

This is also a debate — given that few Republicans actually want to deport the dreamers, and most Democrats seem to prioritize their welfare — on which compromise is particularly ripe. The obvious deal: stronger border enforcement (though not the surpassingly silly wall) for a new version of DACA.

A key problem is that significant numbers of members on both sides of the aisle will see that as capitulation rather than compromise. For any compromise to be possible there needs to be a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate who believe that it is conscientiously possible to forge a compromise.

I don’t see it.

You would also need a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate who are willing to forego what they see as the additional leverage conjoined with protective coverage that coupling a legislative resolution to the status of young illegal immigrants to much broader piece of legislation whether “comprehensive immigration reform” or some other omnibus legislation would provide. That seems similarly unlikely.

We have abandoned the lubricants that used to make our form of government possible including consensus, moderation, compromise, logrolling, and earmarked spending. The foreseeable consequence is that it has become difficult or impossible to do anything. I am not optimistic.

I don’t have much to say this morning. I was up all night in excruciating pain. Just something that happens every once in a while.

It sounds like Puerto Rico is in rough shape and Florida is expecting the worst. Send your prayers their way. Or your thoughts. And send money—much better than sending stuff. I usually give through Catholic Charities. If you earmark a contribution for specific disaster relief, they commit to devoting 100% of your contribution to relief for that disaster. I’ve known people who’ve volunteered or worked for Catholic Charities and IMO they’re credible.

I agree with Dean Obeidallah’s point at The Daily Beast that Democrats don’t have an antifa problem. That’s exactly why Democrats should be very careful not to make it into their problem.

There have been editorials in mainstream newspapers in praise of antifa and some Democrats have attempted to make a distinction between antifa and its use of violence. Those are good ways to make it into your problem. Better to denounce it as Nancy Pelosi has done.

In the Sydney Morning Herald former Australian Prime Minister and present president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, a think tank specializing in Asia-Pacific issues, explores three scenarios that might unfold in the “North Korea crisis”:

So what are the possible scenarios? One, that the US, as China would wish, informally accepts North Korea becoming part of the global nuclear weapons club, and that the North develops its own sets of rules, procedures and nuclear doctrine that enables it to behave “responsibly” as a nuclear weapons state.

Two, a US unilateral military strike to destroy or to retard the North Korean nuclear capability. The conclusion in Beijing is that Washington would never risk the consequences for South Korea, Japan and the future of their alliances with both in such a way. This is also the view held by many others in the wider region and around the world.

I’m less optimistic. Perhaps I’ve been in America too long. As a colleague reminded me recently, war has its own logic. To which I would add, crises have their own logic. The best approach is to avoid crises in the first place

Scenario three is diplomacy. But a potential diplomatic solution to this crisis does not appear to be going well so far.

He neglects to mention the possibility of an aggressive act by North Korea, whether directed against the U. S., South Korea, blackmail, etc. If such an act is impossible, there is no crisis and we should stop acting as though it were. If it is possible, why not consider its implications?

I’m afraid Mr. Rudd’s article is another exercise in wishful thinking posing as analysis.

There’s a fun article at Forbes in which astrophysicist Ethan Siegel reminds us that stars of the incubators of elements other than helium. There’s a lot more fusion going on in stars than the nuclear fusion of hydrogen in helium.