North Korea Taps into the Power of Distraction

Magicians and medical professionals use distraction. Look over there, and while your attention is diverted, something unusual happens or a shot is administered. Distractions are useful, but, beware, they also can be dangerous. In a school lunchroom, one student calls attention to someone coming in the door; an accomplice steals a cookie or two.

     In international relations, countries often need to maintain focus on more than one problem. In my eBook, A Dangerous Mix of Washington Outsiders, I imagined an espionage plot occurring while the U.S. was celebrating the first budget surplus in 28 years, impeaching President Clinton, and preparing for the 2000 elections. My plot is imaginary, but North Korea's recent missile launches are real. Dealing with the coronavirus cannot be allowed to distract world attention from North Korea sending missiles into Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone three times during the month of March, 2020. Because of COVID-19, the Olympic games, scheduled to be played in Tokyo this summer, already have been moved to July, 2021. Canceling them altogether may be necessary, it there is a danger athletes might be killed by a wayward North Korean missile.

     North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, who failed to see any progress on a nuclear deal with the U.S. in 2019, resumed missile testing shortly after 700 legislators met for the country's Supreme People's Assembly. The size of the meeting also indicates North Korea, which had imposed a national lockdown to curb the spread of COVID-19, is no longer concerned about large congregations.

     What U.S. attention is focused on Korea is devoted to figuring out how to share the cost of military defense spending with South Korea and the virus-related cancellation of joint U.S.-South Korean military drills. Those preoccupations also avoid concern, not only about North Korea's missile tests, but also about the World War II reparation claims that undermine cooperation between U.S. allies, South Korea and Japan. The lack of Russian and Chinese sanctions needed to control North Korea's nuclear ambitions also is overlooked.

     At stake is more than a couple of missing cookies. 

   

What's In A Name? An Individualist.

People with uncommon names are likely to be individualists, according to a study of Scandinavian names and behavior reported in The Economist 
(February 16, 2019). Those who left for America to pursue their own personal success when frosts ruined harvests in the 1860s were unlike those who stayed behind to marry and to spur the growth of labor unions at home. On the other hand, a study at Boston University found the U.S. western frontier was populated with immigrants who had rare names, learned English, and married outside their own nationalities.

     These findings reflect those Robert Plomin details in his new book, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are. (Also see the earlier post, "The 'Where Did I Come From?' Game.") Plomin's studies of twins reared together by the same parents and those raised separately by adopted parents blur the formerly accepted notion about the separate influences of what is inherited in an individual's nature and what the nurturing environment affects.

      Inherited physical characteristics, such as height, influence who people in the environment look up to as their leaders. Likewise, behavior traits a person inherits influence the same environmental reactions both natural and adopted parents have toward different individual children. Parents will read to children who inherit a desire to be read to, while a child who breaks the rules and marches to his or her own drummer may badger a parent to buy a musical instrument and take lessons in jazz.

     It seems those who bear unusual names: 1) inherited an individualistic temperament from the parents who named them, and 2) their individualistic behavior probably influenced parents and others in the environment to respond to them in positive and negative ways.

     Where individualistic behavior is valued, an unusual name could serve as a leading indicator of the right person for the job. The art world that welcomes innovation welcomed Salvador Dali the same way entertainment does Dolly Parton and Oprah; military strategy, Dwight Eisenhower and Ulysses S. Grant; human rights, Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth; vehicle innovation, Elon Musk.

     Ambitious politicians, such as Kamala Harris, Marco Rubio, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Beto O'Rourke, and Cory Booker are looking at a mixed pro-con history of the environment's reactions to candidates with unusual names. Zachary Taylor and Barack Obama were successful; Horace Greeley and Adlai Stevenson were not. 

Modern Deterrents

Watching today's young Japanese students push their desks to the side of the room and hide under them, as teachers pull shades over the windows to deflect flying glass, only reminds us this was a procedure that couldn't protect populations from nuclear attacks in the 1950s. Strategies designed to protect a retaliatory second strike weapon system after an initial surprise bombing in the 1960s are out-of-date as well.

     Nuclear-equipped enemies in the 21st century include minor nations and possible terrorist groups that have nothing to lose. Major players have cyber soldiers that don't move on their stomachs. They keep coming without food or sleep. Not only nuclear fallout can contaminate an environment, but climate change and asteroid collisions with Earth also threaten the world's food supply.

     We are seeing people taking survival into their own hands. One of the characters on "Orange is the New Black" represents those families who prepare their own caves with guns and a stockpile of food and water. Refugees already begin walking or taking to the sea in leaking boats and rafts to escape war-torn areas. Farmers are developing cross-breeding for livestock and hydroponic and aquaponic growing methods to produce food in new ways.

     Computer hacking and nanotechnology offer new defensive options for compromising the performance of all sorts of enemy systems. Enemies know how each others guidance systems work. Besides shooting nuclear ICBMs out of the sky and scattering radioactive particles over the Earth, redirecting ICBMs (and any enemy weapons) to strike whoever launched them has the potential to transform MAD (mutually assured destruction) into SAD (self assured destruction) and cause the most fearsome tyrant to try to scamper for a submarine.

     Programmers already send drones to destroy targets as small as individuals. There are "Hurt Locker" experts who disable bombs on land. Could drones disable nuclear missiles in space? In films, astronauts also keep asteroids from hitting Earth, and furry little forest creatures cause oncoming cyber soldiers to crash by tangling their legs in vines. Meanwhile, high-tech Star Wars airmen penetrate fortresses through air supply vents.

      In the past, shields have blocked arrows, gun powder reduced castle walls to rubble, tanks swept around the Maginot Line, and an armada of fishing boats rescued an army, while prayer and repentance saved Nineveh from destruction. Alliances change from century to century, but the darkness of night, fog, snow, and a blinding sunrise still have the power to deter an effective military response.

     The wise expect an unending race between offense and defense and use their smarts to triumph.

Russia Continues to Live in the Past

News of Russia's training for military operations and plans for oil drilling in the Arctic indicate Moscow continues to stake its future on aggression and wealthy oligarchs. Neither will stem volatile oil prices, which dropped to the $43-$44 a barrel range June 26-27, 2017, or unlock the sanctions, imposed after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, that block the import of drilling and fracking equipment needed to exploit the Arctic's oil and gas.

Nor, it seems, is Russia positioning itself to take advantage of the new commercial Northwest Passage opportunities climate change brings to the Arctic Ocean, such as voyages of cruise ships like the Crystal Serenity that carried 1,700 passengers and crew from Alaska to New York in the summer of 2016.

To catch up on the race for the Arctic, see the earlier posts, "North Pole Flag" and "Iceland Gives China the Cold Shoulder."