The example of East Germany exerts a far greater cautionary effect on the North Koreans than Qaddafi’s fate does. The Honecker regime took what Ameri… - Brian Reynolds Myers

Show me a persona non grata, and I'll show you a persona non give a shit.

Ideology, legitimacy, authority: Such topics used to interest academics no end. The mania for quantifying the social sciences and the attendant decline in foreign-language acquisition have changed things. I remember Sovietologists lamenting this trend when I was at school in the 1980s. It’s gone much, much further since. What cannot be researched with the proper statistical-numerical methodology is thought beneath serious analysis. On the rare occasions when a non-quantifier takes the microphone at a conference, the Gradgrinds lean back with an indulgent smile: Time for some light relief.

[W]e must at least stop acting as if the only motive for North Korea’s armament too preposterous to discuss were the one that the country has reiterated, and acted in accordance with, for the past seventy years. Our initial response to 9/11 was to reduce it to a protest against U.S. support for Israel. Only recently have we begun to understand that the jihadists quite literally want the whole world. It is wishful thinking to assume that the ultra-nationalists in Pyongyang, who are far better armed than Islamic State, do not at least want the rest of their ethnic homeland.