The Sony hack... (warning: pure speculation to follow)

The FBI said technical analysis of malware used in the Sony attack found links to malware that "North Korean actors" had developed and found a "significant overlap" with "other malicious cyber activity" previously linked to Pyongyang. Reuters

It's obvious that North Korea is behind the attack on Sony in retaliation for making "The Interview"...

In fact it is so obvious that it makes me suspicious.

The North Koreans say they didn't do it... I believe them.

Much of North Korea’s hacking is done from China. And while the attack on Sony used some commonly available cybertools, one intelligence official said, “this was of a sophistication that a year ago we would have said was beyond the North’s capabilities.” Fareed Zakaria - Washington Post

I think they have been set up for the fall by a much more sophisticated attacker, one who doesn't want to take "credit" for the attack. There are two prime suspects in that case: China and Russia.  In my opinion it was the Russians. Here is a recent report of their work:

Russian state-backed cyber spies are behind coordinated, sophisticated digital attacks in the past two years against sensitive political and military targets, including Nato, the EU and government ministries, according to a security analyst. “Up until now the focus has been on China – but Russia is really the far more advanced player. Russia has been more effective at integrating cyber espionage into a geopolitical grand strategic campaign – not just a military one, but economic and political. They are more tactical too. More targeted in the institutions they go after . . . and more accomplished.” Financial Times - October 28, 2014

For me the Sony hack shows a very deep knowledge of the American economic and social system's weak points, where the celebrity culture intersects with the insurance/financial/complex and the communication infrastructure that supports it... and the rest of corporate America. I believe the Russians accumulated this kind of "reverse-Kremlinology" during the decades of the Cold War and that neither the Chinese or especially the North Koreans, would know how to touch so many of America's raw nerves simultaneously.
 
Why would the Russians pin it on the North Koreans?

They would for the same reason that Sony made the film: the North Koreans are comic book villains that are seen as crazy enough to do anything and it's precisely the the craziness that has made this incident so viral, where the comments about Angelina Jolie's possible insanity take precedence over the plus $90,000,000 that Sony stands to lose by pulling the film or the uncountable, confidential, corporate information, now in hostile hands. Russia certainly wouldn't want to provoke a hostile confrontation with the United States over something so "comic bookish", but the "comic bookishness" is an essential part of the incident's power. An attack on JP Morgan is probably much more serious than the Sony hack, but that would never grab the public's attention in the same way.

That leads us directly to the following questions:

What has the attack achieved? What would Russia have to gain by this attack?

The answer to the first question is the answer to the second.

The Sony hack has shown the fragility of America's complex system in a way that even the least technical person can understand it and because of the celebrity gossip involved the entire country, ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages have seen it and talked about it.

And what if the next target for the cyber attackers is not a film corporation but an electricity grid, or gas suppliers, or water pumping stations? Then what? Call this a comedy? I'm not sure there is much to laugh about. BBC

Russia is at this moment under tremendous pressure from the "West"; it would even appear that the Obama administration is bent on "regime change" in Moscow. The logic of the Russians acting under the cover of the wackos of Pyongyang would be the following: in the light of the Sony hack and seeing the damage that puny North Korea could do to a major corporation, the "good and the great", the "serious" people in corporate America might pause to ask themselves: if Kim Jong-un could cause such havoc, what might Vladimir Putin be able to do, it sufficiently backed into a corner? DS

My solution to the North Korean crisis

David Seaton's News Links

This is all much simpler than it looks.

Dennis Rodman has shown us the way!

Here is the secret: Kim Jong Un is secretly in love with the USA and all things American.

You'd really have to be madly in love with the idea of America to invite a freak like Dennis Rodman to your country and hang out with him... But the young dictator needs to be taught the ways of my people at first hand.

The poor people of North Korea are skinny and starving… This is NOT the American way!

In America, the poor people are fat and have diabetes… We must Americanize North Korea, not bomb them.

I don’t think North Korea should be “taken out”, that is a strategy that in the process might very well tip the entire world economy into depression… Quite the contrary, I think they should be “taken in”, they should be given more food than they can possibly eat, if possible containing lots of corn syrup. Kim Jong Un should be invited to Hollywood, visit Disneyland, have his picture taken with Mickey Mouse, see a Laker’s game and eat a hamburger in the company of Barack Obama and Michael Jordan… let him party with the cheerleaders… the works.

I’m perfectly serious… I really think that it might be that simple with this kid. My reading is that his grandfather fought the Japanese and created North Korea and started the Korean war, Kim Jong Un’s father lived all that and the consolidation of the regime as a young man. These were serious grown ups, but Kim Jong Un is probably a spoiled brat with no idea of anything, living in a dream world… Make his dreams come true!

So, cutting to the chase, my plan is to treat Kim and his people like our own: we idiotize the North Koreans with video games, Bruce Willis films and smartphones and wind up by giving them free dialysis for diabetes-2 related kidney failure induced from ingesting massive quantities of our junk food… then we’ve got them hooked... eating out of our hands so to speak... easy, like feeding super size Cokes to a baby. DS

North Korea puts its armed forces on a war footing

David Seaton's News Links

"As we have learnt again and again in this long period of turmoil, the impossible can become inevitable without even passing through improbable." Anatole Kaletsky - The Times

We seem to be immersed in a period of cumulative disasters, rather similar to the astrological idea of the inauspicious conjunction of certain planets.

This is not how the "age of Aquarius" was supposed to turn out!

Cher North Korea — mon semblable, — mon frère!

David Seaton's News Links

The great preponderance of this so-called truth is a confection of outright lies—not merely false but, more perniciously, a form of unreality, imposed with such relentlessness and violence on a people hermetically sealed from any alternative sources of information that it has become their only reality. A North Korean who does not believe the state’s every claim is left with the void of dumb disbelief, for it is impossible in Kim Il Sung Nation—as the North is sometimes described in its own proclamations—to find anything else to believe in.  Philip Gourevitch - The New Yorker

Hollywood, the news industry and television, all corporate controlled, have become instruments of inverted totalitarianism. They censor or ridicule those who critique or challenge corporate structures and assumptions. They saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is Tiger Woods or the dispute between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. They manipulate images to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge, which is how Barack Obama became president. And the draconian internal control employed by the Department of Homeland Security, the military and the police over any form of popular dissent, coupled with the corporate media’s censorship, does for inverted totalitarianism what thugs and bonfires of books do in classical totalitarian regimes.(...)The civic, patriotic and political language we use to describe ourselves remains unchanged. We pay fealty to the same national symbols and iconography. We find our collective identity in the same national myths. We continue to deify the Founding Fathers. But the America we celebrate is an illusion. It does not exist. Our government and judiciary have no real sovereignty. Our press provides diversion, not information. Our organs of security and power keep us as domesticated and as fearful as most Iraqis. Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, when it emasculates government, becomes a revolutionary force. And this revolutionary force, best described as inverted totalitarianism, is plunging us into a state of neo-feudalism, perpetual war and severe repression. The Supreme Court decision is part of our transformation by the corporate state from citizens to prisoners. Chris Hedges - Truthdig

surrealism [səˈrɪəˌlɪzəm]

n
A movement in art and literature characterized by the evocative juxtaposition of incongruous images in order to include unconscious and dream elements.

DS

North Korea or Murdoch: the art is knowing how to push the envelope

Korean strongman, Kim Jong-il and his son and successor, Kim Jong-un

David Seaton's News Links

There is a lot of speculation, and practically no hard intelligence, as to why North Korea is behaving so strangely of late. Sinking a South Korean ship and killing 45 sailors, showing off their advanced atomic facilities to a visiting American scientist and now, shelling a South Korean island near the capital Seoul, again causing loss of life... and apparently nobody really knows why.

A war between the two Koreas  could take place, a miscalculation or a misreading could set off a nuclear exchange... that is how serious this bizarre business is.

Why is all this happening?

Anybody's guess it seems?

Here is mine.

I have long had the impression that the behavior of the players of international politics is very similar to that of small unsupervised, schoolchildren... Out on the "playground", left to their own devices they are savages and when they are constrained by superior force, they behave no better than said schoolchildren in the hands of a befuddled, substitute teacher, they try to see what they can get away with.

Look at this sequence:

(E)very time North Korea flexes its muscles, threatens its neighbor, or violates international law it gains stature unavailable to it via any other means. Think about it: North Korea has a GDP smaller than Costa Rica, roughly the half the size of that of say, the Sudan. Finally, every time the North does one of these things, the response of the rest of the world actually, brings about benefits. After the "official condemnations" die down and the sanctions are proved to be ineffective -- as they inevitably are when pitched against a country in which the will or discomfort of the people does not exactly drive the political system -- North Korea gets a reward of some sort, a deal, an aid package, energy supplies, food. Best of all, the rest of the world accepts its word on vital matters even though North Korea has never ever kept its promises. David Rothkopf - Foreign Policy

"Mr. Lee said he expects further incidents by the North — including perhaps another nuclear test — in the coming weeks, perhaps to coincide with Kim Jong-un’s birthday on Jan. 8. The North has previously tested two nuclear devices." Lee Sung-yoon,professor of international politics at Tufts University, quoted in the New York Times

The other day I wrote about why I thought Rupert Murdoch's creature, Glenn Beck, was being allowed to engage in Jew-baiting, something which in American discourse, in the context of a top rated network TV program, is the political equivalent of testing a nuclear device. My conclusion is that Murdoch did it just to prove he could.

He did it, he has gotten away with it and now some very powerful people feel themselves less powerful and see Murdoch as even more powerful than they did before.

My conclusion is that the North Korean's motive is the same as Murdoch's: by showing what they can do and not be punished they underline their power and raise the price that would have to be paid to make them cease and desist.

The major difference in my mind is that Rupert Murdoch is much more powerful and more dangerous than North Korea. Like the poet said, "things fall apart". DS

The Korean mess

"As we have learnt again and again in this long period of turmoil, the impossible can become inevitable without even passing through improbable." Anatole Kaletsky - The Times

David Seaton's News Links

We seem to be immersed in a period of cumulative disasters, rather similar to the astrological idea of the inauspicious conjunction of certain planets.

This is not how the "age of Aquarius" was supposed to turn out!

This feeling that everything is happening at once colors my reading of the Korean story. Certainly the world's tinder is very dry and any spark could set the whole thing alight. Sarajevo was such an unlikely place to start the Great War, wasn't it? Sometimes, events do pile up in a sinisterly random way, which is where the astrological metaphor of the inauspicious alignment of the planets has at least a poetically descriptive value.

There is this wonderful Spanish saying to describe such a situation, "there already were too many of us and then grandmother had a baby". As if we didn't have enough to worry about, suddenly North Korea looks like starting a war.

The first thing you notice when looking at this unexpected affair is that it couldn't have come at a worse time.

Perhaps that is the key to it all.

I really don't think anybody, not even the Chinese, has much of an idea of what North Korea is up to. The whole "selling point" of North Korea is its mystery. That is their major card in any conflict: nobody understands them.

The USA is bogged down in two inconclusive wars and the Washington neocons and Israel are pressuring them to start another one with Iran. The world economy seems to be entering into multiple organ dysfunction syndrome, as Angela Merkel becomes the "incredible shrinking German chancellor" ...a war with North Korea right now could have sensational knock-on effects.

Although we assume they would be defeated in short order, I understand that North Korea has enough concentrated artillery to destroy Seoul and decimate the token American forces in South Korea. Probably the American ground forces are too overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan to react conventionally and this might lead to the use of atomic weapons. Certainly even a minor war ending in a mushroom cloud could be enough to sink the world's leaking economy.

This knowledge that they hold the world's economy in their hands is probably what is causing North Korea to take these chances.

North Korea observes the Greek bailout and suddenly wants to take sirtaki lessons.

No country is more precarious than North Korea and if it collapsed, China would have huge problems with refugees, South Korea would have to somehow absorb the dysfunctional north like West Germany did with the East... and the German Democratic Republic was Switzerland compared to North Korea. it would suck all the life out of the south's vibrant economy. Asia would be in turmoil for quite some time.

Just as a sailor uses the wind to navigate, but doesn't create the wind, anybody, who has grown up reading Sun Tzu and Lenin, might see opportunities in the chaotic world situation. I think that we live in a world which is overly exposed to random events, that nobody is really "in charge" and to quote another wonderful Spanish saying, "troubled waters make for good fishing".  Perhaps, the fact that so many disasters are happening at once and leaders are so distracted by the specter of financial collapse has led the the North Koreans to think they may be able to win something in this confusion.

So my guess is that the North Koreans want money, food, relaxation of sanctions, you name it. However they might miscalculate, or any of the other players could too.

Of course all these calculations of mine could be way off. There is always a chance that the North Korean leaders are simply bat-guano crazy. That doubt is their secret weapon. DS