Thomas Sowell writing on “The Anger of the Left”:

That people on the political left have a certain set of opinions, just as people do in other parts of the ideological spectrum, is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is how often the opinions of those on the left are accompanied by hostility and even hatred.

Particular issues can arouse passions here and there for anyone with any political views. But, for many on the left, indignation is not a sometime thing. It is a way of life.

How often have you seen conservatives or libertarians take to the streets, shouting angry slogans? How often have conservative students on campus shouted down a visiting speaker or rioted to prevent the visitor from speaking at all?

Or beat their teacher to death with sticks, for that matter. Here’s an example from China’s Cultural Revolution of what results when that anger is taken to its pathological conclusion and made into state policy:

“What is your name?” the Great Helmsman asked a young student as she pinned a Red Guard armband on him in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. “Song Binbin,” she responded enthusiastically. The name her parents chose meant “properly raised” and “polite,” qualities that Mao Zedong found unappealing. “Be violent!” he ordered the girl. A short time later she changed her first name to Yaowu, or “Be Violent.”

It was Aug. 18, 1966 and the 72-year-old Chinese leader had called male and female students to assemble on Beijing’s Square of Heavenly Peace to launch his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Hundreds of thousands waved Mao’s little red book and cheered the old man.

Mao’s call to violence fell on willing ears among many young people. Thirteen days earlier Song, 19 at the time, was presumably present when the female students at her school, which was part of the Beijing Teachers University, killed their teacher, Bian Zhongyun. The girls brutally beat the 50-year-old woman to death using wooden sticks spiked with nails. On the day before the killing, members of the Red Guard had already maltreated the teacher, who was the party leader at the school — they suddenly viewed her as a “counter-revolutionary revisionist” who they believed had gambled away her life.

Bian went down in history as the first victim of the Cultural Revolution — the bloody mass movement Mao used to eliminate his enemies within the party. The teacher’s murder was followed by the killings of millions of Chinese people. The ten-year campaign destroyed entire families, irreplaceable cultural treasures and centuries-old traditions. In August 1966 alone, about 100 teachers were murdered by their own students in the western section of Beijing.

Thomas Sowell sums up his point:

If it is hard to find a principle behind what angers the left, it is not equally hard to find an attitude.

Their greatest anger seems to be directed at people and things that thwart or undermine the social vision of the left, the political melodrama starring the left as saviors of the poor, the environment, and other busybody tasks that they have taken on.

It seems to be the threat to their egos that they hate. And nothing is more of a threat to their desire to run other people’s lives than the free market and its defenders.

And here’s an example of what free market capitalism has been teaching the children of China’s great Asian competitor, India:

During the mid-1990s, the first Internet cafes began opening up in Bangalore, with one going into operation nextdoor to Gopinath’s house. “My brother Shreyas took me there. I was fascinated. The Internet changed my life,” he says. He spent every spare minute online.

He taught himself how to build Web sites. “He spent every rupee he had in the Internet Café,” says his mother, disapproval still evident in her voice. Gopinath admits, “I had been a good student up until then. After I discovered the Internet, I was an average student.” Before finding cyberspace, he had dreams of becoming a veterinarian.

So what did he become instead? How about this:

Suhas Gopinath started a software company at age 14 and has since become one of the most remarkable success stories of the Indian IT boom. Now he’s 21 and runs a world-class business with 400 employees.

Nice one, Suhas!

Is there an evil global warming did not cause?

Global warming oppresses the poor:

Mrs Beckett quoted a remark made by the President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, that global warming was “an act of aggression by the rich against the poor”.

People do not cause Darfur genocide, global warming does:

British diplomats said the intention of Tuesday’s session was to lift climate change to the top of the international agenda. Britain has pointed to the violence in the Darfur region of Sudan as an example of conflict partly caused by land degradation.

Global warming causes Al Qaeda:

Last November, the Stern report suggested that 200 million people could be displaced by rising sea levels and drought by 2050. It said the global economy could shrink by one-fifth. Even Osama bin Laden accused the US in 2002 of harming nature “more than any nation in history”.

Seriously. What the fuck kind of paragraph is that. Who the fuck is writing this shit? Looking at you, Andrew Clark in New York. STFU, n00b.

And tucked at the end of the story, China don’t take no shit from no rising temperatures:

■ China has created artificial snow in Tibet after experts warned of melting glaciers in the Himalayas. The Tibetan meteorological station had created a fall of 2.2 millimetres, which accumulated to one centimetre, last week, about 4000 metres above sea level in northern Tibet, the Xinhua news agency said yesterday.

Nice one. Or maybe not.

The Chinese Communist Party – its a force of nature. They’d be pissing away deserts and drinking away rising sea levels if it’d keep that economy chugging up and away.

Meanwhile someone somewhere has pioneered the Abstract Expressionist school of journalism and the world didn’t even notice.

From the Manilla Times last week:

When nations stop breeding
by Dan Mariano

HERBERT MEYER was the first senior official of the US government to predict the disintegration of the Soviet Union. For this feat he was awarded the US National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, the highest honor in the American intelligence community. Under President Ronald Reagan, Meyer served as special assistant of the Director of Central Intelligence and vice-chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council.

Meyer later parlayed his record as one of America’s top intelligence analysts into a career as a consultant and writer. He has authored several books; his views are highly regarded by conservative American businessmen. He was also an associate editor of Fortune magazine.

In a recent article—titled “What in the world is going on? A global intelligence briefing for CEO’s,”—Meyer tackles four major transformations that, taken individually or in combination, will produce radical changes on how to do business worldwide. These transformations arise from the war in Iraq, the emergence of China, shifting demographics of Western civilization and the restructuring of American business.

Each of these developments will give rise to monumental changes, but it is Meyer’s discussion of shifting demographic patterns in the US, Europe, Japan and elsewhere that drew this column’s keenest interest. His forecasts in the area of population seem to have the greatest relevance to countries like the Philippines.

[..]

Meyer’s discussion of “shifting demographic pattern” drew the keenest interest around here also. I haven’t been able to find the original source where Meyer’s essay appeared, although you can find a few articles by him on American Thinker (“An open letter to Europe” is good for a laugh!). On the blogs where the essay has appeared in the last couple of weeks, people mentioned getting it by email, so it seems to have gone viral. Herbert Meyer has also been briefing CEOs about “What in the world is going on?” at least since August 2005 and a number of things in the essay hint at a mid-2005 writing date. For example the statement that other than the US only China is putting money into its military ignores developments in Russia (and a number of small players) and the assertion that Lebanon is moving in the right direction does not match current reality, although it would have matched the apparent reality post Cedar Revolution in March 2005. The section on demographics has not lost any relevance however. You can read the whole essay here, I’ll post just the sections from Meyer’s essay that relate to demographics:

FOUR MAJOR TRANSFORMATIONS

A GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING FOR CEOS

HERBERT MEYER

Currently, there are four major transformations that are shaping political, economic and world events. These transformations have profound implications for American business owners, our culture and our way of life.

1. The War in Iraq
[..]
2. The Emergence of China
[..]
3. Shifting Demographics of Western Civilization

Most countries in the Western world have stopped breeding. For a civilization obsessed with sex, this is remarkable. Maintaining a steady population requires a birth rate of 2.1. In Western Europe, the birth rate currently stands at 1.5, or 30 percent below replacement. In 30 years there will be 70 to 80 million fewer Europeans than there are today. The current birth rate in Germany is 1.3. Italy and Spain are even lower at 1.2. At that rate, the working age population declines by 30 percent in 20 years, which has a huge impact on the economy.

When you don’t have young workers to replace the older ones, you have to import them. The European countries are currently importing Moslems. Today, the Moslems comprise 10 percent of France and Germany, and the percentage is rising rapidly because they have higher birthrates. However, the Moslem populations are not being integrated into the cultures of their host countries, which is a political catastrophe. One reason Germany and France don’t support the Iraq war is they fear their Moslem populations will explode on them. By 2020, more than half of all births in the Netherlands will be non-European.

The huge design flaw in the post-modern secular state is that you need a traditional religious society birth rate to sustain it. The Europeans simply don’t wish to have children, so they are dying.

In Japan, the birthrate is 1.3. As a result, Japan will lose up to 60 million people over the next 30 years. Because Japan has a very different society than Europe, they refuse to import workers. Instead, they are just shutting down. Japan has already closed 2000 schools, and is closing them down at the rate of 300 per year. Japan is also aging very rapidly. By 2020, one out of every five Japanese will be at least 70 years old. Nobody has any idea about how to run an economy with those demographics.

Europe and Japan, which comprise two of the world’s major economic engines, aren’t merely in recession, they’re shutting down. This will have a huge impact on the world economy, and it is already beginning to happen. Why are the birthrates so low? There is a direct correlation between abandonment of traditional religious society and a drop in birth rate, and Christianity in Europe is becoming irrelevant. The second reason is economic. When the birth rate drops below replacement, the population ages. With fewer working people to support more retired people, it puts a crushing tax burden on the smaller group of working age people. As a result, young people delay marriage and having a family. Once this trend starts, the downward spiral only gets worse. These countries have abandoned all the traditions they formerly held in regards to having families and raising children.

The U.S. birth rate is 2.0, just below replacement. We have an increase in population because of immigration. When broken down by ethnicity, the Anglo birth rate is 1.6 (same as France) while the Hispanic birth rate is 2.7. In the U.S., the baby boomers are starting to retire in massive numbers. This will push the “elder dependency” ratio from 19 to 38 over the next 10 to 15 years. This is not as bad as Europe, but still represents the same kind of trend.

Western civilization seems to have forgotten what every primitive society understands-you need kids to have a healthy society. Children are huge consumers. Then they grow up to become taxpayers. That’s how a society works, but the post-modern secular state seems to h.ave forgotten that. If U.S. birth rates of the past 20 to 30 years had been the same. as post-World War II, there would be no Social Security or Medicare problems.

The world’s most effective birth control device is money. As society creates a middle class and women move into the work force, birth rates drop. Having large families is incompatible with middle class living. The quickest way to drop the birth rate is through rapid economic development. After World War II, the U.S. instituted a $600 tax credit per child. The idea was to enable mom and dad to have four children without being troubled by taxes. This led to a baby boom of 22 million kids, which was a huge consumer market that turned into a huge tax base. However, to match that incentive in today’s dollars would cost $12,000 per child.

China and India do not have declining populations. However, in both countries, there is a preference for boys over girls, and we now have the technology to know which is which before they are born. In China and India, many families are aborting the girls. As a result, in each of these countries there are 70 million boys growing up who will never find wives. When left alone, nature produces 103 boys for every 100 girls. In some provinces, however, the ratio is 128 boys to every 100 girls.

The birth rate in Russia is so low that by 2050 their population will be smaller than that of Yemen [TOD: Yemen's population is now about 21 million, but the birthrate is 7 children per woman. Interestingly the population is evenly split between Sunni and Shia. The projection for Russia in 2050 is 100 million]. Russia has one-sixth of the earth’s land surface and much of its oil. You can’t control that much area with such a small population. Immediately to the south, you have China with 70 million unmarried men – a real potential nightmare scenario for Russia.

4. Restructuring of American Business
[..]

IMPLICATIONS OF THE FOUR TRANSFORMATIONS

3. Demographics

Europe and Japan are dying because their populations are aging and shrinking. These trends can be reversed if the young people start breeding. However, the birth rates in these areas are so low it will take two generations to turn things around. No economic model exists that permits 50 years to turn things around. Some countries are beginning to offer incentives for people to have bigger families. For example, Italy is offering tax breaks for having children. However, it’s a lifestyle issue versus a tiny amount of money. Europeans aren’t willing to give up their comfortable lifestyles in order to have more children.

In general, everyone in Europe just wants it to last a while longer. Europeans have a real talent for living. They don’t want to work very hard. The average European worker gets 400 more hours of vacation time per year than Americans. They don’t want to work and they don’t want to make any of the changes needed to revive their economies.

The summer after 9/11, France lost 15,000 people in a heat wave. In August, the country basically shuts down when everyone goes on vacation. That year, a severe heat wave struck and 15,000 elderly people living in nursing homes and hospitals died. Their children didn’t even leave the beaches to come back and take care of the bodies. Institutions had to scramble to find enough refrigeration units to hold the bodies until people came to claim them.

This loss of life was five times bigger than 9/11 in America, yet it didn’t trigger any change in French society. When birth rates are so low, it creates a tremendous tax burden on the young. Under those circumstances, keeping mom and dad alive is not an attractive option. That’s why euthanasia is becoming so popular in most European countries. The only country that doesn’t permit (and even encourage) euthanasia is Germany, because of all the baggage from World War II.

The European economy is beginning to fracture. The Euro is down. Countries like Italy are starting to talk about pulling out of the European Union because it is killing them. When things get bad economically in Europe, they tend to get very nasty politically. The canary in the mine is anti- Semitism. When it goes up, it means trouble is coming. Current levels of anti-Semitism are higher than ever. Germany won’t launch another war, but Europe will likely get shabbier, more dangerous and less pleasant to live in.

Japan has a birth rate of 1.3 and has no intention of bringing in immigrants. By 2020, one out of every five Japanese will be 70 years old. Property values in Japan have dropped every year for the past 14 years. The country is simply shutting down.

In the U.S. we also have an aging population. Boomers are starting to retire at a massive rate. These retirements will have several major impacts:

• Possible massive sell-off of large four-bedroom houses and a movement to condos.

• An enormous drain on the treasury. Boomers vote, and they want their benefits, even if it means putting a crushing tax burden on their kids to get them. Social Security will be a huge problem. As this generation ages, it will start to drain the system. We are the only country in the world where there are no age limits on medical procedures.

• An enormous drain on the health care system. This will also increase the tax burden on the young, which will cause them to delay marriage and having families, which will drive down the birth rate even further.

Although scary, these demographics also present enormous opportunities for products and services tailored to aging populations. There will be tremendous demand for caring for older people, especially those who don’t need nursing homes but need some level of care. Some people will have a business where they take care of three or four people in their homes. The demand for that type of service and for products to physically care for aging people will be huge.

Make sure the demographics of your business are attuned to where the action is. For example, you don’t want to be a baby food company in Europe or Japan. Demographics are much underrated as an indicator of where the opportunities are. Businesses need customers. Go where the customers are.

You might think that the South Korean people would see the US as a friend and ally and perhaps be thankful for its help in the Korean War and for the billions of dollars in economic and military aid it has received since. Nope, nothing like it. Jonathan Last in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Americans generally think well of South Korea. The feeling is not mutual. A 2003 Pew survey found that 50 percent of South Koreans (and 71 percent of those age 18 to 29) have an unfavorable view of the United States. This isn’t anti-Bushism: 72 percent of those who disliked America said their hostility was toward the country in general, not just the president. The same survey found that half of South Koreans were “disappointed that the Iraqi military put up so little resistance in the war against the United States.” A 2002 poll found that, by a margin of 3-1, South Koreans opposed even the idea of the war on terror. Some allies.

South Korea has a long history of anti-Americanism. In 1982, for instance, South Korean students set fire to the American Cultural Center in Pusan. At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the undercurrent of anti-Americanism was so strong that then-president Roh Tae Woo held a special meeting of his cabinet to try to figure out how to soothe public opinion. As one student radical explained to the Associated Press in 1989, “the United States and its proxy ruling force… are primarily responsible for all our country’s problems and divisions.”

[..]

The United States was a big issue in South Korea’s last presidential election in 2002, with the most anti-American candidate, Roh Moo Hyun, winning.

President Roh has been less than true blue. He believes that North Korea must be appeased. He and his predecessor, Kim Dae Jung, encouraged their countrymen to forget about the North’s frequent acts of provocation and extensive network of gulags. Instead, they taught South Koreans to view the North as a slow, underprivileged little brother – more of a burden than an enemy. That view has taken deep hold in the South Korean psyche: In 2004, 39 percent of South Koreans said that America was the biggest threat to their national security, while only 33 percent said North Korea was.

Just in case you keep track of these things, 54,246 American soldiers gave their lives to save the South during the Korean War. Between 1945 and 2001, the United States gave South Korea $15 billion in economic and military aid. The annual cost of maintaining our 30,000 troops on the Korean peninsula is about $3 billion. Which is a pretty hefty subsidy to be giving the world’s 11th-largest economy.

Last says he has an “escape fantasy” about the US military leaving South Korea. Actually this is not such a far fetched idea at all. Both Washington and Seoul are keen to move in this direction and over the next five or so years the US military presence, more a relic of the Cold War than a deterrant to North Korea or China, will be greatly reduced on the Korean peninsula. This will happen gradually as the South Korean military is restructured to reflect the realigned defence relationship, which currently hinges on the fact that the US has wartime operational control of the South Korean military (the Combined Forces Command). In a recent agreement the time frame for the transferral has been set as between October 2009 and March 2012 (a 30 month period).

Part 1 of the weekly round up has more North Korea lovin’ than you can poke a nuke at. Part 2 and the rest in the (Australian) morning.

So point your missiles in the air and launch ‘em like you just don’t care!

Jonah Goldberg in the National Review: Multilateralism Falls Short: Exceptions and reality.

Kim Jong Il would seem unrealistic even as a comic-book villain. In a world full of strange and exotic cultures, North Korea’s neo-Stalinist experiment ranks as otherworldly. Try to imagine what a North Korea exhibit at Epcot Center would display: emaciated, out-of-work actors (no shortage there) eating fake tree bark while guarding a giant concentration camp where prisoners are forced to worship a guy who should be wearing a tinfoil hat at the local library. Don’t forget to try the sawdust kimchi!

Proof that North Korea is a hard case can be found in the fact that the Democrats and Republicans have switched sides. Ordinarily multilateralist Democrats are now unalloyed champions of unilateralism, in the form of face-to-face negotiations with North Korea, while President Bush – that infamous go-it-alone “cowboy” – has embraced international teamwork. Both approaches are flawed for a simple reason: North Korea wants a nuclear weapon because it wants a nuclear weapon.

William F. Buckley on RealClearPolitics.com (Universal Press Syndicate): Diplomacy Hits Kim

We have been told for many years that Kim is obsessively vain. But I had not remembered the document of September 1997 from the official government news agency. Reproduced here are the last few sentences of the paean, which serve our purposes. The official document concluded:

“The General is the mental pillar and the eternal sun to the Korean people. As they are in harmonious whole with him, they are enjoying a true life based on pure conscience and obligation. They are upholding him as their great father and teacher, united around him in ideology, morality and obligation. So their life is a true, fruitful and precious life without an equal in history.”

In North Korea such tributes as these substitute for food, which does not exist, at least not enough to feed the country’s 21 million people, 10 percent of whom died of starvation in Kim’s first half decade in power.
..

The proposed sanctions could hypothetically immobilize Kim. You can reduce the need for food by depriving incremental millions of it, but a million-man army needs fuel. Unfortunately, there isn’t any way to seal the border to the north, sufficiently to block extra fuel from passing through the long frontier North Korea shares with China. China has a special consideration here. The pressure of masses of North Koreans who want food and stability creates a huge problem, so much so that the Chinese worry more about instability in the Korean peninsula than about nuclear bombs dispatched from Pyongyang.

The diplomatic ideal, where China is concerned, is to mount sufficient pressure to influence Kim’s behavior, but not so much as to threaten his hegemony. The final formulation of Beijing’s collaboration will be critical, and the challenge in Washington is to egg it on to ensure that Dear Leader will recognize that he has gone one step too far.

Trudy Rubin in the Philladelphia Enquirer: Worldview | Why talks with N. Korea eventually must resume

North Korea’s apparent test of a nuclear weapon has provoked another debate over whether it’s worth negotiating with rogue states.

I believe this is not the moment for a U.S. dialogue with Pyongyang. This dangerous regime, with its track record of illegal weapons sales, must be disabused of any idea that it can get a free pass to the nuclear club. Strong U.N. economic sanctions are crucial, backed by a united front of U.S. and Asian powers. Also crucial is President Bush’s warning that North Korea will be held accountable if it passes nuclear materiel to other states or groups.

But then what? I’ve talked to no one – dove, hawk or owl – who believes sanctions alone will force Kim Jong Il to give up his arsenal. Nor does anyone believe military force is a viable option (provided Kim doesn’t sell his plutonium to al-Qaeda or Iran).

Unless sanctions are crafted to prod North Korea back to the table, it’s hard to see any chance of curbing Pyongyang’s nuclear program. But can talks with North Korea work?

Melanie Kirkpatrick with an idea that I’d love to hear more about, in the Wall Street Journal: “Let Them Go: China should open its border to North Korean refugees.”

The Border Police document, dated Jan. 10, 2005, begins blandly enough: “From the start of illegal border crossings in 1983,” it says, “the number of illegal immigrants from North Korea that have stayed in China has increased every year.” It adds, “Public Security and Armed Police departments have strengthened preventative and deportation efforts.”

The numbers it reports are newsworthy–and staggering: “To date, almost 400,000 North Korean illegal immigrants have entered China and large numbers continue to cross the border illegally.” And, “As of the end of December 2004, 133,009 North Korean illegal immigrants have been deported.” While Chinese authorities obviously know how many refugees they have deported, by definition they can’t know how many are in hiding. The estimate of 400,000 is sure to be low.

The Yanbian Finance Bureau document, dated Oct. 19, 2004, provides further evidence of the extent of the crisis. It is a letter to provincial authorities requesting more money to help with deportation efforts. “According to statistics from the Public Security, border police and civil administration, more than 93,000 refugees are still living in Yanbian Prefecture.” The letter goes on to say that although the Border Police Bureau has established “six new refugee-deportation and detention centers,” it does not have sufficient funds to do the job. Yanbian requests 30 million yuan ($3.8 million) a year “to solve this financial problem.”

..

If Beijing wants to send a message to Pyongyang about its nuclear program, it could announce that, effective immediately, it is taking several steps: It will stop deporting North Koreans, allow the United Nations to set up refugee camps, and permit the resettlement of refugees in third countries, from which they could go to South Korea, whose constitution codifies its moral responsibility to accept its Northern cousins, or to other countries willing to take them in. The U.S., which so far has accepted a mere eight North Koreans, could step up to the plate here.

The Border Police document notes that since the early 1980s there have been six instances of mass migrations that have coincided with North Korea’s famines. Now, winter is coming, and there are already reports of food shortages. Allowing the world to help the North Korean refugees in China would help Beijing deal with a problem that is likely to get worse.

Thomas Lifson on RealClearPolitics.com (The American Thinker): “The Desperate Dictator: Kim Jong-Il”

Any dictator who can allow a million or two of his 20 million countrymen to die of starvation, rather than open up his country to allow the adequate provision of proffered aid, must be pretty well invulnerable. Death by starvation is visible, prolonged, painful, and heart-wrenching for the survivors. Anyone dominant enough to compel mass acceptance of starvation must have an iron grip on the reins of power.

Or so one might assume.

Thus most foreign observers consider Kim Jong-il to be acting to achieve foreign policy goals of some sort by provocatively launching missiles and detonating nuclear devices. Perhaps he is demonstrating to terrorist state customers that he has salable goods? Or perhaps he is seeking unilateral talks with the United States? Or perhaps he is just aid-seeking or even anticipating another deal like he got with Bill Clinton, in which the United States will supply billions of dollars in aid in return for promises he doesn’t intend to honor.

But an alternative theory of power in North Korea suggests that Kim is in fact desperate, and is acting to quiet a threatened rebellion by the only group which matters when it comes to domestic power: the North Korean military.

David Warren, in the Ottawa Citizen: Desolations

When I filed this, the United States was still trying to get a limp resolution through the United Nations, condemning North Korea for its claim to have tested a nuclear device, in defiance of all its international agreements. The Americans wanted something like “the full chapter seven” — which would not merely impose, but enforce a general embargo on all shipments of military equipment to the rogue state, and could lead to a naval blockade to isolate it. Instead, to please not only its enemies such as China, but its nominal allies such as France, the U.S. has watered its resolution down to “Article 41″ measures, such as making empty diplomatic gestures, and banning air travel. The pressure was continuing, to water the U.S. resoluton down some more.

The matter is unimportant at one practical level. For even if the psychopaths in Pyongyang cried uncle, they would only have to hide their nuclear programme a little more effectively, in return for the receipt of the generous aid package they negotiated a year ago. There being no commitment even from the U.S. to remove the rogue regime.

Charles Krauthammer on RealClearPolitics.com (the Washington Times) : What Will Stop North Korea

It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

– President John F. Kennedy, Oct. 22, 1962

WASHINGTON — Now that’s deterrence.

Kennedy was pledging that if any nuke was launched from Cuba, the United States would not even bother with Cuba but go directly to the source and bring the apocalypse to Russia with a massive nuclear attack.

The remarkable thing about this kind of threat is that in 1962 it was very credible. Indeed, its credibility kept the peace throughout a half-century of Cold War.

Deterrence is what you do when there is no way to disarm your enemy. You cannot deprive him of his weapons, but you can keep him from using them. We long ago reached that stage with North Korea.

Richard Halloran on RealClearPolitics gives a run-down of the four options currently open in dealing with North Korea, and the limitations of each: “No-Win Reactions to N. Korea’s Actions”

The detonation of what North Korea claimed was a nuclear device last week should not have been a surprise as it has been evident for many months that the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il, had no intention of giving up his nuclear ambitions.

The New York Times reported that the explosion had given the Bush Administration and much of Washington a “strategic jolt.” But that was because official Washington hasn’t been paying attention, consumed as it has been with Iraq, the Middle East, and the coming elections.

The critical question now is what the U.S. and its allies should do next. None of the options is promising: Negotiations, Sanctions, Military Force, Do Nothing

Jon B. Wolfsthal in Pittsburg Live: “Avoiding Armageddon”

After pursuing atomic weaponry for the better part of a generation, it now appears that North Korea has finally clawed its way into the “Nuclear Club.” And that means that the global strategic game has changed forever.

North Korea, which was barely tolerable to the major Asian powers back when it was merely a potential troublemaker, is now a real and present danger. The time for negotiations is over. Now it’s about containment and deterrence.

Todd Crowell on RealClearPolitics.com: “A Deadly Kind of Fizzle”

It is probably unwise to taunt a man who commands a million-man army. It is also probably unseemly to make light of the man’s ballistic and nuclear weapons, even if they don’t work.

Right now people around the world are running around in circles, pulling their hair and wringing their hands over North Korea’s underground atomic bomb test, when it ought to be the subject of late-night television comedians.

In the old days opposing armies faced each other in an open field before the battle , war paint on their faces, feathers in their helmets, rattling their shields and making rude comments about their opponents’ manhood.

Today global leaders rattle their ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons rather than spears and battle axes, but it is still a macho world. And in macho terms, Kim Jong-il is a man who literally can’t get it up.

A whole new world of ‘fucked up’ perpetrated by the sickness that is the North Korean regime:

The latest description of Kim Jong-il’s policy of state eugenics came from a North Korean doctor, Ri Kwang-chol, who escaped last year and told a forum in Seoul that babies with deformities were killed soon after birth.

“There are no people with physical defects in North Korea,” Dr Ri said. Such babies were put to death by medical staff and buried quickly, he claimed.
[..]

“I defied the order to abort the fetus the prison authorities contemptuously called a ‘Chinese Chink’ and was badly beaten and kicked in my belly by a guard. His name was Hwang Myong-dong,” she said.

One week later, said Ms Han, she was led to a prison clinic “where in a most blunt manner they extracted the dead child from my body”.
[..]

Choi Yong-hwa, 28, described how she was made to accompany a heavily pregnant woman, who had also been returned across the bridge from China, to a clinic where doctors induced labour.

After the infant was born, Ms Choi said she and other women stood by in disbelief as it was suffocated with a wet towel. The mother passed out.

A 66-year-old grandmother also testified to witnessing the deaths of babies at Sinuiju, two of them healthy boys born at full term. The first belonged to a 28-year-old woman called Lim.

The witness was holding the newborn in a blanket when a guard grabbed him by a leg and threw him into a large box lined with plastic.

A total of seven babies – five born prematurely after labour was induced – were left to die in the box. Two days later the premature babies were dead.

The two full-term boys were still blinking, although their lips had turned blue.

A guard battered them to death with forceps, the witness said. At the Nongpo centre in Chongjin, witnesses saw the “children of betrayers” tossed into a wicker basket, covered in plastic sheeting and left to die.

One woman watched the killing of seven babies, taken from their mothers and left face-down on the ground within their view. After two days the guards smothered any that were still alive. “Guards would say the mothers had to see and hear their babies die because they were Chinese,” the report said.

..

“It’s vital to recognise that juche – the dogma of self-reliance – is not a theory but a cult and that Kim is worshipped as the leader of a religion,” said a veteran Western diplomat who negotiated with the North Koreans on 19 visits.

“These Koreans genuinely believe they are a master race and that the peninsula will be united under the rule of the Kim dynasty.”

Behind the facade of a Supreme People’s Assembly, a presidium, a cabinet and the Korean Workers party, North Korea operates as a one-man military dictatorship founded on clan rule, blood ties and deification of the leader. Kim is falsely said to have been born on the sacred slopes of Mount Paektu.

In the October issue of Quadrant (which turned 50 this month, btw) Ross Tirrell, author of “Mao: A biography”, tracks the ideological evolution of Mao from an ardent individualist in his youth, albeit with a revolutionary streak, to a ruthless blood-Emperor, who saw the Chinese people as a crude blank mass for him to sculpt into a neo-Spartan utopian nation with word and sword. And its fascinating reading.

IN THE EARLY 1990s, according to a story told by many Chinese taxi drivers, an eight-car traffic accident in Guangzhou resulted in injuries to seven of the drivers involved; the eighth, unscathed, had a Mao portrait attached to his windshield as a talisman. The incident fuelled a Mao fever (“Mao re”), a neo-folk religion with superstitious overtones.

Shopkeepers offered busts of Mao that glowed in the dark and alarm clocks that featured Red Guards waving Mao’s Little Red Book at each tick of the clock. Even Mao temples appeared in some villages, with a serene portrait of the Chairman on the altar. A transmuted use of Mao as folklore goes on today. In Beijing there are nightclub singers who croon songs that cite Mao’s words. Youths dine in “Cultural Revolution-style” cafés off rough-hewn tables with Mao quotations on the wall, eating basic peasant fare as they answer their cell phones and chat about love or the stock market.

Such non-political solutions to the burden of Mao Zedong are an escape that fits a Chinese tradition. When floods hit the Yangtze valley and farmers clutch Mao memorabilia to ward off the rushing waters, it is reminiscent of Chinese Buddhists over the centuries clutching images or statues of Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, to keep them safe and make them prosperous.

Following the eclectic nature of Chinese popular beliefs, Mao is added to the panoply of faith.

But where is Mao the totalitarian?

Read the rest of “Mao’s Battle with Freedom”

Guess this country.

It’s army, under the command of the ruling regime, is engaging in a campaign of genocide against racial and religious minorities, often beheading, raping and torturing its victims, but it is not the Sudan.

Children as young as 12 are being forcefully recruited into this army, but this is not the Taliban in Afghanistan or “Saddam’s Lion Cubs” in Hussein’s Iraq.

The military regime is busily building bunkers in a strongpoint defence matrix, allegedly in anticipation of a US attack, but it is not Iran.

This country is removing any crosses or other Christian symbols from public spaces, bit it is not Algeria.

This country has the world’s largest narcotics-trafficking militia operating on its territory, but it is not Columbia.

This country has a health crisis worse than the poorest areas of Africa, with more children dying before age 5 in some areas, than the Congo, but it is not Afghanistan.

This country has recently agreed to allow Russia to share in exploitation of its oil fields, in exchange for weapons shipments, but it is not Venezuela.

This country, while shunned by the West, counts China as its main political and economic ally, but it is not North Korea.

While the world’s attention is focused on several noisy ideologically and religiously driven nutjob regimes, one old backyard hussler is slowly but surely losing touch with reality, seemingly by way of good old fashioned drug-induced psychosis. That twitchy little battler is Burma.

“The side road the soldiers have blocked off is 15 kilometers (9 miles) north of the city of Pyinmana in the central Burmese plains. The jungle stretches for more than 400 kilometers (249 miles), like some vast, green carpet, toward a line of jagged peaks on the distant horizon marking the Golden Triangle bordering Laos and Thailand. The only destination worth seeing in this rural stretch of Burma is its tropical rainforest research institute.

But Burma’s ruling generals recently declared the region a restricted military zone, making the trip to the institute off-limits to outsiders. The Junta is having its new capital built somewhere at the end of this 20-foot-wide highway. The central government’s officials were already required to move there last November.

..

Burma’s leadership apparently plans to barricade itself into its remote new capital, from which it expects to control the country in the future. The nearest major city, Mandalay, is a 250-kilometer (155-mile) journey away on a deeply potholed road, and the trip to Rangoon takes about eight hours. Naypyidaw, or “Royal Country,” is the name Than Shwe, the junta’s 73-year-old leader, has personally selected for his government’s secretive new headquarters. According to official instructions to be followed in the event of a foreign attack, “Naypyidaw is our war bunker, where we will wait, during an American attack, until the Chinese hurry to our aid.”

Sounds like a brilliant plan. Although, considering the pace of events in Iraq and throwing in some generous estimates for the actions against Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Trans-dnestr my estimated date of invasion is somewhere around hmmm.. how does 2090 sound? By which date you won’t need to wait long for China to help, because you’ll be a part of it.

So what the hell is going here? Well, I did mention drug-induced psychosis, didn’t I?

“Beheadings by troops are common. So too are beatings, the use of forced labour and rape. Growing use of amphetamines among Burma’s 400,000-strong army is fuelling this violence.

A narcotics expert from the Australian National University who is based in Thailand, David Matheson, said researchers had concluded that many troops went into battle high on amphetamines. “When they come across dead Burmese soldiers, they find methamphetamine tablets on most of them if not all of them, particularly in the Shan state.”

The brutality of the attacks is evident in video footage, taken by members of the evangelical Christian missionary group the Free Burma Rangers, of the burning of villages. The video shows young men, armed with AK-47 rifles, setting fire to bamboo homes as residents flee in terror.”

Lets put two and 400,000 together here. “Most if not all” of the military is marching to the rhythm of an ICE binge, and its leadership is barricading itself away from the world in the middle of the jungle, declaring their new place of residence “Royal County”. Add the delusion and paranoia up with the erratic acts of violence, and this is obviously one hell of a tweak out. And it is sure to be followed by one hell of a come down, yet oddly enough “Royal County” just doesn’t sound like a rehab centre to me.

But I propose a solution. Send in the bicycles. That should keep them busy for at least a couple of decades. Heck, maybe after that we can arrange for them to sort through the world’s garbage for recycling, and get on top of that global warming biznit too. Hey, its far more likely to have an effect than another UN Resolution.

It looks like I am going to have to hurry right up if I am going to get a chance to experience that magnificently scenic new railway China has built to Tibet. Before the whole thing crumbles, that is.

WHEN the first cracks appeared in the concrete base and bridges of the Qinghai Tibet railway, just weeks after the carefully staged, triumphal opening on July 1 (the 85th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party), they were not the only sign that all is not well with China’s policies in Tibet.

The cracks seem to be the result of the unstable geology of the Tibetan plateau. Equally worrying to Beijing, shifts in Tibetan political geology have caused cracks in the official Chinese narrative of unity and harmony between Tibet and China.

There had been sporadic unrest for several months. In November last year, the monks of Drepung monastery, in central Tibet, staged a sit-down demonstration against “patriotic education” — the Government’s enforced propaganda campaign. The demonstration was echoed in other important monasteries in the region.

Then, in January, in a religious address delivered in India, the exiled Dalai Lama called on Tibetans to stop wearing wildlife skins, to save animals from extinction.

The results were dramatic: from Lhasa to Gansu, Tibetans gathered for public fur burnings.

Confronted with this evidence of his continuing influence, the Government accused the Dalai Lama of promoting “social disorder” and responded, bizarrely, with a pro-fur campaign in which TV presenters were ordered to wear fur on air.
[..]

Thats not bizarre. Thats insane.

Technorati Tags: Tibet, Dalai Lama

Spiegel Online are hosting some fantastic photos of a new railroad connecting Tibet and China. I am adding this one to my list of things to do before I die, the landscape is breathtaking.

The train link is a mixed blessing for the Tibetans. Since it opened last month 70000 Chinese and foreign tourists have already taken the train, so the local economy is going to benefit greatly. Further the Chinese understand that preserving at least some Tibetan culture is in their interest, because that is what draws the foreign tourists. Although to them it is just another cash cow to milk, much like they are doing with the Shaolin Temple, which was first razed and forgotten and then repackaged and sold out, the increased tourist thoroughfare will moderate Chinese aggression against the Tibetan population. The Chinese Communist Party realises the importance of appearances, knowing that the rest of the world will continue to turn a blind eye on Tibet if at least a thin veneer of tolerance and harmony is maintained. They also realise all those “Free Tibet” stickers are nothing more than a fashion accessory for the morally vain imbecilia of the West and no serious threat to Chinese interests in Tibet exists.

On the other hand there are rumours in Tibet that China is planning on sending 400,000 people to resettle in the region. Demographics is after all the most powerful geopolitical force in existance and it has served the Chinese well.

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