What North Korea gets out of the Sony Hack

The Hack of Sony has been getting a lot of airtime as of late, and rightfully so. I will leave it to others to fully explain the sheer amount of damage it did to the company. However, a primary suspect for the hack that has emerged is North Korea, and that warrants some further attention.

Many reacted in disbelief over this accusation - after all, why go that far over a mere movie even if that plot was likely to upset the North Korean leadership (considering that involved an assassination plot against the Supreme Reader)? But what those people are missing is that stopping was not the point of the whole exercise (assuming for the moment that North Korea really was behind it) - it was just an excuse.

Keep in mind that North Korea has very few sources of revenue - and it is, in fact, dependent on humanitarian aid to prevent wide-spread starvation. If the nation opened up more, it might get more aid - but it will also weaken the regime, possibly causing it to collapse.

And they can't have that. Instead, North Korea has always used a different approach - acting as if they are a crazy loon who must be appeased before they hurt anyone. All those military threats, all those artillery pieces aimed at Seoul, even the nuclear weapons tests... all those are North Korea saying: "Negotiate with us and make us concessions, before something happens you will regret!"

So far, it has worked for them. But, well, sooner or later such threats get stale. If you haven't shelled Seoul for a few decades, then nobody is going to believe you are planning to do it soon. And the nuclear weapons held the attention of the world for a while, but now they too no longer move many headlines. And the thing about military attacks is that they would represent regime suicide if they are actually used - sure, you can hurt (some) enemy nations, but after that they will flatten you. Which is why the North Korean regime - which is very interested in its own survival - won't use them.

But this hack? It works out brilliantly for North Korea. It was no military attack, which means that it will be hard to justify military strikes in return. But they hurt one of the biggest companies in the world very, very badly - and considering the attack was against a media company, and involved a potential blockbuster, the attack and its consequences are now very public. Suddenly, North Korea is discussed by everyone again, and everyone fears them again. How many other companies are vulnerable to attacks like these? Far too many - and as a result, many others will tell their respective governments to tread more softly with North Korea and perhaps give them more concessions - just so that they won't strike again.


Mission accomplished.

My thoughts about Ferguson

The aftermath of the Ferguson shooting as well as the recent Grand Jury verdict on the case have made it as far as the German news media, and this compelled me to write down my own thoughts on this issue.

A Nation in Fear

The United States, a very high percentage of armed people. Anyone around you might be armed, and thus anyone around you might be a threat to your life.

And "I was afraid for my own life" is a legitimate reason for lethal self-defence. And since, in the United States, there is almost always a reason to feel threatened like that by a stranger, it becomes disturbingly easy to justify shooting shooting said stranger in a manner that will satisfy the average jury. This, of course, includes the police - who are far more likely to shoot for kill in the USA than elsewhere in the developed world. In all of 2013, German police officers shot 42 bullets at other people, killing eight. In the USA - a country with only four times the people of Germany - police officers killed 45 people in January 2013 alone.

So shooting others is easy to justify. And it becomes especially easy if said stranger is a member of an ethnic group which is portrayed as especially "violent" and "prone to crime" by the prevailing media narratives.

Echoes of Trayvon Martin

If the shooting of Martin Brown had been an isolated incident - if it had been a single aberration - there wouldn't have been so many protests. But there are ample precedents.

It may be instructive to go back to the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The "mistake" of Trayvon Martin was walking around a neighborhood where a local thought he didn't belong. That was enough to cause his death.

His second mistake may have been that he didn't carry a gun of his own. After all, he was provably stalked by an armed stranger - and that, according to the logic established above, would have been enough to make him fear for his life and establish a legitimate case for lethal self-defense. It wouldn't even matter if - as George Zimmerman claims - that Trayvon Martin threw the first punch during their altercation. As long as he had sufficient reason to be afraid of his life - and who wouldn't, if stalked by an armed stranger? - he would have been amply justified in using any force necessary to stop Zimmerman from posing a threat to him.

Though it remains an open question if the jury would have seen it the same way, or indeed the police wouldn't have simply shot him at the scene. But he didn't have a gun while Zimmerman did, so Zimmerman shot him, survived, and got free.

And immediately afterwards a campaign began to vilify Trayvon Martin - painting him as a "violent thug" instead of a normal teenager who had every reason to be afraid of his life - while Zimmerman was lauded as a "hero" by too many people - standing up for the right to shoot black teenagers who look "suspicious".

Young black people apparently can't win. As long as the narrative portraying them as "violent" and "dangerous" persists, they remain targets that can be shot nearly at will. If they try to look as unthreatening as possible - playing out "respectability politics" - they need to constantly watch their steps and live under constant fear about "stepping out of line", to a far greater degree than white people do. And the other alternative - arming themselves so that they can better defend themselves - looks rather dubious, since that would only play into the "blacks as violent thugs" narrative and is thus far more likely to get them killed. In fact, considering recent cases where carrying toy guns was enough for black men to be shot, carrying actual weapons looks like an invitation to suicide-by-cop.

Police - The Face of Oppression

Which brings us to the next point - law enforcement. I've seen people claim that if Michael Brown and other young black people in similar situations had acted just like the police wanted them to, nothing would have happened to them.

I find that dubious. Maybe they wouldn't have been killed, but it is still very possible that something bad could have happened to them with no fault on their part. It needs to be remembered that the police in Ferguson - and too many other places like it - does not act as the "friendly neighborhood cop", always willing to assist ordinary citizens. Instead, there is plenty of evidence that they were simply the biggest extortion racket around, preying upon the community's poorest members because those had the least access to legal counsel.

How long would you be willing to remain quiet in the face of oppression? Ask that yourself, before you condemn the protesters of Ferguson.

And while Ferguson might be an extreme case, it is hardly the only one. Systematic abuse of, for example, forfeiture laws is disturbingly common. Not all police departments in the United States are rotten, but in many the rot sits deeply. They are the oppressors in many cases, and it is the poorest who have noticed it first - and that includes much of black America.

And as long as it remains easy to justify shooting others, and as long as black people continue to be portrayed as a threat to others, the killings will continue.

What is to be done?

Frankly, I do not know if it is even possible to fix this. Guns are too prolific and too much a part of American life to eliminate the constant fear of violence, and harsher gun control laws probably wouldn't change anything - just like with Prohibition, it would only drive the guns underground instead of removing them.

And the narrative of black Americans as dangerous will continue as long as poverty affects black Americans disproportionally - after all, it is always useful for the upper classes when the middle classes have a lower class to look down to, and fear.

So this narrative will only end if there is a long-term, concentrated movement to lift black America out of poverty - but that will require fixing housing discrimination, unequal school funding, job discrimination and so many other forms of structural discrimination that even stricter gun control seems less of a long shot in comparison.

So no, I don't have any ideas for how to fix this, except to keep on talking about it. What are your thoughts?

[Global Warming] No, the Earth is NOT "doomed". But it will be bad enough.

There is plenty of hyperbole surrounding climate change, so let's get this out of the way first. No, the Earth is not going to be destroyed because of global warming. The Earth is far more resilient than that. Even humanity will almost certainly survive, unless the resulting resource wars somehow manage to trigger global thermonuclear war.

But just because the worst things we can imagine won't happen it doesn't mean that more realistic scenarios aren't horrible enough.

Let's start with sea level rise. In the latest IPCC report, possible sea level rises until the year 2100 range from 26 cm for the most optimistic scenario to 98 cm for the most pessimistic, depending on how CO2 concentrations will develop in the coming decades - and, as the report notes, sea level rise is likely to continue after 2100.

Now, for obvious historical reasons, much of Earth's most valuable real estate is within a short distance of the coast. Many of the world's greatest cities are ports - New York City, Tokyo, Singapore, Mumbai, and many, many others. What would happen if sea levels were to rise half a meter? Remember, that's only the average sea level - storm surges will also reach higher.

Either they will have to surround the cities with Dutch-style dikes - which is enormously expensive - , or they will have to abandon the areas closest to the coast and rebuild everything deeper inland, including the entire infrastructure - which is also enormously expensive. And, of course, smaller towns or poorer countries will not be able to shoulder such expensive, which means that they will have to go for the second option.

Then there will be all those climatic shifts. "Global Warming" will not be a uniform process. Some places will get a lot warmer, while others barely so. Some places will get much more precipitation, and some much less.

And all our local agriculture and infrastructure is optimized for our current local climate. The rich nations of the world will be able to cope... probably. We can adjust our farming techniques and update our infrastructure so that we can still produce crop yields - and if that fails, we will probably still have enough money to buy our food from elsewhere. But the poorer nations won't have the means to adapt and change, which means that their inhabitants will attempt to leave en masse. And we will notice a few hundreds of millions of refugees on our doorsteps.

Beyond agriculture, there is the shift of ecosystems. Numerous species suddenly can't live in their usual habitats any more, because the temperature and the precipitation changed. The oceans are getting more and more acidic thanks to all the dissolved carbon dioxide, with unknown effects on the most fundamental components of the oceans' ecosystems. We do not yet know how that will affect our food sources, but it would be foolish to assume it doesn't. And beyond that, this mass extinction represents a truly epic loss of genetic diversity - of information. What might we have learned about biology, genetics, and numerous other subjects by studying these species? What inventions might have been inspired by this information?

We will never know.

And worse, much of this is probably inevitable. Already, the permafrost in the Arctic is thawing, releasing massive amounts of methane which will likely continue the warming process even if humanity were to somehow stop emitting CO2 tomorrow. It's a very slow process, taking place over decades and even centuries - but it is quite likely unstoppable.

"So what's the use?" you might ask. "If all this is inevitable, shouldn't we just give up on reigning our CO2 emissions in?"

Well, we might not be able to stop global warming any more, but we can still affect the rate at which it occurs. Reducing our emissions will slow it down, which buys us time. Time to adapt, for both us and the species that live around us. Time to figure out new technological solutions to combat both the warming and its effects.

Even beyond the likely loss of human lives, global warming represents a huge economic drain on the world's funds. And worse it gets, and the faster it arrives, the bigger this drain will be. By causing this change, we are forcing our descendants to spend much of their resources on mitigating its effects, rather than improving themselves and their lives - or even just enjoying their lives. And, of course, if current life extension research works out, we will be damaging our own prosperity as well.

We can argue all day how we are supposed to reduce our CO2 emissions - but that is a topic for future blog posts. However, in my mind there is no doubt about the need to reduce them.