Vox Sentences: Obama got a warmer welcome in Hiroshima than the Japanese prime minister

Obama goes to Hiroshima; the Libertarian Party picks a presidential nominee; Donald Trump's energy policy is kind of basic.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

No apologies, just hugs

(Atsushi Tomura/Getty Images)

• President Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit the Hiroshima memorial Friday, where he delivered a speech calling for the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons.

  [Reuters / Minami Funakoshi and Matt Spetalnick]

• The visit represents a milestone in American politics. The blinkered and often chauvinistic debate in the US over the use of the atomic bomb has often, as Jeffrey Lewis writes, "reduce(d) the victims of 1945 to the role of extras in their own murders."

  [Foreign Policy / Jeffrey Lewis]

• Several hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bomb) attended Obama's speech; he was warm with them, even hugging one, but didn't offer an apology to them or to Japan.

  [NYT / Jonathan Soble]

• The politics of such an apology would have been tricky. Not only do some in the US find it unnecessary, but it could have placed the Japanese government in the awkward position of needing to apologize for its own World War II atrocities.

  [Vox / Abigail Leonard]

• Indeed, at the memorial, Obama received a warmer reception than Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — whose last appearance at the memorial was booed when he failed to invoke a traditional promise not to use or develop nukes himself.

  [The Daily Beast / Jake Adelstein and Mari Yamamoto]

• This isn't to say the US has made amends and gotten closure. Even the descendants of those involved in the Manhattan Project (including Vox's Victoria Massie) are still coming to terms with the consequences of what their ancestors did.

  [Vox / Victoria Massie]

• And the federal government is only now paying enough attention to the existing nuclear arsenal to phase out the use of floppy disks(!) to secure it.

  [The Verge / Amar Toor]

The most suspenseful party convention of 2016

(Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

• The Libertarian Party will pick its presidential nominee at its convention in Orlando this weekend, trying to take advantage of a campaign in which both major parties' candidates are more disliked than liked.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Libertarian delegates are unbound, so the race is still up in the air.

• The frontrunner is 2012 nominee and former (Republican) New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson. But some Libertarian purists aren't too pleased with Johnson or his preferred running mate, former (Republican) Massachusetts Gov. William Weld.

  [Reason / Matt Welch]

• The plausible insurgent is libertarian activist Austin Petersen, whose pro-life politics have made him the choice of the dwindling ranks of #NeverTrump Republicans.

  [The Resurgent / Erick Erickson]

• The implausible but hilarious insurgent is antivirus mogul John McAfee, whose politics are somewhere between the anarchist "seasteading" movement and Burning Man.

  [The Awl / Zachary Schwartz]

• If the party does nominate Johnson it could make a run for it. He's polling at 10 percent — not quite the 15 percent he'd need to make the main stage in the fall debates, but not too far off.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• But the obstacles to a third-party victory are still huge, and the obstacles to the actual governance of a third-party president are even huger.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• Besides, if there is a critical mass of Americans who support an ideology that's opposed to the platforms of both parties, it'd be a group of populists, not libertarians. And, oh right, one of the two major parties has already nominated one of those.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

Trump's energy policy (beyond Jeb Bush not having much)

(Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

• Donald Trump has turned his attention to energy policy. In a policy speech Thursday, he laid out an agenda Vox's Brad Plumer describes as "Mitt Romney's energy policy in 2012, only with more exclamation marks."

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• Trump used a teleprompter for the speech, which means you can actually read it. (This is something that happens when Trump's speaking on issues where he needs to stay in line with a core Republican constituency, like pro-Israel group AIPAC.)

  [Donald J. Trump]

• Trump continued the theme in California on Friday, saying that his response to the state's drought would be to stop "taking the water and shoving it out to sea."

  [BuzzFeed News / Jim Dalrymple II]

• In an act of Trumpterpretation that frankly blows my (Dara's) mind, reporters have been able to figure out that this means. Trump would stop the state's efforts to divert water to wetlands, and allow the agriculture industry to use more water than it's allowed to now.

  [Los Angeles Times / Michael Finnegan]

• (When you put it that way, Trump's position lines up with that of California's Republican House delegation.)

  [Rep. Ed Royce]

• At another point, he promised to "open up the water," a policy plank presumably taken from Mad Max: Fury Road's Immortan Joe.

  [Jane Showalter]

• Don't worry, though, Trump hasn't sold out entirely. He said Thursday he'd approve the Keystone XL pipeline only in exchange for a cut of the profits — a deal the pipeline's developer rejected out of hand.

  [The Hill / Timothy Cama]

MISCELLANEOUS

How a middle-schooler managed to fool the entire internet into believing Henry Winkler was in the '90s cartoon classic Street Sharks. [Geek / Jordan Minor]

• According to Google, the most-misspelled word in Massachusetts is … "Massachusetts."

  [Google Trends]

• Remember that brief, shining moment in, like, 2003, when the Do Not Call registry worked exactly as intended? Here's how everything went to shit again.

  [Slate / Helaine Olen]

• Kim Jong Un's aunt has lived in the US, a few hours away from New York City, since 1998. She and her husband finally granted an interview to the Washington Post, 18 years after their defection.

  [Washington Post / Anna Fifield]

• Dr. Henry Heimlich, now 96, just used his namesake maneuver for the first time in his entire life.

  [BBC]

VERBATIM

"Yes, even Tinder uses [an algorithm]. Called 'Elo,' a chess reference, the formula assigns an undisclosed rating to each profile based on the frequency of right swipes." [Los Angeles / Fiona Ng]

• "Having Trump in the White House would both give me more confidence to speak my own opinion and more of a shield from instantly being dismissed as a racist/xenophobe/Nazi (all three things I have been called personally)."

  [Anonymous Trump supporter to the Atlantic / Conor Friedersdorf]

• "This is a not-very-veiled reference to the alt-right idea that effete progressive white men, as well as RINOs, secretly want to watch their white wives have sex with black people."

  [NY Mag / Jesse Singal]

• "While India is home to a dizzyingly diverse, multiethnic and multilingual society, prejudice abounds. Africans experience the same crude cocktail of ignorance and bias toward 'whiteness' as their counterparts in China."

  [Washington Post / Ishaan Tharoor]

• "I was served an image of the gates of Auschwitz, the famous words 'Arbeit Macht Frei' replaced without irony with 'Machen Amerika Great.'"

  [NYT / Jonathan Weisman]

WATCH THIS

When carmakers taunted horses [YouTube / Phil Edwards]

(Getty Images)

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