Bits and Pieces - January 17, 2012

Reactions to Rick Perry's charge that Turkey is "a country that is being ruled by, what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists," from Juan Cole, the Foreign Ministry of Turkey, and Turkey's ambassador to the United States.

Marc Lynch: No Military Option in Syria.

City dwellers in China now outnumber rural dwellers.

And now NATO helps some Iranian fishermen. I suggested a while ago that the two previous saves were likely a way to open a communication channel and to provide a tiny bit of confidence-building. Still looks that way to me.

Bits and Pieces - January 16, 2012

If you read only one thing about Iran today, make it Gary Sick's analysis of the Obama administration's approach.

And, speaking of the Obama administration, Sick's analysis dovetails with Andrew Sullivan's broader analysis. Which has some similarities to my analyses that I can't immediately find links for.

Speaking of getting it wrong, here's a good analysis of what far too many people get wrong about Central Asia. My limited time there showed me very little Islam. My hosts said that they were Muslim, but they seemed to be in the same way that people who go to church only on Easter are Christian. But there were gigantic monuments in the Russian style, many of them commemorating those who died in the Great Patriotic War, World War II to us.

And, yeah, if you still want to read more about Iran, check out Nuclear Diner.

Martin Luther King Day - Lyndon Johnson's Speech on Civil Rights

It's almost half a century now. This speech was made in 1965. There is so much win in it - read the whole thing.

In our time we have come to live with moments of great crisis. Our lives have been marked with debate about great issues; issues of war and peace, issues of prosperity and depression. But rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved Nation.

The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.

For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans--not as Democrats or Republicans-we are met here as Americans to solve that problem.

This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: "All men are created equal"--"government by consent of the governed"--"give me liberty or give me death." Well, those are not just clever words, or those are not just empty theories. In their name Americans have fought and died for two centuries, and tonight around the world they stand there as guardians of our liberty, risking their lives.

Lyndon Johnson is well-known as one of the great political wheeler-dealers. There are any number of colorful stories about his exploits in that realm. But when push came to shove, his interests were for his country and for what was morally right.

That's quite a contrast to far too much of what we see in Congress today. And those guys (yes, mostly guys) can't even claim Johnson's wheeler-dealer chops. They've made a lot of money for themselves, but they haven't moved politics. And far too many of them are still fighting the same battles Johnson was trying to end. Read the section of his speech on voting rights, for example.

We owe great thanks to Martin Luther King and the others who fought for civil rights back in the sixties. But the fight isn't over, and now it's up to us.

H/T to Tom Levenson at Balloon Juice.

Bits and Pieces - January 12, 2012

The United States no longer has heavy-duty icebreakers, and the delivery of fuel oil to Nome, Alaska, couldn't take place before the sea froze because of an unusual monster storm. So now Russia is helping us out, but it's touch-and-go for the people of Nome.

A Nordic-Baltic bloc is forming in the EU. It's been an obvious move for influencing Germany for some time, but it seems to be firming up. And I love to think about snow in Estonia.

Rumours of a coup in Pakistan may be exaggerated. The army may be satisfied with a political change of regime.

Since a focus of this blog is philosophy, I'll point to some links having to do with the morality of the assassinations of Iranian scientists and the use of the word terror over at Nuclear Diner. Plus lots of other good stuff.

A Warning to Israel? - Updated 1/15/12

The latest assassination of an Iranian scientist took place a day or so after American Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton released a statement condemning the Iranian Government’s decision to begin enrichment operations at its Qom facility but also calling for a return to negotiations. One interpretation of the assassination is that it was intended to disrupt the possibility of negotiating.

The Israelis are widely believed to be behind the assassinations of Iranian scientists, possibly with the cooperation of the Mujaheden-e-Khalq, an opposition group within Iran that has been designated a terrorist organization by the American government.

The murder was rapidly condemned by the American government:

The United States has denied any role in Wednesday's killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran.

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said the United States had “absolutely nothing to do” with the blast that killed Mostafa Ahmadi Rosha, and said the U.S. strongly condemns the attack and all acts of violence.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeated the White House denial.

“I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”

President Barack Obama called Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. This report tells us that Obama assured Netanyahu that he is committed to Israel's security. Added later: Some say that Obama demanded some explanations from Netanyahu.

The condemnation of the attack is extremely strong. Obama's assurance to Netanyahu is pretty much the usual, which would make sense in balancing out the condemnation. And, of course, we don't know what else may have been said in their phone conversation. Added later: Some say that Obama demanded information about the killing.

Today this article appeared in Foreign Policy. It's a blockbuster: Israeli intelligence agents passed themselves off as CIA agents to recruit members of a Pakistani Sunni terrorist group that wants to overthrow the Iranian government. President Bush is reported to have been furious when he found out about it, as were members of the CIA.

"We don't do bang and boom," a recently retired intelligence officer said. "And we don't do political assassinations."

Israel regularly proposes conducting covert operations targeting Iranians, but is just as regularly shut down, according to retired and current intelligence officers. "They come into the room and spread out their plans, and we just shake our heads," one highly placed intelligence source said, "and we say to them -- 'Don't even go there. The answer is no.'"

That would seem to underscore the White House's condemnation of the latest assassination, as does the article's timing.

Is Washington trying to tell Israel something?

Update (1/15/12): A missile defense exercise between the United States and Israel, scheduled for April, has been canceled. This seems to have been done rather suddenly. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, will visit Israel on Thursday.

Israel's Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon says he's ' disappointed" with President Obama and says that ‘election-year considerations’ are behind U.S. President’s caution over tough Iran sanctions. That's pretty undiplomatic.

Here's an interview with Mark Perry, who wrote the Foreign Policy article on Mossad's false flag operation with Jundullah.

Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner.

Bits and Pieces - January 10, 2012

I don't want to be able to search Google+. Or Facebook. Possibly Twitter. What I write on Google+ and Facebook (Facebook more than Google+) is mostly trivial. If I write something there that I think is worthy of further distribution, I'll write it here or at Nuclear Diner. So give this up, Google!

This is a longish article, the large middle part of interest mostly to air-power wonks. But the beginning few paragraphs and ending few paragraphs say all you need to know about the role of lobbying in our defense spending.

So who's a terrorist? A thoughtful consideration of the way law enforcement officials use words.

Reeling in a nuclear whopper. Very cool photo for us nuclear remediation nerds.

Update: Just had a Twitter uproar (1/10/2012, 8 o'clockish EST) over this Washington Post article, which started out quoting an anonymous American official as hoping that sanctions will lead to the overthrow of the Iranian regime. The article now has a correction right up front; corrections are usually at the bottom. Here's an early reaction to it.

Now I see Twitter speculation that that's what the official said and had to walk it back. Or it could be the reporters; the WaPo folks don't seem quite as eager for war with Iran as the NYT folks do, but both have been extremely careless (I'm being nice) in their writing, implying that Iran definitely intends to produce nuclear weapons or has one already. That's not true, not even close.

So now we can only wait and see what the mullahs think the case might be. Or what they choose as the most beneficial to their situation.

And all this in the middle of the always-intricate dance of setting up another round of negotiations. Thanks a bunch, WaPo!

The Pentagon and R&D;

One of my longer-range projects, which may never get done, is to write up some of the history of research in government laboratories, as seen from my perch at Los Alamos. It would be a broader history of something that was felt to be important in the 1950s and 1960s and got whittled away by any number of factors after those plummy days. The 1970s weren't too bad, and we even got some good stuff done in the 1980s, but it kept getting more and more difficult.

I was inspired in that enterprise by Hugh Gusterson's excellent article (sadly, now behind a subscription wall; this is an excerpt) on the decline of science at Los Alamos. But there was a history of decline before Gusterson's start in the 1980s that, in some ways, says more about the country's attitude toward research than the history after.

Now comes the New York Times with a paen to the Pentagon as the fount of R&D.; Well, they have lots of dollars. A number of people have written about what's wrong with that idea and article; here's one that hits some of the points. I saw another somewhere along the way, the link now lost, that mentioned the corruption of the Pentagon's system of describing research, the 6.x system, where 6.1 is pure research. Some time ago, the greed of the defense contractors started pushing development and procurement, the big moneymakers (the higher numbers, like 6.5) back into the lower numbers so they could loot those categories. I suspect that very little pure research is done any more in 6.1.

But I really do have to note Robert Wright's article. The Times mentions Charles H. Townes, father of the laser, who apparently had some DoD funding at some time.

I don't know anything about Charles H. Townes, but if he's a Nobel Laureate who laid the groundwork for compact discs and laser eye surgery, here's my guess: Even if he had never gotten whatever DOD support he got, he would have done something pretty productive with his mind. He might, for example, have done research in the private sector, maybe starting his own company or going to work for one.

Mr. Wright is new to blogging, although he seems to have practiced journalism somewhere in his past. Mr. Wright, teh Google is your friend! Here's Townes's Nobel biography, obtained a little faster than I could type his name into the Google box.

Townes worked at Bell Labs, an institution that Mr. Wright, born in 1957 (teh Google again) may be unaware of. It was indeed private, as is Columbia University, where he worked later. Bell Labs was an important part of the country's research and development; the transistor was invented there. But that Bell Labs (I think there continues an institution by that name) is long gone. That's part of the story of the breakdown of research and development in America. There was also an ethos that held that research was important, teaching was important, and so people like Townes remained in institutions of higher education rather than creating their own companies, favored as that path and phrase are today.

Wright goes on from there to contrast private-sector and defense department R&D;, seemingly oblivious that today's private-sector R&D; compares to Townes's Bell Labs or what he did at Columbia as assembling Legos does to writing a novel. The Defense Department funding that Townes received was very likely 6.1 funding when that really meant research.

His admitted ignorance of history derails all the rest of Wright's post. I guess I'm going to have to write my long-range post, although I have another intensive one under way.

Science and Secrecy - III

More about the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and its limitations. The bottom line seems to be that nobody really thought out beforehand how something like this might unfold.

Reinforcing what I said about nuclear weapons secrecy actually keeping information out of the hands of those who would use it badly (that includes both terrorists and semi-competent amateurs playing at WMD), Alex Wellerstein examines The Nth Country Experiment. The Livermore Laboratory employed a couple of recent Ph.D.s and told them to design a bomb from open-source materials. His conclusion, through a heavily-redacted version of the report, is that there's some question as to the potential effectiveness of the design they came up with.

That was in 1967, long before the internet. I see the claim frequently that "all the information is out there," but I have my doubts about that. And, as Wellerstein points out, the design is only the first step.

I won’t even bother pointing out that “designing” an atomic bomb on paper is, of course, nothing doing compared to actually producing the fissile material, casting explosives, fabricating the right shapes of things, assembling the whole device, all the while not killing yourself in the process. Headlines aside, these guys did not build an atomic bomb in any sense of the term “build,” which I think most thoughtful nuclear observers realize.

Much of that information is classified too.

Peace, Not Non-Intervention

Well, I see that since I posted Bits and Pieces a fight that I'd like to join has broken out on the internets.

Ron Paul has suggested that America has been wrong to participate in wars. All wars. Ever. He would bring American troops home from everywhere and eliminate military action as a response to anything short of an invasion, and maybe not even that.

Some liberal commenters, who would like to see less American intervention, have latched onto Paul's non-intervention meme, perhaps just the word. Do they really think it was a bad thing for the United States to participate in World War II? And I guess that maybe even an attack on American soil (Pearl Harbor, remember?) isn't enough to justify military action for him. And then there's Robert Wright, who finds that the issuer of racist newsletters has "moral imagination" in his foreign policy.

I thought Kevin Drum got it right the other day: don't leave your message to crackpots to carry. If you look beyond non-intervention, as Kevin does, Paul is crazy. I would argue that he carries his non-intervention to a point of crazy as well.

I would like to change that framing, by reference to the much saner op-ed penned by Nicholas Burns. Let's look at peace as an objective. Not just withdrawing troops from everywhere, although troop withdrawal would be part of it. What would it take to bring peace in the places where the United States is involved? Yes, we're involved everywhere, so that would be peace to the world. (Didn't we just have a holiday with something about that?) That would require prioritizing some things: Iran and Israel would be near the top of the list, and things like relations with Russia might be framed differently.

Yes, I understand that we are going into the campaign with the candidates we have, rather than the candidates we might want, and Paul's non-intervention sounds sorta kinda like peace. But thinking it out suggests that Paul's preference are likely to lead to less peace, not more: let the Iranians get a nuclear bomb. Let the Israelis slaughter Palestinians and take their land. Confine the relationship with Russia to commerce.

And that's only the nonintervention part. Kevin outlines the rest.

It looks to me that if we want peace, we need to be thinking about peace and encouraging the candidates. Stephen Walt has pointed out that to get ahead in Washington, young international relations graduates have to be hawkish in either political party. To press for peace, we've got to do some thinking about it and then lean on the candidates. Ron Paul has done none of that. His foreign-policy ideas are just as crazy as his goldbuggery.

Bits and Pieces - January 3, 2012

A bunch of nuclear-related stuff, but why don't I bring on the peace first?

Nicholas Burns links to his excellent Boston Globe op-ed on how we've forgotten about peace as an international objective and suggests that maybe we might think about this during the upcoming presidential campaign. Sounds like a good idea to me.

How many times and ways can you say that the Republican Party has descended into unreality and extremism before you lose your viewers and readers?

What an EMP blast might actually do. Listen up, Newt!

Oak Ridge's mercury problem.

Pakistan doesn't want to talk about controlling fissile material production (continued).

Mark Hibbs on how Iran gets the HF and F₂ for its UF₆ production and the difficulties the Nuclear Suppliers' Group has dealing with this. Very wonky and very good.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission seeks public comment on a report updating preliminary assumptions for an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) the agency will develop to analyze the effects of storing spent nuclear fuel from the nation’s commercial power reactors for as much as 200 years. The link tells you how to comment, if you are so inclined.

Micah Zenko's eight questions for the Obama administration if it decides to attack Iran.

Happy New Year!

Western goldfinch (Carduelis tristis)

The World Health Organization Warns About Those Engineered Flu Viruses

The United Nations health body said it was "deeply concerned about the potential negative consequences" of work by two leading flu research teams who this month said they had found ways to make H5N1 into a easily transmissible form capable of causing lethal human pandemics.

[snip]

The WHO said such research should be done "only after all important public health risks and benefits have been identified" and "it is certain that the necessary protections to minimize the potential for negative consequences are in place."

A poor post to end the year with, I know. But I am optimistic about 2012. I'll greet the New Year with something better tomorrow.

Blog The Halls

ZenPundit (aka Mark Safranski) has given us a bit of holiday nostalgia in a blog challenge.

I’m not sure that’s the proper name for it, or if the custom ever had a name. It’s a throwback to the early days of blogging, say 2004, when I started. We bloggers were eager for links and clicks, and one way to get links was a sort of chain letter: here’s what’s on my desk, and I challenge blogger1, blogger2, and blogger3 to do the same. Those were linked, of course, and when those bloggers wrote their posts, they would link back to you.

The blogworld has moved on, at least the parts I frequent. Some of the bloggers from back then like Praktike (aka Blake Hounshell) and Marc Lynch have moved on to bigger things, and some have stopped blogging altogether. Some of us, like Mark and me, have stuck with it, augmented by Facebook and Twitter. The MSM have encroached with media they frequently call blogs, but, since those documents are generated by paid staff and presumably edited for conformity with the parent publication’s policies, they’re not quite what I would call blogging.

So okay, here’s what’s on my desk. I never did pass these challenges on to others, just as I don’t send chain letters on, but that never has stopped Mark from listing me.

It’s hard to delineate exactly what constitutes my “desk.” I have a wrap-around set of shelves and worktable that, for the most part, contains the usual things: papers, office supplies, the small mechanisms necessary to working with paper and computer (stapler, postage scale, hand calculator), and a telephone. More paper. At least two cameras have temporary residence on the worktable, sometimes migrating to the windows through which I can see birds and other wildlife in the yard. Materials for the next Nuclear Diner meeting. For now, Christmas cards and associated address labels and stamps. Material to be organized into scrapbooks. Android being recharged. A cup of pens, pencils, envelope knife, and scissors, the cup from a flower arrangement someone sent me a long time ago.

Copies of Sky Calendar from the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University. This is very worth subscribing to for information about interesting stuff in the sky, like eclipses and meteor showers. An Iittala glass paperweight with a picture of birch trees in the fall that I bought in the Helsinki Airport. And a cube with glass sides containing sand, driftwood, shells, and rocks from the Oregon beach. I can turn it different ways to get different scenes. The paperweight and the Oregon beach scene are in the photo above, along with the cup of pens.

Peace on Earth

Seems to be something we've sort of forgotten. Nicholas Burns asks if the word "peace" is disappearing from our national conversation.

Stephen Walt points out that only those espousing a muscular (read: military-driven) foreign policy need apply for posts in Washington.

Christmas is, as Walt points out, looked upon as the season of peace. The Prince of Peace. Peace on Earth. Peace to all our readers, and let's share it in the coming year!

Science and Secrecy - Continued

Here are some thoughts on the subject from Michael Eisen, who knows a lot more about building viruses than I do. His uncertainties are worth considering, although I disagree with his bottom line and will explain why.

One of the things I should have written, but didn't, in my previous post (I know, no credit for that!) was that we don't know how well these modified viruses will survive in the real world. It's possible that their modifications also damage their ability to survive in some way. That hasn't been tested. He doesn't address that directly, but I suspect that it's behind this statement (my emphasis):

Although it is impossible to know how this virus would affect humans, its behavior in ferrets establishes a non-trivial possibility that the evolved Rotterdam virus could cause a lethal global pandemic.

He argues that it is likely that the existing virus constitutes more of a danger than that terrorists will develop a similar virus. Laboratory accidents are not unknown, and the incubation period for influenza assures that others would be exposed. But he is working through some arguments on publication of the full preparation of the virus. And I'm not so sure that this comparison is relevant to that argument.

Later in the post, he continues this line of reasoning:

But the thing that really really annoys me about this whole debate, is the disproportionate attention paid to mitigating the risks of these experiments compared to the far greater risks that surround us. It seems insane for a government to spend so much time wringing its hands about publishing the results of a few potentially dangerous experiments, when it does things every day that entail a far, far greater risk to its peoples’ health and well being. For example, we continue to ship massive amounts of arms to sketchy “allies” across the globe, many of which are destined to end up in the hands of terrorists, who would have a far easier time using them against us than they would any H5N1 virus. And we have done little to address the sorry state of our public health infrastructure – something that is an indispensable part of our response to major pathogen outbreaks, whether of natural origin or otherwise. And let’s not even talk about our stubborn refusal to deal with global warming…

I'm weighing into the argument because it's analogous to arguments that have been made regarding nuclear weapons. And we have some experience there with controlling information. I would also argue that the fact that bad, perhaps worse, things happen does not negate our responsibility to deal with the case at hand.

I would argue, however, that controlling specific information about how to do some things is both responsible and effective, and that the history of restricting nuclear weapons information supports this. It is true that knowing that something can be done is useful for someone who wants to repeat that something. But in chemistry (my field) and, I'm sure, in virology, details are enormously important. As the dimensions of nuclear weapons components are necessary for building a bomb, so are the exact mutations and how to arrive at them for the production of these new flu viruses. And that is the information that needs to be held closely.

In the case of nuclear weapons, we can consider the latest wannabe, North Korea. The yields of their nuclear tests suggest that they didn't get all those dimensions to where they wanted them to be. They can probably get closer the next time around. But keeping that information from them made it more difficult for them to build a bomb. And they may well have had the help of A. Q. Khan.

Part of the difficulty is in the handling and preparation of materials. That may account for North Korea's low yields as well as design specs. I think, although I am not quite convinced, that producing a virus to spec is less difficult than producing a nuclear weapon. Producing a virus requires fewer specialized talents, but what I am unsure of is whether keeping from being infected with the virus is more difficult than making sure that the explosives don't blow up as you machine them.

I recognize that free dissemination of information is something of an article of faith for academics today. Certainly censorship can be badly misused. But I think there are two issues here that have to be considered together in a way that extraneous issues like global warming don't need to be. Those issues are the responsibility to avoid harm to the public and the need to maximize the availability of information. I am not sure that the obligations toward informing one's colleagues are at the same level of avoiding harm to the population.

As I've argued the unlikelihood of terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons, I think there is an analogy to their producing this flu virus, with my reservation above that this flu virus may be easier to produce. I agree that the danger lies in the currently existing virus, and would add the danger of some amateur looking to score some points who doesn't properly contain the virus.

And this brings us to another question I had: whether this exercise was genuinely in the pursuit of better ways to deal with viruses or a way to call attention to the researcher. Another quote:

Here’s where things get complicated for me, because truth be told, I think these were really stupid experiments that have little practical value. The ostensible reason for carrying out and publishing these experiments is that they tell us important things about what a human transmissible H5N1 virus will look like, allowing us to better detect and prepare for a future pandemic.

I think this is very wrongheaded, and exhibits an almost willful ignorance of the ways that viruses in general, and flu in particular, evolve. RNA viruses like flu have very high mutation rates, and sample an astonishing diversity of variant sequences even in the course of infecting a single individual. The best demonstration of this is the rapidity with which drug-resistant strains emerge whenever any of the available anti-influenza drugs are used. It is because of the rapid emergence of resistance that use of these drugs is largely restricted to managing outbreaks in places with highly susceptible individuals, like nursing homes.

For me, this tips the balance, along with the history of restricting nuclear weapons information. Eisen remains unconvinced:

But I remain uneasy that the quick censorship trigger being pulled here with the easy acquiescence of most of the scientific community augurs future restrictions on science that will do real harm to one of the few things with the potential to protect us from deadly viruses and the other real and imagined perils of our future.

Update: Ivan Oransky argues that removing some information from these papers isn't censorship.

Science and Secrecy

Biological weapons have a serious drawback: they consist of entities that reproduce themselves. That means that they can get out of control and infect everyone, not just those they are aimed at. This is the reason that bioweaponeers look for diseases most of us find exotic: they want bacteria that will infect the targets but not spread so easily that they are a danger to those using them.

The big news of the past few weeks has been that Dutch and American researchers, Ron Fouchier and Yoshi Kawaoke, and their teams have made new influenza viruses that kill most of the organisms they infect and are easily spread through the air. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has advised the journals (Nature and Science) to which the papers describing the preparation of these viruses have been submitted to publish the papers with key passages relating to the preparation of the viruses deleted. The purpose, of course, is to keep the critical information of exactly what the operative mutations are and how to induce them out of the hands of amateurs and terrorists.

Because of their communicability, these viruses present much greater danger than the anthrax attacks of 2001. If an amateur tried the prep and messed up, infected his family, things could get ugly. We have the previous example of SARS that shows that something like this could be contained, but people would die.

On the other hand, if researchers know the components that make these viruses so virulent, they may be able to come up with defenses against them, maybe even a vaccine against all varieties of influenza.

I feel strongly that the NSABB has made the right call. Some people feel that information wants to be free, or something like that, a libertarianism of the intellect. Consequences be damned, I guess. And that link has it wrong: specifics of the mutations and how they are induced make it much easier to produce the viruses. Knowing that such a thing is possible is useful to those who would reproduce the process, as is any additional information in the papers. But it's some distance to figuring out the exact steps in the laboratory.

The people who discovered fission in the 1930s and realized its implications faced the same sort of dilemma. Here's a historian who discusses how that worked.

It's impossible to keep this sort of information secret forever. I'd be happy if we could damp down idiotic attempts to do it in someone's garage until we have some idea of how to make a vaccine.

Solstice

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.

T. S. Eliot, East Coker

The photo is mine, of New Mexico's Ortiz Mountains this morning.

Bits and Pieces - Vaclav Havel Edition

Some very good material in these three links and their links. Havel retained his integrity under the Soviet regime and then helped to remove it.

Vaclav Havel on Intellectuals in Politics.

Vaclav Havel's Critique of the West.

Vaclav Havel on true leadership in times of crisis.

Bits and Pieces - North Korea Edition

With Kim Jong Il dead, and his twenty-seven-year-old son his immediate successor, although probably with some sort of regent/advisor, nobody knows what is likely to happen in the short or longer run. South Korea has gone to alert status, because one way North Korea has historically dealt with uncertainties within has been to provoke someone else.

If you want to follow the speculation, here's some.

This is more a news article. The United States was just about to offer another round of food aid to North Korea, which is verging on famine conditions once again. That might have led to further talks on North Korea's nuclear program, but it appears that there will be a month of obligatory mourning in North Korea while those in power reassess their situation.

A broader look at the nuclear talks.

More links at Nuclear Diner.

North Korea at night, illustrating the oppressiveness of the regime and consequent lack of economic development, the same factors that lead to famine.

Lots of biographical pictures of Kim Jong Il.

From the BBC: a lineup of people and nations affected by Kim's death.

Steve Clemons lists people who are among the best placed to provide some insight. None seem to have published anything on Kim Jong Il's death yet.

Howard French: Crazy like a fox.

Christian Caryl: North Korea’s Not-So-Simple Succession.

Michael Hirsh: How Kim Jong-Il Became the Most Successful Dictator in Modern History.