Whatever else the resignations of officials working for the Environmental Protection Agency portend, I believe that they support my view that we are in desperate need of civil service reform. The editors of the Wall Street Journal note:

The media and federal unions are making a cause celebre out of federal scientists who have resigned and then denounced Trump Administration policies on the way out. We’re all for shrinking the government workforce, but the political melodrama could use a few leavening facts.

The latest splash is from Elizabeth Southerland, until recently the director of science and technology in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Water. Ms. Southerland ended a 30-year EPA career last week with an internal memo decrying Donald Trump’s “draconian” budget cuts, and his “industry deregulation.” She said her “civic duty” required that she warn that “our children and grandchildren” face “increased public health and safety risks and a degraded environment.”

This follows the much-publicized April departure of Michael Cox, who quit the EPA in Washington state after 25 years, complaining in a letter to Administrator Scott Pruitt about “indefensible budget cuts” and efforts to “dismantle EPA and its staff as quickly as possible.”

Both EPA employees are of retirement age, and they are right to bow out if they can’t in good faith work for Mr. Pruitt. Their letters nonetheless reveal an entrenched and liberal federal bureaucracy. Though career civil servants who are supposed to serve political appointees of any party, they have clearly become progressive ideological partisans.

The very least we should do is expand the Hatch Act’s scope, including more civil servants under its strictures, and imposing broader penalties for its violation including civil and, in the most egregious cases, criminal penalties.

In his Washington Post column Michael Gerson is outraged that the Tillerson State Department isn’t pursuing an agenda of promoting justice and democracy abroad:

If Cabinet members are to be judged by the gap between expectation and performance, Rex Tillerson is among the worst. He was supposed to be one of the adults in the room, a steadying force. But Tillerson has managed to be both ineffectual and destabilizing — unfamiliar with the workings of government, unwilling to provide inspirational leadership, disconnected from American values and seemingly hostile to the department in his care.

Who would want to be known as the secretary of state who retreated from the promotion of justice and democracy? Yet this is exactly what Tillerson seems to desire.

To a certain kind of corporate mind, a statement of organizational purpose — following a bottom-up, 360-degree, consultant-driven review process — is a big deal. The one currently under consideration at the State Department (according to an internal email obtained by my fellow Post columnist Josh Rogin): “We promote the security, prosperity and interests of the American people globally.” In contrast, the previous version called for “a peaceful, prosperous, just and democratic world.”

He doesn’t seem to be fazed at all over how big a flop our efforts in that direction have been over the period of the last couple of decades. That’s the position of the dead-ender Wilsonians.

Wilsonians (referred to that way from Wilson’s 1917 speech asking Congress to enter the First World War) come in two varieties. On the right they’re called “neoconservatives”; on the left they’re called “liberal interventionists”. Their efforts to spread peace, justice, and democracy at the point of a gun over the last generation have been complete flops. The world is less safe for democracy today than it was a generation ago and far from prospering abroad democracy is actually in trouble at home.

Hamiltonians in contrast see America’s primary interests as mercantile and it appears to me that’s Sec. Tillerson’s attitude. It has a certain logic to it even for Wilsonians. We’re more likely to attract people to justice and democracy from the base of a prosperous and successful United States than we are by overthrowing their governments and replacing them with corrupt regimes or, worse, chaos.

Left unanswered by Mr. Gerson is how the United States can make a credible case for human rights and democracy without confronting the World’s Heavyweight Champion Human Rights Abuser, China. That’s something the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations have all decline to do. Or even the middleweight champ, Saudi Arabia? Complaining about the flyweights isn’t merely hypocritical; it’s ineffective.

I’m afraid the editors of the Washington Post are engaging in a free flight of fancy in pursuit of an effective strategy for keeping North Korea from having the ability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons:

President Trump seems to grasp the dangers of North Korea’s expanding nuclear and missile programs, but it is not clear what he intends to do, aside from his tweeted broadsides at China. Beijing’s role in any solution is large but not singular. This is the kind of security problem that requires deft diplomacy and alliance-building — not the forte of this administration, at least so far. New sanctions are a necessary and potentially useful precondition, but what are the next steps to bring the bellicose North Korean leader to negotiate a verifiable agreement to stop his nuclear and missile programs? We have yet to see a coherent strategy. Nor has Mr. Kim felt the heat.

President Trump’s abilities or inabilities aside what diplomacy or alliance do they have in mind that would have the desired effect? IMO they aren’t more specific because they know that they’re blowing smoke.

The only sanctions that would have any real effect are sanctions against Chinese banks and against China. If we’re not willing to impose those for fear of provoking a trade war, the only available strategy is what I’ve advocated—biding our time.

The editors of the New York Times come out in favor of a series of tax reforms including raising the marginal tax rates of those earning higher incomes, increasing the taxes on foreign earnings of U. S. corporations which would place us even farther out of step with the other OECD countries than we already are, and imposing a VAT. Anything that would remove money from the private sector:

Real reform would honestly confront the fact that in the next decade we will need roughly $4.5 trillion more revenue than currently projected to meet our existing commitments without increasing the federal debt as a share of the economy. Even more would be needed if the government were to make greater investments to lift productivity and living standards through education, infrastructure and scientific research. Real reform would do this by diversifying methods of taxation while targeting individuals and sectors best able to pay.

I wouldn’t have a problem with tax reform that would reduce deadweight loss or that made the U. S. competitive with other countries in a revenue-neutral way, e.g. bringing corporate taxes into line with OECD norms while raising marginal tax rates on the richest to make up the difference.

Spending increases on the things that government at all levels has been spending money on, i.e. health care, education, and pensions have far outstripped increases in national income. Our fiscal problem is obviously not inadequate taxation but the lack of spending discipline. And make no mistake: extracting money from the private sector is a sure formula for decreasing private sector economic activity and will inevitably be regressive in its effects.

The latest in the ever-expanding circle of U. S. military activities may be airstrikes in the Philippines according to this report from NBC News:

The Pentagon is considering a plan that allows the U.S. military to conduct airstrikes on ISIS in the Philippines, two defense officials told NBC News.

The authority to strike ISIS targets as part of collective self-defense could be granted as part of an official military operation that may be named as early as Tuesday, said the officials. The strikes would likely be conducted by armed drones.

If approved, the U.S. military would be able to conduct strikes against ISIS targets in the Philippines that could be a threat to allies in the region, which would include the Philippine forces battling ISIS on the ground in the country’s southern islands.

The U.S. military has been sharing intelligence with the Philippines for years, according to Pentagon spokesperson Capt. Jeff Davis, who called it a “steady state.”

“We have had a consistent CT [counterterror] presence in the Philippines for fifteen years now,” he said.

There is a small U.S. military presence on the ground supporting the counter-ISIS fight, called Joint Special Operations Task Force Trident.

The rationalization that’s being used in support of these actions is a 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty between the Philippines in the United States. The pact is clearly focused on international threats from hostile foreign governments. Construing that as a freewheeling authorization to attack anybody in the Philippines sounds like a stretch to me.

If it goes forward it would be yet another example of the illegal and immoral use of military force by the United States. How this would not expand to attacking drug dealers or political opponents of Duterte is unclear.

The rule of law means sometimes not being able to do things that you think you should be able to do.

It’s somewhat heartening to me to find that the security advice I’ve been giving for the last decade has been pretty good. What I’ve advised for selecting passwords has been:

1. Using upper and lowercase and punctuation is only good because it makes systematic trying of passwords harder by increasing the number of options.
2. There is no empirical evidence that aging passwords for 90 days is more secure than for 120 days or 180 days or even annually.
3. A long password you can remember is better than a short one, especially a short one that you forget.

That’s what the chap who literally wrote the book on passwords has decided, too, as this Wall Street Journal article reports:

Back in 2003, as a midlevel manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Bill Burr was the author of “NIST Special Publication 800-63. Appendix A.” The 8-page primer advised people to protect their accounts by inventing awkward new words rife with obscure characters, capital letters and numbers—and to change them regularly.

The document became a sort of Hammurabi Code of passwords, the go-to guide for federal agencies, universities and large companies looking for a set of password-setting rules to follow.

The problem is the advice ended up largely incorrect, Mr. Burr says. Change your password every 90 days? Most people make minor changes that are easy to guess, he laments. Changing Pa55word!1 to Pa55word!2 doesn’t keep the hackers at bay.

Also off the mark: demanding a letter, number, uppercase letter and special character such as an exclamation point or question mark—a finger-twisting requirement.

“Much of what I did I now regret,” said Mr. Burr, 72 years old, who is now retired.

In June, Special Publication 800-63 got a thorough rewrite, jettisoning the worst of these password commandments. Paul Grassi, an NIST standards-and-technology adviser who led the two-year-long do-over, said the group thought at the outset the document would require only a light edit.

“We ended up starting from scratch,” Mr. Grassi said.

The new guidelines, which are already filtering through to the wider world, drop the password-expiration advice and the requirement for special characters, Mr. Grassi said. Those rules did little for security—they “actually had a negative impact on usability,” he said.

Key problems are that there may be no empirical information and the experts frequently aren’t really experts or at least not experts in the field on which they’re giving advice. Being a mainframe software developer does not make you an authority on security or human behavior.

At the New Republic Emily Atkin circles the wagons defending Al Gore’s outsized carbon footprint:

As David Roberts pointed out in Vox last year, the reason climate advocates don’t intensely advocate for personal behavioral changes is that they’re “insignificant to the big picture on climate.” That’s true even for huge energy users. DiCaprio’s emissions “are a fart in the wind when it comes to climate change,” Roberts wrote. “If he vanished tomorrow, and all his emissions with him, the effect on global temperature, even on US emissions, even on film-industry emissions, would be lost in the noise.” And it wouldn’t be hypocrisy, since DiCaprio isn’t asking you to stop flying.

That precisely wrong both factually and in behavior terms. In this non-linear world carbon emissions rise exponentially with income. An Indian peasant living on $1 a day has a very small carbon footprint. Al Gore’s income is 30,000 times and and his carbon footprint is a multiple of 30,000 times that. Plus one should model the behavior one wishes to see in others. It’s how you change people’s behavior.

I’m not complaining about hypocrisy. I’m pointing out that reducing carbon emissions on the backs of the poor is impractical. It won’t work.

Here’s a good way to use those summer vegetables which you may have ready to harvest from your garden.

Quinoa Salad

½ cup each of cucumbers, bell peppers, and onions cut into ½ inch dice
1 cup of fresh tomatoes cut into ½ inch dice
1 cup of quinoa
2 cups of water
¼ fresh herbs, minced
Balsamic vinaigrette
8 oz. feta cheese, crumbled

1. Bring the water to a boil.
2. Add the quinoa and simmer until the water has been absorbed and the quinoa has plumped to about three times its size
3. Dice the cucumber, bell peppers, and onions
4. Mince the fresh herbs
5. Let the quinoa come to room temperature
6. Toss the quinoa, vegetables, and herbs with the balsamic vinaigrette
7. Top with the feta cheese

This serves four as a main dish or more as a salad. If served as a main dish, it would be good with grilled chicken, fish, or, possibly, a pork chop.

As a main dish it’s tasty, colorful (we used orange and red bell peppers and yellow tomatoes), and nutritionally complete. Lots of vitamins, good protein because of the quinoa, reasonably low in fat and sodium. For the two of us we made half this amount and it was our entire dinner.

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected president, Scott Adams predicted that the media, Democrats, and other opponents of Trump’s would go through the following stages:

1. Trump is a traitor.
2. Trump is incompetent.
3. Acceptance

I do not believe that acceptance will ever happen. At best it will be grudging acceptance. I do see some signs of an alternative stage which I would call “Well, it could be worse” emerging, particularly in WaPo editorials.