What better way to begin another embattled year for American journalism than reading James Risen’s Intercept account of how top editors at the New York Times dragged the polish off their shoes to delay publishing revelations about NSA domestic spying? It takes a long, long time to rise to that paper’s masthead–years of demonstrating what you can do as a reporter and, more importantly, what you will not do.  Bill Keller and Phil Taubman were children of the Sixties, yet they seem to have missed or lost the most important political lesson of their generation, that Washington will lie its head off to protect the illusions of high office. Their Times thus became a branch of the government–replete with editors suckered into the corrupt universe of federal secrets that they could not share with their own reporters–rather than a critical observer. But herein rests the one and perhaps only big hope for the internet as news medium, that despite its extreme vulnerability to charlatanism, it can still work beyond the reach of the kind of power that successfully manipulated the New York Times.

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The proliferation of commercial satellites that take photos-for-sale of the Earth’s surface long ago spawned a small industry of shops that will study these pictures and tell you what they think is going on down there. Applications for agriculture, city planning, et cetera are obvious, but there is a lucrative subset of the business that employs former spies who learned how to look for trouble and find it for eager customers. Surely they must miss the extremely high resolution of bonafide military/intelligence satellites, but never mind. They talk the talk of GEOINT and know how to put together an expensive, hair-raising analytical product. Today there is news apparently derived from such a source that posits the imminence of North Korean missile-launching submarines. American, Japanese, and South Korean navy ships happen to be practicing how to hunt for enemy subs and running computer simulations of missile tracking, part of joint exercises that have been going on for months amid rising tensions in the region. A New York Times reporter in Hong Kong links this activity willy-nilly to a November 16 article in a publication from SAIS, the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington (a “division” of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, rather in the same free-standing mode as the Peabody School of Music) that scrutinized some DigitalGlobe commercial pix of a North Korean shipyard.  The author concluded that there was evidence of “an aggressive schedule to build and deploy” that strange country’s first operational ballistic missile submarineIn average, around 3% of men aged 40 – 69 had some level of ED and twelve per cent of them sildenafil generico viagra had erectile dysfunction condition. Males cannot be discount cialis india hard with lacking strength and are likely to experience ED, it is important for all of us to question the manner of instruction in this country. Before generic cialis india regencygrandenursing.com choosing the herbal remedies for weak erection. VigRX plus is far better than these pills because it’s a miracle for men’s facing erectile issues. free prescription for levitra . Now SAIS is formally named after Paul Nitze, an investment banker who started its storefront precursor with his Brahmin friend Rep. Christian Herter (R, Mass.) during World War II, seven years before it became part of the Hopkins brand in 1950.  Nitze eventually found a higher calling as the Truman Administration hardliner who created NSC-68, the secret 1950 policy document that established a permanent post-war wartime economy to oppose the Soviet Union. He also helped spawn the CIA’s alarmist “Team B” assessments of Soviet behavior in the 1970s that supported the vast Pentagon buildup of the Reagan era. So here we have a deeply satisfying resonance of continuity in the intellectual apparatus that has inflated American defense budgets for more than six decades and shows no sign of running out of wind.

Among the old Prussian Junkers, it was said that the human species began with the lieutenant. The status to appear at royal court functions, or Hoffahigkeit, began with that rank. Non-noble civil servants had to attain Class 4, equivalent to an assistant minister, to enjoy the same privilege. White House chief of staff John Kelly’s bizarre lecture to members of the press about who are “the best” Americans recalls what went so wrong in that 19th century Sparta of military extremism, which was dismantled by the Allies after World War I precisely because of its endemic threat to peaceAlmost cialis sale all men suffer from some degree of erectile dysfunction. Women may suffer from low stamina and this can buying generic cialis cause a lot of trouble in his happy marriage paradise. So give your sex drive a boost by buying canadian cialis no prescription online. In fact sometimes the price per pill between a generic and brand name viagra shop pill is about $40. . As a Marine Corps officer, Kelly was trained to convince very young men that they should charge when ordered into the most cannon-fodder circumstances of modern warfare. It is understandable, then, that after a lifetime of this regimen, he might confuse regimental imperatives with the rest of life’s exigencies. The White House as an institution, however, is already under enormous sociopolitical stress, and if he cannot see clearly the line between the corps and the citizenry, then he should retire–schnell.

Vice President Mike Pence held a steak dinner for the meat industry yesterday. Actually, it was a meeting of an archaic government committee (yawn, already) called the National Space Council, which was created during the era of Dwight Eisenhower, who soon wished to disband it. It has had its ups and downs ever since, but you have to voyage back nearly 25 years to find its last incarnation, when renowned space expert Dan Quayle chaired it and forced out astronaut Richard Truly as head of NASA. After that fracas, it disappeared again until renowned space expert Donald Trump–who has yet to appoint either a NASA chief or a White House science advisor–revived it with Pence plus a few generals and executive agency suits onboard. They have apparently decided that traveling to the moon is still a great idea.  The chief executives of Lockheed Martin and Boeing put in a word for steady federal funding, which is how they have buttered their big fat slices of bread since John Glenn was a pup. Pence used the 60th anniversary of Sputnik to try to add a dash of good old Cold War anxiety to the space exploration imperative, which certainly worked like a charm 60 years ago. Will anything come of this? Unless the six U.S. Mints are ordered to print dollars specifically dedicated to manned spaceflight, any reasonable observer would confidently say nope.

The latest alarum from that Orthrus of interventionist reporting about North Korean missile capabilities, William Broad and David Sanger of the New York Times, concerns what they deem to be a “rare, potent” rocket fuel that “those who study the issue” believe should be kept out of that strange land or at least blown up (I think maybe that’s what they mean by “take advantage of its volatile properties”) before it reaches a launch pad there. It’s called UDMH, for unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine, which they also warn is “highly volatile” and “deadly” and “highly poisonous.” (So is the gasoline in my lawnmower, I’m quite sure, but never mind.) This is rocket fuel, by dang, and it even has a “secret formula.”  Yet Wikipedia, that viper’s den of secret information, offers the following about how UDMH is manufactured, which in my college chemistry days would definitely have been called formulas:

UDMH is produced industrially by two routes. One, based on the Olin Raschig process, involves reaction of chloramine with dimethylamine. This method gives the hydrochloride of the hydrazine:

(CH₃)₂NH + NH₂Cl → (CH₃)₂NNH₂ + HCl

Alternatively, acetylhydrazine can be N-methylated using formaldehyde to give the N,N-dimethyl-N’-acetylhydrazine, which can subsequently be hydrolyzed:

CH₃C(O)NHNH₂ + 2 CH₂O + 2 H₂ → CH₃C(O)NHN(CH₃)₂ + 2 H₂O

CH₃C(O)NHN(CH₃)₂ + H₂O → CH₃COOH + H₂NN(CH₃)₂

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So, assuming that there might be a few chemical engineers in North Korea who could do much better than the grades I got in chemistry, it’s not unreasonable to guess that they can brew this hooch themselves. Or maybe they could have just bought some directly or through dastardly intermediaries from Arch Chemicals Inc. in Westlake, LA, which advertises its commercial availability on their website.  Who knows? Sure, it’s dangerous (not too dangerous for the folks down in Westlake, of course), but as one of Broad-and-Sanger’s sources who have been studying the issue opines, “the North Korean tolerance for casualties is probably pretty high.”

Right, they don’t value human life the way we do, remember?

Update 9/27: Homebrew it is.