Open Sources, December 13, 2013

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LINK HAS RESCUED 204 NORTH KOREANS since 2010. Please support them if you can afford to. If you can’t — or even if you can — please go to this page and vote for LiNK’s “Project for Awesome” page. It helps to keep their fund-raising project where it gets more views.

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SHIN DONG HYOK TELLS DENNIS RODMAN how he can help the North Korean people, in case Rodman actually cares about that. But in a way, Rodman already has, even if unwittingly, by being a perfect imbecile and thereby destroying Kim’s domestic and international credibility, by attracting attention to everything that’s loathesome about Kim Jong Un, and perhaps even hastening Kim’s downfall.

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YOUR STATE DEPARTMENT finally sounds more upset about the misery of the North Korean people than the “tragedy” of one brutal thug shooting another.

“(Under) a relatively new young leader, clearly the North Korean people are facing an incredibly dire economic situation that its own regime has put it under and it’s getting worse,” the State Department’s deputy spokeswoman, Marie Harf, said at a press briefing.

She added the economic situation facing the North’s people is a “direct result of what their government has chosen to spend its money on — unneeded and unnecessary weapons and military systems that they don’t need that would be much better spent on food for their people.”

“So if they want to talk about the deplorable conditions in their country, they need to take a look in the mirror, quite frankly,” Harf added.

South Korea is also telling the North to take responsibility for the welfare of its people.

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A SOUTH KOREAN INTELLIGENCE REPORT leaked to The Joongang Ilbo helps you keep score of who has been purged and who has been promoted, in case you’re one who keeps track of such things.

It said the young leader carried out a generational shift across the board, replacing many older figures with relatively youthful ones, lowering the average age of the inner circle from 76 to 62. “Those senior party secretaries and military officials in their 70s – who exerted their influence in the era of Kim Jong-il – appear to have lost actual power now,” the report said. “The speed of the power shift was also faster than expected.” 

Barbara Demick got the broader trend right, then. Also of note is that the military has had a disproportionate share of purges. One detail that should be worrisome to U.S. and ROK forces is that they’re promoting more people based on merit than on family background.

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UNDER THE RADAR: Amid all the attention about Jang Song Thaek, Japan and South Korea held a joint exercise inside China’s unilateral “air defense zone.” Good.

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THE FOLKS AT BOINGBOING, bless their hearts, have created a North Korea denunciation generator. I tried it out, and I must confess to the tribunal that every word of it is true.

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NOT KOREA-RELATED, BUT STILL FUNNY: The married Kama Sutra. Sadly, safe for work.