Category: Uncategorized

American billionaire Ted Turner is to go to North Korea next month. Allegedly the trip is for environmental conservation reasons:

Diplomatic sources in Washington said that Turner, accompanied by a huge CNN media corps, was planning a visit to North Korea in mid August to discuss North Korea’s ecosystem conservation measures in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) with the Turner Foundation, an international environmental conservation organization which he runs.

Having personally seen much of the DMZ, I wonder if the North Koreans plan to show Mr. Turner all the deforested hills adjacent to the DMZ as shown in this picture looking into North Korea from Freedom Village near the JSA? I imagine they will probably parade him around the DMZ on the East Coast where it is not nearly as deforested as the Western portion of the DMZ. I have always found it interesting to see how the brown, deforested, land of North Korea gives way to the green, forested landscape of South Korea at the DMZ.

Is it any wonder why so many crops and people get washed away which seems like every monsoon season in North Korea when they have mismanaged their forests so badly. Well, now they got Ted Turner coming to town to tell the world how great and eco-friendly their land is, never mind the deforestation, land mines, artillery emplacements, bunkers, infiltration tunnels, and tanks destroying the environment adjacent to the DMZ.

Apparently USFK and a nuclear waste dump have a lot in common in Korea now a days according to this Joong Ang Ilbo article:

The Pyeongtaek problem has in many ways the potential to become another Buan incident. The residents of Buan also had confrontations over the choice between the livelihood of the residents and the economic gains from the construction of nuclear waste disposal facilities. However, with the intervention of outside forces, the logic for environmental protection and the development logic collided each other and the problem was expanded to a national level and became a political issue, making it more difficult to solve.

We shouldn’t leave the Pyeong-taek situation alone so that it can become another Buan incident. In order to stop this, the government and local autonomous organizations must actively mediate friction among the residents over their livelihood and business interests. The greater the friction among the residents is, the more room there is for outside organizations to intervene. Therefore, minimizing the chances of internal friction is the shortcut to keeping the problem from expanding to the national level. After that, the government must make an effort to find a contact point where those parties to the Pyeongtak issue who emphasisze the importance of the alliance and those who emphasize the importance of peace can compromise.

Maybe a nuclear waste dump is a good analogy for USFK. A nuclear waste dump is something no one wants in their back yard but the pay off of cheap electrical power is worth the annoyance of keeping the nuclear waste dumps around. Maybe USFK is the same way; an annoyance but useful to keep around.

However, I think the USFK “nuclear waste dump” that is trying to be expanded in Pyongtaek is being held up by the local farmers, not because people don’t want it in their backyards, because Camp Humphreys is already in their backyards, but because they want more money from the government for their land. The anti-USFK parasites are just jumping on to this issue to try and make it look like the big American bullies are pushing around Korea again to further their own political agendas. They could care less about the farmers. However, once the farmers get their pay day from the government the majority of them will happily move out to greener pastures.

Here is something in the article I need to point out that just annoys me:

For the sake of our alliance with the United States, they want the Pyeongtaek issue to remain a non-political and local problem. They think that the Pyeongtaek problem can be solved by efforts to improve such procedural matters as eliminating unequal elements in the Korea-U.S. alliance, not by the demand to withdraw the U.S. forces from Korea.

Quick somebody name these unequal elements in the US-ROK alliance? This is a common quote I hear over and over again but never see anything to substantiate it. It is just something people like to throw out there because they hear it over and over again and just assume it to be a fact. If you know of any of these inequalities in the US-ROK alliance please feel free to comment.

The merger between Hite and Jinro is now complete:

South Korea’s anti-trust body has approved a controversial mulit-billion-dollar takeover deal between the country’s two leading liquor firms, Hite Brewery and Jinro.

The Korea Fair Trade Commission said a plenary session decided late Wednesday to give conditional approval for a bid by Hite, the country’s largest brewer, to take over Jinro, the country’s biggest soju liquor maker.

I wonder how many bribes it took to make this happen? So who likes Hite better than OB? I like OB better.

Former South Korean National Soccer Team Coach Guus Hiddink, dropped a big time bombshell yesterday:

Coach Guus Hiddink, the man behind Korea’s semifinal run in the 2002 World Cup, dropped a bombshell Wednesday when he revealed he would love to coach the Teaguk Warriors again but had to cast around for other work when nobody asked him. Hiddink made the remarks in an interview with the Sports Chosun, a subsidiary of the Chosun Ilbo, before a PSV Eindhoven training session when asked about reports that he could lead the Australian national team.

That is unbelievable that as much as the general Korean public loves Coach Hiddink that the Korean soccer authorities did not ask him to continue coaching the team. The fact that he dropped such a big dime on the Korean soccer authorities shows that he is pretty bitter about it. Possibly he didn’t get along with people operating the Korean national soccer team. Who knows, but I’m sure we will hear more about this.

Also I’m not a soccer expert but it appears to me as a casual observer of Korean soccer that their team is still playing pretty well with their new coach Jo Bonfrere. In opinions on this?

The Marmot has provided a link to this video of 2ID Assistance Division Commander General Joseph Martz meeting with Uijongbu City Mayor Mr. Kim Mun-won. I tend to agree with the Marmot that the whole video seemed kind of goofy and a translator with some PR skills could of helped but it did provide a look at the taxi cab and the driver. The cab driver pointed to how the soldier jumped up and ran across his taxi and then showed the marks he had on his body due to the altercation. He had some bruises on his shoulder.

I think the video backs up my prior opinion that the soldier should pay for whatever the damage to the taxi was and offer a big apology to the taxi driver. Isn’t his how it would be handled in a Korean on Korean incident? The taxi driver was not seriously harmed so to throw the soldier in jail for this would be ridiculous. Yes he is an idiot but should all idiots go to jail? I guess we will see.

Checkpoint set up to look for the criminals

A ROK Army patrol in Donghae was assaulted by a group of unknown thugs. The only people that can be ruled out now for committing the assault are 2nd Infantry Division soldiers since the attackers spoke with South Korean accents and did not involve a taxi cab:

A group of men in their 20s ambushed a patrol near a coastal guard post on the East Sea coast in Gangwon Province on Wednesday night, taking one K1 and two K2 assault rifles and 30 rounds of live ammunition.
The guard post commander, a first lieutenant identified by his family name of Gwon, and his signalman, a corporal identified as Lee, were overpowered at 10:10 p.m. by men in a black Hyundai Grandeur who stripped them of guns, two magazines of 15 rounds each, a P-96K walkie-talkie and a mobile phone.

The Army provisionally concluded the assailants are not North Korean spies since they spoke South Korean accents, and the ambush did not suggest professional training. The assailants fled without killing the soldiers and there was no damage to fences near the guard post, it said.

The police and Army suspect the assailants were common bandits who intended to use the guns in robberies or similar crimes. Investigators are trying to trace the vehicle.

How come their is nothing in here about Korean criminals “running amuk” in Donghae? I guess the Korean media can only use that phrase if after the assault and theft the criminals jumped on top of a taxi before fleeing the scene.

There is good news for people who are sick of receiving the scam e-mails from Nigeria:

Nigerian court has sentenced a woman to two and half years in jail after she pleaded guilty to fraud charges in the country’s biggest e-mail scam case, the anti-fraud agency said on Saturday.

Anajemba’s sentencing by a Lagos High Court on Friday is the first major conviction since the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) was established in 2003 to crack down on Nigeria’s thriving networks of email fraudsters.

She only got 2 1/2 years for swindling $242 million dollars? I wonder if she had to give the money back at least? Anyway, hopefully this will reduce the amount of scam emails I get every week.

According to this Blogcount article Korea is a nation of bloggers:

“It is asserted that there are 11.9 million bloggers in South Korea, a country with a population of around 50 million people. This means that over 20 percent of the people in the country, including old ladies and babies, are bloggers. This is a laughable and needy assertion. IBM cannot even muster 0.1 percent of its employee base, and Korea manages over 20 percent of its entire population? This is how delusional the blogging-crowd members have become about their hobby. And, frankly, I don’t get it. Everyone has to conform. It’s the ‘everyone must become a blogger because I am one’ mentality.”

Does 20% of the population in Korea really blog? I don’t buy it. That is an extremely high percentage when you think about it. However, I can agree with the group think mentality in Korea that may lead to Korea having a larger than normal blogging population, but 20% seems really high.

As a fellow K-blogger I can definitely say that this place never runs out of things to blog about. Between the violent protesters, the bias media, wacky politicians, the Dear Leader, one word: Dokto, and not to mention the threat of nuclear annihilation there is always something to blog about here.

Hat tip to the Asiapundit for the link.

A Chinese general speaking during a conference for foreign journalists had this to say if war broke out over Taiwan:

“If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition on to the target zone on China’s territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons,” said General Zhu Chenghu.

Gen Zhu is a self-acknowledged “hawk” who has warned that China could strike the US with long-range missiles. But his threat to use nuclear weapons in a conflict over Taiwan is the most specific by a senior Chinese official in nearly a decade.

He actually better prepare himself for more than just the destruction of all the cities east of Xian; he better prepare for the destruction of the entire country and the end of the Chinese people if the United States were to receive a nuclear attack from the Chinese. I tend to agree with this take on what to do if attacked by the Chinese:

I don’t think he understands that no city west of Xian will be safe either. If one, 10, 100 American cities were nuked; no American President or his political party would do nothing less than ensure the obliteration from the face of the earth the country that did that. We are better at it than the Chinese when it comes to nukes. The only concern of the remaining 150 million Americans will be that we do not destroy the remaining Pandas as we move forward to killing as many of the remaining 500 million or so Chinese left after our initial attack.

We are not stable when given weapons and a good reason to fight. Ask the Japanese, Sioux, and Saddam’s kids. The best thing that China could expect from this conflict is retaining 1/3 of their prior population and their country broken up into Manchuria, Canton, East Turkistan, Tibet, and for good measure we will give some land back to our Mongolian friends, let the non-nuked Hong Kong become a Singapore, a bit to the now-united Korea, let Vietnam, Pakistan and India get their bits back, and Japan will have all oil rights outside 2NM from China’s shores for 99 years.

Well said, but I don’t think there will be much left of Korea either to give land back too.

Anyway, does anyone wonder why President Bush is pushing for national missile defense? The lefties will probably claim this guy doesn’t speak for the majority of peace loving Chinese thus we don’t need missile defense; let’s give the money ear marked for National Missile Defense to corrupt African regimes instead so we can feel better about ourselves because we are trying to end poverty though by giving handouts we are only prolonging it. First of all, it doesn’t matter if the majority of the Chinese people don’t want nuclear war, what matters is who is the guy that would push the button and right now they got one senior Chinese general threatening to nuke the United States. Plus if the US did get nuked by the Chinese the same people going after Bush now over the National Missile Defense project would be the same people criticizing him if we did get nuked, for not implementing National Missile Defense.

What would happen if an American general made a claim to nuke the Chinese? It would be all over the world news and we would be called an aggressive nation looking to provoke wars. The Chinese would demand the general apologize and be removed from the military. When a Chinese general does it, it is regulated to the back pages of any paper if it made the paper at all and limited to debate and analysis only in the blogosphere. Somebody should call the Chinese to account on this.

Anyone wonder where the North Koreans get their belligerent attitude towards nuclear weapons from now?

This video from the Jack’s Army site is really amazing.

The terrorists are initially yelling Allah Akabar when they first shoot the soldier which means, God is Great. I understand very little Arabic but you don’t need to understand Arabic to understand what they are saying after the soldier gets right back up. They are probably saying something like, “What the %$#@! The US Army would later capture these coward terrorists and recover this video tape to show during a Commanding General’s Brief.

Hat tip to Greyhawk for the link.