Video

The Velvet Underground & Nico: I’ll Be Your Mirror (1967)

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The Eyes, I’m Rowed Out (1965)

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When I was young and skinny I ardently wished I had been born about 1947 in England and that I got to see the Who and the Stones at little clubs in London before they were big and rode a Vespa scooter and went to groovy parties with cool people unlike (most of) my high school classmates and the world was wall to wall with cute girls who had exquisite taste in music (they liked the same stuff I liked!), who went shopping for groovy mod clothes, at places like the one in this video … .
 


 
(My adolescent mod dream utopia was set in 1965-66, and this video looks more “Swinging London” 1967-68, but still, close enough).

(Dig the boots on the guy at :33. Nice.)

(The Eyes totally rocked. I previously posted their brooding proto-psychedelic gem When the Night Falls.)

No Nukes or New Nukes?

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This presentation by the Center for Security Policy is worth watching. The points that most impressed me were made by the former head of the Defense Nuclear Agency, the bureaucracy that manages our nuclear-bomb inventory. He pointed out that the inventory is old and that weapons need to be tested from time to time to insure their reliability, and that any test ban would therefore be incompatible with our maintenance of a reliable arsenal.

Furthermore, our nuclear weapons were designed to destroy cities and large, hardened missile installations and airfields and the like, and are much too powerful to be useful in today’s world. For example, we can’t plausibly threaten to blow up Tehran to discourage the mullahs from building nukes. Everyone knows we wouldn’t follow through. But if we had very-low-yield nukes built into penetrating warheads we could actually use them, and it would become possible for us to change the Iranians’ behavior without attacking (or by attacking conventionally and then threatening to use nuclear penetrators on Iranian R&D and production facilities if the Iranians didn’t scuttle their nuke program). But we aren’t building these small nukes, because Obama doesn’t want to, and even if he wanted to it’s difficult to produce a new generation of reliable nuclear weapons if we forbid ourselves the ability to test them.

(After the CSP video, C-SPAN showed video from a Global Zero PR event, perhaps for comic relief. Global Zero wants to apply the logic of domestic gun prohibition to global nuclear armaments. I am sure this concept will work as well with the Iranian mullahs as it does with common criminals.)