The L.A. Times is giving reports of Kim Jong Il’s demise the Big Sneer:

But the speculation may have less to do with political forces inside North Korea than outside. In particular, President Bush’s reelection has emboldened critics of the North Korean regime in the United States and in Asia who want Kim ousted. The North Korean Human Rights Act, passed in October, allocates up to $24 million to promote better conditions for North Koreans, and has revitalized an activist movement made up largely of Christian missionaries.

I almost thought that the L.A. Times was getting its news from me (damn you, link me!) until I read about . . . Christian missionaries? Oy vey! What would my mother think? Or his? Or his? Well, maybe, if “largely” means “between one and twenty percent,” or if by “missionaries,” the writer means any Christian who attends a church at least one a month. Hey, they’re all missionaries in a way, aren’t they? Anyway, nice to know that the media blackout on the NKHRA can safely end, now that a decent interval has passed since John Kerry called for bilateral talks with the nice man who runs the gas chambers. The news blackout on said gas chambers continues, alas. Thus, unbiased reporting quashes the necon cabal’s rumor campaign to make North Korea safe for Baptist missionaries . . . right? Well, not quite right:

There are certainly signs that something is amiss in the secretive regime. Kim purged his powerful brother-in-law from the ruling Workers’ Party this year in what was believed to be a struggle over succession. And a decision in the summer to place new restrictions on foreign aid agencies and crack down on the use of cellphones also might indicate a feeling of insecurity on the part of the government.

All of which means the following: something may be happening, and then again, maybe nothing’s happening. It depends on who you quote. This reporter doesn’t know anything more about what’s happening in North Korea than the rest of us, but we certainly learned plenty about her opinions from reading that piece. At least we bloggers are willing to admit we’re speculating–and that we’re opinionated–instead of hiding behind quotations and doing it vicariously.

I may be several months behind on this, but these before and after photographs have astonishing resolution. Scroll down to the bottom right-hand corners and click the “expand” icons. Is it me, or did the pictures we saw last spring have anything approaching this magnification? I’d also like to see a picture of what it looks like today.

This boneyard pic is pretty cool, too. Much, much more here.

Who are the real reformers in North Korea? Forget Kaesong. It might just be these people.

From the Chosun:

North Korea is one of the world’s foremost providers of missile technology, but experts say there is still no evidence that Pyongyang has shared its suspected stocks of nuclear materials or chemical and biological weapons.

“You’d have to export a lot of these things to make a significant difference, that’s something that would be highly observable, and again, something that countries themselves might be able to accomplish without having to rely on North Korea,” [the expert] noted.

So relax. We have no absolute proof beyond a reasonable doubt that they’ve sold any plutonium to terrorists or their sponsors. Yet. Then, a few paragraphs later, we get this:

But some experts think the initiative has problems. They say the chief flaw is that it may not detect small weapons shipments, such as the eight kilograms of fissile material needed to make a crude nuclear weapon, or the workings of a missile guidance system.

That is why the current six-nation talks are seen as the best hope to get North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program and end any proliferation threat.

Emphasis all mine, and what a roller coaster that was! But it seems that whether North Korea “is seen” as a danger or not, more talks “are seen” as the best way to get North Korea’s hope-to-die promise not to sell slimy stuff to slimy people.

You know who your friends are by how comfortably they allocate risks to you.

The Christian Science Monitor has a fairly detailed and balanced report on South Korea’s Fugitive Slave Act Anti-Human Smuggling Initiative.

South Korea, North Korea, and China–one big, happy co-prosperity sphere.

A Kazakh news site says that Japan says it is planning to impose a “tough step” against North Korea. So does the Korea Herald. Hmmm.

Funny, none of the Japanese papers I’ve read are reporting this.

Amazon has this link to the American Red Cross. The first day, it seemed a disaster of horrifically ordinary scale. The next day, I saw a picture of a father grieving over the body of his baby son. His son looked like my son, and I haven’t been quite myself since. That day, I left work early to spend a completely computer-free evening with my own (we learned that rolled-up socks make superb father-son projectiles; I learned that such opportunities can never be regained when you learn, too late, that you missed the last one). This is all I can manage to write. What can you say about something so completely random, natural, and hideous, other than admitting to your anguished gratitude that it wasn’t your family?

Money can’t bring the dead back to life, but it can save live people who might well die of cholera within the next few days. At times like these, the words “international community” briefly mean something . . . to most of us.

If you don’t recognize the name of New York’s most overrated intellectual, consider yourself fortunate, move on, and go wrestle with your kids or something you’ll be glad you did when you die.

If you’re still reading, it may be because you were confused by fawning tributes like these, inspired partly out of doctrinally mandated reverence and partly out of another kind polite societies (in contrast to this site today) offer cheaply to the deceased. Speaking of which, here’s Susan Sontag’s 9-12 take on 9-11:

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others.

Later on, in the same essay, she compared Congress’s reaction to that of a Soviet Party Congress, which is perplexing, given that Susan Sontag hoped in 1968 that a new “revolution” in America would make us more like North Vietnam, which, incidentally, “genuinely care[d] about the welfare of hundreds of captured American pilots and [gave] them bigger rations than the Vietnamese population gets.” Who knew? Not these guys, anyway.

One of the many blasphemous ideas with which I’ve toyed is that hell is living in the prison of your own self-loathing, self-absorbtion, contempt for others, and irreconcilable contradictions, only to have your soul summarily extinguished between the Almighty’s calloused thumb and forefinger without leaving a lasting mark on either. If there is any merit to that idea, Susan Sontag’s afterlife would be superfluous.

The L.A. Times is giving reports of Kim Jong Il’s demise the Big Sneer:

But the speculation may have less to do with political forces inside North Korea than outside. In particular, President Bush’s reelection has emboldened critics of the North Korean regime in the United States and in Asia who want Kim ousted. The North Korean Human Rights Act, passed in October, allocates up to $24 million to promote better conditions for North Koreans, and has revitalized an activist movement made up largely of Christian missionaries.

I almost thought that the L.A. Times was getting its news from me (damn you, link me!) until I read about . . . Christian missionaries? Oy vey! What would my mother think? Or his? Or his? Well, maybe, if “largely” means “between one and twenty percent,” or if by “missionaries,” the writer means any Christian who attends a church at least one a month. Hey, they’re all missionaries in a way, aren’t they? Anyway, nice to know that the media blackout on the NKHRA can safely end, now that a decent interval has passed since John Kerry called for bilateral talks with the nice man who runs the gas chambers. The news blackout on said gas chambers continues, alas. Thus, unbiased reporting quashes the necon cabal’s rumor campaign to make North Korea safe for Baptist missionaries . . . right? Well, not quite right:

There are certainly signs that something is amiss in the secretive regime. Kim purged his powerful brother-in-law from the ruling Workers’ Party this year in what was believed to be a struggle over succession. And a decision in the summer to place new restrictions on foreign aid agencies and crack down on the use of cellphones also might indicate a feeling of insecurity on the part of the government.

All of which means the following: something may be happening, and then again, maybe nothing’s happening. It depends on who you quote. This reporter doesn’t know anything more about what’s happening in North Korea than the rest of us, but we certainly learned plenty about her opinions from reading that piece. At least we bloggers are willing to admit we’re speculating–and that we’re opinionated–instead of hiding behind quotations and doing it vicariously.

Who are the real reformers in North Korea? Forget Kaesong. It might just be these people.