I just love this story. The opening sounds like a joke. A guy walks into a flea market, buys an old typewriter for €100 and sells it for €45,000. It was an Enigma machine and the guy was a professor of cryptography and knew what he was looking at. From the BBC:

A 100 euros typewriter has sold for 45,000 euros (£40,000; $51,500) at auction, after it was discovered it was actually a German Wehrmacht Enigma I.

The World War Two cipher machine was bought at a flea market by a cryptography professor, who apparently recognised its true worth.

It was sold to an online bidder in Bucharest, Romania, on Tuesday.

Enigma machines were used to carry coded military communications during the war.

First developed in Germany in the 1920s, the codes created by the electromechanical encryption devices were eventually cracked by mathematician Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park.

The pictures are pretty neat, too.

What I like about this story is not just the turning trash to treasure aspect of it but that the cryptography professor saved the machine. It might have been scrapped. We’ll never know how many things have just been thrown away because people didn’t realize what they were.

I’ve literally pulled valuable rarities out of the trash. Not $45,000 rarities but still. I’ve got the base of a rare epergne sitting on my piano that the owner of the store I bought it from obviously had no idea what it was. Just a few months ago I purchased a piece of pottery for a buck at a garage sale that’s probably worth $100. The seller didn’t know what it was.

When precisely the same information is seen as damning or exculpatory depending on your ideology, I think we can reasonably conclude that there is no meeting of minds.

While we’re thinking about the unthinkable, at the Observer Austin Bay has a more inclusive list of options in dealing with North Korea. His #4 is something I’ve been saying around here for a long time. Here’s his description of war with North Korea:

The U.S. and South Korea have exercised what they call a 4D strategy to “detect, defend, disrupt and destroy” North Korea’s missiles.

Weapons systems involved include various U.S. aircraft and a South Korean submarine with cruise missiles.

This is a bare sketch of some of the systems that would be employed in a “simultaneous strategic bombing strike” to knock out North Korean missiles, missile launchers, storage sites, nuclear and chemical weapons sites, command and control centers, communications systems and air-space defenses.

The U.S. and its allies in east Asia have the aircraft and missiles (cruise and ballistic) to deliver at least 2,000 (likely more) precision blockbuster-sized conventional weapons within a two to 10 minute time frame on North Korea’s critical targets. The April U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile attack on a Syrian Shayrat airbase provides an example.

The missiles were fired at a distance, but since they can “loiter,” the 59 missiles arrived near simultaneously. U.S. Air Force heavy bombers can drop smart bombs so that munitions dropped from different aircraft arrive near simultaneously.

A simultaneous strategic bombing strike seeks to surprise the enemy, destroy his strategic weapons systems and suppress his key defenses throughout the battle area.

That is asking a lot—perhaps too much.

Success depends on many things, but the first D—detect—is vital. Conducting a successful simultaneous strategic bombing strike requires very accurate, real-time intelligence. Allied ABMs must be ready to intercept any North Korean missiles that survive the attack.

That’s a sketch of the first 10 minutes. Over the next month subsequent strikes would occur, to make certain North Korea’s long-range missiles, chemical munitions, nuclear weapons stockpiles, missile manufacturing capabilities and nuclear weapons manufacturing capabilities are eliminated.

The U.S. and it allies must protect Seoul. North Korean artillery can bombard the northern reaches of South Korea’s capital. Military analysts debate the severity of the threat posed to Seoul by North Korean artillery deployed along the Demilitarized Zone. Some call it overrated. Perhaps, but best to suppress and destroy the artillery. North Korea’s tube and rocket artillery systems—even the ones in caves and bunkers—are vulnerable to weapons like the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb.

2,000 in two minutes sounds like a vision of hell to me.

At RealClearDefense Crispin Rovere articulates the case for immediate war against North Korea. His Consequence 1 of Option 2 (war) is about what I’d expect from the U. S. going to war against North Korea:

North Korea is hit by a massive cyber-attack that disables communications, shuts down the power grid, and cripples command and control chains. Minutes later the sky lights up with massive ordinance as MOABs detonate over North Korean nuclear facilities and launch platforms. Thousands of North Korean artillery pieces are similarly struck, along with all palatial compounds. By the time the attack is generally known in Pyongyang, North Korea’s forces have already been seriously degraded. Eventually, low-level commanders acting under their own initiative commence an un-coordinated retaliatory action primarily targeted at Seoul. The subsequent artillery barrage kills some 30,000 people before the guns are found and destroyed. After these initial setbacks, North Korea is given some time to re-group as the American air campaign focuses obsessively on suspected nuclear sites. 36 hours later North Korea retaliates with a massive ballistic missile bombardment of Japan, killing thousands. Meanwhile, North Korean submarines attack American surface ships, somewhat complicating carrier-based sorties over the peninsula. Using hitherto undetected tunnels, thousands of North Korean troops appear south of the DMZ. They are pushed back with heavy losses on both sides, as huge numbers of marines arrive in preparation for an invasion of the North.

I’d add an EMP attack to the cyber-attack and wouldn’t limit myself to the targets he lists but that sounds like the way it would unfold to me. His emphasis is on downside risk but he concludes with an analysis of upside gain:

This analysis has rightly focused on the negative consequences of each decision; however, it is necessary to also assess potential benefits. With Option One there are none. But war would: prove that nuclear weapons do not confer unfettered license to threaten world peace, unify an artificially divided people, and extinguish a regime that is an affront to the human race. Moreover, depending on how it progressed, the war could bolster America’s long-term position in Asia by proving America’s ability to sustain high-intensity operations in the Western Pacific and giving China pause.

I wouldn’t start a war with North Korea at this point. However, I would take actions that the North Koreans would very likely respond to by starting a war with us. There are only bad and worse options in this situation.

If you hadn’t guessed it from his forename, Mr. Rovere is an Aussie. I didn’t think he argued his position as an American would.

Here’s the conclusion of Patricia Sullivan’s RealClearDefense article on whether it’s ever a good idea to arm violent nonstate actors:

My own research suggests that the arms and ammunition supplied to a combatant in wartime can perpetuate a state of insecurity in the region long after the war has officially ended. A recent study concludes that security force assistance can achieve some limited goals, but only if states make aid conditional and intrusively monitor recipients. The reality is the conditions under which the U.S. trains, equips and advises armed opposition groups are seldom conducive to either.

Arming violent nonstate actors is bad policy, illegal, and immoral. The question of whether we should do it practically answers itself. No. It’s a cowardly alternative to taking the political heat for letting bad things happen through U. S. inaction.

Bad things will happen. If you wish to heal the world, do it as a private citizen.

Jeffrey Snider comments on last week’s Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report:

It is for once a payroll report more like the actual economy. It may be improving after having spent several years slowing, but it does so at so far an incredibly lethargic pace. Thus, the overall economy is left off worse for having undergone the slowdown in the first place, as the cost in time only increases while stuck in this condition.

What I mean is the incredible lack of momentum and acceleration. Even where and when negative pressures abate, that is the only positive force seemingly at work – the lack of further decline, or in the case of labor slowing. It is an odd state unlike anything else, where the only two conditions are either negative or not negative. The idea of actual growth is foreign. To my mind that is the essence of what would be a depression, but most people are conditioned to believe that word applies only to something like 1929.

Whatever the technical or colloquial term, the substance of it clearly remains to be repeated back and forth, slowing and not slowing. Growth and expansion are at 4.4% unemployment still absent.

It’s too bad that politics is focused on personal and political gain while policy takes a back seat. Otherwise we might actually have some policies that comport with the circumstances as they are.

Do you remember that presidential election commission organized by President Trump and its request to the states for voter registration information? So far 14 states have refused, as catalogued in this piece at NPR, California among them. The response from California Secretary of State Alex Padilla to the request by the commission is here. It reads in part:

The President’s commission has requested the personal data and the voting history of every American voter–including Californians. As Secretary of State, it is my duty to ensure the integrity of our elections and to protect the voting rights and privacy of our state’s voters. I will not provide sensitive voter information to a commission that has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally. California’s participation would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud made by the President, the Vice President, and Mr. Kobach. The President’s Commission is a waste of taxpayer money and a distraction from the real threats to the integrity of our elections today: aging voting systems and documented Russian interference in our elections

Voter registrations are public records. Under the California Public Records Act, modeled after the federal Freedom of Information Act, he is required to provide that information—it does not fit under the exemptions listed in the act. The state routinely provides that information to political parties, candidates, polling organizations, and others. There is no presidential commission exception to the law.

Fortunately for the secretary of state, CPRA presently carries no penalties. Fortuitously, a bill, supported by the state’s major media outlets, is making its way through the California legislature that would impose penalties for non-compliance. The penalty is nominal but it’s something.

Most if not all states have similar public records acts. California and the other states that have refused to supply the voter registrations should comply. That is what it means to have a rule of law. Civil servants have no right of civil disobedience. Such a thing would be tyranny. They do have the right to resign rather than obey laws they believe to be wrong.

In his Wall Street Journal review of Steven Weitzman’s book, “The Origin of the Jews”, Benjamin Balint writes:

The first to gauge the formative moment of this people’s story, Mr. Weitzman says, were 20th-century archaeologists who claimed that around 1200 B.C. the Israelites emerged from the earlier Canaanite culture. The archaeologists variously proposed that the Israelites were invaders from Egypt who seized Canaan in an act of conquest; migrants from Mesopotamia who infiltrated the land peacefully; or Canaanite peasants who revolted against their exploiters and gave birth to a new set of rituals and principles. The pioneering biblical archaeologist W.F. Albright (1891-1971) found evidence of an abrupt leap: “The Canaanites, with their orgiastic nature-worship . . . were replaced by Israel, with its nomadic simplicity and purity of life, its lofty monotheism and its severe code of ethics.”

Still other scholars locate the Jews’ founding moment in the encounter with the ancient Greeks. Drawing on Shaye Cohen’s study “The Beginnings of Jewishness” (1999), Mr. Weitzman takes up the theory that Judaism (itself a Greek coinage of the second century B.C.) was catalyzed by the Judeans’ cross-fertilization with Hellenistic culture. Before Alexander the Great’s conquest, Judean identity was a matter of ethnicity, determined by birth. Afterward, emulating the ways in which Greeks thought of their “Greekness,” it became a community of belief. Paraphrasing Mr. Cohen, Mr. Weitzman writes that “the Judeans realized under the influence of the Greeks that identity was not fixed by birth, that one could make oneself into a Jew through conversion.”

In his book “The Hebrew Bible: a Socio-Literary Introduction”, Norman Gottswald provides another explanation: Judaism arose as a religious, political, and social movement among Canaanites in the last millennium before the common era.

The subject has been a matter of intense investigation for many years, made more pressing by the founding of the state of Israel. When I was a kid there was a best-selling book “The Bible As History” by Werner Keller and Mr. Keller was a guest in our home at the time. It made for a fascinating dinner table discussion. More recently there have been genetic studies to determine the relationship between modern Jews and the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible. They’ve gone pretty much as you might have expected. Yes, today’s Jews have Middle Eastern ancestry. What we have learned pretty convincingly if not conclusively is that the Maronites of Lebanon are likely the descendants of the Phoenicians.

Today’s award for humor goes to the editors of the Wall Street Journal. From their editorial on the challenges that remain after the retaking of Mosul:

A politically stable and independent Iraq, by contrast, would improve the chances of stabilizing Syria after ISIS is swept from Raqqa.

A flying unicorn would be nice, too. They are such kidders.