Archive for WTF?

Say, do you think Kim Jong Un might just be a complete doofus who happens to have nuclear weapons?

March 1, 2013 AP Watch, Kim Jong Un, WTF? 7 comments

SO THE FIRST WELL-KNOWN AMERICAN to meet with Kim Jong Un is not an AP interviewer, a tribute-bearing Bill Richardson, a ransom-bearing Jimmy Carter, or first choice Michael Jordan.  It is this man:

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Strain, if you must, to make this into some sort of soft power diplomatic coup; it really looks like a tragic sequel to “Being There.” The very weirdness of it all is evident in some priceless exchanges from yesterday’s State Department daily press briefing.

Delectably, the AP’s part-time Pyongyang correspondent and photographer were scooped by Vice Media, led by Shane Smith, a man who is to journalism what The Dude is to alternative dispute resolution.  Nate Thayer tells the story here.  At least Smith, unlike the AP, does not ask us to take his brand of journalism seriously. What makes all of this even harder to explain is that Smith’s ventures into North Korea and North Korean logging camps in Siberia have portrayed North Korea as bizarre, controlling, brutish, and ridiculous.  Smith, in other words, scooped the AP without (so far) having pulled any punches or sacrificed his objectivity. That’s why I’m willing to see the product Vice produces before I’m as critical as others have been, although I applaud another unlikely source, Gawker, for putting this circus into its rightful context.

You can’t help pity the AP which, for all its literary and literal prostrations – for all its willingness to make jarring ethical compromises to gain the regime’s favor – was frustrated in its priapistic lust for an interview with His Porcine Majesty.  It looks like we’ll all have to wait a little longer to learn whether it’s briefs or boxers.  Meanwhile, Jean Lee, the AP’s Korea Bureau Chief, must quote pesky upstart Vice to even report what Kim said to Rodman, and was otherwise relegated to tweeting pictures of sandwiches.  No word yet on that AP expose on the starvation and cannibalism said to be ongoing a few miles to the south of Pyongyang.  Maybe Vice will beat them to that, too.

I’ve been pondering why the North Koreans would snub such willing instruments as Jean Lee and Bill Richardson, people who could actually deliver things a wily regime could use to advance its coldly calculated interests.  Instead, it left them all at the altar for a man who does, admittedly, look rather fetching in a wedding dress.  The resulting publicity mostly portrays Kim Jong Un as a bizarre, detached hedonist in a kingdom of helots, a gluttonous man-child who is blithely apathetic about statecraft or the welfare of his pitiful subjects.  Out west, where I’m from, our fathers teach us to take better care of our tools than this.

After consulting William of Occam, I offer this novel hypothesis: Could it be that Kim Jong Un is just an impulsive imbecile who happens to be the nominal leader of a state with nuclear weapons? Nothing we know about his academic history or his policy record contradicts my hypothesis.

Update: What. The. Fuck. (Hat tip).

Birth control, Pyongyang Style: Lady-Mullets!

February 26, 2013 Humor/Satire, WTF? No comments

Sure, you say, a list of 18 state-approved hairstyles certainly seems generous and libertine, but on closer examination, it’s actually more like 18 pictures of three hairstyles — three hideous, man-shriveling hairstyles — one of which (6, 10) is a mullet, and the rest of which appear to have been inspired by the 80s metal band Queensrÿche.

According to late-breaking news from New York, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has demanded an inquiry, but China has blocked it. And at the risk of offering cultural sensitivity training to KNCA, do you suppose they could have picked a number without all the unflattering connotations that “18″ has for women in the Korean culture?

Afterthought:  The Daily Mail is only marginally more credible than KNCA, so I wouldn’t take this as authoritative evidence that North Korea allows only 18 female hairstyles, but more reputable sources hold that North Korea has paid undue attention to the the hairstyles of its subjects.  There is also this:

Sometimes, a missile is just a missile

February 6, 2013 Anju Links, Anti-Americanism, Propaganda, WMD, WTF? 2 comments

Every time North Korea tests a rocket, Hans Blix sheds a little tear and Ban Ki Moon’s fluffy white tail stops wagging, because North Korean rocket tests violate three U.N. Security Council Resolutions — 1695 (which bans “all activities related to its ballistic missile programme”), UNSCR 1718 (ditto, and requires N. Korea to “re-establish its pre-existing commitments to a moratorium on missile launching”), and 1874 (which bans “any launch using ballistic missile technology”).  North Korea’s official response is that it is launching peaceful satellites, not testing ICBMs.  You may be wondering if anyone on the Outer Earth is still fool enough to believe this.

There’s little reason to doubt North Korea’s claim that it simply wants to put a satellite into space.  [John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus]

Maybe John Feffer just needs more reason, so he can reason his way to what’s obvious to the rest of us.

North Korea exhibited the fuselage of what is presumed to be the long-range rocket it launched in December, and explicitly called it a ballistic missile, despite its claims to the outside world that the Unha-3 was part of its peaceful space development program, a report said Monday.

The report by Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun quoted North Korean sources as saying that the fuselage was displayed under the name “Hwasong-13″ among the exhibitions of the country’s missile lineup in an exhibition hall in Pyongyang. The Hwasong line also includes shorter-range scud missiles, which the country has produced since the 1980′s.  [Yonhap]

Well, you say, if they’re missiles, then they must be for strictly defensive deterrence.  No need to infer any malicious intent here, right?  So we now have this, via North Korea’s quasi-official Uriminzokkiri:

Uriminzokkiri roughly translates to “among our race only” and is aimed at South Korean norksimps. It is reportedly run from China, a country that selectively decides what speech should be permitted based on the state’s value judgments about its content.  Or so you may have heard.  (Hat tip)

If your memory is long enough, may recall that other norksimps in South Korea, the Korean Teachers’ Union, produced an equally sickening video for schoolchildren before the 2005 APEC Forum in Busan, featuring replays of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, set to “What a Wonderful World.”  A theme seems to be emerging.

I’m sure that all across the more progressive quarters of this world, there are fevered minds with room enough for the conflicting lunacies that the Jews and neocons pulled off 9/11, and also that on 9/11, nineteen great martyrs fulfilled a divine mandate of vengeance against toddlers, flight attendants, and office workers.  Similarly, there’s clearly some market in some quarters of Korea for fantasies of North Korea’s peaceful satellites destroying American cities.  I hope that market is a whole lot smaller than it was a decade ago.

If nothing else, it’s a useful reminder that the North Koreans aren’t just fucking around.  We already know what they’re capable of, morally speaking.  Faster, please.

So … does this mean KCNA believes in unicorns?

November 30, 2012 AP Watch, Unintended Humor, WTF? 2 comments

America’s finest news source, The Onion, is presented as parody but can be mistaken for reality.  North Korea’s finest news source, KCNA, is presented as reality but can be mistaken for parody.  But if you compare the best work of each news source, KCNA is clearly funnier:

Pyongyang, November 29 (KCNA) — Archaeologists of the History Institute of the DPRK Academy of Social Sciences have recently reconfirmed a lair of the unicorn rode by King Tongmyong, founder of the Koguryo Kingdom (B.C. 277-A.D. 668).

The lair is located 200 meters from the Yongmyong Temple in Moran Hill in Pyongyang City. A rectangular rock carved with words “Unicorn Lair” stands in front of the lair. The carved words are believed to date back to the period of Koryo Kingdom (918-1392).

Jo Hui Sung, director of the Institute, told KCNA:

“Korea’s history books deal with the unicorn, considered to be ridden by King Tongmyong, and its lair.

The Sogyong (Pyongyang) chapter of the old book ‘Koryo History’ (geographical book), said: Ulmil Pavilion is on the top of Mt. Kumsu, with Yongmyong Temple, one of Pyongyang’s eight scenic spots, beneath it. The temple served as a relief palace for King Tongmyong, in which there is the lair of his unicorn.

The old book ‘Sinjungdonggukyojisungnam’ (Revised Handbook of Korean Geography) complied in the 16th century wrote that there is a lair west of Pubyok Pavilion in Mt. Kumsu.

The discovery of the unicorn lair, associated with legend about King Tongmyong, proves that Pyongyang was a capital city of Ancient Korea as well as Koguryo Kingdom.”  [KCNA, Nov. 29, 2012]

Unlike the Editor of The Peoples’ Daily, I’ve paused to ask myself, “Can they really be serious?”   A S.T.A.L.I.N. search of KCNA’s archives reveals previous references to unicorns, but in those cases, KCNA characterized them as “mythical,” and this report does use the word “legend.”  Perhaps North Korea is throwing a lifeline to its embarrassed Chinese sponsors by planting this cunning and cryptic parody in the U.S. press, although if there’s any place you’d expect to see parody in North Korea, this isn’t it.  (The North Koreans are deadly serious about establishing Pyongyang as the historical capital of a unified Korea.)  Or perhaps KCNA is offering us scientific evidence that King Tongmyong deceived his people with myths and legends about himself … to bolster the credibility of its own historical claims.  Or perhaps they’re telling people to believe in freaking unicorns!

I know I’ve been a little hard on KCNA for its faked photographs, its calls to slit the throat of the President of South Korea, and its attribution of supernatural powers to Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un, but not even I can deny that KCNA reports like this one provide us unique and exclusive access to a world no one else is showing us.  As Jean H. Lee recently put it:

Even though the images and words that the AP produces from Pyongyang are clearly shaped and influenced by the regime, Lee defended her bureau’s presence against accusations from media critics that it is serving the interests of a brutal regime rather than investigating the truth about starvation and a vast gulag system. “Some critics don’t want us there,” she said. “But isn’t it better that we are there? We try to get on the ground to see what’s happening. We have to flesh out the narrative.”

Who, me? I want the crack AP-KCNA Truth Squad right where it can tell us what a keun of unicorn flesh sells for in Chongjin today! Far better that we know just the officially-shaped part of the story of North Korea’s unique biodiversity than none at all! Surely there’s a fragile ecosystem here that requires protection through a generous U.N. grant.  So far, however, the AP hasn’t put this exclusive KCNA report on the wires.  I hope they dare to believe in their sweet dreams, because nothing cloaks a news agency in an air of global respectability like shouting “Look! Unicorn!” to the whole world. 

Speaking of which, who else has noticed how quiet the AP’s Pyongyang Journal has been recently?  The last report hosted there is this (seriously, no-kidding) excellent October 7th report from Tim Sullivan.  Sullivan has published at least one other report since then, about the supposed popularity of “Gone With The Wind” in Pyongyang.

Hat tip to (no, not The Onion) Chico Harlan’s Twitter feed.

ChiComs Behaving Stoopidly: Peoples’ Daily Falls for The Onion’s Award to Kim Jong Un of “Sexiest Man Alive”

November 27, 2012 China, Unintended Humor, WTF? No comments

As funny as I thought the original parody was at the time, it’s infinitely funnier when humorless authoritarian propagandists don’t realize it’s a parody and put it on Page One.  And while the Onion guys aren’t exactly ruthless in the we-send-children-to-the-gulags-on-Mondays-and-Thursdays sense, they didn’t show the Peoples’ Daily much mercy with this hat tip:

UPDATE: For more coverage on The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive 2012, Kim Jong-Un, please visit our friends at the People’s Daily in China, a proud Communist subsidiary of The Onion, Inc. Exemplary reportage, comrades.

For demonstrative reference, here’s the Sexy Man himself hitting the gym with a cancer stick clutched in one claw and the pitiful Ri Sol Ju in the other, looking like the victim of the tentacle monster in that Japanese anime flick you won’t admit watching:

I’d sell my body behind a bus station for video of that self-criticism session.  See also Isaac Stone Fish in Foreign Policy and our good friends at the Associated Press.

And in other news that no doubt has the Fifty Cent Party working overtime, a sex tape of a Chinese official bedding an 18 year-old woman has gone viral.  The tape was made five years ago, most likely by the would-be government contractors who hired the woman to “entertain” the official, to ensure that once bought, he’d stay bought.  It’s telling that such precautions are necessary.  Really, if you can’t trust a corrupt, adulterous pervert overlord of an unaccountable oligarchy, who can you trust?

Frankly, I’m beginning to question all that Thomas Friedman-style “realist” masochism about the superiority of Chinese statecraft, its harmonious public order, and its sophisticated use of non-interventionist Soft Power.  Could it be that they’re really just a bunch of bumbling, mirthless goons with nuclear weapons?

Most Unfortunate North Korean Photo Op Ever: The Kim Jong Un Workout Video!

September 28, 2012 Kim Jong Un, Unintended Humor, WTF? 7 comments

Holy mother of Zeus. No matter how many times I watch this, I can’t believe they actually filmed it. On purpose.

It’s wrong to laugh, but sometimes I can’t help myself.

Hat tip: Chico Harlan.

From the Gallery of Unfortunate North Korean Photo Ops: Jabba at the Gym

September 14, 2012 Famine & Food Aid, Kim Jong Un, Propaganda, Unintended Humor, WTF? One comment

Good news: Margaret Chan may have missed the evidence, but at least one North Korean has an obesity problem. Bad news: He just appointed himself National Personal Trainer.

That may be the worst photo op since this one. Or this one.

North Korea’s KCNA state media said Kim was accompanied by his new wife, Ri Sol-ju, and that the exercise centre had been “built according to the direct initiative and plan” of the Young General, as he is known. It added that Kim is “always deeply concerned for the promotion of people’s health and living standards.”

So concerned that he blew enough rice money to feed a small town for a year on a new gym that no one in North Korea but him needs, in the middle of its 18th annual food crisis since his grandpa became North Korea’s largest stockpile of preserved meat.

Kim told the staff that if office workers who work indoors all day, “take exercise and receive medical treatment at the centre, they can devote themselves to revolutionary work in good health.” - The Telegraph, Julian Riall

Can you imagine what it must have been like to be one of the gym staff members, being lectured on fitness and exercise by a morbidly obese man … who showed up in a Mao suit? Suppress your amusement, comrade. Think of your children.

And of course you’re right. This really isn’t funny at all.

Forgive me. If I didn’t laugh, I’d be too depressed to write this and you’d be too depressed to read it. I wonder how many people living outside Pyongyang will ever see that picture.

Really? DJ Horked the Whole Sunshine Thing from the Moonies?

September 7, 2012 Sunshine, WTF? 3 comments

Depending on your perspective, this revelation may soften your image of Reverend Moon, or you might be saying to yourself, “yeah, that figures.” Having lived in South Korea during the height of the Sunshine craze and observed it with more pity than anger ever since, the whole thing certainly looked like a cult to me.

Moon was an early practitioner of the kind of conciliatory politics that the South Korean government would eventually embrace in its now-abandoned “Sunshine Policy,” which it introduced in the late ’90s in an effort to build friendlier ties with the North. In 1991, the self-made mogul visited North Korea’s founding leader, Kim Il Sung, in Pyongyang, nine years before South Korean president Kim dea-Jung’s groundbreaking visit to the North Korean capital. “Moon began his efforts to engage with the North Koreans at a time when the South Korean government still formally opposed that kind of interaction,” says Scott Snyder, a Korea expert with the Council on Foreign Relations.

But Moon had hardly been coopted by his hosts. The Washington Times published a conspicuously defiant opening paragraph about the meeting: “President Kim Il-sung of North Korea, one of the last of the Stalinist states, yesterday discussed reconciliation of the two Koreas with a man he once imprisoned, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the fiercely anticommunist Unification Church.” Moon’s flagship American media property published original reporting about the “horror” of the country’s “communist gulag,” even at a time when the Unification Church was engaged in precedent-setting investment in that same country. This approach was not without its drawbacks for Moon and his business empire. [Armin Rosen, The Atlantic]

In related news, Moon’s funeral is widely expected to be “all weird.”

Sticks and Stones

May 12, 2012 Propaganda, Terrorism (NK), WTF? No comments

Sure, it’s creepy when North Korea teaches children to torment effigies of your president, but that’s the kind of insult a mature society learns to ignore.  The next time the North erupts in contrived outrage about some perceived slight to its leaders, just put that into perspective.  Words are just words, unless they’re threats. When North Korea communicates threats, we need to treat those like acts of terrorism and sanction them accordingly.

North Korea’s jamming of GPS used by airliners, of course, is more than just words — it has caused “four close calls where passenger jets approaching Incheon and Gimpo airports abruptly shifted course when their GPS malfunctioned and landed only after circling the airports.” I can see why South Koreans would call that terrorism, too.

North Korea was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008.

North Korea Imitates South Park

May 10, 2012 Kim Jong Un, WTF? 5 comments

Yonhap reports:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un lashed out at officials of an amusement park for neglecting to take proper care of the facility’s grounds and rides, the North’s state media said Wednesday in an apparent move to highlight the leader’s concern for his people.

North Korean media, including the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), said Kim inspected the Mangyongdae Funfair in Pyongyang and scolded officials there after discovering flaws throughout the park.  [....]

According to the news reports, Kim Jong-un noticed a damaged path in front of a Viking ride and called it “pathetic,” while also pointing out flaws in the park’s gardens and a roller coaster, the condition of paint on rides and the safety of a water park.

The Associated Press has exclusive video.

From the episode summary for “Cartmanland,” season 5, episode 6:

Cartman’s grandmother dies (which Cartman treats as nothing more than an inconvenience to his weekend plans) and he inherits her life savings of one million dollars because the rest of the family would likely have spent the money on crack. Cartman decides to buy an amusement park, fulfilling his dreams not only of having a park all to himself without having to wait in lines, but also for the pleasure of telling other people that they can’t come to it, presenting it as a reference to How the Grinch Stole Christmas! [....]

Cartman decides to hire a security guard to keep trespassers out, especially Stan and Kyle. Cartman believes the guard will accept a few free rides a day as payment, but the guard insists on a cash salary. Cartman is unable to pay after spending all his inheritance to buy the park, so the guard advises him to let a couple of people in a day, for a fee, which should pay for the salary. Cartman also believes from the guard’s advice that he should not be inconvenienced by a few customers in the large park, so he sets off the rest of the day to enjoy the rides. Much to his dismay, the customers form a line to one of the rides that he wants to ride. More expenses begin to pile up for maintenance, refreshments, utilities and such to keep the park intact.

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