Category: Blogs & Blogging

Blog Find: North Korea Leadership Watch

This is one of the best finds I’ve seen in a long time — prolific, funny, and full of information I hadn’t heard anywhere else. That’s all the more impressive given that blogger Michael Madden was ambitious enough to choose subject matter that most would consider droll, stultifying, opaque, and impervious to verifiable empirical analysis. Not just anyone could begin with material like that and come up with posts like, “Habemus Successor? Or Thaek it to the Limit?.”

Sorrow for a friend I’ve never met

It’s been a terrible thing reading Kevin, a/k/a The Big Hominid, describing the terminal cancer of his mom, someone he obviously loves and respects very much. Kevin is a founding father of the Korea blogosphere, one who never really fit into any of the standard categories — who else could manage to bridge the spiritual, philosophical, and scatological the way Kevin does? I’ve never quite managed to meet Kevin, and yet I’m really at a loss to explain just how...

Still Having Trouble Reading this Site With Firefox?

Firefox has been all I ever use since shortly after I got a computer pre-infected with Vista.  Vista causes IE to crash and ate several of my posts.  With Firefox, there are far fewer crashes, but if there is one, I can usually restart and the half-finished post will still be there in WordPress. So with that said, try going to your upper toolbar under Tools/Clear Private Data and then check all of the boxes except “Saved Passwords” and “Offline...

Malaysian Bank Linked to North Korean WMD; Happy 5th to GI Korea (Updated)

GI Korea explains what Philip Goldberg was doing in Malaysia. By the way, let me add my belated good wishes to GI Korea on the fifth anniversary of the founding of his blog.  The fact that it’s one of two with feeds on my sidebar should be some testament to my high regard for the amount and quality of information he posts (NKEconWatch would be the third if its RSS worked there).  It’s one of my daily reads, and the...

Latest “New Ledger” Piece

Although the piece nods toward recent events, such as President Lee’s visit to Washington, its central theme is really the inescapable relevance of human rights and North Korea’s disinterest in the kind of coexistence that too many diplomats, academics, and grad students long for in much the same way that Borat longed for Pamela Anderson.  Also, I am not responsible for selecting the photo of that priceless pose by Mrs. Clinton, or for her choice of a pantsuit color.

OFK’s 15 Minutes: We’re in the Wall Street Journal Today

This blog is mentioned in a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal about Google Earth and North Korea. Curtis Melvin, who has done vastly more study of North Korea on Google Earth, deservedly gets the most ink, but it’s nice to see this humble blog get mentioned: Joshua Stanton, an attorney in Washington who once served in the U.S. military in South Korea, used Google Earth to look for one of the country’s notorious prisons. In early 2007, he...

Kos Diarist Calls for Prayers for Michelle Malkin’s Death

Thanks to everyone of every point of view who linked to this post.  Of course, any high traffic post is a mixed blessing.  You get good links and comments and widen the circulation of your ideas, and you also dredge the swamp.   I’d have to say that the  call by  Kos diarist “Gramarye”  for prayers for Michelle Malkin’s death (and after her blog linked this one) sets a new low.  Seriously: According to her blog, “Take me now, Lord. My...

“China Hand” Owes Me a Retraction

[Update, 31 May 08: China Hand publishes a retraction: In a comment on Arms Control Wonk in 2007, I made the statement that the website Onefreekorea had apparently received an advance copy of a government ruling concerning Banco Delta Asia. I inferred this from my reading of the timestamp on the OFK post, which I believed indicated that the post had been put up the day before the ruling was officially announced and publicly available. OFK’s proprietor has advised me...

I Hate Vista

If you’re about to buy a new computer pre-installed with that virus called Vista, here’s some friendly advice: don’t. XP users have heard too many chilling stories from relatives and friends about Vista upgrades that have gone badly. The graphics chip that couldn’t handle Vista’s whizzy special effects. The long delays as it loaded. The applications that ran at slower speeds. The printers, scanners and other hardware peripherals, which work dandily with XP, that lacked the necessary software, the drivers,...