North Korea’s First Family

The government of North Korea is a giant criminal syndicate, or so it is generally believed. The rulers of the Hermit Kingdom allegedly profit from selling opium and running a black market in weapons technology, pushing missiles and nuclear know-how on the likes of Syria and Pakistan. It has been widely reported that the North Koreans make additional ill-gotten gains from counterfeiting passports and currency. Some of this may be exaggerated. It could be, for instance, that North Korea merely peddles bogus $100 bills that are made in China. But there is no doubt that control of the government in Pyongyang is a rich, if tainted, prize. While roughly a third of the population is malnourished, the rulers can divvy up a $40 billion economy that draws on North Korea’s plentiful natural resources, including gold. The question is, who gets the gold?

Succession is always a tricky subject in totalitarian states. In the case of North Korea, a bizarre world shrouded in secrecy, it is a source of urgent fascination for the country’s neighbors and for the United States, especially since the prize includes control over nuclear weapons and, possibly, the eventual capacity to launch them on Tokyo—or Hawaii.The current ruler, Kim Jong Il, seems to be tottering. He reportedly suffered a stroke a year ago, and may be ill with cancer as well. At 68, he rarely appears in public, and when he does he looks frail and dazed. Because nothing is certain about North Korea, the true state of his health is still debated in the intelligence community, with some officials, who requested anonymity when discussing sensitive in-formation, arguing that Kim is not as ill as advertised. Nonetheless, he does seem to be worried about passing power to one of his three sons.

None of them seems remotely ready for the job. They do not appear to be self-indulgent sadists, like Saddam Hussein’s evil progeny, Uday and Qusay. They’ve apparently inherited their father’s more benign, if eccentric, tastes for things Western. Kim, also known as the Dear Leader, has boasted to guests that he owns 20,000 movies, and he once instructed his ambassador to the United Nations to obtain a copy of Sudden Death, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, who is said to be the Dear Leader’s film hero. The North Korean ruler’s sons variously worship Armani, NBA stars, Eric Clapton, and Disneyland. The third son, Kim Jong Un, is the most mysterious. That may be for his protection, as he seems to be the heir apparent. But his ability to hold on to power in a renegade dictatorship widely regarded as an international pariah is very uncertain. NEWSWEEK recently tracked the paths of Kim Jong Il’s three sons. Their stories might seem comical if the stakes were not so large.

North Korea’s First Family | Newsweek International | Newsweek.com

Scientists Explain Why People Vote For Republicans – Gawker

Scientists Explain Why People Vote For Republicans
By Pareene, 12:08 PM on Fri Sep 19 2008

Every election season, commentators trot out the old statistics about how more education makes people more likely to support Democrats, more studies are published on how liberal Daily Show viewers are so well-informed, and various smart people try to explain why anyone would ever vote for a Republican, against their “self-interest.” This month has seen three alarming and remarkable scientific investigations into Americans’ inexplicable habit of voting for George Bush and John McCain. Which means: trend! Hooray! Let’s take a look at what America’s top scienticians say about fucking idiot flyover losers and their stupid voting:

Conservatives Are Scared A Lot
Rice University Political Scientist John Alford published some research in the creatively named journal Science about a possible biological basis to liberalism and conservatism. Basically, “46 mostly white Midwesterners who self-identified as having strong political beliefs” were shown “threatening images” (“a large spider on someone’s face, a bloodied person and maggot-filled wound”). The conservatives were more scared, of all of the images. Or, as Newsweek puts it, “illegal immigrants may = spiders = gay marriages = maggot-filled wounds = abortion rights = bloodied faces. ” Liberals were not sensitive to the scary images. Which means they’re biologically inferior, because they’d die if a gay spider tried to abort their faces to death. Notable problems with this study: small sample, also wtf this doesn’t explain anything.

Conservatives Refuse to Believe “Facts”
The most upsetting and alarming research? Probably Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler’s backfire effect study. In that, the political scientists took two groups of volunteers and gave them the Bush administration’s prewar claims that Iraq was a threat and had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation — the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration’s claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.This “backfire” effect only worked on conservatives. Even when they varied the source of the refutations, it made no difference—corrections from the New York Times and Fox News both caused conservatives to believe the lies even harder. In other words, objective truth is dead, observable reality is a fairy tale, etc.

Scientists Explain Why People Vote For Republicans – Science – Gawker

Quitters Never Quit

This is all very true. It relates to the strong streak of “anti-intellectualism” within American society.

North Korean Anti-US Propaganda Posters | rightwrongrusty.com

Check these out, they’re great!

North Korean Anti-US Propaganda Posters

It seems that North Korea has a great love for the hating of America. Their posters speak volumes on the mistreatment and isolation they feel, and the apparent cause of this strife is the US. Other than being shear fantasy in nature, these posters tell a story of control and fear that has kept a society under the control of a father and son dynasty with penis envy. Is it me, or are the North Koreans depicted in the following posters super sized? We can only hope their propaganda machine of artists can crank out a few new ones soon to entertain us all.

North Korean Anti-US Propaganda Posters | rightwrongrusty.com