It’s the slowest of slow news days, so perhaps you’d like to spend a few moments learning about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea from their new website. As this picture shows (click to embiggen), they do accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative – I can’t match this guy to the dough-faced kid (Jong-un) or his much shorter and fatter dad (Jong-il), so I’m guessing this must be the patriarch (Il-Sung). And, I didn’t realize that they actually start numbering their years based on when Il-Sung was born:
It was President Kim Il Sung who successfully pioneered the victorious modern history of Korea.
He was born on April 15, Juche 1 (1912) in Mangyongdae, Pyongyang. The birth of the President was a great stroke of luck for the Korean nation an event unprecedented in the history of the nation. From then on, a new chapter was opened in the Korean history and the new origin of the Juche era. It represented the beginning of the era of Juche.
I have to imagine that Juche 100 (last year) is a big deal in NK, but for some reason we didn’t hear much about it in the press. Here’s a commemorative stamp and an open thread in honor of the anniversary of that unprecedented stroke of luck.
rlrr
Kim Il Sung who successfully pioneered the victorious modern history of Korea.
South Koreans might disagree…
MattF
That guy in the upper left of the picture who’s looking in the wrong direction– needs to be re-educated.
PeakVT
OT: Charges were filed today in the phone-hacking scandal, including against Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, David Cameron’s former communications director. That’s good news on the justice front, but unfortunately for the Brits, it probably won’t bring down the government.
gene108
Kim Il-Sung is still President of North Korea. After his death, the Politburu (or whatever the North Korean equivalent is) voted him the Eternal President.
I think the veneration North Korea has for Kim Il-Sung and then for his son sort of shows a modern day example of how earlier civilizations decided to have god-kings, who commanded religious style devotion.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
I wonder why he’s pictured wearing a western style business suit like a decadent running dog capitalist tool.
rlrr
@gene108:
Also shows North Korea isn’t truly atheistic…
Linda Featheringill
Lost a brother in the general area of the DMZ. Disappeared.
There were many, too many, people who just got lost in that zone. Them and Us. Must have been absolute chaos.
I like the idea of buying North Korea. :-)
rlrr
I find it interesting the North Korean website has a .com tld and is hosted in France.
JGabriel
Thereby repeating the same idiotic mistake of the Gregorian calendar in lacking a year 0.
.
mainmati
Juche is the N. Korean state ideology of self-sufficiency, which as we have seen doesn’t work and wasn’t really ever actually implemented since either China or the Soviet Union kept the place afloat for much of its history. I didn’t realize Kim Il Sung’s B-Day was Year 1 of their dating system like Jesus Christ or Muhammed. Weird. Of course, as we all know, for the average N. Korean, it’s been starvation and misery excepting the military and the nomenklatura as usual.
Villago Delenda Est
The “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” is one of those names (along with the Deutsche Demokratische Republik) I use to illustrate to wingtard dipshits how their notion that a certain central European regime of the 1930’s and 1940’s was not a leftist outfit as they assert, citing a banned by FYWP word in the formal name of the organization. But then again, they do not have the slightest fucking clue as to what “socia1ism” is in the first place. They’ve been told it’s bad, that’s all they need to know.
They are also the people to whom the guys on Madison Avenue rely on to make their pitches and demonstrate their effectiveness to clients. Larry Tate loves those guys.
flukebucket
That picture looks like the cover of a Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet. If a few of the people were carrying baskets of apples and tomatoes it would be perfect.
MattF
Speaking of N. Korea, there’s a series of very good murder mysteries by ‘James Church’:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Church
where the protagonist is a N. Korean detective ‘Inspector O’. The novels lend some insight into life in N. Korea, such as it is.
Jack the Second
Maybe there wasn’t much of a celebration because they’re holding off on celebrating the new century until Juche 101. I mean, that’s what I would do if I were a dictator with absolute control over a population.
Punchy
@JGabriel: And ya learn sumpthin every day! From your link:
Had no idea.
Davis X. Machina
No Funky Juche Dance Party?
Carnacki
My birth also was an unprecedented event for a planet. Then again every birth is
Gin & Tonic
Really scraping for material today, aren’t we?
Linda Featheringill
@Punchy:
On December 31, 1999, a number of people were grumbling about this being the wrong day to celebrate. The grumblers may have comprised 1/10 of 1% of the people. The rest of us had a good time.
The 20th Century, as I recall, was a bitch. It was good to have survived it and to move on to the next era.
Villago Delenda Est
Well, it wasn’t a slow news day the other day in Iraq but you’ll never get our MSM to tell you about it, because it’s not part of the approved narrative. Our invasion was a success! Remain calm! All is well!
Linda Featheringill
Apropos to nothing, I finally managed to watch Return to Brideshead. If Waugh had a strong editor to lop off the last 1/3 of the story, it would have been really, really great. Of course, I don’t know if he could have gotten it published without all that redemption stuff. So there’s that.
Linda Featheringill
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yes. The folks in Iraq have some problems. I idly wonder what they are going to do about it.
Gin & Tonic
@MattF: Thenk you very much for that pointer.
Flying Squirrel Girl
Anyone ever watched the Vice Guide to North Korea? Oldie but goodie.
http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-to-north-korea-1-of-3
chopper
i dunno why they didn’t call the guy “Il Juche”. that would have been pretty tight.
beltane
@flukebucket: I think it looks exactly like one of wingnut artist Jon McNaughton’s http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/ “patriotic pieces”.
catclub
@MattF: He is internal security and watching the rest of the crowd.
me
@Flying Squirrel Girl: This one about the DPRK camps in Siberia is even more amazing.
jibeaux
Why does the website have a “shop”? Isn’t that a little bit, I dunno, capitalistic?
catclub
@Villago Delenda Est: Not sure about that. One (of some competing) mode of conservative opposition to Obama getting out of Iraq was ‘We can never leave!’ These bombings reinforce that and yet the MSM barely reports.
I would guess this might be an oversight ascribed to laziness.
The less likely possibility is that the right has figured out that the rest of the nation does not have a tremendous desire to go back into Iraq. Less likely because then they might also figure out the nation does not care two figs about invading Iran.
Villago Delenda Est
@Linda Featheringill:
What’s interesting is the Wiki article talks about how “al-Qaeda” is apparently taking responsibility for the attacks.
An organization that did not have a presence there back in 2002.
Way to go, deserting coward! Best recruitment officer Osama bin Laden ever had!
Onkel Fritze
They’ve got mugs and t-shirts. I’m sold!
Villago Delenda Est
@beltane:
“Socia1ist Realism” was the official approved art style of the USSR under Stalin. The aforementioned German regime also was very much into the same basic form of art.
These totalitarian regimes have an amazing number of similar notions about culture in general.
So it’s no wonder at all that our home grown totalitarian theocrat wannabes embrace that same visual motif.
gnomedad
The Right hasn’t proposed numbering years since Reagan’s birth yet, so that’s something.
Flying Squirrel Girl
@me: Thanks! I don’t have TV so I’ve devoured about all the Vice Guides I have been able to find.
Villago Delenda Est
@catclub:
Well, the problem here of course is the bombings would not have taken place if we hadn’t destroyed the existing Iraqi state, which was keeping a lid on potential sectarian conflict.
The only winner of the US invasion of Iraq was, ironically, Iran. The US went out of its way to install a Shiite (and therefore Iran friendly) regime in place of Saddam.
THEN they actually had the chutzpah to say that what was needed to run Iraq was a secular but nominally Sunni strongman. Uh, wait…
Mr Stagger Lee
@MattF: Also Netflix has a cool movie from South Korea, which actually makes good movies, called Shiri about female NK assassin. Oh by the way nice touch by the North Korean branch of the NRA if you notice a couple people left of the Great Leader, there is kid with rifle, Wayne LaPierre you sneaky snake!
Elizabelle
But where’s the velociraptor?
jeffreyw
Thread needs moar bugs.
gnomedad
@Elizabelle: LOL!
Gus
Careful. Some irony impaired wingnut is going to accuse you of being pro-Kim.
JGabriel
@Punchy: Which I why I prefer Astronomical Year Numbering.
.
Litlebritdifrnt
@jibeaux:
“Where’s the shop? They always have a shop. Not a big one. Just a little one. I like a little shop”
Villago Delenda Est
@Gus:
Irony impairment seems to be one of the marker traits of the wingnut.
gnomedad
The Dear Leader did a great job coding the website. And we really must thank him for Apache.
NCSteve
As long as we’re talking about North Korean krazy, this guy, who actually speaks Korean and reads the stuff they give to the proles to read, says “juche thought” is a deliberately impenetrable hoax that the regime puts out solely for the consumption of outsiders. None of it makes its way into the propaganda fed to North Koreans, which basically lacks any identifiable connection to Marx or Lenin and is, instead, just straight-up banal racist hyper-nationalistic fascism.
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/04/immersion-in-propaganda-racebased-nationalism-and-the-unfigureoutable-vortex-of-juche-thought-colin-.html
Robert Sneddon
The Japanese government dates their official calendar from the ascension of the current Emperor so this is Heisei Year 24. Pretty much everyone else in Japan uses Gregorian calendar dating. The one case where I have personally encountered the Empirical calendar is the date stamp in the Japan Rail pass I get when I visit there.
EconWatcher
Shouldn’t we have a thread on Alexander Cockburn, who passed away today?
I’m sure there are others like me who came of age politically in the mid 80s, who will feel a jolt from this. It was the heyday of The Nation, with Cockburn and Hitchens leading the charge. When I first discovered them as a disgruntled undergrad at a right-wing college, I was intoxicated. They spoke my language.
Neither of them aged very well. We all know what happened to Hitchens. And although Cockburn remained on the left, he got weirder and weirder in his cabin in the redwoods, joining the global waming skeptics, for example.
But when they were good, they were very good. Oh, the 80s. No pasaran.
beltane
@Villago Delenda Est: Yes, you really can know everything there is to know about a political movement by looking at the art associated with it. Excessive sentimentality and kitsch are sure signs of a highly oppressive totalitarian mindset.
maya
@gnomedad: You know, Ron Il-Reagan does sound kinda catchy. The Repub House is planning on naming the oceans after him and that in-continent above the neck part does scream Reagan America. Though the canucks might object.
Maude
@beltane:
The exception being the Third Reich. They stole everyone’s art.
gnomedad
@Elizabelle:
A little Photoshop should fix this right up.
maya
@beltane:
Amen!
gene108
What the press should be asking about Romney not releasing his tax returns is if he’s this secretive on the campaign trail, how secretive would he be in the White House? Would he make the Bush, Jr./Cheney White House seem like an open and inviting place in comparison?
It’d be irresponsible for the media not to speculate.
Schlemizel
@Carnacki: IF ONLY! but, sadly, no, every birth is well precedented.
gene108
@maya:
Optimus Prime would not approve of Republican’s inhumanity towards other sentient life!
The guy, who made the Reagan portrait should understand this.
MattF
@gene108: Well, yes. It’s already been noted that Romney’s explanation for not releasing his tax returns, “Democrats might say mean things,” is not really much of an explanation, in the sense of explaining anything that anyone might want to know. In the White House, I’d expect that Executive Privilege would expand to cover anything that ‘those people’ wouldn’t really understand.
Rafer Janders
@Linda Featheringill:
Hey, a lot of people are innumerate. You’re in good company.
But it’s nothing more than simple math. A century is defined as 100 years, so without a year zero the first century runs from year 1 to year 100. The second century, therefore, runs from year 101 to year 200, etc., which gets us to the 20th century running from 1901 to 2000, and the third millenium only starting on January 1, 2001.
By the way, we didn’t always used to be so bad with numbers. The headline of the New York Times on January 1, 1901, was “Twentieth Century’s Triumphant Entry”.
MattF
@Rafer Janders: …and the reason you can’t have a ‘year zero’ is…? I’ve always felt that the solution to this issue is a ‘two-party’ system, where you have a party on the 100 anniversary and another party on the 101 anniversary.
Rafer Janders
@MattF:
Oh, you can have a year zero. We should have had a year zero. But our current calendar system was organized in a slap-dash, disorganized system over many hundreds of years, so the mistake was baked in.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
@Rafer Janders:
Nobody who worked on Y2K software remediation would make that mistake about years beginning with zero.
Today’s my birthday, along with about 1,000,000 other Americans. I’m older than the state of Hawaii by about a month. Off to work…
Davis X. Machina
@EconWatcher: Cockburn’s the main reason why a few years ago I let my dead-tree Nation subscription lapse after 25+ years, really since college.
Cockburn lived in a world where Irving Howe — one of the co-founders, with Michael Harrington of the DSA — was on a good day, just another squish, and on a bad day the conscious tool of the plutocrats.
Not a world I recognized.
burnspbesq
Not that slow a news day. The Supreme Court released the oral argument calendar for the first two months of next term.
The biggies are Fisher v. University of Texas, the affirmative-action-in-admissions case, on October 10, and Clapper v. Amnesty International, about standing to challenge warrantless wiretapping, on October 29.
http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/07/octobe-and-november-calendars/#more-149518
burnspbesq
@Davis X. Machina:
I grew up reading Cockburn in the Village Voice. I’m not entirely certain, but I think I will miss his cantankerous, crazy old ass. He was a whack-job, but he was always interesting.
Rafer Janders
@burnspbesq:
That’s some catch, that Catch-22.
burnspbesq
@Rafer Janders:
No shit. Pretty much anything the Court does in this case will further fuck up the law in this area.
Woodrowfan
back in 1999 some wingnut told me that the century DID begin on January 1, 2000, that the idea that it really started on January 1, 2001 was “liberal bias” and that “of course there was a year zero.”!! Yes, he was serious.
The Other Chuck
Nobody cares when the “proper millenium” occurred. Not then and certainly not now. 2000 is a big round number. It was a celebration of a big round fucking number. That is all.
joel hanes
Bob Harris brought this to my attention:
Kim Jong-Il once kidnapped a prominent South Korean actress and her film director husband, hoping to kick-start the North Korean movie industry. The result: a monster movie in which a lizard-shaped rice ball turns into a giant beast that eats iron. He brings peace to a village but then eats the heroine and dies.
jacksmith
“Give me Liberty, or Give me Death!” – Patrick Henry
What a brilliant ruling by the United States Supreme Court on the affordable health care act (Obamacare). Stunningly brilliant in my humble opinion. I could not have ask for a better ruling on a potentially catastrophic healthcare act than We The People Of The United States received from our Supreme Court.
If the court had upheld the constitutionality of the individual mandate under the commerce clause it would have meant the catastrophic loss of the most precious thing we own. Our individual liberty. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Supreme Court.
There is no mandate to buy private for-profit health insurance. There is only a nominal tax on income eligible individuals who don’t have health insurance. This is a HUGE! difference. And I suspect that tax may be subject to constitutional challenge as it ripens.
This is a critically important distinction. Because under the commerce clause individuals would have been compelled to support the most costly, dangerous, unethical, morally repugnant, and defective type of health insurance you can have. For-profit health insurance, and the for-profit proxies called private non-profits and co-ops.
Equally impressive in the courts ruling was the majorities willingness to throw out the whole law if the court could not find a way to sever the individual mandate under the commerce clause from the rest of the act. Bravo! Supreme Court.
Thanks to the Supreme Court we now have an opportunity to fix our healthcare crisis the right way. Without the obscene delusion that Washington can get away with forcing Americans to buy a costly, dangerous and highly defective private product (for-profit health insurance).
During the passage of ACA/Obamacare some politicians said that the ACA was better than nothing. But the truth was that until the Supreme Court fixed it the ACA/Obamacare was worse than nothing at all. It would have meant the catastrophic loss of your precious liberty for the false promise and illusion of healthcare security under the deadly and costly for-profit healthcare system that dominates American healthcare.
As everyone knows now. The fix for our healthcare crisis is a single payer system (Medicare for all) like the rest of the developed world has. Or a robust Public Option choice available to everyone on day one that can quickly lead to a single payer system.
We still have a healthcare crisis in America. With hundreds of thousands dieing needlessly every year in America. And a for-profit medical industrial complex that threatens the security and health of the entire world. The ACA/Obamacare will not fix that.
The for-profit medical industrial complex has already attacked the world with H1N1 killing thousands, and injuring millions. And more attacks are planned for profit, and to feed their greed.
To all of you who have fought so hard to do the kind and right thing for your fellow human beings at a time of our greatest needs I applaud you. Be proud of your-self.
God Bless You my fellow human beings. I’m proud to be one of you. You did good.
See you on the battle field.
Sincerely
jacksmith – WorkingClass :-)
Scuffletuffle
@jacksmith: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
handsmile
@EconWatcher: , @Davis X. Machina: , @burnspbesq:
Re Alexander Cockburn
FYI, Corey Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind, wrote an obituary/appraisal for Al-Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/07/201272310391240304.html
and there are several posts at his personal blog (coreyrobin.com), including this link-laden one: http://coreyrobin.com/2012/07/23/more-on-alexander-cockburn/
Like burnspb, I was introduced to Cockburn through his Village Voice column, co-written with James Ridgway iirc. Like DXM, I gradually became disaffected with what I’d call a kind of aristocratic nihilism articulated by him at The Nation and elsewhere.
I wonder if his old comrade Christopher Hitchens will be there to greet him.
NotMax
BTW, the DPRK site is not exactly “new,” having been online since August of 2000.