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Category: Humor/Satire

April 22, 2014

N. Korea keeps it classy, calls Chair of U.N. Commission “a disgusting old lecher with 40-odd-year-long career of homosexuality”

Last week, the Honorable Michael Kirby, a retired Justice of the High Court of Australia, and the Chairman of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry for Human Rights in North Korea, was in Washington. It was my honor to be invited to two events with Justice Kirby — a small-group breakfast meeting (Kirby called this is a “barbarous” custom) hosted by the Australian Embassy, and a small-group dinner hosted by a member of the Board of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea....

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/WTF?
February 27, 2014

In latest N. Korean turmoil, Chaz Bono promoted to Supreme Leader

Forget what I said this week — North Korea is still funny. Look what a reader spotted on this apparently official North Korean propaganda video, posted on YouTube at a channel that has always posted authentic North Korean material in the past.   If this is a fake, well, they fooled me. Note the logo on the upper left-hand corner, which appears in some other apparently legit videos posted at the same channel. The video was a compilation of stills...

Categories Unintended Humor/WTF?
January 9, 2014

So, Dennis — other than that, how is the trip going so far?

Dennis Rodman’s September trip to North Korea included a trip to Kim’s yacht near Wonsan, which Rodman described as “like going to Hawaii or Ibiza.” Evidently, this trip hasn’t been as pleasant: A day after the former basketball star sang “Happy Birthday” to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and led a squad of former NBA players in a friendly game, Rodman issued the apology through publicist Jules Feiler in an email message to The Associated Press. “I want to...

Categories Sports/Useful Idiocy/WTF?
November 20, 2013

Elle Magazine makes a morally retarded fashion statement about North Korea

When I first saw the report here that an Elle Magazine columnist had declared “North Korea chic” to be one of this year’s top fashion trends, I immediately assumed that someone was failing to appreciate someone’s rather tasteless parody. When Americans do think of North Korea, they often infantilize it. Tasteless parodies may be our third-most common reaction to North Korea, after apathy and passive disgust. Sadly, having seen the screenshot of Joe Zee’s post, I think Zee was seriously...

Categories Media Criticism/Useful Idiocy/WTF?
October 28, 2013

Is the next Banco Delta Asia in Malaysia?

Over the weekend, a lot people were giggling at the decision by Paul Chan, President of HELP University, to award an honorary degree in economics of Kim Jong Un. Foreign Policy’s Isaac Stone Fish, who first revealed the story, obligingly prints Chan’s manifesto, which reads like the work of a true belieber — a man who writes as if he has spent an inordinate amount of time watching High School Musical over and over again. I have fond memories of...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/Useful Idiocy/WTF?
March 18, 2013

You’re gonna need a bigger boat.

So the news today is that North Korea–which President Bush removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008 for agreeing to give up its nuclear weapons programs–has warned the civilian populations of Baengnyeong-do, Yeonpyeong-do, and other islands in the Yellow Sea to evacuate now. The instrument this time is the quasi-official Uriminzokkiri, which is hosted in China, a nation that embraces the sacred principle that all speech, no matter how threatening or objectionable, has a...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Korean War II/Terrorism (NK)/Unfortunate photo ops
March 1, 2013

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

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: 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...

Categories AP Watch/Kim Jong Un/WTF?
February 27, 2013

This Just In: North Korea fails to absorb any of Dennis Rodman’s tact, class, gentility, or gravitas.

So yet again, we learn that visitors do not change North Korea. The tricky part is getting out before North Korea changes the visitor. Since I broach the engagement-versus-isolation debate, it’s been argued enough times that I seldom hear any new arguments, but this one by Michael Totten, in response to the reliably trite Nick Kristof, is a terrific deconstruction of mirror-imaging by both the North Koreans and the Americans who don’t understand how they think. The answer to the debated question,...

Categories Appeasement/Humor/Satire/Useful Idiocy
February 26, 2013

Birth control, Pyongyang Style: Lady-Mullets!

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...

Categories Humor/Satire/WTF?
February 10, 2013

In Poor Taste

Quite a few readers have been coming in over the last two days from this New York Times Op-Ed by Adam Johnson, author of the acclaimed The Orphan Master’s Son.  Johnson links to the Camp 14 page and asks how anyone could be so tasteless as to post a satirical review of a North Korean concentration camp.  Johnson thinks that in the same sense as the maps review something disturbing and inhuman about North Korea, the reactions reveal something disturbing and inhuman about us. Writing at...

Categories Humor/Satire/The Camps
February 6, 2013

Sometimes, a missile is just a missile

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...

Categories Anju Links/Anti-Americanism/Propaganda/WMD/WTF?
November 30, 2012

So … does this mean KCNA believes in unicorns?

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...

Categories AP Watch/Unintended Humor/WTF?
November 27, 2012

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

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...

Categories China/Unintended Humor/WTF?
September 14, 2012

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

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...

Categories Unfortunate photo ops
September 7, 2012

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

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...

Categories Sunshine/WTF?
August 19, 2012

Open Sources, August 20, 2012

SMILES! SMILES, EVERYONE! You’re on Fantasy Island! ————————————————– DEATH OF AN ALLIANCE? Regular readers know I haven’t been fond of keeping U.S. ground forces in South Korea since I was a part of that force a decade ago. If anything has cooled my ardor for winding down U.S. military welfare for one of the world’s wealthiest nations, it has been the understanding that we shouldn’t punish the leaders of a government who act like allies at least part of the...

Categories Anju Links/Unfortunate photo ops