North Korea: the Peaceful Way
The world has been propelled towards a crisis by North Korea’s new tests of ICBM’s that could reach Hawaii or Alaska, and an enlarged nuclear weapon that could level a large city like New York. The North Koreans and our own Don the Con have been engaged in a Twitter war, although Don’s credibility was diminished one day when he threatened with warships that were headed the other way. The North Koreans have threatened to attack Guam, an isolated US airbase that is the most forward expression of US power and the home base of B-1B bombers that are reputed to carry nuclear weapons that project power over all of Southeast Asia. Fortunately, the last Twitter exchange between the two sides seemed to indicate that the North Koreans would temporarily delay their threatened launch of missiles at Guam while they observed our behavior. Don the Con tweeted back that he was glad to see the North Koreans showing good sense.
This sort of Twitter exchange is not an adequate substitute for private, personal negotiations between the governments of the two nations involved.
The way to prevent WW III from breaking out in Korea is to unambiguously tell the North Koreans that we will not attack them first, even in the face of outrageous provocation, but that we will strike back with overwhelming force if they attack us or any other country (South Korea or Japan, for example.) Then we can proceed to lower tensions by repeating those statements, with variations. In order to prevent war, we can reduce our level of aggression– avoid military exercises and overflights of North Korea, for example. The forces we have in Guam and Japan available to attack North Korea can be ever so slightly reduced. We can even offer to open bilateral talks, even if there is no progress to be made.
There is always the offer of “freeze for freeze”, which I am told the present White House is dead set against, as they are against any bilateral negotiations.
At the same time, we should continue the UN-approved sanctions and hold secret talks with the Chinese about infiltrating North Korea or even having the Chinese forcibly depose the Kim regime. The point is that we do not want to do anything that would be seen as a push towards war between the US and North Korea but, at the same time, we are prepared to continue crippling sanctions.
Then we should mount a massive propaganda campaign directed towards information-starved North Koreans. For example, cell phones and chargers smuggled into the country could be used if some method of spreading cell phone service to areas of the North currently out of reach could be managed. There is the example of the high-flying drones carrying cell phone antennae that can saturate the country with signals if flown in quantity.
The Problem
The problem is that we have allowed an insane person to build up a nuclear regime, with an estimated twenty to sixty nuclear weapons and an active program to mount them on ICBM’s (see last week’s New Yorker magazine for these numbers and a revealing visit by a reporter to North Korea only a month ago.) This mini-arsenal (less than half the size of the United Kingdom’s nuclear arsenal) would, even if all the weapons were delivered, only produce horrific suffering at the their targets, with the vast majority of US military might undamaged. There is no possibility of North Korea even slowing the US down in such a war. A hundred American nuclear weapons, each ten times the size of the North Korean weapons, would turn North Korea and much of Southeast Asia into a radioactive wasteland– and the US has thousands of those and more powerful weapons, and the means to deliver them. The North Koreans don’t understand this and they think that they can credibly deter the US from attacking them– they are, by our definitions, insane.
The point is that there is a serious lack of knowledge of both sides about one another which should be addressed with high-pressure injection of truthful information and personal contacts.
As to the definitions of insanity, there are these beliefs:
The North Koreans actually believe that we started the Korean war and that they won it. Literally, they believe that we surrendered in the face of their superior resolve and abilities. They believe the most fantastic things because these “facts” have been drilled into them all their lives, over the seventy year life of the current North Korean government. They really think that they can credibly stop us from attacking them again with a couple of dozen nuclear bombs not much bigger than the Hiroshima weapon. They seem to not know that we have spent more than the next five largest countries in the world combined every year for many years on weaponry and that we have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out all of humanity the world over.
The North Koreans are so deluded that they think they can start another war, invade South Korea, and deter us from attacking them with their nuclear weapons. That is their ultimate goal: to conquer South Korea and prevent the US from intervening with a threat. They have been drilled to believe in their right to possess the whole of Korea and the necessity of military means.
The North Koreans will never abandon their nuclear weapons because they believe that the United States would destroy them if they did. They point to the fate of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi: after abandoning his nuclear program in 2001 (after 9/11) he was eventually deposed and murdered by rebels supported by the US and Europe.
Because of this insanity, their regime is unstable and will eventually start a war or collapse catastrophically unless someone intervenes.
Because of this insanity and paranoia, it is necessary for us to treat them with kid gloves– to humor them. We should provide them with elaborate reassurances that we mean them no harm and give them a wide berth– but secretly we should be plotting to have them removed. The Chinese might be willing to do us this service if we give them appropriate incentives.
Our current problem, however, is the pathological narcissist in our Oval Office. Before we can make progress and peace in Korea, we have to impeach and remove the emolument-in-chief and his enabler Pence. Now that the emails promising Russian government help with dirt on Clinton have surfaced, the evidence that Don the Con broke election laws by “accepting anything of value” from a foreign government is strong enough– all that remains is to convince Republican congressmen that they are better off without Don than without a party.
Don the Con made a speech at the UN and threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea if they threatened the US or Japan. He has not thought this through. Attacking North Korea, obviously with nuclear weapons, would create a humanitarian catastrophe right on the borders of China and Russia, who would be on the hook for taking care of tens of millions of refugees. This is to say nothing of what would happen to South Korea, specifically Seoul, after an American first strike. To clarify, the “decapitated” North Korean Army would reflexively fire all of its artillery located on the DMZ at the South Korean capital, home to ten million people. Casualties in this enormous metropolitan area would be in the millions, as bad as in North Korea (which has a smaller, much more dispersed population that would not be killed outright by a nuclear attack) but without the radioactivity. The US would have to supply humanitarian aid to South Korea, and the world economy would immediately enter a severe depression which would make some venal politicians wish for more war to stimulate the economy.
The way this works out is incredibly bad. Attacking North Korea is a very bad idea. My first thought would be to hold secret talks with China and offer to stand by if they were to invade North Korea, remove Kim, and take control of their nuclear weapons factories and finished bombs. In this way, North Korea could not credibly attack South Korea because the South would not be involved. More importantly, China would not face the prospect of having a Western-allied country like South Korea directly on their borders if the US were to “destroy” the North Korean government and take over there. After over-running North Korea, the Chinese could install a puppet regime that surely would be better than Kim’s murderously repressive autocracy.
My final demand: lay off Iran. They do not sponsor significant terrorism, they are holding to a very good treaty preventing them from proceeding further to nuclear weapons, and their people are actually friendly to the US (incredibly.) Despite their government’s radical Shia Muslim faith and their belligerent words, they are relatively stable and far less repressive than the North Koreans. Most importantly, their government is not a pure autocracy but has at least a semblance of democratic mechanisms. Iran is not a threat to the US or the peace of the world under the current treaty or by the nature of her government. If we hold to the current treaty, so will they. If we withdraw from the treaty, it will still be in effect (it is multilateral, with China and Europe being co-signers) but no-one would ever trust the United States again.
North Korea is a threat to the world because of its autocratic, paranoid government. The US is a threat to the world because its leader is a talentless, narcissistic blowhard who is destroying the Executive Branch from within. Let us hope and pray that Mueller gets the goods on Don before it is too late, and further let us pray that the Republicans realize that Don the Con is an existential threat to their party (and see that impeachment is the only way to save themselves from a blow-out in the 2018 elections.) The Vice President, by the way, is a threat as well, and should be removed in the same impeachment proceedings because he was complicit in the collusion with Russia to throw the election for his boss.
Hurricane Maria is now a Category Five storm, the second of the year. We can confidently attribute this occurrence to global warming.
An Unusual Web Site: Patriotic Millionaires
This web site was suggested by a letter-writer to the New York Times, Lawrence Blum, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. It contains writings that are dear to my heart, writings that advocate a fair (progressive) income tax system, government help for the poor and downtrodden, and so on. It is very much in the mood of “I have a lot of money and I feel guilty about it, so I’m going to give away half.” (Not all, not by any means.)
So check it out: https://patrioticmillionaires.org/
The picture has nothing to do with the content of this post. It got stuck here by accident. So sue me, I’m going to call it a meme.
Columbus Had Blood on His Hands
A statue of Christopher Columbus in Central Park was vandalized last night: the hands were painted red and graffiti on the base read “Something Is Coming” and “Hate Will Not Be Tolerated.” The incident was reported to the police by a parks worker at 7 AM this morning, September 12, 2017.
The bronze statue was dated 1892, according to the New York Times.
I’m sorry I didn’t post this sooner. The photo was by New York Times photographer Dave Sanders.
Don the Con Has No Sense of Humor
This article in the New York Times says something I’ve never noticed before, but it’s obvious when you think of it: Don has no sense of humor. The only time he was seen during the campaign laughing was when a stray dog ran into the auditorium and somebody in the audience said “It’s Hillary!” That’s not the same as having a sense of humor. That is the same as thinking that your opponent in the Presidential election resembles a dog.
I just responded to a comment by an internet troll– a person who posted a highly religious comment on a science-based website, on an article that discussed scientific theories of the formation of the Earth. Here is the exchange:
However, as I turned 50 years old yesterday I’ve been able to free my mind of this elaborate 16-year indoctrination that had me thinking I was, in fact, part of some insignificant speck of dust in hurtling through space at millions of combined m.p.h.
Yet the stars seem to reset every year to their exact same position with no explanation as to why. As I dug deeper into this, I found out we are indeed significant in fact earth could very well be the center of the universe and everything revolves around us, not the other way around.
There was and is a creator I am personally grateful to be able to see through the B.S. of modern day faith based pseudo science, which itself seems more like a religion to me than most religions do. There is just no way the number of beautiful things on this Earth could have been created by a chance event that “just happened” billions of years ago.
There are scientific principles that we do not, as yet, understand. Principles such as Einstein’s Theories of Relativity and the law of uncertainty, only more complicated and abstruse (to us) because we have not yet figured them out.
Nonetheless, what we have figured out is enough to show us that our world exists based on simple rules, no matter how elaborate reality may seem to be. So there is no need for God (G-d) to actually do anything– he/she/it only needs to supervise.
Your complaint against agnosticism and/or atheism or “modern day faith based pseudo science” is that it “is like a religion”, which is a common and easily refuted claim that I will not trouble myself with here as I have limited space and time to respond to your supposed conversion.
My conclusion, however, is this: in publishing a comment on this web site that denies the “supremacy of science” you are acting as a troll, which makes all your arguments suspect.
Your entire history is in fact suspect, as people who were raised from childhood on agnosticism and free thought have an extremely low incidence of conversion to religious faith at age fifty.
Therefore, I allege that you are either paid to create dissension or you are deluded. If you are paid to create dissension, it is a fair bet that you are in the employ of cut-outs for the Russian government, whose intelligence services are actively trying to undermine the stability of the American and European web because it serves their ultimate purpose of helping Russia by impairing the “West.”
Recently the President has denounced the growth of groups he calls “antifa” without admitting that they are a reaction to the armed fascist movements in the streets that espouse white supremacy and neo-Nazism. The onset of protests such as those that occurred in Charlottesville is a black omen for fascism in the United States. If the police cannot keep control of the streets and prevent armed groups from attacking one another, the public will be so alarmed that they will vote into office the first fascist dictator who comes along. G-d help us if it is Donald J. Trump.
This type of disturbance is reminiscent of the era in which Adolf Hitler’s party was elected in Germany, over a period of months in 1932 and 1933. At that time there had been rioting in the streets for many months between communists, fascists, Nazis, and other groups– clashes in which the police and courts were often complicit in ordaining light sentences on known Nazis. At the same time, Nazis infiltrated state governments and the federal administrative apparatus. A phenomenon similar to that is currently happening in our federal government: parts of it are being hollowed out and replaced with a skeleton staff of Trump loyalists.
To paraphrase Karl Marx, from 1851, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
Comment of the Day: Insensitive Hurricanes
RC
WA 22 hours ago
Is it insensitive to discuss terrorism on 9-11 each year? No, it’s considered not only appropriate, but almost a patriotic duty. Climate change is proving to be a devastating, albeit very different form of terrorism. It’s impacts mostly hit poor and disadvantaged populations, not just here but all around the globe. Yet we can point to real people with a real agenda to suppress that conversation, and stomp on the efforts to slow climate change. This is a real source of fear and anxiety in my life, and I’m going to discuss it.
Articles for Today: Income Inequality
First, there is a classic article by Paul Krugman, originally published in 1992, about the stunning rise in income and wealth inequality in the period 1979-1989 and how conservatives tried to deny that it even happened, much less had any significance. Here are the last two paragraphs of the article:
The surprise lesson of the income distribution controversy, then, is what it says about today’s conservative mind-set. It turns out that many conservatives, for all their anti-totalitarian rhetoric, have Orwellian instincts: if the record doesn’t say what you wish it did, hide it or fudge it.
There are substantive issues about income distribution. Nobody really knows all the reasons why incomes at the top have soared while those at the bottom have plunged. Still less is there a consensus about what kinds of policies might limit or reverse the trend. But it seems that many conservatives not only don’t want to discuss substance: they prefer not to face reality, and to live in a fantasy world in which the 1980s turned out the way they were supposed to, not the way they did.
This article says a lot about the mind-sets of conservatives like those who publish the Wall Street Journal (now run by Rupert Murdoch, a toady of Don the Con.) If the facts are inconvenient, simply deny they exist.
Second is an article about the book by Thomas Pikketty called “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” which caused some terrible uproar when it was published a couple of years ago. The book laid out clearly how rich people have been screwing poor people out of the gains from their increases in productivity, partly with a regressive income tax system. The article is titled “Pikketty’s Triumph” and is worth reading, especially if you are unfamiliar with the book.
As a bonus, here is an article from the Guardian about how Rupert Murdoch and Don the Con have become “best friends forever” and how Murdoch is systematically slanting the Journal’s coverage to “normalize” Don (as if that were actually possible.)
