by Cheryl Rofer
Um, does anyone recall what happened when Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam Hussein that the US had "no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait"?
President George W Bush has told the Israeli government that he may be prepared to approve a future military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations with Tehran break down, according to a senior Pentagon official.
...................
The six plotters who intended to use those famously mysterious liquid explosives are on trial in London.
Using a sealed 17-ounce sports drink, the men planned to drain the plastic bottle through a tiny hole in the bottom and then inject an explosive mix of concentrated hydrogen peroxide, along with food coloring to make it look like the original beverage. An instant glue would seal it shut. AA batteries filled with the explosive HMTD would serve as the detonator; a disposable camera would serve as the trigger.I don't know whether the reporter has this right. If it's what the defendant(s) said, it still doesn't make sense. We can hope that at some time in the trial, the question of whether the plotters actually had a way to make explosives (it appears they never got to the making phase) or just thought that they did will be addressed. We can also hope that the reporters will be able to convey the discussion accurately.
.....................
The paranoid style in evaluating developments in North Korea. A lot of this op-ed is simply not true. The talks have not finished, so we don't know yet whether Kim Jong Il will "keep his stockpile of plutonium and even hang on to his existing rack of nuclear weapons." And we don't know yet whether he had a uranium enrichment program beyond some paper wishes. The author's basic gripe, beyond his fantasizing what is happening, seems to be that negotiations have resulted in some gains for North Korea in engaging the rest of the world.
......................
I suppose I should say something about Ken Salazar's WaPo op-ed on Colorado oil shale, seeing as I've worked on the stuff in a couple of different ways. Salazar should have seen it, so he should know that it's misleading to call it an "oily rock." It's tan and dry and doesn't even smell of oil, as does, say, the piece of Uvalde (Texas) tar sands I've got. But otherwise, he's got the situation pretty much right. The organic matter in oil shale is a precursor to petroleum, and it makes up only about 10% of the rock. There are better and worse techniques available for turning it into oil, but they either pile up the other 90% of the rock on the surface, or they process the stuff underground, endangering the water table. And no, the miracle of heat-at-a-distance that some think that microwaves (sometimes also referred to as radio waves) can provide will not be the answer, any more than it was in the 1970s. It's already appeared in a comment on Kevin Drum's post on the subject. Ugh.
.....................
And a couple of pretty good articles inspired by that New Yorker cover, in the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Update (7/16): A couple more articles on the New Yorker cover:
They Get It
What's so shocking about satire?