Tag: Politics

North Korean Counterfeiting

Snip from a long New York Times Magazine story about North Korean counterfeiting efforts:

Though there is some dispute on the timing, the first counterfeit big-head supernotes might have arrived on the market as early as 1998. Like the earlier generation of supernotes, the big-head imitations show an ever-growing attention to detail. “They would certainly fool me,” said Glaser, who points out that the “defects” of the supernote are arguably improvements. He recalled looking at the back of a $100 supernote under a magnifying glass and noticing that the hands on the clock tower of Independence Hall were sharper on the counterfeit than on the genuine.

From all accounts, superb quality is a feature of much North Korean contraband: methamphetamine of extraordinarily high purity; counterfeit Viagra rumored to exceed the bona fide product in its potency; supernotes. It’s an impressive product line for a regime that can barely feed its people. When I discussed this with Asher, he let out a sigh. “I always say that if North Korea only produced conventional goods for export to the degree of quality and precision that they produce counterfeit United States currency, they would be a powerhouse like South Korea, not an industrial basket case.”

[Image: xmasons]

No Good Deed…

I told you ten months ago that this would happen.

[Photo credit: twdbth]

NK: Gassin’ up a Taep’o-dong 2

License to Il

With the North Koreans preparing to test launch a ballistic missile (the Taep’o-dong 2), I thought this would be a good time to re-visit the bizarre NK images I linked to a few days back — see them again for the first time with English captions.

Also, I came across the following image. If you ever wanted a stark visual representation that illustrates the fact that totalitarianism/centrally-planned economics doesn’t work and democracy/free-market capitalism does, check this out — South Korea is lit up like a Christmas tree at night while their crazy cousins to the north are completely blacked out. Perhaps the North Korean government — which I heard someone refer to recently as less a nation than a cult — is saving up for rocket fuel by cutting back on electricity? Let’s hope not.

North Korea at Night

Oh, and one more thing: to you optimists who think this preparing-a-rocket-to-launch is just the North Koreans grandstanding to gain attention, I’d like to point out that it’s extremely difficult to remove fuel from rockets once they’ve been gassed up. Just a little something to ponder.

Man, North Korea. Would someone please convince the Halliburton muckety-mucks that they could practically print money if they snapped up some sweet no-bid contracts to rebuid the country if we would only just invade already? (No pun intended.)

Understanding Afghanistan

Afghanistan

In an interesting Newsweek story, Joe Cochrane describes being caught in Kabul’s recent mob uprising — and provides context for the country’s flare-ups in violence:

Even under the best circumstances, Afghanistan is a massive undertaking in nation building. It’s landlocked, surrounded by potentially hostile neighbors, has limited natural resources and has been ravaged by decades of war. The international community remains completely engaged and committed here—it has little choice given the questionable performance of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government. “There is a frustration at the lack of progress, there is a frustration that the government is not reaching out to all areas of the country,” Adrian Edwards, spokesman of the U.N. mission here, told me today. “We need to deliver quickly here. Reconstruction is slow and people don’t see the dividend of peace.”

Related: The US invasion of Afghanistan — Operation Enduring Freedom — was launched on October 7, 2001. Has it really been nearly five years? Time flies.

Related to Related: who’s the lucky SOB at the Pentagon who gets to sit around and dream up these monikers for the US’s various conflicts? You’ve got your War on Terror, naturally. And then there’s Operation Iraqi Freedom, of course. And you can’t forget about Operation Unflinching Rottweiler.

Got you on that last one, didn’t I?

Here’s an in-depth look at the practice of naming military operations.

Leaving the WSJ for the Marines

Thanks to Miles B. for passing along this moving op-ed from Matt Pottinger, who recently left the Wall Street Journal, at age 31, to join the Marines. More info here.

Pottinger says that living abroad made him more patriotic. I feel the same way. I’ve never loved America more than I do now.

Evo Morales, President of Bolivia

This is an historic moment for Bolivia and all of South America. The continent has elected its first-ever indigenous president, Evo Morales: coca legalization proponent, self-proclaimed “nightmare” of Washington, and pal of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro. And he won convincingly. Here’s a good article providing some context from the NYT.

My quick take: Evo’s election symbolizes:

1) an oppressed ethnic majority finally saying enough is enough and giving the boot to the traditional (white) elite minority ruling class;

2) the rejection of neo-liberal economic policies;

3) an example of the unintended consequences of the Bush adminstration’s hardline foreign policy. Morales might not have been elected if anti-US sentiment weren’t so high in South America these days — indeed, his campaign slogan was “‘Causachun coca, wanuchun Yanquis’ (‘Long live coca, death to the Yankees’).

Evo, Evo+Morales, Morales

Bolivia Votes

Bolivians are voting for a new president today.

I haven’t been able to find any news on how the voting has shaped up so far, but the best analysis I’ve seen is from Bolivia expert Miguel Centellas, who says Evo Morales is set to win — but may ultimately be hamstrung by a lack of support in Congress:

And an Evo presidency, facing an opposition-controlled Senate & House of Deputies, and w/ none of the prefects under his control, will be the most heavily restricted presidency in Bolivia’s democratic history.

Bolivia, Evo+Morales

All Eyes on Bolivia

Will this indigenous man — a former coca farmer — be the next president of Bolivia? No one knows for sure. The election is on Sunday.

Fire Howard Dean

What, exactly, does Howard Dean need to say to get canned? Would somebody please shut this jackass up? I mean, seriously, the guy is a fool.

I’m sure he’s not the only one who thinks the war in Iraq can’t be “won” (if “winning” means a complete end to violence in Iraq in the short term and the entire dismantling of the insurgency — insurgent movements, by their very nature, don’t ever go away completely). We need to re-define what “winning” looks like, formulate a plan for a successful withdrawl from the country in the next year or two, and devote our resources to protecting our own country from domestic terrorist attacks.

But Howard Dean can’t be bothered to craft the DNC’s message in any coherent way. He is a bombastic, grandstanding whiner; this is actualy about what I expect from him, sadly.

AP:

WASHINGTON — Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, likened the war in Iraq to Vietnam yesterday and said, ”The idea that the United States is going to win the war in Iraq is just plain wrong,” comments that drew immediate fire from Republicans.

Climate Change and Hurricane Katrina

I saw this poster in my Metro car on the way to work this morning:

It’s from Friends of the Earth, an environmental group that “champions a healthy and just world.”

FOE’s claim — that global warming is responsible for the devastating storms of the past season — is a massive oversimplification of what we know about climate change and hurricanes. The actual working climate scientists say that it just ain’t that simple:

Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming – and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.

In fairness, they go on to note that:

…In the same manner, while we cannot draw firm conclusions about one single hurricane, we can draw some conclusions about hurricanes more generally. In particular, the available scientific evidence indicates that it is likely that global warming will make – and possibly already is making – those hurricanes that form more destructive than they otherwise would have been.

So it may well be that global warming is exacerbating hurricanes, and it does, indeed, appear that sea surface temperatures, which fuel hurricanes, are on the rise. But in the aftermath of Katrina, it’s in poor taste for FOE to claim, as a matter of fact, that “warmer seas mean more killer storms.”

Global climate change is happening. We need to burn fewer fossil fuels. We need to do a better job of conserving energy. And we need to do whatever it takes to make New Orleans safe from future storms (including implementing a real, workable evacuation plan). But the situation is exponentially more nuanced, from a scientific perspective, than FOE makes it out to be.

UPDATE: Don’t miss my friend Ben Preston’s response to my post. Ben’s a climate scientist himself (now with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Australia, formerly at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change) and he points out some mixed messages FOE’s sending with this oversimplified poster.