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North Korea raised the stakes in its face-off with the United States and South Korea on Saturday, threatening to use nuclear weapons if Washington and Seoul go ahead with military exercises planned for regional waters this summer. [WaPo]

President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008 to reward it for giving up its nuclear weapons, and as of June 23, 2010, President Obama saw no particular reason to disturb that decision.

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Just imagine the apoplexy if John Bolton said something like this:

Robert Einhorn, the State Department’s special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control, said North Korea’s recent alleged sinking of a South Korean warship – which Pyongyang denies – and its aggressive rhetoric suggest it is not willing to make serious commitments toward denuclearization.

“I don’t know that we are ready today to resume those talks,” Einhorn told reporters in Tokyo. “North Korea’s actions raise legitimate questions about whether they are willing to live up to their commitments.”

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Just don’t let him back in. Problem solved.

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Hundreds of North Koreans have died in floods this year. The record rains cover most of the country, from South Hamgyeong to the Yalu River. Heavy rains are pretty much an annual event each year at this time, but I have yet to read that rain has caused a famine in South Korea.

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The U.S. military turns to manga to promote the U.S.-Japan alliance:

In it the young girl, Arai Anzu – which sounds like alliance when pronounced by a Japanese person – asks the boy, Usa-kun – a play on USA – why he is protecting her house.

“Because we have an alliance,” he says. “We are ‘Important Friends’.”

“It’s good to have a friend you can rely on to go with you,” the little girl concludes.

The idea is less silly than it seems. In America, comic books are for twelve year-olds and stoners. In Asia, manga often discuss politics and history. Heck, in Korea, they’re even used to teach children to hate Jews. My problem with this is more fiscal than format — it’s the host nation governments that need to do things like this, not ours.

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The highest-ranking North Korean to defect to South Korea has criticized the South Korean people as “pathetic” in their attitude toward the North. Hwang Jang-yop, former secretary of the ruling North Korean Workers’ Party, has consistently criticized the communist regime of his former country after fleeing to the South in 1997. In a recent news interview, he said certain South Koreans have rejected the official results of the scientific investigation into the sinking of the South Korean naval vessel Cheonan, adding such ill-considered support for North Korean leader Kim Jong Il will not only sabotage reunification, but prevent the South from defending itself. “I know Kim Jong Il was behind the Cheonan sinking, and it’s a pity that as many as 30 percent of the South Korean people don’t believe that” he said. [Donga Ilbo]

I don’t think Hwang has access to any more evidence about the Cheonan Incident than the rest of us, but I think he’s speaking unpleasant truths about South Koreans, many of whom will concede that they live in an exceedingly superficial society. Mind you, I’d love to be able to say that Hwang is wrong, but the great weight of the available evidence says he isn’t.

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According to a question posed in the State Department’s August 2, 2010 briefing, Aijalon Gomes is on a hunger strike in North Korea. The report is sourced to “the number-two of the British foreign office, Mr. David Howell,” who is said to have reported this fact to the House of Lords. The State Department spokesman professed no knowledge about the report.

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An interesting article on China’s new claims of sovereignty over the South China Sea, which would be a lot like the United States claiming sovereignty over the Gulf of Mexico. I’m sure Chas Freeman find some way to argue that China doesn’t really mean it.

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  1. I heard my fave ever conspiracy story today. Apparently the Americans sank the Cheonan to get back at kim yuna. This is second-hand from a student at one of the top Korean universities. I would love to believe this is an example of Koreans have finally discovering sarcasm

  3. And to think that Americans to this day after almost 30 years since the song debuted would rather be turning Japanese instead of Korean…

    First scenario in no particular order:
    “East sea is not Sea of Japan!, But East Sea is Sea of Korea/Chosun!”

    Second scenario in no particular order:
    “Dokdo is Japan’s Island !”

    The whole civilized world knows that both are lying, however one needs to know it’s boundries.

    You don’t even want to know the present scenario, it invovles China’s new role to subdue them both. Another “Pax Asiana”, this time under the Dragon’s will, not Japan,…

  4. Juche rapidly losing every vestige of credibility…

    From the Christian Science Monitor:

    Twenty-one-year old Yi Gil-dong says a rare glimpse of South Korean television was the catalyst for her journey into China on the back of a bribed North Korean soldier. Ms. Yi, who graduates next year, hopes to qualify as a psychiatrist and counsel other North Korean defectors.

    “I wasn’t even allowed to wear the shoes I wanted,” Yi says of her school days in the North. “We pretended to believe the propaganda we were taught at school. But we knew the difference between being free and not being free. It feels natural for me to be here [Anseong, Republic of Korea], like this is where I am supposed to be.”

    Oh, how this warms my heart!

  5. KCJ:

    Juche rapidly losing every vestige of credibility…

    yea…Juche dies when the concentration camps are closed…

  6. Unfortunately the North Chosun camps will be flooded and never made to exist unless the Allies stop their “general” and his Bastard Dynasty. The Concertration Camps of the DPRK and the numerous innocent Korean families within them must be saved before the tyrant “Kim” family hits the self-desruct button.

    BTW, it is true that Koreans in the north have the atom bomb by support of China….

    But is is also true that the United States will glady show China and the D.P.R.K what South Korea and the U.S. has developed within the past 58 years, besides a commitment blood-alliance and advanced international infastructure together.

    True Chinese disdain the ONE Communist party that controls the state. True North Koreans disdain the ONE Jucheist cult that controls the people.

    At least in a free society you have the choice to believe in or not believe in anything.

    And in a freee society, at least you also have the luxury of not being sent to labor for another person’s mistakes against the state.

    God Bless the Free World.

    May the people of North Chosun have freedom soon.

  7. The idea of flooding the camps is a myth. Look at the satellite images and you’ll quickly realize that most of them are simply too vast to be erased by flooding, and that the water supply to do it simply isn’t there.

  8. Well, besides the news that Kim Jong il tops the list of the world’s worst dictators, we have this slice of life insight into the Juche Cult’s ‘re-education’ brainwashing camps:

    Defectors Recount Nightmare in N.Korean Camps
    Tales of unimaginable suffering were at the core of testimony from former inmates of North Korea’s political concentration camps at a press conference Monday.

    “I ate whatever I could put into my mouth, except stones,” recalled an inmate at the Yodok camp between 2000 and 2002. “Grain stock was checked every day and we were kept away from grains, so you had this extreme pain of being unable to eat them even if they were within sight,” he said. “As starving inmates surreptitiously ate seeds, security guards sprayed pesticides on the seeds, so many died from eating the poisoned seeds.”

    The event was organized by activist group Democracy Network against North Korean Gulag at the Seoul Press Center.

    Of 250 inmates he met at the camp, 80 starved to death or executed in public after being arrested for attempting to flee the Stalinist country. He himself was held on espionage charges after being caught with a Bible smuggled in from South Korea.

    Women at the event wore dark glasses to conceal their identities but were unable to hide their tears. One recalled how she languished at the Kaechon political prison camp for 28 years after being taken into custody at 13 for guilt by association with a crime committed by one of her relatives. She said, “I saw a starving woman eat the flesh of her son who had died of a disease.”

    Another was detained at Kaechon Women’s Prison for attempting to flee the North twice, in 2003 and 2005. “Once we stood in line in the hallway of a detention house where a security guard was kicking a pregnant woman,” she recalled. “Some time later, this woman returned and lay bleeding with an empty womb. But nobody could do anything to help her.”

    May the Righteous God of the Universe put the Juche Cult out of its misery. Now.

  9. Yes Joshua, you are right when it comes to no floods near the death camps,. When it comes to the most likely targets of the DPRK regime, they will be, if history is correct, which it is, the innocent “chosen” by the Northern “Chosun” regime, will be the unfaithfull
    to the regime, the martrys.

    This has already been happening for at least 15 years sgo, circa 1995.

    By the year 2018, The Kim Empire will be like a Disneyland exhibit.

    A little bird told me so…. [-_-]