In the midst of all the news in the Middle East, North Korea may be getting ready for an underground nuclear test. Here’s hoping for a dud (though it would be hard for us to know if they failed).

Lileks, on the absurd theatre that is the United Nations:

…the West struck a deal with Hezbollah and its paymasters, and it was regarded as a positive development. Peace in our time, and all that.

It’s a wonder they didn’t pass out tiny collectible umbrellas from the Franklin Mint “Neville Chamberlain Collection” to solemnize the event.

The cease-fire resolution wasn’t surprising; the United Nations may have created Israel, but it’s been apologizing ever since. Nevertheless, let no one assert the document lacks teeth. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice put it: “This resolution has an arms embargo within it, and a responsibility of the Lebanese government to make sure that illegal arms are not coming into their country.”

Yes, that’ll work. You can well imagine the frosty reception that awaits an Iranian general who tells the mullahs he’s found a way to slip new rockets into Lebanon:

“We will smuggle in the parts under the guise of providing reconstruction machinery; if satellites detect the tell-tale profile of the rockets, we will simply point to the damage suffered by the Lebanese Space Agency. Then we tattoo assembly instructions on small children and send them via diplomatic pouch. When the parts are in place — why are you looking at me that way?”

The mullahs look at one another, and one finally speaks.

“General, perhaps you were unaware of this fact, but all parties have agreed to disarm Hezbollah. Assurances were made to Ms. Rice. Do you understand? Assurances. Now rip up your mad schemes, return to base, and think no more of perfidious things.”

I think he’s being sarcastic again.

Some scary reading over at Technology Review, on the democratization of high-tech weaponry. As technology continues to advance, and things like this get cheaper, asymmetric warfare is going to become ever harder to wage. At some point, when fighting an enemy that worships and revels in death, we may have no choice except to give him what he wants, wholesale.

…continue to be more clearly drawn. From the Guardian:

The Salafist movement was under-rated and misunderstood and the reaction to it has been confused. As always, the right is triggerhappy and hostile to free expression; as always, the left never wants to do anything that would hazard its self-righteous sense of moral purity.

These are historic fault lines. The right tolerated fascism in the thirties, the left Soviet Communism in the fifties. Of course these two earlier totalitarian movements were different in nature and our response when it came was not always well judged – the tendency is to think first of the excesses of the right typified by the witch hunts of the odious McCarthy, but we should remember, too, that the Democratic party in the immediate postwar years of Henry Wallace would have abandoned Europe just as the left in the eighties would have left Europe at the mercy of the new Soviet missiles.

The apologists for the Islamo-fascists – an accurate term – leave millions around the world exposed to a less obvious but more insidious barbarism.

Nelson Ascher writes about anti-semitism by proxie, and the Jihadis’ real agenda:

The Nazis managed to convince millions and millions of Frenchmen and Poles, Belgians, Norwegians etc. and, yes, Brits and Americans that, since they were fighting a common enemy, the Jews, they weren