The Second Inter-Korean Summit has been officially postponed today due allegedly to the severe flooding that hit North Korea.  However, knowing that things with North Korea are never what the appear to be I have to wonder if the flood damage is being exaggerated in order to get more concessions from the South Korean government?  As the South Korean presidential election gets closer President Roh and his ilk will be growing more and more desperate for the summit and thus North Korea can demand more aid and use the flood damage as cover for their demands. 

Call me cynical, but I long ago quit believing anything from the North Korean regime that So far I have seen nothing that can definitely confirm the alleged massive flood damage in North Korea. 

You can read more over at Nomad and Marmot’s Hole.

This is just another hint of what South Korean government is prepared to give up to the North Koreans during the second Inter-Korean Summit actual physical South Korean territory. 

Lee told the parliamentary standing committee on unification the “characteristics and historical background” of the sea border are important, but so are “the purposes South Korea aims to achieve through the establishment of the maritime border.” The minister made the remarks in response to Grand National Party Rep. Shim Jae-yup, who had asked why South Korean soldiers risked their lives to protect the sea border if it was “not a territorial concept,” as Lee had asserted on Aug. 10. There has been intense speculation that South Korea will discuss redrawing the NLL at the upcoming inter-Korean summit.

Shim said Lee seemed to mean that the 2002 battle would not have occurred if Seoul had accepted Pyongyang’s demand to redraw the NLL. The lawmaker accused Lee of insulting the memory of the South Korean soldiers who sacrificed their lives for the nation.

It is quite sickening that Unifiction Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung is declaring that the six sailors killed and the eighteen more that were wounded in the deliberate North Korean attack died for nothing because they should not have been defending South Korean territory in the first place.  The Roh Moo-hyun administration has been treating the soldiers killed in this battle as if they never existed, so it should come as no surprise that they are about to give up South Korean territory that has been defended for years with the blood of South Korean naval personnel.  Can the men that died and were wounded that day be any more dishonored by this administration than by giving away the territory they gave their lives and blood to defend? 

I posted a couple of months ago about the KBS report I saw on television about Incheon International Airport taxi drivers overcharging foreigners.  Courtesy of the Marmot he has translated a Hankyoreh report of an investigation they have done as well into the corruption of the airport taxi drivers. 

For instance, a taxi ride from Incheon Airport to Seoul City Hall normally costs 40,000 won (by normal taxi) and 70,000 won (by call van), but these jokers were charging 150,000 won.

Police said that the “bonbang” would not allow other taxi drivers to work in their turf, assaulting drivers who tried. In May, gang members beat the crap out of a taxi driver who didn’t belong to the “bonbang,” leaving the victim with wounds that took four weeks to heal.

Police are investigating whether the “bonbang” used violence or threats on the foreigners they overcharged as well.

An employee at a hotel in Myeongdong said there are at least one or two arguments a week between foreigners and “call van” taxi drivers over fares. He also said — sit down for this — that taxi drivers regularly overcharge US soldiers (!), referring to the hapless GIs as “butter.”

Just for the record the vast majority of taxi cab drivers in Seoul and Korea in general are quite honest and will give you no problems.  However, there are certain areas where the cab drivers are some of the lowest scum you will find in Korea and Incheon airport is just one of those places.  If you are a foreigner, do not take a taxi from Incheon airport; take either the bus or the new installed train.  The bus is much cheaper than a taxi and more comfortable as well with its large, spacious seats.  The train is also cheap, quite comfortable, and uncrowded.  The only downside with the train is that it only goes as far as Kimpo Airport where you have to transfer on to the subway, but construction is continuing on the line to take the train all the way to downtown Seoul.  Both these options are much better than taking a taxi cab. 

I have long pointed out on this blog that other places to watch out for dishonest cab drivers is Uijongbu, particularly the Uijongbu train station and Stanleyville, as well as in the city of Dongducheon.  These cab drivers regularly rip off soldiers and even try to provoke incidents in hopes of big payoffs. 

These taxi drivers are vultures who are looking to rip off GIs. They know that the GI’s are desperate to get back to camp before curfew, so they feel free to charge exuberant fees, knowing full well that the soldier will more than likely pay it because they have to get back to camp. However, sometimes when you got a GI that is drunk and the cab driver tries to rip him off, tensions mount and the incidents occur. It is not an excuse for a soldier to get in a scuffle with a taxi driver, but it is just the reality of what is happening.  The foreigners at the airport are just getting a taste of what soldiers in Uijongbu and Dongducheon have to regulary deal with in regards to cab drivers.  So will there ever be undercover investigation of the cab drivers in Uijongbu and Dongducheon?  Probably not, but the uncovering of the corrupt cab drivers at Incheon airport is at least a start.

After reading this Bill Roggio posting it is clear that the US is not the only country conducting a surge operation in Iraq:

The aggressive pace of operations since January has resulted in an explosion in the prison population. There are currently 42,000 detainees in Iraqi and Multinational Forces Iraq custody. Of those detained, 2,760 are foreigner fighters as of August 8. This number includes over 800 Iranians.

Nearly 30% of the foreign prisoners in coalition jails are Iranians, yet there are people that want the public to believe that Iranian involvement in Iraq is exagerated by the Bush Administration.  Others are in total and complete denial.  I’m not sure what more evidence would please these people considering the EFP bombs that have been found in Iraq with some containing packaging clearly indicating they are from Iran.  Than there is the six Quods Force operatives captured in Erbil and the smuggled sniper rifles clearly from Iran because their manufacturer linked their serial numbers to the rifles they sold to the Iranians.  Even more damning is the senior Hezbollah operative captured in Iraq admitting to his Iranian ties.  Now as US casualties from Sunni insurgents and terrorists decrease due to the "awakening" movements and military victories against Al Qaida; there is a surge in activity by the Iranian sponsored Mahdi Army to kill more US soldiers and kidnap and assassinate government officials before General Petraeus’ report to Congress next month. 

With such clear Iranian involvement in Iraq what should the US do about it?  I have long felt that entry to Iranians into Iraq should be closed until the security situation improves.  A deadline for Iranians to leave Iraq should be given than any Iranians discovered inside of Iraq after the deadline should be arrested.  Such a policy would obviously not prevent Iranians from secretly entering Iraq, but it would greatly hinder their movements and give the US military and Iraqi police the cover they need to arrest Iranians where as it is now they have to have reason to do so. 

Many Iranians do legitimately travel to Iraq to see religious sights that they had long been unable to see during the Saddam Hussein regime.  In order to allow these pilgrims to enter the country the Iraqi government at some point could have highly organized bus tours to control the religious pilgrims entering the country.  This is a way to not alienate the actual Iranian public from having access to religious sights while also keeping tourist money from pilgrims flowing into the country. 

So why doesn’t the Iraqi government and the US military implement such a policy?  Probably because such a policy would directly effect the Mahdi Army, which is dependent on Iranian aid.  Muqtada Al-Sadr’s political front is part of Iraqi Prime Minister’s Maliki’s political coalition that gave him the prime minister seat.  Stopping the free movement of Iranians in Iraq could cause them to pull their support of Maliki thus causing him to fall from power. 

The time may not be now, but at some point, hopefully in the near future, both the Iranians and Al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army will have to be dealt with.  There will never be reconciliation in Iraq until Sadr and his thugs are dealt with. 

More thoughts on the Mahdi Army can be read at the Captain’s Journal.  

General Bell has released a new Bell Sends letter that criticizes the Stars and Stripes article about the new installation access policy for Korean civilians that I covered here.  Reading the letter it appears General Bell’s main beef with the Stars and Stripes is that he believed it portrayed that an "inquisition" was going to be waged against Korean citizens who hold passes to access USFK facilities. 

Also General Bell goes on to say that the policy change was implemented in order to meet Department of Defense ethics standards.  The General goes on to explain that the policy change addressed the issue of money changing hands in order to receive access passes in the past.  This has been one of the worst kept secrets in USFK that for years money was being paid to people who work in the various US-Korea friendship groups in order to gain access to USFK facilities.  It was basically like paying your country club fee because these people were buying passes through the friendship groups to golf and play slot machines on post.  Paying off the friendship groups was much cheaper than actually buying a golf membership at a Korean golf course.  The rumor mill was that this open secret was allowed to go on for all these years because of the money it was bringing in for the military’s MWR program. 

This policy change of Korean nationals getting passes through field grade officers verifying membership in a good neighbor group is supposed to address the policy of buying passes in the past through the friendship groups.  Like I have said before, I will have to see this policy change work before I believe it.  I fully believe the golf courses and slot machines will still be filled with Koreans, but instead of buying their way into a friendship group they will buy their way into being good neighbors. 

Do you want to be an online defender of Dokdo?  Well now online groups have now made it possible for you to be a virtual defender of Dokdo by taking virtual tours and planting digital flowers on the island. 

It is humorous to listen to Koreans complain about "invisible barriers" to their products:

Sales of Japanese cars in Korea are soaring, but Hyundai Motor isn’t doing nearly so well in its eighth year in Japan. The problem may be the high non-tariff barrier, a stumbling block for Korean automakers in Japan. The Korean government meanwhile does not discriminate against Japanese cars and Korean consumers are also generous towards their hefty price tags.

A Hyundai official in charge of vehicle shipments in Japan shared a recent bizarre episode. A Japanese customs official, detecting a tiny scratch on the windshield of a Hyundai car, demanded the company replace the windshields of all 500 cars that were going through customs at the time. The Hyundai official thought the request was preposterous but had no option but to do as told.

I have to wonder what American car manufacturers and beef producers are thinking reading these complaints?

I recently began reading a book that people have been telling me for quite some time that I really need to read and it is even on the official US Army reading list.  For various reasons I kept passing on reading the book, but now I’m glad I finally decided to read this book.  This book was written in 1959 and it is amazing how many of the themes of the book fit in with contemporary attitudes today.  Take this passage for example:

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The longer General Petraeus stays in command the more I’m convinced he is definitely the right man to be leading the war effort. Not only have many gains been made on the ground in securing Iraq, but he is also very savvy with engaging the media. A perfect example is this bombshell he just dropped:

The top American commander in Iraq said Wednesday he was preparing recommendations on troop cuts before he returns to Washington next month for a report to Congress, and believes the U.S. footprint in Iraq will have to be “a good bit smaller” by next summer.

But he cautioned against a quick or significant U.S. withdrawal that could surrender “the gains we have fought so hard to achieve.”

If you are closely following things in Iraq you would already know that this is nothing new, but most people are not. The US military has to begin troop reductions from Iraq by next summer because the “surge” was created by extending tours for units in Iraq and deploying units earlier that were scheduled to go to Iraq. A lot of people don’t realize that no new units were sent to Iraq to create the “surge”, just a change in timings for the units already there or going.

The Army recently announced that no tours to Iraq would exceed 15 months thus that means US troops would have to start being withdrawn by next spring. However, General Petraeus’ is using this fact to his advantage by dropping quotes in the media about how the troop reductions are actually related to gains on the ground and he is simultaneously taking away talking points from the Democrats praying for the defeat of US forces in Iraq by announcing troop reductions. He has also announced this when Congress is in recess thus ensuring he has maximum media attention and the Democrats probably cannot respond.

It seems out of all the Generals who have been running things in Iraq, General Petraeus understands that engaging the media is just as important as making gains on the ground. By doing this he slowly preparing the battlefield in Washington next month to his favor. You can almost feel the conventional wisdom about the war slowly changing and it is all because of the leadership from the top by General Petraeus and the servicemembers executing his new counterinsurgency strategy.

Yes it is man made by a political partisan at NASA:

My earlier column this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. One of these people is Steve McIntyre, who operates the site climateaudit.org. While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he noticed a strange discontinuity, or “jump” in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000.

These graphs were created by NASA’s Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.

McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an “oversight” that would be fixed in the next data refresh.

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place.  1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.  Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events.

So of you out there may be wondering what the big deal is about this.  Here is what the big deal is:

All of these necessary revisions to surface temperatures will likely not make warming trends go away completely. What it may do is bring the warming down to match the much lower satellite measured warming numbers we have, and will make current warming look more like past natural warming trends (e.g. early in this century) rather than a catastrophe created by man. In my global warming book, I argue that future man-made warming probably will exist, but will be more like a half to one degree over the coming decades than the media-hyped numbers that are ten times higher.

The discovery of what could be argued was an intentional error by Hansen to support his political beliefs means that global warming now matches prior natural warming periods such as the one that happened in the 1930’s.

The global warming religionists are down playing this by saying that Hansen was only responsible for producing US climate numbers, which is true, but US climate numbers were long considered the most reliable in the world.  If Hansen’s incorrect numbers were considered highly reliable than how bad are everyone else’s numbers?  Something else I learned from all this is that when looked at in five year blocks the globe is undergoing global cooling now:

More importantly for climate purposes, the longer term US averages have not changed rank. 2002-2006 (at 0.66 ºC) is still warmer than 1930-1934 (0.63 ºC – the largest value in the early part of the century) (though both are below 1998-2002 at 0.79 ºC).

Temperatures in the past five years have actually dropped from the previous five year block and temperatures now are comparable to the temperature average during the last global warming period in the 1930’s.  This revelation is a huge danger to the global warming religion, associated industries, and their socialist allies.

But then again what do these facts matter when global warming has long ago become a matter of faith?

You can read a whole lot more over at Ace and Malkin’s sites.