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Category: Humor/Satire

June 5, 2009

The Fury of the Smoking Manure

USA Today has a long, interesting, and amusing read on North Korean propaganda, including some extensive quotes by B.R. Myers.  Read the whole thing on your own, but I can’t resist quoting this: In a wild rhetorical flourish during a 2003 confrontation with the United States, state radio charged that the Earth itself was furious at the Americans and that even “piles of manure in the fields are fuming out smoke of hatred.”  [USA Today, Paul Wiseman] I, for one,...

Categories Humor/Satire/Propaganda/Unintended Humor/WTF?
May 28, 2009

Anonymous Prankster Steals North Korea’s Identity on Twitter

Forbes reports that the real North Koreans are not amused: Those 140-character news flashes have ranged from announcements of the recent underground nuclear explosions that are currently testing the rogue nation’s relations with the West, to accusations of Japanese war crimes, to the invention of a new type of North Korean toothpaste with “high medical properties.” (In addition to preventing cavities, it also aids in digestion and can be used to treat insect bites, eczema and colds.)   [Forbes]

Categories Humor/Satire
May 27, 2009

What? That Is Your Day Job? (Part 2)

David Albright, who has spent the last several years discounting the evidence of North Korea’s nuclear cheating and cheerleading for diplomatic giveaways to Kim Jong Il, has joined the coalition of the willing.  Sort of: “North Korea’s thrown something in our face that we have to deal with now and it could have tremendous ramifications for the ability to stop proliferation in the future,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a nuclear disarmament think...

Categories Washington Views/WTF?
May 27, 2009

What? That Is Your Day Job? (Part 1)

I never was a fan of Lawrence Eagleburger, and I see no reason to become one now: VARNEY: Would you — do you believe that the U.S. and/or China should now seriously consider and plan for a military attack? EAGLEBURGER: I have believed that for some time. So, you’re — you’re call — you are asking the wrong person, I guess, because I have felt, as I say, for the better part of 10 years, that we could see this...

Categories Washington Views/WTF?
May 22, 2009

The Banality of James Church

The pseudonymous author is asked to perform his only apparent talent for an interviewer:  writing dialogue between fictional North Korean bureaucrats — here, as based on Church’s assumptions about the ongoing captivity of Laura Ling and Euna Lee.  Judging from what Church wrote for this interview, I wouldn’t call Church a bad writer or an especially good one.  I suspect the final revelations about Ling and Lee, if we ever have them, will be unkind to some of Church’s assumptions,...

Categories Media Criticism/WTF?
May 21, 2009

Smart, Tough Diplomacy: Hillary Clinton Asks Bloggers to Free U.S. Journalists from North Korea

Because if there’s one thing Kim Jong Il simply cannot withstand, it’s that lethal instrument of soft power known as “snark:” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday urged women students to use the Internet to campaign for the release of two American women journalists held in North Korea. Clinton urged graduates of Barnard College, a women’s university in New York City, to show their opposition to Pyongyang’s detention of the two journalists who are due to go on...

Categories Abductions/Activism/Diplomacy/Unintended Humor/WTF?
May 4, 2009

ROK Navy Saves N. Korean Freighter from Pirate Attack

The spirit of 2000 isn’t quite dead yet: A South Korean naval unit rescued a North Korean freighter from being hijacked by suspected pirates in Somali waters on Monday, a Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) official said. The incident, which took place at 5:40 a.m. (Somali time) 37 km south of the Yemeni port city of Aden, came amid chilled relations between the Koreas that have been technically at war for over five decades.  [Yonhap] The freighter arrived safely in...

Categories Humor/Satire/North-South
April 30, 2009

Korean Word of the Day: 막무가내

This word, pronounced mak-mu-ga-nae, roughly translates to that most untranslatable of Yiddish words:  chutzpah. On Tuesday, North Korea had the chutzpah to demand (막무가내로 우기다) that the U.N. Security Council apologize for the flaccid non-binding presidential statement it offered in lieu of any meaningful enforcement of the two Security Council resolutions North Korea’s recent missile test violated: The UNSC should promptly make an apology for having infringed the sovereignty of the DPRK and withdraw all its unreasonable and discriminative “resolutions”...

Categories "United" Nations/Unintended Humor/WTF?
April 9, 2009

Despite “Sports Diplomacy,” Assholes Still Firmly in Control in North Korea

Here’s another brick that can be pried out of the wall of Unifiction idiocy. Shallow thinkers across South Korea once told us that sports diplomacy would be another one of those gentle, warming rays that would eventually give us a kinder, gentler North Korea. Proponents of that theory were willing to overlook some early setbacks from the 2002 Universiade Games at Taegu, when North Korean “journalists” attacked peaceful human rights protestors, and when North Korean cheerleaders became hysterical at the...

Categories WTF?
April 4, 2009

Psalm for a Lost Utopia

And the era of cowboy diplomacy ended, and the war-gods were banished from the great city, and the world was uplifted on the wings of Hope and Change. And utopia dawned across Mother Gaia, and our wisest emissaries were sent to talk to our enemies rationally, carrying the word of His love and promises of much treasure. And all was calm and placid. Peace was at hand, double rainbows shone over the sacred mount, and stimuli of expropriated cheese and...

Categories Humor/Satire/Missiles
April 2, 2009

KCNA Stands Up for Press Freedom!

North Korea, which was ranked 172nd out of 173 countries on last year’s survey of world press freedom and which is currently holding two journalists hostage, has lent its moral authority to the oppressed purveyors of the fraudulent P.D. Diary in South Korea, which inspired last year’s violent mad cow demonstrations. The Citizens Federation for Democratic Media of south Korea issued a statement on March 27 denouncing the present “government” and the ruling party for their undisguised moves to put...

Categories Censorship/Media Criticism/Unintended Humor
February 8, 2009

Life (in North Korea) Imitates ‘The Onion’

What motivates me to go on, day after day, you ask? NORTH Korea has declared it is actively pursuing a space program, amid reports from US and South Korean officials that Pyongyang is preparing to test fire a long-range missile. Rodong Sinmun, the official daily of the ruling communist party, said the North had every right to develop a space program, as a member of the international community. “The DPRK’s (North Korea) policy of advancing to space for peaceful purposes...

Categories Humor/Satire/Unintended Humor/WTF?
February 6, 2009

‘Chosun Gripped With Boundless Emotion and Joy’

You have to wonder what goes through the minds of the people who write this stuff today. It’s so over the top as to suggest a subversive intent. KCNA’s words, my links: Pyongyang, February 4 (KCNA) — Upon hearing the news that General Secretary Kim Jong Il was nominated as a candidate for deputy to the 12th Supreme People’s Assembly at Constituency No. 333, the entire army and people are full of great happiness and pride of having the peerlessly...

Categories Kim Jong Il/Unintended Humor/WTF?
January 26, 2009

That Rabbi was such a nice man. Maybe I should send him another ham.

South Korean President Lee Myung Bak, who as mayor of Seoul awkwardly offered the city to Almighty God, was recently rescued from the brink of a social and sectarian fiasco when a staffer prevented him from sending Chuseok gift sets of dried anchovies to a group of Buddhist monks (link is in Korean). Fact 1: Buddhist monks are required to abstain from eating living things. Fact 2: 22.8% of President Lee’s constituents are Buddhists. So many mouths. How can one...

Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society/Unintended Humor
November 26, 2008

Tokdoheit 451: Let’s have an essay contest!

There appears to be no end to Korea’s passion for insignificant, isolated scraps of land. Some 85.5 percent of the 451 islets in the Apnok (or Yalu) and Duman (or Tumen) rivers on the border between North Korea and China properly belong to the North, an academic claims. Prof. Suh Kil-soo of Seokyeong University makes the claim in a study of the border along Mt. Baekdu and the two rivers, which will be released in a seminar of the Koguryo...

Categories China & Korea/Korean Society/Unintended Humor
August 24, 2008

Let Them Eat Grass: North Korea’s ‘Miracle’ Foods

Displaying its characteristic talent for attracting universal apathy punctuated by brief moments of global disgust, the North Korean regime claims to have invented noodles that make you feel full … even when you aren’t. North Korean scientists have developed a new kind of noodle that delays feelings of hunger, a Japan-based pro-Pyongyang newspaper has reported. The noodles were made from corn and soybeans, the Choson Shinbo said. They left people feeling fuller longer and represented a technological breakthrough, the newspaper...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/WTF?