26 March 2009

GOOD QUESTION! Now that he’s pending confirmation as a senior Pentagon official, do you suppose Ashton Carter will call for President Obama to destroy North Korea’s missile on the ground, as he and William Perry did in 2006? The idea of launching a military strike against North Korean territory is stoopid — that’s with two O’s — whether you look at it politically, diplomatically, or militarily. Waiting for North Korea to launch it and destroying it in flight, however, would be a another matter entirely.

WHY DO THEY STILL NOT LOVE US? Russian aircraft overfly U.S. carriers off South Korea, at an altitude of as little as 500 feet. This wouldn’t be happening if that chimpy cowboy George Bush wasn’t President.

THE TIBETANS fight back.

PRIVATE AID GROUPS ARE LEAVING NORTH KOREA. Even as the regime deprives its people of one source of food, it continues its war against the markets on which most North Koreans now depend for their survival:

U.N. investigator Vitit Muntarbhorn told the world body’s Human Rights Council last week the situation in North Korea was “dire and desperate”. Authorities were moving to close all markets on which many people rely for food, he said.

North Korean authorities were also apparently planning to ban small-lot, or “kitchen” farming, which had been vital for the survival of much of the population, while army personnel were forcing farmers to provide them food, Muntarbhorn said. [Reuters, Paul Eckert]

THIS WAR IS LOST!

IT WAS THE PROMISE OF EURO-BASHING that drew me in, admittedly, and although Charles Murray really didn’t deliver on that, I did find the most profound historical observation I’ve ever read that wasn’t written by Eric Hoffer:

The 20th century was a very strange century, riddled from beginning to end with toxic political movements and nutty ideas. For some years a metaphor has been stuck in my mind: the twentieth century was the adolescence of Homo sapiens. Nineteenth-century science, from Darwin to Freud, offered a series of body blows to ways of thinking about human beings and human lives that had prevailed since the dawn of civilization. Humans, just like adolescents, were deprived of some of the comforting simplicities of childhood and exposed to more complex knowledge about the world. And 20th-century intellectuals reacted precisely the way that adolescents react when they think they have discovered Mom and Dad are hopelessly out of date. They think that the grown-ups are wrong about everything. In the case of 20th-century intellectuals, it was as if they thought that if Darwin was right about evolution, then Aquinas is no longer worth reading; that if Freud was right about the unconscious mind, the “Nicomachean Ethics” had nothing to teach us. [Charles Murray, The Wall Street Journal]