The admiral in charge of Pacific Command calls on North Korea not to test another nuke. Personally, I hope the North Koreans test one. It’s one less they can use in an actual weapon, and it’s great for my traffic. Bonus points if the test a uranium bomb, since that will make plenty of the right people look really stupid.
Selig Harrison call your office: Reuters has published a devastating chronology of all of the retrograde, statist, anti-reform confiscations and despotisms that coincided with the rise of “reformer” Jang Song-Taek’s rise to Vice-Chairman of the National Defense Commission. The source is the Peterson Institute, the home of Marcus Noland.
“North Korea’s autumn harvest officially began on September 20th. As a result, North Korean cooperative farms are in the midst of the annual war with food thieves. Among the rice paddies and farms owned by the North Korean state and private civilian farmers, one can see not only workers busily gathering the crops manually in the absence of agricultural machinery, but also guards charged with protecting the harvest from thieves.” [Daily NK]
Ban Ki Moon says that North Korea is — amazingly — headed for yet another food crisis and decries cuts in international aid, but again fails to call on Kim Jong Il to kick in anything from the funds he has allocated for parades and shiny new missiles.
“But if I’m simply applying the weirdness filter, then nothing I’ve seen anywhere I’ve ever been – I mean nothing – compares to what I saw in and around Kim Il Sung square last week.” [Jim Axelrod, CBS News; hat tip to Theresa D]
Mere days after the Reaper beat them to it, a third North Korean agent has been arrested for trying to assassinate Hwang Jang Yop.
The man accused of seeking to kill Mr Hwang, Ri Dong-sam, was described as an agent with North Korea’s premier intelligence organisation, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, who had begun five years of espionage training in 1998. [The Age]
President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, to reward it for its complete, verifiable, irreversible nuclear disarmament, and President Obama has seen absolutely no reason whatsoever to revisit that decision.
Congratulations to Barbara Demick, whose wonderful book “Nothing to Envy” is a finalist for a national book award.
Nothing to Envy? Kids from North Korea’s ruling class are so desirous of the lifestyle they see in South Korean soap operas that they’ve been imitating South Korean accents.
The Kim Jong Eun deification campaign has not yet succeeded in rural North Korea, according to a source in North Hamgeyong Province:
“Farmers who read the material laughed at it, saying if it was true Kim Jong-un could solve the North’s food shortage simply by stepping on all the farms in the country, so all they’d have to worry about is how to dispose of the excess amount of food next year,” the source said.
The good news: A new poll finds that most South Koreans believe that North Korea really did sink the Cheonan. The bad news: the minority that doesn’t may well be comparable to the percentage of Chinese who think Lee Myung Bak did it. What is reported about the methodology and sampling of both polls leaves plenty of room for skepticism, so I’ll withhold judgment on the governability of South Korea for a while longer.
i totally agree with letting NK test another bomb.
it’s the only way that the chicoms learn a lesson.
keep backing KJI and regime and keep getting stabbed in the back.
Admiral Willard doesn’t want North Korean nuclear bomb tests, but if there is another test, we’ll know that China doesn’t really object.
In the CBS link, Jim Axelrod compares the recent spectacle in North Korea to Nazi Germany. Poke around a little on Youtube; you will see for yourself that North Korea is far beyond Nazi Germany’s wildest dreams.
of course the Chinese will do whatever it can to prevent NK from imploding.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-22/north-korea-circumventing-un-sanctions-with-china-s-help-u-s-report-says.html
but i’m sure they’ll have something to say if Japan and Taiwan buys some nukes from the US…..I mean Israel.
Yay I got a hat-tip!
You know you have been taking hip hop dance classes for too long when you see the phrase, “How sick is Kim Jong Il” and think it means, “how cool is he?”
————————————
From the Urban Dictionary:
Sick:
crazy, cool, insane
1)man, that trick was sick yo
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2010/10/26/2010102601065.html
http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2008/200806/news06/19.htm
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-10/26/c_13574898.htm
Great victory over the imperialist invaders? I didn’t know a lameduck, handout dependent, starving, militaristic, misruled, pathetic, backasswards North Korea is considered a “great victory”.
Your Porcine Majesty, I also noted something along the same lines.
Looks like we are still dealing with the fallout of the Bush administration. Had it not been for Bush’s failure to uphold the Carter agreement we would probably not be looking at North Korea’s THIRD nuclear test now. A clear an indictment as any of conservative and Republican foriegn policy of non-engagement.
Aid Request Snags Korea Talks
by Mark McDonald
in the New York Times
“A request by North Korea … for huge shipments of fertilizer and half a million tons of rice has derailed talks about further reunions of Korean families …”
” … a South Korean Red Cross official … told reporters that his group did not have the authority to approve such a large amount of aid.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/world/asia/28korea.html?_r=1&ref=world
And again you reveal your superficial nature.
Obama is not perfect, he could do a lot more to engage with North Korea. But still he is cleaning up a big mess as he pointed out, and in Korea that mess is huge. Had Gore been put in office as he should have after winning in 2000, Obama would probably be mediating negotiations for a further opening up of North Korea with an eye towards unification. Instead he’s cleaning up after eight years of foreign policy which was basically run by petulant little children.
Bruce, it would seem the subtext of Joshua’s sarcasm is that President Obama — a Democrat — is taking a hardline approach to North Korea that one would expect of a Republican.
Had so many Blacks not been wrongly purged of the voter roles in Florida prior to November 2000, we might have ended up with an Al Gore presidency (and I think Bush was remiss in essentially having no policy one way or the other well into the first year of his presidency), but I’m not entirely convinced a Gore administration would have continued to greet Pyongyang with open arms as you think. Case in point, Obama.
There may have ended up being on “Axis of Evil” speech or even a war in Iraq (at least not in 2003), which could have freed up more US resources for an even tougher approach against North Korea, minus an emboldened China trying to flex its muscles in the West Pacific.