Claudia Rosett proposes to kick North Korea out of the U.N.  This strikes me as a perfectly sound idea in theory and one that stands no chance of coming to pass in practice.  North Korea’s presence at the U.N. hasn’t contributed to peace or development; after all, U.N. membership isn’t a sine qua non for WFP aid, and most the focus of  diplomacy is on the six-party talks, an opera that alternates between long intermissions and broken crystal.  The fact that states like North Korean can be members of the U.N. in good standing really only proves that the organization has no standards, and that’s the reason why it can’t accomplish anything.  But then, given all of the other bad characters and motives in the U.N., that’s probably a mixed blessing.  The real answer to the U.N.’s failings is its gradual replacement with an organization without permanent members, where membership is a function of the member state’s democratic legitimacy and past contributions to humanitarian and peace-keeping efforts.

North Korea’s Priorities Again:   They’re building a big “birthplace” shrine to Kim Jong Eun in the district where this large palace sits, near the obviously faked Tomb of Tangun that North Korean archeologists “discovered” in 1993.  The Google Earth imagery is too old to show the new construction.

Also, new photos of a Kim Jong Il statue, which makes considerable effort to morph Jong Il with his father.

The latest casualty of the Great Purge of 2010:

“Railway workers suffering from the food shortage stole copper and aluminum parts from locomotive trains that were in store for wartime and sold them as scrap metal. As a result, about 100 locomotives were scrapped,” it claimed. “This was revealed in an inspection by the National Defense Commission in 2008.” [Former Railway Minister] Kim Yong-sam was then taken to the State Security Department and executed in March the following year, it added.

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Woefully Predictable:   South Korea’s government loses the message war over the Cheonan Incident to conspiracy theories and disinformation, many of them probably spread by China, North Korea, and their proxies in South Korea.  It’s times like these when I revert to my default view that there’s just no saving South Korea from itself.  But in the end, that’s up to South Korea, not America.

A female North Korean spy will avoid criminal charges because she cooperated.  Good, if sincere.