Positive Quiddity: Kim Jong Il Died

North Korea was created by the old Soviet Union in 1945 with the installation of a Korean Communist, Kim Il-Sung, as the liberating leader. This founder of North Korea died in 1994 and his son, Kim Jong Il, born in Vyatskoye, Soviet Union, 1941, served as the leader of the nation until his death last weekend.
　
As leader, Kim Jong Il continued the policy of using concentration camps to deal with the slighest dissent among the people. If a questionable statement was made, or an inconvenient counter-revolutionary question was asked, an entire family was sent to a camp. Seldom did any return to the community.

                                                     Kim Jong-Il

Kim Jong Il himself lived a luxurious life, enjoying at one time the status of being the largest customer of French cognac. He also had a film library of western motion pictures. The money for these luxuries came from a state-run counterfeiting operation. The phony American bills were flown by private jet to Asian money centers and converted into the cash used to buy personal luxuries for the leader.

Though North Korea was mismanaged to the point of public starvation in the early 1990s, Kim ruthlessly pursued a nuclear weapons program, even though people were cooking seaweed in order to have something to eat. Even the huge, white elephant showplace palatial hotel being built in the capital city had to be shelved for lack of money, especially since no money was forthcoming from Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed
and Boris Yeltsin was elected. But the nuclear program continued unabated.

How can such rampant and inhuman dictatorship survive? A rock steady totalitarian system without an underground was maintained due to the universal North Korean concept of "juche."

Juche

"…There is a reason why the regime of the Kims survives while, all around it, the Soviet bloc disintegrated and the Chinese opened up and reformed. The North Korean regime's ideology, called juche, is often simplistically defined as Korean self-reliance and ridiculed in the West. But to the North Korean elites, juche is still a powerfully intoxicating brew of traditional Korean xenophobia and nationalism, Confucian respect for authority and utopian Marxism-Leninism. The party embodies all of these ideals--nationalism, filial respect, utopia.  Exploiting this confluence of philosophies and experiences, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il created "an impermeable and absolutist state that many have compared to a religious cult," wrote longtime Korea observer, Don Oberdorfer in his 1997 book, "The Two Koreas."

"Hence it hasn’t broken down, long after other regimes have, despite a smorgasbord of Western policies ranging from tough sanctions to occasional freezes in aid…"

-- http://nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/the-death-of-dr-evil-20111219


Wikipedia has an article on Kim Jong-Il that includes these observations:

Personality

Like his father, Kim has a fear of flying and always travels by private armored train for state visits to Russia and China. The BBC reported that Konstantin Pulikovsky, a Russian emissary who traveled with Kim across Russia by train, told reporters that Kim had live lobsters air-lifted to the train every day.


Kim is said to be a huge film fan, owning a collection of more than 20,000 video tapes and DVDs. His reported favorite movie franchises include Friday the 13^th, Rambo, Godzilla, Hong Kong action cinema and any movie starring Elizabeth Taylor. He is the author of the book On the Art of the Cinema. In 1978, on Kim's orders, South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee were kidnapped in order to build a North Korean film industry. In 2006 he was involved in the production of the Juche-based movie Diary of a Girl Student – depicting the life of a girl whose parents are scientists – with a KCNA news report stating that Kim "improved its script and guided its production".

Although Kim enjoys many foreign forms of entertainment, according to former bodyguard Lee Young Kuk, he refused to consume any food or drink not produced in North Korea, with the exception of wine from France. His former chef Kenji Fujimoto, however, has stated that Kim has sometimes sent him around the world to purchase a variety of foreign delicacies.

Kim reportedly enjoys basketball. Former United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ended her summit with Kim by presenting him with a basketball signed by NBA legend Michael Jordan. Also an apparent golfer, North Korean state media reports that Kim routinely shoots three or four holes-in-one per round. His official biography also claims Kim has composed six operas and enjoys staging elaborate musicals. Kim also refers to himself as an Internet expert.

US Special Envoy for the Korean Peace Talks, Charles Kartman, who was involved in the 2000 Madeleine Albright summit with Kim, characterised Kim Jong-il as a reasonable man in negotiations, to the point, but with a sense of humor and personally attentive to the people he was hosting. However, psychological evaluations conclude that Kim Jong-il's antisocial features, such as his fearlessness in the face of sanctions and punishment, serve to make negotiations extraordinarily difficult.

The field of psychology has long been fascinated with the personality assessment of dictators, a notion that resulted in an extensive personality evaluation of Kim Jong-il. The report, compiled by Frederick L. Coolidge and Daniel L. Segal (with the assistance of a South Korean psychiatrist considered an expert on Kim Jong-il's behavior), concluded that the "big six" group of personality disorders shared by dictators Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Saddam Hussein (sadistic, paranoid, antisocial, narcissistic, schizoid and schizotypal) were also shared by Kim Jong-il—coinciding primarily with the profile of Saddam Hussein. The evaluation also finds that Kim Jong-il appears to pride himself on North Korea's independence, despite the extreme hardships it appears to place on the North Korean people—an attribute appearing to emanate from his antisocial personality pattern. This notion also encourages other cognitive issues, such as self-deception, as subsidiary components to Kim Jong-il's personality. Many of the stories about Kim Jong Il's eccentricities and decadent life-style are exaggerated, possibly circulated by South Korean intelligence to discredit the Northern regime. Defectors claim that Kim has 17 different palaces and residences all over North Korea, including a private resort near Baekdu Mountain, a seaside lodge in the city of Wonsan, and a palace complex northeast of Pyongyang surrounded with multiple fence lines, bunkers and anti-aircraft batteries.

Finances

According to the Sunday Telegraph, Kim has US$4 billion on deposit in European banks in case he ever needs to flee North Korea. The Sunday Telegraph reported that most of the money was in banks in Luxembourg.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Jong-Ill

The Ryugyong Hotel

Emblematic of this regime has been an enormous white elephant of a hotel, originally approved and partly constructed by the "founder" of North Korea, Kim Jong-Il’s father, Kim Il-Sung, in 1987.  The Ryugyong Hotel  construction began in 1987 under the "Great Leader"for a 1989 youth exhibition. After a 1,000 foot high steel frame was built, construction was abandoned as the nation nearly starved in the early 1990s. Under the "Dear Leader," the recently deceased Kim Jong Il, construction resumed. The facility may actually open as a multi-use hotel in 2012. There are reports that the elevator shafts are crooked. The quality of the concrete in the building has also been questioned. 

The Orascam Group of Egypt, a telecommunications firm, is apparently completing the construction, though some have denied this connection.

Wikipedia reports: "Even though the Ryugyong dominates the Pyongyang skyline, official information regarding the hotel and its status have proven difficult to obtain. Though mocked-up images of the completed hotel had once appeared on North Korean stamps, the North Korean government denied the building's existence for many years. The government manipulated official photographs in order to remove the structure, and excluded it from printed maps of Pyongyang. The alleged problems associated with the hotel led some media sources to dub it "The Worst Building in the World","Hotel of Doom" and "Phantom Hotel".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel

Czech Hero Vaclav Havel Dies

Vaclav Havel, playwright and leader of the "Velvet Revolution" for Czechoslovakian independence, died Sunday at his weekend home in the northern Czech Republic. He was 75 years old. A chain-smoker, he suffered from chronic respiratory issues since his many years in prison.

"Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred," Havel famously said.

President Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa of Poland, and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offered written tribute to Havel.

Havel was born in Prague in October, 1936. His wealthy family lost their property when the Communists took over in 1948. Denied a formal education, he obtained a degree from a night school and started his theater career as a stage hand, eventually becoming a playwright who penned plays and essays profoundly irksome to the Communists. His 1977 manifesto made him famous. Along with other writings, he served four years in jail, where his letters to his wife, Olga, became famous to the people of his country.

Demonstrations in August, 1988, exactly twenty years after the country was invaded by the Warsaw Pact, led to chants of Havel’s name by a young crowd. He was arrested in January of 1989 at another protest. His trial generated anger both at home and internationally. The pressure was so intense that he was released from jail in May. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall fell. Eight days afterward, a demonstration by thousands of Prague students was violently broken up by the police. Within two days, a broad opposition movement was founded, and in three boisterous weeks, communist rule was broken. Just as the Soviet tanks rolled out of Prague, Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones arrived for a concert. The country’s parliament, still in communist hands, ,made him President on December 29, 1989.

Havel was not pleased by the breakup of his nation into the Czech Republic and Slovenia in the early 1990s, and he resined as president. His popularity was such that he became president of the new Czech Republic in an uncontested race. Most of the subsequent pro-market reforms have been credited to his political rival Vaclav Klaus, who was then prime minister of the country and is now President.

The media became more critical of Havel, his wife Olga died on cancer in 1996, the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999, and he left office in 2003.

Havel’s second wife, Dagmar Veskrnova, and a nun who cared for him in his final months, were at his side at the time of he died.

Havel received dozens of awards, including Sweden’s Olof Palme Prize, the American Presidential Medal of Freedom, and several nominations for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Havel viewed the worldwide economic slump that began in 2008 as a reminder to retain basic human values even when trying to prosper. He published another play, "Leaving," about a struggling leader at the end of his time in power. This work attained critical acclaim.

Summarized from this Associated Press report:

http://news.yahoo.com/havel-hero-anti-communist-revolution-dies-210508182.html;_ylt=AiDEB9kE6RKBIOY75dGK1AKs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNtdHEzdTF1BG1pdANUb3BTdG9yeSBGUARwa2cDMWI3N2JlYzQtMWE1NS0zNTEzLTg1N2YtNGU3YWY4MmI2ZTU1BHBvcwMxNARzZWMDdG9wX3N0b3J5BHZlcgNmODU0YzEwMC0yOWJjLTExZTEtOWZhZC1iODkwOGY1NmEwOWI-;_ylg=X3oDMTJlaTQzcG12BGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdANob21lBHB0A3NlY3Rpb25zBHRlc3QDTm9uZXdzcmVhZGVyb25uZXdzaG9tZQ--;_ylv=3  

Positive Quiddity: Richard W. Fisher

The head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas agrees that businesses are seeing record profits and that banks have plenty of money to lend, in part because of Federal Reserve policies. Then he says this:

"I maintain that no matter how much cash you have on your balance sheet, or how compliant your banker might be, or how cheap the cost of money, you will not commit substantial capital to expanding your payroll or investing significant amounts to expand plant and equipment until you know what it will cost you to run your business; until you know how much you will be taxed; until you know how federal spending will impact your customer base; until you know the cost of employee health insurance; until you are reassured that regulations that affect your business will be structured so as to incentivize rather than discourage expansion; until you have concrete assurance that the fiscal "fix" the nation so desperately needs will be crafted to stimulate the economy rather than depress it and incentivize job creation rather than discourage it; or until you are reassured that the sinkhole of unfunded liabilities like Medicare and Social Security that Republican- and Democrat-led congresses and presidents alike have dug will be repaired so that our successor generations of Americans will prosper rather than drown in dark, deep waters of debt."

--Richard W. Fisher (President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas), December 16, 2011. The entire speech available at: http://www.dallasfed.org/news/speeches/fisher/2011/fs111216.cfm

Fisher quotes Martin Luther King:

"Cowardice asks the question—is it safe? Expediency asks the question—is it politic? Vanity asks the question—is it popular? But conscience asks the question—is it right? … There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right."

and then says this:

"That time is now. Our nation’s economy is at risk. The Federal Reserve has done everything it can to reduce unemployment without forsaking our sacred commitment to maintaining price stability, or crossing over the monetary river Styx into full-blown debt monetization. I personally don’t care which party is in the White House or controls Congress. All I know is that the "honorable" members of Congress and presidents past, Republicans and Democrats alike, have conspired over time, however unwittingly, to drive fiscal policy into the ditch. They purchased their elections and reelections with popular programs so poorly funded that they now threaten the economic well-being of our children and our children’s children. Instead of passing the torch on to the successor generation of Americans, they have simply passed them the bill. This is the opposite of honorable. "

Positive Quiddity: Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens, writer, journalist, and contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Slate and other publications, has died at 62 from complications of esophageal cancer. He was being treated at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, at the time of his death.

It is my view that Hitchens was the last genuine, authentic, uncompromisingly and perfectionistic classical liberal. From John Locke to John Stuart Mill, the classical liberal stood for rational empiricism, for equality before the law for all sentient creatures, for the strict responsibilities of parenthood (rather like a leasehold for stewarding priceless assets) and for the advance of scientific knowledge liberated and expanded by an understanding – a thorough understanding! – of the humanities.  The very last link at the bottom of this post consists of reminiscences of another reporter -- who remembers Hitchens instant, encyclopedic knowledge of English literature.

Hitchens was a graduate of Balliol College at Oxford, from whence his exquisitely precise prose was honed. It also gave him the experience of performing ruthlessly thorough and unbiased research, a talent particularly manifest in the essays and books he wrote. And what books! He wrote one that indicted Henry Kissinger, a tome bristling with footnotes. The absurd adult lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton, who pranced about in Arkansas and then in Washington a few short steps from grand jury investigation for decades (No One Left to Lie To) is a classic full of ugly laughs. He even took on the puffy reputation of Mother Theresa!

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens is a remarkable book even for Hitchens, a large summary collection of his best later essays.  He even takes on the irrational beliefs of other liberals about the political left itself, particularly in his sterling insights into the disarray of the political left in Europe since a meeting in Vienna in 1927 and the effects of that schism on the Nazis and the Soviet communists – no modern liberal would have written about this so bitingly and incisively.

Hitchens became famous in the last decade of his life for his views contrary to religion, especially the three Abrahamic religions. Rather than quote his own inflammatory statements in this area, let me simply state a view he certainly held, which was splendidly summarized by John Horgan in Slate: "All religions…stem from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests." Hitchens would agree, and, notably, he did not himself turn to faith in his last days.

I think that the death of Christopher Hitchens has repercussions. He was a valiant and persistent critic of people and ideas that deserve close and unbiased examination. For at least that talent, he will be sorely missed.

Much more on Hitchens at:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/christopher-hitchens-dies-62-051006229.html;_ylt=AvU_UdsJEJ0fNqst70BcaS2XCMZ_;_ylu=X3oDMTFnb25kdGRhBG1pdANCbG9nIEluZGV4IGJ5IEJsb2cEcG9zAzIxBHNlYwNNZWRpYUJsb2dJbmRleA--;_ylg=X3oDMTFvcGs0cnBnBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdANibG9nBHB0A3NlY3Rpb25zBHRlc3QD;_ylv=3#more-25953

and at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens

Funny article about what it was like to share a tiny office with Christopher Hitchens in New York during the 1980s:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/12/christopher_hitchens_death_david_corn_on_sharing_a_tiny_office_with_hitchens_.html

And from a journalist who was in Kuwait and Iraq with Hitchens:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/hitchless-world_613396.html   

Filming Light at 1 Trillion Frames per Second

LiveScience, December 14, 2011

Forget about slow-motion shots of a bullet destroying an apple or a hummingbird shaking off water. Making a slow-motion video of light beams bouncing around inside a 1-liter bottle required a new super-fast imaging system — one capable of taking 1 trillion frames a second. MIT's Media Lab has now made such a system possible by harnessing camera technology usually found in chemistry experiments.

An imaging system that makes light seem slow speaks for itself, especially when light travels 700 million miles an hour on a good day in a vacuum. But to better appreciate 1 trillion frames per second (fps), consider that the iPhone 4S camera shoots HD video at just 30 fps. Even Hollywood has relied upon a mix of digital wizardry and cameras shooting at 24 fps to capture its beloved slow-motion explosions. ("Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson just recently stepped up his game by choosing to film "The Hobbit" prequels at 48 fps.)

"There’s nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera," said Andreas Velten, a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Media Lab.

The MIT researchers used a streak camera that has a narrow slit to allow in particles of light, known as photons. An electric field deflects the photons in a direction perpendicular to the slit, but deflects late-arriving photons more than early-arriving photons because it keeps changing.

Such a difference allows the streak camera to show the photons' arrival over time, but it also captures only one spatial dimension through its Slit view. To create two-dimensional images for their super-slow-mo video, the researchers had to perform the same light-passing-through-a-bottle experiment over and over again as they repositioned the camera slightly each time.

An hour's worth of work led to hundreds of thousands of data sets. Next, the MIT team, led by Ramesh Raskar, Media Lab associate professor, turned to computer algorithms to stitch the data together into the two-dimensional images.

Such work came as a spinoff of another MIT Media Lab project by the Raskar's Camera Culture group — a camera capable of bouncing light off reflective surfaces and measuring the return time to see around corners.

The "world's fastest slowest camera" won't have any practical filmmaking purposes anytime soon because of the time it takes and the need to repeat each scene many times, Raskar said.

But Raskar suggested that using information from how light bounces around different surfaces could allow researchers to analyze the structure of manufactured materials and biological tissues. Such technology might resemble "ultrasound with light," he said.

If the ultrafast imaging technology gets fine-tuned, Raskar envisions using it to figure out how light's photons travel through the world. That might allow his team to recreate photos taken by a portable camera with compact flash to give the illusion of studio lighting.

The streak camera and laser that created the light pulses came with a combined price tag of $250,000. They were provided by Moungi Bawendi, a professor of chemistry at MIT, who also participated in the research.

http://news.yahoo.com/slow-mo-video-catches-light-1-trillion-frames-145805098.html

Positive Quiddity: Amazon.com

I want to start off with a paean to Amazon.com and its services. The prices are competitive or superior to other places. Payment over the Internet is secure. The variety of books, music, videos and gadgets I amazing and ever-expanding. And it is a great way to research a picky topic, especially if you are looking for personal knowledge as well as some kind of technical written narrative.

Let me explain this odd statement about Amazon helping to perform research – it doesn’t appear on the face of it to make sense.

The key to Amazon research is knowing how to read the reviews. There is a rhetorical specialty out there in academia called logical argumentation. There are certain characteristics of a logical argument. It doesn’t attack based on personalities. It doesn’t state theories as facts. There are a lot of references to subject matter experts. The premises and inferences are sound and proceed in a comprehensible, logical manner.

When I look up music CD or video DVD or book on Amazon, I first scan the reviews to see if there are some that proceed along the lines of a logical argument. Then I carefully read and compare the logical reviews. This accomplishes two things. I’ve weeded out the whiny, petty or resentful reviews. And I’ve made contact with thinkers who care enough about the item to write sensibly about it, which carries the bonus that there is no ideological nor academic gloss, meme, or bias associated with the review writing. These are reviewers who know how to think clearly, but who are not babbling to get a good grade from a professor with biases.

If you pick up this knack of sorting reviews for logical consistency, then before making a purchase you have a group of written arguments before you to assist you with your decision. How about that!

There is a great bonus to shopping these reviews for logical argumentation. Such good quality reviews tend to have outside references – other music CDs, other movies or other books tend to be mentioned. And these high quality, outside references are a gold mine of other avenues worth researching. It’s easy to take notes of the reviews and continue to surf the net for more, higher-level questions about an area that interests you. Try getting service at that level from the local hippie bookstore!

So I would say that, overall, Amazon represents a modern, high-tech, electronic example of positive quiddity. Although there are some shortcomings: Amazon recently asked its customers to act as spies and check out prices at the bricks-and-mortar stores. Amazon ruthlessly seeks to evade paying state and local sales taxes. And Amazon has been accused, in a New York Times editorial by Richard Russo, of heartlessly pressuring and killing off the local independent bookstores, thus stabbing at the heart of local culture.

Slate magazine, in an article written by Farhad Manjoo, considers Russo’s argument and rejects the contention that Amazon seeks to destroy or homogenize the culture of a community. In a style and with literacy far exceeding the typical, sanctimonious, effete preening toward an NPR-style audience, Manjoo makes a fiercely clever and memorable argument on behalf of Amazon. This timely piece is available at:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/12/independent_bookstores_vs_amazon_buying_books_online_is_better_for_authors_better_for_the_economy_and_better_for_you_.html

Positive Quiddity: Martin Feldstein

"Instead of increasing intra-European harmony and global peace, the shift to [monetary union] and the political integration that would follow it would be more likely to lead to increased conflicts within Europe and between Europe and the United States."
--Martin Feldstein in Foreign Affairs, 1997

In an opinion piece in today’s Washington Post, Charles Lane [link further below], adds this:

"Feldstein foresaw that the trigger for political tension would be a sharp economic downturn, imposing different levels of unemployment on different members of the monetary union, because high-unemployment countries could not recover their competitiveness through currency devaluation."
　
and there is this analysis from an international certified public accountant firm:

"We are currently experiencing unprecedented levels of uncertainty in the Eurozone. The potential political and economic outcomes emerging from the Eurozone crisis in 2012 are disparate, although all share a similar theme. A harsh adjustment to a new fiscal reality will be unavoidable, regardless of the path politicians finally decide to follow.

"The Eurozone that re-emerges next year is likely to be very different to the one we know today and the implications for business within and outside this region are enormous. We spend a lot of time advising boards and senior executives on the scenarios that they should consider and their potential impact on their bottom line. In this report, we bring you insights from a range of distinctive scenarios that we are recommending our clients use to prepare for potential outcomes that could take place next year.

"Growing market pressure and significant tranches of sovereign debt due for refinancing by early Spring point at a likely resolution to the current phase of the crisis around the first quarter of 2012. Politicians have taken more than two years to face up to this moment. And the resolution they finally agree is likely to be implemented overnight in order to minimise market actions that can make it harder to implement."

--a report by CPA firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers (available at: http://press.pwc.com/GLOBAL/News-releases/pwc-outlines-four-potential-eurozone-outcomes-for-2012/s/14205036-2049-44c9-a3ff-44c220a55dc7

Charles Lane’s Washington Post editorial summarizes the report this way: "In the most benign, the European Central Bank takes mass quantities of bad debt onto its balance sheet and Europe avoids a depression at the expense of higher inflation and slower long-run growth.

‘The only difference among the other choices — organized default by the euro zone’s biggest debtors; a Greek exit from the euro; and the rise of a new, smaller euro zone led by France and Germany — is the depth of the recession each would trigger," writes Lane.

See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-man-who-predicted-the-european-debt-
crisis/2011/12/12/gIQAN1geqO_story.html

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Notes from the Blog Author

What’s this?! "…significant tranches of sovereign debt due for refinancing by early Spring…" says PWC in their report (apparently out of London). That isn’t what the financial press is covering in depth.  And PWC says this upcoming drop-dead refinancing necessity likely leads to a quickie overnight solution, intentionally not giving the market any time to think and react to the jarring, mandated change.

The Euro agreement never contained language allowing the central banking body to fire a compulsive debtor from the Euro, forcing any deadbeats out of the system and back onto an unstable, constantly self-devaluing local currency for any financially irresponsible member. The only way the Euro would ever have worked would have been to force any irresponsible parties to walk the plank. Such a policy still hasn’t been established.  So failure of the Euro was always merely a question of time.

Conclusion:  Martin Feldstein was right. And Margaret Thatcher was right.