Finally, can you read German? Then maybe Germany’s federal government has a job for you! Die Zeit now has a piece about it, called Those who glue together the Stasi files. The former East German State Secret Police (formally the “Ministry for State Security”) got really busy with their shredding-machines in October and November of 1989 as it became increasingly obvious that the regime was tottering and probably about to fall. They had a just incredible amount of incriminating documentation to worry about, miles & miles of files & files (the vast majority in traditional paper). After all, the former East Germany might have set some sort of record for percent of the population informing for the government – spouse spying on spouse was hardly unheard-of – and the Stasi were interested in almost everything.

Unfortunately, those shredders were given the time and lack of interruption to do a pretty good job, resulting in 16,000 sacks of . . . confetti, basically, the shredding machines’ output, each sack containing 50,000 to 80,000 little bits of document.

Nevertheless, the re-unified German government wants to recover as many of those as it can, and has already had people at work since 1995 trying to piece them together. Soon – thank Heavens! – they will be assisted by computer software developed by Germany’s renowned Fraunhofer Research Institute, designed first to scan all the little pieces electronically and then to use automatic algorithms to fit them together.

Until then – and, surely, afterwards as well – there will be a continuing need for human application. This Die Zeit piece is really not any sort of article but a brief photo-series. Yes, the first few are of some unexciting paper-shreds, but then there follow a couple shots showing the puzzle-workers on the job, contemplating the pieces before them, with yet more available in a seemingly-endless procession of sacks. They look stoic; what could be going through their heads? Anything more interesting than a yearning for that next cigarette/chocolate break?

                          

Ol' Pappy & Son (Reuters)

Experteneinschätzung: Nordkorea könnte bald eine Atomrakete haben http://t.co/luFw9VFb

December 28, 2011 11:45 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@weltonline

Welt Online

Atomrakete – yes! “Atom-rocket”! One that will be in North Korean hands, and thus under the “Great Successor’s” personal control, and rather soon!

Hey, that’s not nichts! It’s in fact the estimation of one Larry Niksch, long-time North Korea expert at the (US) Library of Congress, brought to us in an article from Die Welt, who in a recent paper set forth his view that the Pyongyang regime will be ready to mount its Nodong missiles with nuclear warheads within two years at the most, whereas most estimates up to now had foreseen at least five. Now, the Nodong is still but a middle-range ballistic missile – still out of reach of California, probably also Hawaii, but more than capable of hitting, say, Seoul or Tokyo. (Then again, mere North Korean artillery has always been able to devastate Seoul whenever the Great/Dear Leader/Successor felt like giving the order.)

A somewhat less dire prognosis is cited in this same piece from Siegried Hecker, who, despite what you might gather from his name, is former chief of America’s Los Alamos research laboratory. Hecker says that, before North Korea can go ahead confidently with anything very threatening (in the missile realm, you understand), it still has to have a third test-explosion, a successful one (there were doubts whether the first two were really that) to make sure that a nuclear device miniaturized so as to fit as a warhead will actually behave as ordered.

Two points here:

1. He might style himself the “Great Successor,” but “king” or “emperor” might be more pertinent titles for Kim Jong Un, given his absolute control over every aspect of the lives of his subjects. Actually, let’s go with “emperor” – as in “new clothes,” for the silence here is truly deafening. Just look at the guy! Only in his late twenties, having been outside the country only to study among luxurious conditions at some Swiss school, yet now he’s supposed to be in charge of a country still at war with its southern neighbor (at least formally – although northerners have certainly acted like it numerous times in the past, even after 1953), with a moribund economy where people starve to death and everyone wants to escape to China – and with nuclear warheads and, soon, the means to deliver them! Where is the innocent little child to cry out “You’re in way over your head, Jack!” and so to break this spell of fantasy, so that people can once again call things what they are?
   
2. This “Great Successor” was of course the “Dear Leader’s” son – his third it seems – and the mantle came the same way to the “Dear Leader” back in 1994 (although with seemingly much more opportunity to practice the job beforehand). Here we see again the amusing if wearying paradox where all-powerful rulers in what are putatively “republics” (here: “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”) decide that no one is better qualified to succeed them in the people’s service after their demise than . . . their direct progeny. Abrupt terminations to this sort of farce have been realized over this past year in several North African/Middle Eastern countries (with one or two more possibly to come), as Prof. Juan Cole points out in an excellent recent blogpost. But this phenomenon was also addressed at more depth in Francis Fukuyama’s excellent new book The Origins of Political Order: it’s the sort of primitive, tribal-based urge that truly mature, developed systems of government usually leave far behind as they progress to leadership based on true merit and authentic popular choice. Yet as advanced as any ruling regime may be, those sorts of blood-tie yearnings (i.e. to set up one’s children for life in cushy positions) never cease to be a threat to the political order, Fukuyama states, and the extent of their re-intrusion into the body politic mirrors the extent of that regime’s decay.

UPDATE: Well, I guess we need to note and fully appreciate any bit of good news emanating from that part of the world that we can:

BREAKING: Kim Jong-Un Rebrands North Korea as “N. Kiddy”

December 30, 2011 4:39 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@BorowitzReport

Andy Borowitz

                          

The answer to that remains up in the air, as the summit continues into the weekend. What we do already know, however, is that an important split has occurred within the EU, resulting from the failure of German Chancellor Merkel and French President Sarkozy to have accepted by all 27 member-states their proposals for greater national budget control and coordination. Now the action on that front has shifted to the group of 17 member-states who actually use the euro.

The excellent “Charlemagne” commentator from the Economist has already termed this development Europe’s great divorce, in an article (in English, of course) featuring at its head a picture of the defiant-looking British PM David Cameron pointing an aggressive finger towards the camera. And indeed, this one and many other press reports from the summit would have their readers believe that the UK is isolated in its stand of resistance against those “Merkozy” proposals for greater EU power over national budgets. That is certainly also the message from the authoritative German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, where an analytical piece from Michael König is rather dramatically entitled Bulldog Cameron bites the British into isolation.

But such observers should be careful about rushing into any over-hasty conclusions. They should remember that a number of other member-states share an attitude towards the EU rather closer to that of the UK than Germany or France. The Czech Republic, for instance:

iDnes: Klaus a Telička schvalují rozvážnost v Bruselu, ČSSD varuje před izolací: Prezident Václav Klaus označil … http://t.co/Qh043Qmm

December 9, 2011 2:55 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

That link leads to an article from the leading Czech daily Mladá fronta dnes, with at its head a picture of Czech President Václav Klaus at the podium, with to the side a copy of the book he just had published, entitled European integration without illusions. Clearly, he is delighted to stand on the British side of the current Brussels developments. The article notes it is only the ČSSD – the main party now in opposition – that is worried about the Czech Republic isolating itself with this stance within the EU.

And there is also Denmark, with an even stronger history of setting definite limits to the sovereignty its government is willing to give up to the EU. As an article in the Kristeligt Dagblad notes, the new Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt needs to be careful to avoid a hostile homecoming from this summit by not giving much away. The unicameral parliament there – the Folketing – is very much divided about what is going on now in Brussels. Many of its constituent parties intend to demand a referendum if there is any significant change to Denmark’s position with the EU promised there.

Perhaps the best conclusion to draw is that Cameron – with his protuberant finger – simply was best-prepared (by temperament perhaps, but also by the very nature of the UK political system) to resist these German/French proposals which after all had been telegraphed well in advance. Several other countries might be alleging a need to return back to their countries to “consult” before they can really make up their mind, but the sort of decisions that will be made back there are in many cases already quite evident, and will ultimately not support any theme of British isolation.

UPDATE: What’d I say?

EU treaty problems? Cameron is not alone. http://t.co/JEjsgdAI

December 14, 2011 12:52 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@ftbrusselsblog

FT’s Brussels blog

Click through to access an excellent article from the FT’s Brussels Blog showing that the latest EU treaty agreed to “26-to-1″ at that last summit faces real problems not just in the UK, but in other EU member-states as well – Czech Republic and Denmark, yes, but also others.

                          

Intervention gefordert: Die kriegerischen Planspiele der Türkei gegen Syrien http://t.co/VbhCTKZ7

November 18, 2011 7:55 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@weltonline

Welt Online

This links to an article from the authoritative German national daily Die Welt about how Syria’s neighbor Turkey – whose Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once termed al-Assad his “brother” – is beginning plans to make its own intervention into the Syrian national uprising go beyond mere words. First of all, it’s starting to prepare to impose its own no-fly-zone on the country. Also, according to the authoritative English-language Beirut newspaper The Daily Star, Turkey wants to seize a strip of Syrian land along the common border as a “security zone.”

Don’t get too excited here about the Turks’ zeal to help out their neighbors, though: the main function of such a zone would be as a place for Syrian refugees to be able to stay for a while in safety from their government, rather than have to cross over into Turkey proper. To the south, Jordan is said to be considering this sort of a move too, and both countries are gaining support for it among Western and other Arab countries as al-Assad continues to be intransigent.

By the way, there is an important US airbase in Turkey, at Incirlik, maybe 120km from the Syrian border. The Welt article also mentions US support of Jordanian armed forces, which might get the Americans involved here that way.

Of course, some representatives of the Syrian rebels – in particular the Muslim Brotherhood there – have already called for full-scale military intervention. Turkish, that is; most still will not accept any such explicit help from Western powers. Still, for all the Turkish sabre-rattling, there are also important questions to give its leaders pause. A no-fly-zone – and even just trying to seize enough Syrian territory for the “security zone” – would require disabling Syria’s air force, built around 100 advanced MiG-29 fighters – is the Turkish air force up to the job by itself? Foreign Minister Davutoglu has also made recent statements that Turkey would really rather not go it alone when it comes to any intervention. It would surely require explicit Arab League and UN Security Council approval for any such step, as well as probably co-belligerents (and Jordan alone would likely not be sufficient).

Then again, Syria also currently depends on Turkey for much of its electricity, and for the water coming over the border from Turkish highlands in the form of the Euphrates river. What’s more, the recent attack by a Damascus mob on the Turkish embassy there – complete with burning Turkish flags – was itself not very “brotherly.”

                          

Of course he is! Lately what has been dominating the economic front has been the Eurozone, especially Greece and Italy. Even when interviewed by a leading German newspaper, Krugman does not hold back, as we can see in the extended interview published on-line by Die Zeit last Friday: “The euro will mutate into an extended Deutschmark”.

Among his remarks:

• Krugman truly lets his freak flag fly when it comes to the European Central Bank as the only possible savior left for the Eurozone, the only institution left that can save Italy by buying as much of its state debt as necessary to push the interest rate it pays down way below the current ~7%. Yes, that sort of “lender of last resort” function is forbidden to the ECB by treaty; nonetheless, according to Krugman ECB officials should – and will – just say “Let’s forget the rules, we have to buy those [Italian] bonds . . . . Otherwise the whole euro-project fails.” Later, by way of mitigation, he even offers an example of the Bank of England “breaking rules” back in the 19th century – the reference is rather too obscure.
  
• The interviewer ventures “But this euro-project was pretty much destined to fail from the start” and Krugman readily agrees, calling it “a horrible mistake,” since “the requirements for a common currency were lacking” from the start.
  
• And oh, he later adds, “Greece is simply fundamentally insolvent.” Portugal, too. Probably also Ireland. But not Spain or Italy, actually – huh? You see, fiscally-speaking, Spain and Italy could handle their levels of state debt at interest-rates of around 4%, say, but not at the 6-7% that Italy is currently having to pay for new debt. He calls that a speculative attack, but was probably just using the most readily-available phrase for interview purposes – I wager that that is more accurately characterized, including by Krugman himself, as a self-reinforcing panic-attack (or even “run” on state securities) whereby fears about their solvency causes the interest-rates to rise, which spurs further fears about their solvency, etc.

A euro-exit is the better alternative for Greece. The risks for the rest of the Eurozone are exaggerated.

For many this will actually be a sort of “No sh*t, sherlock!” kind of article – the benefits of a Greece exit sound better the more you hear them although, yes, there will be some chaos – but maybe not for Prof. Caesar’s German audience. He also has a similarly cavalier attitude to rules and formal treaties as Krugman, like towards the fact that no exit from the Eurozone is actually provided for in the protocols: “The relevant currency-union treaties have already been so frightfully abused in so many ways (No-bail-out clause, prohibition of state-financing via the ECB) that one more violation for Greece would de jure be a mere trifle.”

Also in Die Zeit there is Crisis-talk for Dummies, in case you’ve fallen behind a bit on Eurozone developments and need to update your vocabulary. But alas, it is of course in German, although a few of the words (e.g. “Haircut”) are in English.

                          

#Referendum in #Griechenland: #Papandreou riskiert eine globale Finanzschmelze http://t.co/Q5z7zEYw #Geld

November 1, 2011 2:39 pm via bitlyReplyRetweetFavorite

@weltonline

Welt Online

Yes, every other newspaper is writing about this as well, but this particular Die Welt article, by D. Eckert and H. Zschäpitz, stands out for its headline: Papandreou risks a global financial meltdown, or rather the alarm such a headline evokes in contrast to the serious, mainstream sort of paper we all know Die Welt to be – i.e one that doesn’t usually resort to such headlines. Yes, there are no doubt similar-sounding titles in tabloid papers, and not just in Germany, but all that is mere dog-bites-man.

This piece also stands out for the handy list it provides – you have to scroll down a little, look for Die größten Wertverluste . . . – of the banks which have lost the most market-capitalization, so far, from the plummeting prices of their shares. FYI, BNP Paribas stands at the top, with nearly €4.7 billion lost, followed by Deutsche Bank. (It also stands out for author “H. Zschäpitz”: isn’t that just a howler of a name? But no doubt the fellow has a Google Alert on it and will be reading this blogpost sooner or later – my apologies!)

Otherwise, though, I stand vulnerable to the charge of European tokenism. Because the piece that has really clarified things for me is in English, and written by our old friend Dana Blankenhorn. Greek Latest is Solar Scam is its title, it does spend a few paragraphs dissecting the faulty economics behind a Greek solar-energy investment plan. But then it addresses what Papandreou and the Greek authorities are really trying to do with this referendum. Given that Blankenhorn assumes that the result will be “No,” it’s simple: they are threatening to take the rest of Europe to down with them, unless they get an even-better debt-relief deal than the 50% they got from the EU last week.

You should check it out, and the article from Seeking Alpha that Blankenhorn links to as well. Strangely, his link to it reads “Sink the euro” even though that other article itself argues that there is still a chance for a “Yes” vote!

                          

Holger Dambeck writing in Germany’s Der Spiegel supplies the glad tidings: Mathematicians put together mega-puzzle full of holes. It has to do with a large Renaissance fresco painted back in the 15th century, the time of Leonardo, on a church-wall in Padua, Italy by the noted artist Andrea Mantegna. This particular church was even put on a list, communicated to the Americans in the middle of the Italian campaign in World War II, of places containing artistic treasures that they should try not to damage. Unfortunately, German troops did camp in the area – perhaps counting on being shielded from attack by being so close to a church – and sure enough, they were subject to air-attack and the fresco was destroyed.

That news that this priceless large (almost 1000 square-meters) fresco was dashed in thousands of tiny pieces is not the good news. Into around 88,000 piece, to be more precise – and we know that number because the authorities after the attack did try to gather up all the pieces they could find.

Now many of them are being put back together again to form part of the old fresco! This has been made possible, firstly, by those authorities’ act of collecting all those pieces and storing them in Rome, where in 1992 they were cleaned, photographed, and catalogued insofar as possible. Then all that was needed was some sort of device to figure out how they fit together, and that’s what a team from the Technische Universität at Munich around mathematician Massimo Fornasier provided: software to do that.

On the one hand, this is hardly the first time computers have been brought to bear to a task of this kind – author Dambeck reminds us that German experts came up with software which aided in reconstructing documents which the old East German Stasi had shredded at the time of the fall of the Wall. But on the other, this is only a partial triumph at best, since only less than 10% of the fresco has been recovered as only that many pieces were available. The photo at the top of the article gives you some idea of what they were able to get back. And the project even has its own website – but it’s written in Italian!

                          

Trash, excrement, corpses: pollution on Mount Everest is reaching dramatic proportions. Environmentalists are now demanding installation of toilets.

Is no place now safe from humankind’s depredations? Apparently even the top of the world’s highest mountain is now so frequented that it looks like some penthouse-lounge where no one particularly feels the obligation to pick up after themselves. (Oh, and corpses: that plus corpses.)

According to Focus, the organization currently bringing this dire situation to light is called “Eco Himal,” and their spokesman is the splendidly-named Phinjo Sherpa. These folks have been doing their best to try to clean up the mountaintop since 2008, already hauling away 13 tons of trash, 400 kg of frozen feces and – yes – 4 bodies.

But they claim they can’t handle it by themselves anymore – and they’re not bluffing. They refuse to butte out of the matter until proper sanitary facilities are installed up there

And yes, there at the top of the article you also have a magnificent panorama of a portion of the very same mountain. I squinted and looked hard: couldn’t make out any corpses. Can you?

                          

And then there is this tweet from the German newsmagazine Stern:

Tötungsmaschinen außer Kontrolle?: Computervirus soll US-Drohnen befallen haben: Ein hartnäckiger Virus soll… http://t.co/lYEUIOfJ

October 8, 2011 2:40 pm via stern.deReplyRetweetFavorite

@sternde

stern.de

Seemingly little relief there: that first sentence after all translates as “Out-of-control death machines?” But the larger point is that US drone aircraft have now fallen prey to the same modern vexation that afflicts so many of us: computer viruses.

This Stern piece is based on an exclusive account from the blog by Noah Schachtman on the Wired website, which itself is worth a read. (And of course it’s in English. BTW did you know that the Air Force personnel who operate these drones, from many thousands of miles away at an obscure Nevada airbase, have to do so while wearing their flight suits, as if they were really there themselves, cruising the Yemeni skies?) What it basically adds is reactions from Air Force spokesmen to the Wired account and other similar media reports. Speaking on Fox News, a senior military official dismissed them as “grossly exaggerated,” adding that “The aircraft were never in danger of going crazy.” Yes, he acknowledged virus problems, but insisted that they in no way have influenced the deployment or use of these systems.

The Stern reporter goes on to end the piece with a juicy quote from the Wired article: “We try to eliminate the virus, but it keeps coming back!” And it reminds us that we already know from before that Iraqi rebels have succeeded in intercepting video-data sent – in the clear – from such drones to their controllers. In other words, sometimes things are not all rosy, no matter what official might say. The same could well be true with this virus problem.

                          

Syrien: EU hat es mit dem Ölembargo nicht eilig http://t.co/NOKM6Jq

September 3, 2011 7:33 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@BMOnline

Morgenpost / BERLIN

You see, these sanctions take effect only on November 15! Yes, no new contracts for oil delivery can be concluded effective immediately, but the old ones must be adhered to until then.

The villain here is Italy, which demanded this delay citing “a technical requirement.” Meanwhile, Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja had it right with his observation: “If we really mean it, we should act immediately.” Sure, in the same announcement the EU added 54 further members of the Al-Assad regime’s inner circle to the “no-travel” and “assets frozen” lists. But the embargo is the truly meaningful blow to Assad, and there are Syrian protesters still being killed daily – at least 17 yesterday, according to opposition reports. How long can they hold out? How long can those many thousands continue to take to the streets, knowing they are likely to encounter gunfire from the authorities, as their national economy collapses around them?