January 2018 Archives
Pandas: Meet Wes McKinney, the man behind the most important tool in data science -- Quartz
"But Python was missing some key features that would make it a good language for data analysis. For example, it was challenging to import CSV files (one of the most common formats for storing datasets). It also didn't have an intuitive way of dealing with spreadsheet-like datasets with rows and columns, or a simple way to create a new column based on existing columns.
"Pandas addressed these problems. David Robinson, a data scientist at Stack Overflow, explained the importance of it in technical terms. 'The idea of treating in memory data like you would a SQL table is incredibly powerful,' he says. 'By introducing the 'DataFrame,' Pandas made it possible to do intuitive analysis and exploration in Python that wasn't possible in other languages like Java. And is still not possible.'"
An incidental definition of the Anglosphere?
This list of countries in this section of the United Kingdom's Immigration Rules, dealing with knowledge of the English language and the British way of life, may serve as a reasonable starting point for defining the Anglosphere -- the nations of the world where English is widely and fluently spoken and, specifically for this paragraph, is the primary language of instruction in higher education. The term Anglosphere also implies a legal foundation that is grounded in the English Common Law and the Magna Carta.
"iii) the applicant has obtained an academic qualification (not a professional or vocational qualification), which is deemed by UK NARIC to meet the recognised standard of a Bachelor's or Master's degree or PhD in the UK, from an educational establishment in one of the following countries: Antigua and Barbuda; Australia; The Bahamas; Barbados; Belize; Dominica; Grenada; Guyana; Ireland; Jamaica; New Zealand; St Kitts and Nevis; St Lucia; St Vincent and The Grenadines; Trinidad and Tobago; the UK; the USA; and provides the specified documents;"
The People's Cube: Blocked By the Department of Defense | Frontpage Mag
The People's Cube founder Oleg Atbashian writes:
"Our reader, who is a U.S. Army officer, has sent us the screenshot below showing that The People's Cube has been blocked by the DoD Enterprise-Level Protection System due to 'hate and racism' - a blatantly false label applied by someone on the government payroll, whose salary comes out of our taxes.
"When I lived in the Soviet Union, my speech was expected to be blocked as politically unreliable and not aligned with the government's collectivist, socialist agenda. Such was the default setting and there was nothing I could do about it. At the time I assumed that if I were to move to the United States, I'd be free to speak without censorship. Imagine my surprise when I found that many in this country, including on the government level, were motivated by the same collectivist, socialist agenda I had escaped from.
"Dismayed at the sight of this happening in a free country, I began to satirize the left's absurd and crooked schemes again, this time in English, and launched the People's Cube. This site has become an outlet not just for me, but for thousands of like-minded Americans and contributors from around the world, who opposed socialism and collectivism in general.
"Shortly after the Cube was launched, the 'open-minded' proponents of socialism began to use misrepresentations and lies in order to block our content. ..."
The People's Cube was an online outgrowth of the Communists for Kerry satirical demonstrations during the 2004 presidential election.
Eighteen-minute gap?
"The FBI mysteriously 'failed to preserve' five months of text messages between a senior FBI agent who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller's Trump-Russia investigation and his mistress, an FBI lawyer.
"The Department of Justice made the disclosure in a letter to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Friday, according to the Daily Caller. The letter states that FBI systems didn't preserve text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page.
"'The Department wants to bring to your attention that the FBI's technical system for retaining text messages sent and received on FBI mobile devices failed to preserve text messages for Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page,' the letter states. Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, penned the letter.
"Citing 'misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI's collection capabilities,' Boyd explained that 'data that should have been automatically collected and retained for long-term storage and retrieval was not collected.'"
A scandal maybe so enormous it has produced... silence and muted disdain | MelaniePhillips.com
British political columnist Melanie Phillips writes:
"Last Thursday, some Republicans in Congress who had seen a secret memo, apparently compiled by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes and fellow Republicans on the panel and which involved the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, (FISA) were so disturbed by what it contained that they called for it to be made public immediately. They were not at liberty to divulge what it said, merely to express their concerns. But the assumption is that it supposedly contains evidence that the Obama administration made illegal use of FISA warrants to spy on both the Trump campaign and transition teams....
"If all this is true, it is one of the greatest political scandals in American history: the corruption by a sitting president of the top tiers of the security and justice establishment to pervert the course of justice to exonerate the Democratic presidential candidate of any crimes while simultaneously trying to frame her opponent; and then a further conspiracy between the Democratic party and administration officials to remove the duly elected President from office through an administrative coup based on a further criminal abuse of process."
The Myth of Aboriginal Exceptionalism - XYZ
"The real victims of all this intellectual dishonesty by the leftist elites are the Aboriginal children who are forced to grow up crushed between a Stone Age culture which has died and a postmodern culture which treats them like ornaments of its own righteousness."
Did the fabled Phoenicians ever actually exist? | The Spectator
"In Search of the Phoenicians explores the links that connected these people, language and religion foremost among them, while emphasising the absence of ties based on nationhood and ethnicity. To the extent that we can gauge how Phoenicians looked at themselves, ties and communities were more based on cities, families and religious practices than on anything else. The cult of the Tyrian god Melqart, for instance, known to Greeks as Herakles, tied together Phoenician settlements throughout the Mediterranean, in addition to the Greek diaspora. The child-sacrifice cult of Baal Hammon (Kronos in Greek, generally Saturn in Latin) seems not to have caught on to the same degree.
"No one called themselves 'Phoenician' in Phoenician, not least because phoenix is a Greek word -- for palm tree. From all the available evidence, the first person to identify himself as Phoenician was the writer Heliodorus from Emesa (in what is today the Syrian city of Homs) in the 4th century."
Andrew Roberts's guide to Churchill on screen | The Spectator
"Still the best depiction of Churchill on a screen is in the eight-part TV series The Wilderness Years (1981), in which Robert Hardy inhabited the part of Churchill to such a degree that it affected everything else he did to a greater or lesser extent. (Can one see something of Churchill in Hardy's depiction of the Minister of Magic in Harry Potter?) Hardy's profound reading about Churchill, and friendship with Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill's biographer, helped make the series the success it was, and set the standard for everything that followed."
Chinese authorities blow up Christian megachurch with dynamite | The Independent
"Chinese authorities have demolished a well-known Christian megachurch, inflaming long-standing tensions between religious groups and the Communist Party.
"Witnesses and overseas activists said the paramilitary People's Armed Police used dynamite and excavators to destroy the Golden Lampstand Church, which has a congregation of more than 50,000, in the city of Linfen in Shaanxi province.Â
"ChinaAid, a US-based Christian advocacy group, said local authorities planted explosives in an underground worship hall to demolish the building following, constructed with nearly $2.6m (£1.9m) in contributions from local worshippers in one of China's poorest regions.Â
"The church had faced 'repeated persecution' by the Chinese government, said ChinaAid. Hundreds of police and hired thugs smashed the building and seized Bibles in an earlier crackdown in 2009 that ended with the arrest of church leaders.
"Those church leaders were given prison sentences of up to seven years for charges of illegally occupying farmland and disturbing traffic order, according to state media. "
Matt Walsh writes:
"Our godless society has long been engaged in this campaign to alleviate feelings of guilt, not by discouraging the actions that provoke them, but by making the person who feels them into a victim. You'll notice that we have a 'disease' or a 'condition' to explain just about every vice. We make guilt into a medical or psychiatric issue. A man who has intense feelings of guilt and shame may consult a psychiatrist and come away with a prescription for pills that will numb his conscience. We are always trying to make the feelings go away without ever stopping to consider whether we have the feelings because of how we are living.
"In the realm of sex, we turn guilt and shame into a legal matter. If a woman feels bad after sex, she must be a rape victim. It could not be her fault. It can never be her fault. We cannot allow moral guilt. We cannot put responsibility on the woman; we cannot 'blame' her for her own decisions. We cannot leave her with her guilt because then we allow her no relief other than prayer and repentance. But that means we must acknowledge God, which opens up a whole new can of worms.
"So, as cowards, we retreat back under the shelter of deflected blame. We start talking about 'consent' and 'rape culture' and whatever else. Anything but personal responsibility. Anything but shame. Anything but guilt. Anything but sin. And nothing gets better. And we never feel better. But, we tell ourselves, at least it's not our fault."
Fundraisers Calling on Behalf of Police and Firefighters | Consumer Information
Be on the alert: Ask questions and do your research when someone calls asking for donations on behalf of a group with "police" or "firefighter" in the name. They may be trying to convey a false impression that they're helping your local public safety officers, and they may be pocketing more of your donation as fundraising expenses than the share that goes for actual assistance to public safety officers.
I recently received a call from someone raising money for the "Police Officers Support Alliance." When I asked the solicitor for a website where I could learn more about the organization, he told me he was with "Pledge Assistance" and he pointed me to the Police Officers Support Alliance website. At the bottom of the "About Us" page is this disclaimer: "Paid for by For a Better America, an independent expenditure-only committee, www.fabapc.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate committee."
In your box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes -- these premiums are part of a subplot in the Hancock's Half-Hour episode "The Election Candidate."
Ideas: Breaking the Walled Garden of Childhood
David D. Friedman writes:
"One exception used to be the Society for Creative Anachronism, a historical recreation organization that I have been involved with for a very long time. I was taught to use a sewing machine by a twelve year old girl; a few years later she was the moving spirit behind a puppet theater. But that has gradually changed. More and more over the years, children who come to SCA events are expected, not to help set up the hall or cook the dinner or run the event, but to attend 'children's activities.'
"What set off this post was the discovery that at the Pennsic War, the SCA's largest gathering, a two week long camping event with something over ten thousand people and a Pennsic University with about a thousand classes (some of which I teach), there is now a new rule. Nobody under eighteen can attend a class unless accompanied by parent or legal guardian. When I complained to one of the people responsible, I was assured that they had made special provision to allow children to attend children's classes.
"I have long held that there are two fundamental views of children: That they are pets who can talk, or that they are small people who do not yet know very much. The wrong one is winning."
(In linking to this, I need to say that I disagree with his nonchalant attitude toward early exposure to internet pornography and find his barnyard analogy inadequate. There is a world of difference between two bovines un-self-consciously engaged in the reproductive act and videos of human sexual interaction organized to arouse a jaded consumer. The medium itself is a message that we don't want children -- or anyone -- to take to heart.)
The Fragile Generation - Reason.com
Lenore Skenazy and Jonathan Haidt write:
"In earlier generations, this would have seemed a bizarre and wildly overprotective upbringing. Society had certain age-related milestones that most people agreed on. Kids might be trusted to walk to school by first grade. They might get a latchkey at 8, take on a newspaper route around 10, start babysitting at 12. But over the past generation or so, those milestones disappeared--buried by fears of kidnapping, the rise of supervised activities, and the pre-eminence of homework. Parents today know all about the academic milestones their kids are supposed to reach, but not about the moments when kids used to start joining the world.
"It's not necessarily their fault. Calls to eight newspapers in North Carolina found none that would take anyone under the age of 18 to deliver papers. A police chief in New Albany, Ohio, went on record saying kids shouldn't be outside on their own till age 16, 'the threshold where you see children getting a little bit more freedom.' A study in Britain found that while just under half of all 16- to 17-year-olds had jobs as recently as 1992, today that number is 20 percent.
"The responsibility expected of kids not so long ago has become almost inconceivable. Published in 1979, the book Your 6-Year-old: Loving and Defiant includes a simple checklist for what a child entering first grade should be able to do: Can he draw and color and stay within the lines of the design being colored? Can he ride a small two-wheeled bicycle without helper wheels? Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to a store, school, playground, or friend's home?
"Hang on. Walk to the store at 6--alone?"
Kazakhstan Cheers New Alphabet, Except for All Those Apostrophes - The New York Times
Another example of totalitarian manipulation of language for control, from a story about a new writing system for the Kazakh language.
'Later, growing fearful of pan-Turkic sentiment among Kazakhs, Uzbeks and other Turkic peoples in the Soviet Union, Moscow between 1938 and 1940 ordered that Kazakh and other Turkic languages be written in modified Cyrillic as part of a push to promote Russian culture. To try to ensure that different Turkic peoples could not read one another's writings and develop a shared non-Soviet sense of common identity, it introduced nearly 20 versions of Cyrillic, Mr. Kocaoglu said....
'The modified Latin alphabet put forward by Mr. Nazarbayev uses apostrophes to elongate or modify the sounds of certain letters.
'For example, the letter "I" with an apostrophe designates roughly the same sound as the "I" in Fiji, while "I" on its own sounds like the vowel in fig. The letter "S" with an apostrophe indicates "sh" and C' is pronounced "ch." Under this new system, the Kazakh word for cherry will be written as s'i'i'e, and pronounced she-ee-ye....
'The only reason publicly cited by Mr. Nazarbayev to explain why he did not want Turkish-style phonetic markers is that "there should not be any hooks or superfluous dots that cannot be put straight into a computer," he said in September. He also complained that using digraphs to transcribe special Kazakh sounds would cause confusion when people try to read English, when the same combination of letters designates entirely different sounds....
'"The president is thinking about his legacy and wants to go down in history as the man who created a new alphabet," said Mr. Satpayev, who supports the switch to Latin script but not the president's version. "The problem is that our president is not a philologist."'
"The Ashes may be over once again, but one of the biggest talking points during the cricket Test series between Australia and England was the continued meteoric rise of Australian captain Steve Smith as a Test batsman.
"There was much speculation as to whether Smith is the best Australian Test batsman -- bar Donald Bradman -- ever to have played the game....
""The Don" Bradman is widely regarded as the greatest Australian cricketer, and was voted the greatest cricketer of the 20th century, with an unrivalled Test batting average of 99.94.
"So what is the ranking of Australian Test batsmen since Australia's first ever Test match in 1877?"
This report from Australia illustrates what Real ID is all about. Worries about your ability to get on an airplane was just leverage to get you to scream at your state legislators until they agreed to surrender your personal data to the Feds. (It worked!)
"Driver's licences will be added to the Commonwealth Government's already vast biometric databases after it struck an agreement with the states and territories, handing authorities access to an unprecedented level of information about citizens.
"A system known as "the interoperability Hub" is already in place in Australia, allowing agencies to take an image from CCTV and other media and run it against a national database of passport pictures of Australian citizens -- a process known as "The Capability".
"But soon driver's licences will be added to the system, allowing both government and private entities to access your photo, age and address.
"It is a $21 million system being sold as a way to tackle terrorism and make commercial services more secure.
"But experts warn people now risk losing control of their biometric identity entirely as commercial interests, governments and organised crime gangs all move to capture more personal metadata for their own gain."
Fred Bass, Who Made Strand Bookstore a Mecca, Dies at 89 - The New York Times
'Following his father's playbook, he pursued a policy of aggressive acquisition.
'"At first I used to think he was crazy," Mr. Bass told the cable news channel NY1 in 2015. "Why are we buying extra books? We haven't sold all these. But we just kept buying and buying. It was a fact -- you can't sell a book you don't have."
'The 70,000 books in the Fourth Avenue store swelled, at the Broadway site, to half a million by the mid-1960s and 2.5 million by the 1990s, requiring the purchase of a storage warehouse in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. By the time Mr. Bass bought the building for $8.2 million in 1997, the Strand had become the largest used-book store in the world.'"
Genetic Study Supports Carbohydrate-Insulin Model of Obesity
Dr. David Ludwig writes:
"According to the Carbohydrate-Insulin Model of Obesity (CIM), the processed carbohydrates that flooded our diet during the low-fat diet craze undermine our metabolism and drive weight gain. Put simply:
"Processed carbohydrates -- think white bread, white rice, potato products, low -fat snacks -- raise insulin more than any other food, calorie for calorie. This is just Nutrition, 101.
"Insulin is the Miracle-Gro for your fat cells. A child with new onset type 1 diabetes -- unable to make enough insulin -- will invariable lose weight until receiving treatment, no matter how many calories she consumes. Give that child the right amount of insulin, and weight trajectory returns to normal. Give that child (or an adult with type 2 diabetes) too much insulin and excessive weight gain will predictably result. This is just Endocrinology 101.
"When too many of the calories we eat get locked away in fat cells, there aren't enough calories to supply the needs of the brain and other organs. So we get hungry and "overeat." And to make matters worse, metabolism slows down, further fueling weight gain. This is just Obesity 101....
"This difference is of much more than just theoretical interest, with direct implications for how best to prevent and treat obesity. If the Conventional View is right, we need to focus even more intensively on cutting back calories, for example with a 1600 calorie diet. If the CIM is right, the emphasis should instead be placed on lowering insulin secretion with a lower-carbohydrate/higher-fat diet and other supportive dietary and lifestyle measures. Calorie balance will then adjust naturally due to reduced hunger, greater satiety and faster metabolism."
Surprising Approaches To Achieving Density -- Strong Towns
Andrew Price writes: "I'm not anti-towers, but building up is not the only way to achieve density. Brickell [in Miami, Florida] achieves a population density of 27,302 people per square mile. In contrast, Union City, New Jersey has a population density of 51,810 people per square mile (89% higher) without resorting to towers.
"Most buildings in Union City are low-rise (two to four stories)Â plus a handful of midrises, all on on small lots. There are many single family homes, and many small-scale apartment buildings and condominiums with a single digit number of units. The cost of developing one of these buildings is within the range of a mortgage for a middle-class family.
"You can achieve extremely high population densities before having to build up. The 11th arrondissement of Paris houses an astounding 110,000 people per square mile (4x that of Brickell and 2.1x that of Union City) without building up....
"Again, I'm not against towers, but I want to show you that there are cheaper, more adaptable, and more economically inclusive development patterns that achieve high population densities without having to jump straight into high-rise towers financed by big banks and built by huge development companies. The secret starts with looking at the development pattern's granularity."
Historical County Maps of Arkansas - 1936
Scans of county highway maps, showing the locations of roads, schools, churches, and settlements.
Indian Land Cessions: U.S. Congressional Documents
Links will lead you to maps and descriptions of each of the territories ceded by treaty by Indian nations to the U. S. Government, through the year 1894, from the Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1896-1897. A very useful reference if you are looking for detailed and specific information about the steps and stages of Indian removal and resettlement in Indian Territory.
Panoramic Maps | Library of Congress
Bird's-eye-view maps, panoramic maps, and other semi-geographic, semi-artistic representations of American cities in the early decades of the 20th century. Includes the 1918 Fowler and Kelly maps of Tulsa and Bartlesville.
1948 Shell Highway Map of Oklahoma. - David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
A remarkable map of Oklahoma that not only shows the official highway system, but also county roads and small towns that were usually omitted by the official state highway map. This is Oklahoma before turnpikes, before the Corps of Engineers massive lake-building effort. Highway 33 (now US 412) crossed the Grand River east of Chouteau via a free ferry.
The backside features 1948 maps of Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Muskogee, Okmulgee, Ardmore, and Enid. Interesting to see the paths that the highways took through the cities in the days before interstates and expressways.
United States Air Navigation Maps - Perry-Castañeda Map Collection - UT Library Online
Strip maps for significant air routes, with dates from 1923 to 1932.
Why young Christians can't grasp our arguments against gay 'marriage' | Opinion | LifeSite
John Stonestreet writes: 'The only argument for conjugal marriage they've ever encountered has been the wooden proof-texting from the Bible. And besides, wrote Rine, "What the article names as a 'revisionist' idea of marriage--marriage as an emotional, romantic, sexual bond between two people--does not seem 'new' to my students at all, because this is the view of marriage they were raised with, albeit with a scriptural, heterosexual gloss."
'As Rine points out "the redefinition of marriage began decades ago" when "the link between sexuality and procreation was severed in our cultural imagination."
'And if marriage "has only an arbitrary relationship to reproduction," then it seems mean-spirited to Rine's students to argue that marriage by its very nature excludes same-sex couples.
'And where do students get the idea that marriage "has only an arbitrary relationship to reproduction"? Well, everywhere--television, church, school, their homes, in youth groups....
'What can we do to win back our children, our churches, and the culture? In our recent book "Same Sex Marriage," Sean McDowell and I lay out a game plan. We offer strategies for the short-term and the long-term, with the ultimate goal: re-shaping the cultural imagination towards what God intended marriage to be, starting with the church. Come to BreakPoint.org to pick up your copy.'
McGraw Electric Railway Manual - Perry-Castañeda Map Collection - UT Library Online
Maps of streetcar lines, interurbans, trolleys, and other electric railways from 1898 to 1913.
Bill Clinton lost president's nuclear codes, and nobody found out - Business Insider
"However, around 2000, according to [Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Hugh] Shelton, a member of the department within the Pentagon that is responsible for all pieces of the nuclear process was dispatched to the White House to physically look at the codes and ensure they were correct -- a procedure required to happen every 30 days. (The set of codes was to be replaced entirely every four months.)
"That official was told by a presidential aide that President Bill Clinton did have the codes, but was in an important meeting and could not be disturbed.
"The aide assured the official that Clinton took the codes seriously and had them close by. The official was dismayed, but he accepted the excuse and left....
"Shelton and [Secretary of Defense William] Cohen feared the saga would reach the press and become an embarrassing story. But word of the missing codes never made it out, and Shelton's recounting of it in his 2010 book was, to his knowledge, the first time it had been shared publicly."
DVIDS - News - Oklahoma Cavalry unit inherits Active Duty mission in Afghanistan
?KABUL, Afghanistan - Oklahoma Army National Guard members of 1st Squadron, 180th Cavalry Regiment, 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, held a transfer of authority ceremony in Kabul, Afghanistan, Dec. 31, 2017, alongside members of 3rd Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, representing the transfer of mission from one organization to another.
"Nearly 500 members of the 180th are currently deployed to Afghanistan in support of the NATO-led train, advise and assist mission, Operation Resolute Support. In this case, the 180th replaces the 3-73rd for the Kabul Security Forces mission; a mission focused primarily on adviser force protection....
"While deployed, the 180th will work alongside other coalition forces, including the British Army, Royal Danish Army and Mongolian Armed Forces, all of which play a key role in the Resolute Support Mission, from base defense operations, site force protection, adviser force protection, to incident response."
When a North Korean Missile Accidentally Hit a North Korean City | The Diplomat
Extracting information about NK's nuclear capabilities from news of a failed launch. "As North Korea's production of now-proven IRBMs and ICBMs continues, it will have a large and diversified nuclear force spread across multiple hardened sites, leaving the preventive warfighter's task close to impossible if the objective is a comprehensive, disarming first strike leaving Pyongyang without retaliatory options. The time is long gone to turn the clock back on North Korea's ballistic missile program and its pre-launch basing options."
The Clash Between Donald Trump and Steve Bannon Was Inevitable | National Review
Jim Geraghty writes: "I hope you don't have any toxic personalities in your life; if you do, I hope you can separate yourself from them soon and with minimal pain and aggravation. There are certain people in life who are miserable and can only find pleasure in making other people miserable. Roughly ninety percent of these people's difficult behavior is completely unnecessary, but they've convinced themselves that their snarling is toughness, that their petty grievances are about an all-important code of respect, that their bluster genuinely impresses others, and that their narcissism is because they are doing or are destined to do great things. Their lies are a tool for leverage, their explosive temper a weapon, their refusal to treat others with respect a sign of their 'authenticity.'
"You may or may not think this description applies to the president of the United States. I don't think there's much dispute that this applies to Steve Bannon, who has managed to alienate just about every potential ally along the way in his career in politics....
"In this light, it is not surprising that Bannon would eventually lash out at the president for being yet another person who disappointed him, another person who failed to recognize and appreciate his genius, another person who wasn't enough of a fighter and who didn't have the guts to fight the 'war.' It's not surprising that Bannon would trash Trump's family. Because Steve Bannon's disappointments and problems can never be his own fault; they can never be a consequence for the way he treats people and the methods he uses to achieve his goals...
"Very few of us will ever get the opportunity to shape a presidency and the country's laws like Steve Bannon had in January 2017. And it's hard to imagine that anyone else will fumble away that opportunity the way he did."
The Other Terrifying Lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis - POLITICO Magazine
"...the more telling lesson of the Cuban crisis is that opposing leaders in a nuclear showdown inevitably lack sufficient information about each other's military capabilities, intentions and perceptions, and much of what they think they know is probably wrong. And given how little the United States and North Korea understand about one another, that should worry us....
"Given the stakes involved, it behooves leaders in the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, the White House and Congress to learn from pertinent history and ask what could go wrong if North Korea has more or different weaponry than U.S. intelligence assumes, and if North Korean officers and crews will behave differently than is assumed when they are attacked. Similar out-of the-box thinking should be applied to how South Korean officials, military crews and society will act if conflict begins.
"American officials cannot control whether their North Korean counterparts conduct similar analyses of their own assessments of U.S. capabilities, intentions and likely behaviors. Maybe they will conclude that the wisest course is to avoid a conflict they cannot win, or maybe they will not. As scholars such as James Blight and Janet Lang have documented, the young and deeply ideological Fidel Castro in 1962 urged Khrushchev to initiate nuclear war with the United States in Cuba, preferring national suicide to an American invasion and overthrow of his government. It will be left for historians in 50 years to determine whether the antagonists were lucky or unlucky, wise or unwise."
