Category: Uncategorized

If you live in Kunsan they are looking for volunteers to help teach English:

“When I explain this to people on base, I tell them to think of ‘Good Morning Vietnam’ with Robin Williams, when he tries to teach them a song,” said Barrett, who works in the Logistical Readiness Squadron’s inventory section.

Unfortunately for Kunsan area schools, there aren’t enough Patrick Barretts to go around. There are 19 airmen volunteering their time every other Saturday, down from 63 when the program started in 2001.

Meanwhile, there are about 70 schools that would like a volunteer English teacher from the base, said Rosemary Song, Kunsan Air Base community relations director. Base officials usually make a push for volunteers during the summer and winter school breaks.

During those breaks, the base also supports English camps, where airmen immerse students in American culture. The children practice the language skills they learn in school, but also learn how to buy groceries and use the post office.

The winter camp is fully booked with volunteers, Song said; however, many more are wanted for Saturday mornings.

Now a days it seems like you can almost always count on “Low Quality Foreign English Teachers^TM” to take GI incidents out of the headlines:

A dozen Korean-American, American and Canadian English-language lecturers were under investigation for taking drugs on Monday.

Police said that they detected 12 English lecturers at private institutes, or “hagwons,’’ on suspicion of taking marijuana, Philopon or methamphetamine.

They arrested five Korean-Americans and two Americans, while charging without detention two Korean-Americans, a Korean-Canadian, a Canadian and an American.

The teachers, who are in their 20s and 30s, have worked as English lecturers at hagwons in Seoul and Kyonggi Province since early 2000 and habitually taken drugs at their residences, according to police.

The seven Korean-Americans, who emigrated to the U.S. when young, belonged to Korean-American crime rings there, such as Korean Play Boy. They were deprived of their permanent resident status by their host country for their involvement in drug trafficking, illegal gun possession and robbery, the police said.

After being expelled from the U.S., they got the jobs at the institutes with fake diplomas obtained through a broker.

Now a days it seems like you can almost always count on “Low Quality Foreign English Teachers^TM” to take GI incidents out of the headlines. 

What Yongsan busnapping?

By the way another quick observation, permanent residency card holders are not citizens thus they are not Korean-Americans as labeled in the article, they are in fact Koreans.

A whole lot more over at the Marmot’s Hole.

So will the Korean government dispatch troops to Lebanon?:

South Korea has finished a field survey of Lebanon before deciding whether to contribute troops to U.N. peacekeeping forces there, government officials said Monday.

“But we need more time to consult with the relevant authorities before deciding whether to send our troops to Lebanon,” said a government official, who was one of the four members of the survey team sent to the Middle Eastern country.

Let me translate this for those of you who don’t speak Korean BS.  What this government official is really trying to say is that the Korean government really doesn’t want to send troops there, but they probably will have to since Ban Ki-moon is going to be the UN Secretary General and they want to save face for him.  So what they are trying to find is a nice peaceful area, preferably one with great internet access for Starcraft gaming, where they can base some troops who will do nothing, but it will appear that the Koreans are doing something; much like all the other UN troops in Lebanon.

I have a great recommendation for the Korean government.  How about you load up the Zaytun unit from it’s comfortable confines in peaceful Kurdistan and have them set up shop in Lebanon?

2ID soldiers continue to aid the family of one of the girls killed in the 2002 accident:

Four years after a military vehicle killed two South Korean children, 2nd Infantry Division soldiers still are making amends.

About 25 soldiers from the 2nd Infantry Division’s G-9 Civil Military Operations section and 15 South Korean soldiers helped harvest the farm on Thursday of Shin Hyun-soo, the father of one of the dead children.

Soldiers arrived at 10 a.m. and harvested eggplant, soybeans and peppers on about 18,000 square feet of farmland.

The family still mourns the loss of their 13-year-old daughter, Shin Hyo-soon, who was killed with Shim Mi-sun by a U.S. Army 60-ton tracked bridge carrier while crossing a country road in Yangju.

And they have welcomed the soldiers’ help each year since the girls died.

The family members “were actually very warm,” Lt. Col. Todd Goehler said. “They greeted all of the soldiers and we had a good lunch with them.”

 What I find interesting is that with all the anti-US groups that love to use the deceased girls image during the protests, none of them bother to do anything to help the families of the deceased girls.  That is because the anti-US groups don’t care about the families they just want to use the girls images to promote their own anti-US agenda.

First of all, big hat tip to One Free Korea for providing the links to two interesting articles on North Korea.  The first article is about nationalism on the Korean peninsula:

Because nationalism is more of a collective belief than a particular policy, the positions adopted in its name can evolve, even rotate. Inter-Korean hostility subsided as a result of the “sunshine policy” initiated by former President Kim Dae-jung, who dropped the stance of utter hostility taken by the conservative generals who ruled South Korea from the 1960’s until the 1990’s. The same national pride that set North and South against each other can also create common ties. Now, instead of regarding the North as a violently psychotic regime, the southern attitude is more along the indulgent yet exasperated lines of “Oh, no, what’s our nutty brother done today?” Particularly among South Koreans with no memories of the Korean War — that’s now most of the country — yearnings for peace and good relations, as well as anti-Americanism, are stronger than the hostile anti-Communist intent of their fathers and grandfathers. And in the wake of Germany’s costly unification, policy makers in Seoul realize that the collapse of the North, which an older generation wished for, would create a high degree of political instability and an enormous financial burden that should perhaps be avoided. This helps explain why Seoul has limited its antinuclear criticism of the North, and why South Koreans aren’t rushing for bomb shelters quite yet.

Wacky nationalism is nothing new for those of us who have spent time in Korea, but it is a good article to read for those who don’t understand why South Korea takes such a soft approach towards North Korea.

The second article is on the increasingly falling information blockade over North Korea:

“Money now trumps ideology for an increasing number of North Koreans, and that has allowed this underground railroad to flourish,” said Peter M. Beck, the Northeast Asia project director in Seoul, South Korea, of the International Crisis Group, which has extensively researched the subject in several Asian countries and is publishing a report. “The biggest barrier to leaving North Korea is just money. If you have enough money, you can get out quite easily. It speaks to the marketization of North Korea, especially since economic reforms were implemented in 2002. Anything can be bought in the North now.”

“The state’s control is weakening at the periphery,” Mr. Beck said, explaining that most refugees came out of the North’s rural areas but few from around Pyongyang, where the state’s grip remained strong.

State control may be decreasing on the periphery, but before real change can come to North Korea, Kim Jong-il’s political base in Pyongyang also needs to have a collapse of the information blockade as well.  Will the new sanctions cause this to happen?  Time will tell.

I don’t think so:

Coming under united international pressure, Kim Jong Il reportedly apologized for the Oct. 9 nuclear detonation and said he wouldn’t test any more bombs.

That doesn’t mean Kim can afford to show any weakness to a home crowd who live in an officially enforced siege mentality and are long accustomed to blaming their desperate living conditions on outside forces — mainly the United States.

“No matter how the U.S. imperialists try to stifle and isolate our republic … victory will be on the side of justice,” Choe Thae Bok, secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, told a rally of more than 100,000 people, according to the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

The North also held firm to its demand that the U.S. lift financial restrictions that have strangled Pyongyang’s access to banks abroad as a condition to return to disarmament talks.

Washington has repeatedly rejected that request, and appears even more unlikely to alter its hard-line approach to the communist nation in the wake of the nuclear test — leaving the potential for the crisis to escalate further.

“If the U.S. makes a concession to some degree, we will also make a concession to some degree, whether it be bilateral talks or six-party talks,” Kim was quoted as telling a Chinese envoy, South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo daily reported.

North Korea is just implementing one of the oldest terrorist tactics in the book and just like with the terrorists the media is doing everything it can to aid Kim Jong-il. Kim Jong-il is not apologizing he is just trying to appear conciliatory to save face for China, but also to make the US seem unreasonable because he says they are the ones threatening North Korea and implementing the financial sanctions on him thus causing the nuclear crisis. If the US would just be conciliatory like him and give up the sanctions they would return to talks.

This approach is much like the terrorists in Iraq when they say they want to negotiate with the US, but the US won’t negotiate with them or meet any of their concessions in order to end the insurgency, but at the same time the terrorists are launching death squads to kill civilians and planting as many IEDs as possible to influence next month’s US mid-term election. The terrorists do this because they want to make the US seem unreasonable by not negotiating with them when in fact the terrorists have no intention of negotiating with the US to begin with. This tactic is about as old as the ceasefire tactic used by terrorists when they need time to rearm, reman, and resupply themselves which the media always seems to aid them with as well. Tora Bora, Fallujah, Lebanon ring any bells?

I say the media is complicit in this because they rarely challenge these claims. For example in the AP article I linked to there was no mention that the US financial sanctions on North Korea have nothing to do with the nuclear crisis; they were implemented due to North Korean counterfeiting and money laundering. This just seems like an important piece of information that the AP article just some how left out.

Than again if the media actually challenged the claims of terrorists and dictators than that would effect their access to them; how else would you be able to get video of US soldiers being killed by enemy snipers to air on the news in order to increase ratings?

Chosun Ilbo was kind enough to provide a test to determine if you are an “ajumma” or not.  Here is a preview:

 The ajumma tends to step on someone’s foot and give them a dark look when they say “ouch” instead of apologizing. She is not ashamed of nudging someone’s bottom with an umbrella on the bus or subway to occupy a seat, and weighing down a person next to her by not taking hold of a handle in a joggling bus or train. What is worse, she shouts into her cell phone so everyone around can hear, and it is never even about serious matters. A lady, by contrast, says sorry when she breezes past, and is told it’s all right in reply: the magic word. Strictly speaking, it is pukkah to refrain from talking on your mobile altogether in a public place. If you get to get a call, keep it short and call back later.

Read the rest, but I’m really curious if this got printed in Korean or not?

I love the wording of this compromise:

In a compromise, Korea and the United States agreed Friday to complete the handover of full wartime operational control of Korean troops to Seoul between Oct. 15, 2009 and March 15, 2012. The two sides issued a 14-point joint communiqué at the end of further negotiations after the 38th Security Consultative Meeting headed by Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung and his U.S. counterpart Donald Rumsfeld.

I’m willing to bet Rumsfeld is leaning towards Oct. 16, 2009.  That’s between the two given dates, right?  This is just a face saving measure for President Roh because he would look even weaker on national security than he already is if he appeared to be trying to kick USFK out the door as soon as possible.  I just don’t see the operational control issue lingering to 2012, I’m betting on 2009.

Name the small island in the center of this picture: