Claudia Rosett has a good idea:

But seriously, if the UN has any interest whatsoever in addressing the clear and present danger of a nuclear-bomb-brandishing North Korea, there is something the UN could do, pronto. It could expel North Korea.

That might not solve the long-festering problem of a totalitarian state that to this day runs a Stalin-style gulag, peddles missiles, narcotics and counterfeit currency, and has starved to death at least one million of its own people and staked its fortunes on a nuclear arsenal. But kicking North Korea out of the UN would at least provide the sort of minimal diplomatic gesture of which the UN is presumably capable.

Definitely something to think about.

Remember back when everything was peaches and cream, skittles and beer, fun without end?  Remember those carefree Clinton years?

Since the Blame Bush crowd seems to be out in force in reaction to the North Korean nuclear tests, perhaps it's time to do a little reminiscing.

FreeRepublic remembers a news story from the year 2000:

North Korea's nuclear production capacity will increase from a dozen nuclear bombs a year to 65 a year by 2010, thanks in large part to American taxpayer money, two renowned U.S. nuclear scientists told congressional leaders last week (April, 2000).
. . .
But an aid policy initiated by the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s to finance two light water nuclear reactors in North Korea puts the isolated communist country on the fast track in the manufacture of nuclear weapons, William R. Graham and Victor Gilinsky told members of the House Policy Committee.

North Korea's missile proliferation has accelerated dramatically since the Clinton-Gore administration began giving aid to the regime in 1994.

"There were no known No-dong missile sales abroad until after the United States signed the so-called Agreed Framework with North Korea," House Speaker Dennis Hastert's North Korea advisory group reported.

But since U.S. aid began, the communist state has sold crucial technology to Iran for the Shahab missile that now threatens U.S. forces and their allies in the Middle East, and for a Pakistani missile in 1998 that disrupted the fragile stability of South Asia.

In 1994 the Clinton administration signed an agreement with North Korea that was designed to halt North Korea's nuclear weapons development program. North Korea sought light water reactors to provide for their energy needs and the U.S. agreed to provide them in exchange for North Korea giving up its nuclear program.

Western aid also earned donor countries the right to inspect the North Korean nuclear facilities.

The U.S. believed the plutonium produced would have to be refined before it could be used for weapons grade plutonium, said Chuck Downs, a leading North Korea expert and author of "Over the Line: North Korea's Negotiating Strategy," in an interview with CNSNews.com. But even though the plutonium wasn't the same yield as that used by the U.S. and some NATO countries, it could still be used to make nuclear weapons, he said.

For the past six years the United States has been trying to put in place two 1,000-megawatt light water reactors in North Korea.

The Clinton administration gambled that construction would take so long that North Korea would collapse politically and economically before the reactors were put in place, Downs said.

"As things have turned out, North Korea has received $380 million in aid from various countries last year, $210 million of it from the U.S., and that is enough to satisfy the needs of their regime. So the regime is roaring drunk and not at all collapsing," Downs said.

When they are in place in 2010, the light water reactors will give the North Koreans 490 kilograms of plutonium every year, allowing them to build 60 to 100 nuclear weapons a year.

"The kinds of facilities that existed in 1994 could only have produced two bombs a year and the kind they conceived [before U.S. aid] a dozen a year," Downs said.

We can deal with the here and now, or we can argue pointlessly over who's more to blame for how we got here.  Diplomacy has been famously called "saying 'nice doggie' long enough to reach for a stick."

The time for saying "nice doggie" has past.  The only relevant discussion now is, what stick should we use?

While the new-age Neros in the mainstream press and the Democratic Party fiddle with the sideshow called Mark Foley, a couple of very important things happened this weekend:

1) The Iranians have arrested the son of Ayatollah Khomeni's one-time rival and superior, charging him with the usual crimes. We probably will never hear from him again, except for the confession of course.

Ayatollah Mohammad Kazemeini Boroujerdi was detained with several supporters, Iran’s student news agency ISNA quoted the deputy governor of Tehran, Abdollah Rowshan, as saying.
. . .
"We believe that our nation is tired of political religion and they want to return to traditional religion," Mr Boroujerdi told Iran’s labour news agency ILNA on Saturday.

2) The North Koreans have reportedly tested a nuclear bomb.

"It's a wicked world we live in."

We now return you to your regularly scheduled political dirty tricks, half-truths, lies, and spin.

Is a revolt starting in Tehran?

Free Republic had it first, a story on the blog antimullah.com:

LATEST UPDATE - all phones in the area of the Ayatollah's house have been disconnected and his numbers, which worked till just now have a recording saying "they never existed".


Monitored from live communication with Iran and the Ayatollah Boroujerdi himself by Voice of Iran Radio (KRSI) and local citizens calling in from Tehran to KRSI.

Shots were being fired around the Ayatollah's home at Sard (cold) Park, Avesta Avenue, Sard Street #9 close to Freedom Square. Fires are springing up in the region at major intersections. Ambulance sirens scream futiley as Tehran citizens pour toward that address blocking streets to prevent Security forces from getting close but also blocking the paramedics and ambulances.

Distress calls from wounded men and women fill the air waves as what they describe as total war is erupting. KRSI, which covers all of Iran, constantly broadcasts calls for the populace to rise up, urging them to make the most of this opportunity.

Said Ghayem-Maghami, the announcer of KRSI repeatedly urges all provinces, cities, professions to revolt against the current regime. He also broadcasts live all suggestions provided by Tehran citizens to wake everyone up and let them know something is up.

Ayatollah Boroujerdi, blockaded on the roof of his home, has used the phone contact broadcast with KRSI to declare that anyone in the Security forces who respects him as their spiritual source should lay down their arms and not harm anyone.

 

My immediately previous post pretty much dispatched the Foley thing as nothing more than a political dirty trick of legendary proportions.

But wait, it gets better! Drudge has this story up:

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX THU OCT 5 2006 2:53:48 ET XXXXX

CLAIM: FILTHY FOLEY ONLINE MESSAGES WERE PAGE PRANK GONE AWRY
**World Exclusive**
**Must Credit the DRUDGE REPORT**

According to two people close to former congressional page Jordan Edmund, the now famous lurid AOL Instant Message exchanges that led to the resignation of Mark Foley were part of an online prank that by mistake got into the hands of enemy political operatives, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.

According to one Oklahoma source who knows the former page very well, Edmund, a conservative Republican, goaded an unwitting Foley to type embarrassing comments that were then shared with a small group of young Hill politicos. The prank went awry when the saved IM sessions got into the hands of political operatives favorable to Democrats.

The primary source, an ally of Edmund, adamantly proclaims that the former page is not a homosexual. The prank scenario was confirmed by a second associate of Edmund. Both are fearful that their political careers will be affected if they are publicly brought into the investigation.

The prank scenario only applies to the Edmund IM sessions and does not necessarily apply to any other exchanges between the former congressman and others.

The news come on the heels that Edmund has hired former Timothy McVeigh attorney, Stephen Jones.

Developing...

If true, what else don't we know? What else about this increasingly ridiculous farce don't we have the context to understand properly?

Courtesy Patrick Godfrey at The American Thinker:

While angry values voters fulminate over Hastert’s failure to do something before the IMs came to light, all I can remember is the Democrats’ mantra.

    That the troglodyte Republicans were obsessed by sex between consenting adults.

    That homosexuals in close working relationships with young people, especially young men, is a good and healthy thing.

    That some forms of sex, aren’t sex.

    That what two consenting adults do or say behind closed doors is their business.

    That intercepting and reading electronic communications between anyone in the US, especially those between two citizens, is never to be tolerated.

    And most of all, never be judgmental.

So in the end, what do we end up with?

    A pedophile that wasn’t.

    A child that was actually an adult.

    The disclosure of personal electronic communications of a highly personal nature between two consenting adults revealed.

    A sex scandal between a couple who never had sex.

    That Democrat Congressmen can have sex with 17 year olds and get re-elected, but Republicans that talk about sex are forced to resign.

ABC news is made to look like a fool, hyping a story beyond the facts at hand.

So, apart from ridding the House of Representatives of a single disturbed man, what's the point here?

Barely reported in most of the media, a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the Terror Surveillance program to monitor international phone calls to and from suspected terrorists and suspected collaborators in the U.S. can proceed while the program continues through the judicial system.  (Meditate upon that more accurate description versus the shorthand "domestic surveillance" used by the program's opponents, if you will . . . )

The unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave little explanation for the decision. In the three-paragraph ruling, judges said that they balanced the likelihood an appeal would succeed, the potential damage to both sides and the public interest.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, speaking about the Foley affair, appearing on the Hugh Hewitt radio show:

(The Democrats) think that this is their silver bullet that will stop us from getting our message out. The fact is that they don't have any other message except scandal, they haven't done anything on border security, they haven't done anything on keeping, getting the economy better. We have. We've got the best economy we've had in years, the stock market's great, jobs lost are down, we've got an extra $180 billion dollars in revenue just this year alone, ever since January, more than we expected to reduce the deficit. And we've done a lot of things in the war against terror, plus secured the border against illegal immigrants. So we've had a lot to talk about, a lot to do. We just need to get back on track.

Emphasis added.

I'll admit when this first came out I thought the worst of Hastert and the House leadership. But, I've come around to believing that the Republican House leadership did what they could based on what they knew at the time. This includes going to Foley when the latest accusations came out, and telling him to resign from the House. A cynical person would think they did this from sheer political calculation, but it was the right thing to do no matter what the motivation.

Those Democrats who continue to try to make this an issue for the November elections are, at this point, engaged in the lowest and most contemptible form of scandal politics. They had better pray that there are no Mark Foleys among their number.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average just hit a new record high today, closing at 11,727.34.

This graph from Yahoo Finance (via FreeRepublic) shows the Dow's history since 1930.

It appears to me that the Dow's chart since The Crash of 1929 can be differentiated into five distinct periods.

The first period from the 1929 crash until about 1950, is relatively flat. There's a bit of an uptick after the end of the war. This is generally considered to be a time of great technological innovation, but it wasn't, really. The same technologies which existed at the beginning of the period--the propeller-driven airplane, the automobile, mass production, radio, etc. were also dominant at the end of the period. But change was just around the corner.

The second period, indicated by the black line, is the "postwar boom" which ended around 1966. During this period we went from prop planes to jets, from radio to television, from two-lane highways to Interstates, from computation engines to mainframe computers, from V-2's to the Saturn V.

The third period, the thick blue line, is another flat period. Again, there is really little technological change from the beginning of the period to the end. Most people lived their lives in 1980 not too differently than they did in 1966, really. But that would soon change. (My own bias is to also attribute the relatively flat performance to the impact of the Great Society/Welfare/Medicare on the economy. Socialism is rarely responsible for economic growth.)

The fourth period, the green line, looks to me to coincide with the personal computer--let's call it the first-phase information economy. Personal computers really began to impact productivity in the early 1980's. Probably not entirely coincidentally, "Reaganomics" began to kick in around 1981-1982.

The fifth phase, in red, is interesting. You can easily see the "dot-com bubble" from 1995 to its peak in 2000. But if you look at 2003 to date, it looks to me that there was an underlying expansion going on. I'd call that the second-phase information economy, powered by Internet technologies and evolving generally much faster than the first-wave information economy.

I think you can make an argument that economic growth is directly related to the rate of technological advancement. This isn't a particularly radical thought. But with the Dow curve appearing to approximate a hyperbola, maybe it's time to look into the Singularity after all.

The infamous Kansas City-area interchange known for years as "The Grandview Triangle" has been officially renamed to "The Three Trails Crossing."

Officials will hold a ceremony at 1 p.m. today to unveil the new markers bound for the busy interchange where Interstates 435 and 470 and U.S. 71 converge in south Kansas City. The ceremony will take place two blocks south of Bannister Road on Marion Park Drive near the monuments for the Santa Fe, Oregon and California trails.

Crews then will install the signs along I-435, I- 470 and U.S. 71.

Any bets on how long it will take the locals to stop referring to it as "The Triangle?"