Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
Claudia Rosett on the lack of media attention – not to mention any kind of statement from TCM – regarding the recent UAE seizure of cargo – that would be detonators, ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades, and rocket launchers - from a ship from North Korea bound for Iran.
Claudia Rosett on the Bill Clinton visit to Pyongyang. Key sentences: “Iran has just picked up three Americans . . . Which ex-president should Iran now expect to come calling?”"
UPDATE: Kim Jong Il has pardoned the two US journalists, proving Rosett’s point in the quote above.
. . . take a moment to get your brain around the cyberattacks on South Korean and US government websites, including the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Transportation.
North Korea sends what has become a customary Independence day greeting
. . . North Korea test-fires four more short-range missiles.
North Korea threatens to wipe the United States off the globe if we – well, what? Enforce the sanctions that the Six-Way Talk parties got the UN Security Council to enact?
There are three current aspects to the North Korean situation: the Myanmar-bound Kang Nam, which we have good reason to believe is carrying a cargo of weaponry, which has just passed Shanghai, and is being shadowed, but not stopped and boarded, by the USS John McCain, the two journalists, whose fate is now directly in the hands of heir-apparent Kim Jong Un, and the upcoming Taepodong-2 test, aimed in the direction of Hawaii.
The regimes in Iran and North Korea are watching each other to see how best to taunt TCM. Is there any real question as to why the level of testing and taunting of the US president has gone up dramatically this year?
The effete and mush-headed gushers, the climate-change Kool-Aid drinkers, the Fairness Storm Troopers and the remnants of the hippies may have thought, and may still think, that TCM is some kind of “light worker,” a being so oozing with enlightenment and purity that a few utterances from his radiant mug will make turn the world into Big Rock Candy Mountain. The world’s thugs have no such illusions. They smell weakness and know that this is the moment to go for it.
If we squeak through this summer without experiencing truly unthinkable developments, we’ll still have the issue of a seriously diminished United States to deal with. The one blessing will be that TCM will be rendered so ineffectual that we won’t even bother to look to him as the go-to-guy for handling truly important stuff. There will be a vacuum that, hopefully, some truly American figure can fill.
It will be late in the game for such a realization, but that’s better than not realizing it at all.
That must be the explanation for the joint Russian-Chinese beating of the dead horse of six-way talks. In any event, the implication that the US, Japan and South Korea must shoulder some accountability for the talks’ breakdown is another clear demonstration that Russian and Chinese interests don’t always coincide exactly with those of the three countries to which the implication is directed.
TCM and President Lee vow to not let North Korea become a nuclear power.
Um, one hitch: it already is one.
BTW, any plans in the works to get those two journalists out of there?
North Korea says it will “weaponize” its plutonium.
This is clearly not a dormant phase in the hermit kingdom’s spiralling relationship with the civilized world.
New development: combining the words “nuclear” and “offensive” in their incendiary rhetoric. So much for that solely-for-deterrent-purposes jive.
The two Current TV journalists have been sentenced to twelve years of hard labor.
This current juncture in the ongoing North Korean situation makes a particular aspect of it more obvious than ever: it’s a spiral, not a cycle. At various times over the last twenty years or so, after a crisis mode has subsided and the latest mechanism for “moving forward” (Agreed Framework, Six-Way Talks) is being implemented, pundits of such stripes as libertarianism or realpolitik appeal to the public’s tendency toward complacency with such arguments as other world hot spots being of more pressing importance, or our assured ability to get China to see that it must apply more pressure on Kim, or The NorKor nuke program not really being combat-ready.
Then comes along another crisis mode and the conversation’s tone returns to that of “no good options.” That is to say, hand-wringing.It’s time for us all to notice that with each return to a crisis mode, the stakes go higher. There is an upward – or downward, if you wish – spiral toward even less room to maneuver.
Think about the extent to which the momentum in the volley of taunts from NK to the West has increased just this year.
North Korea was never a back-burner issue. It’s a classic illustration of the truism that problems – real problems – interruptions of life’s wonderfully playful pace – indications of real danger – don’t go away by themselves.
Kim names his youngest son as his successor-in-grooming, and
A giggle amidst the grimness: a mark against the middle son was the fact that he had tried to sneak into the Disneyland in Japan on a fake passport.
That ought to get North Korea to quit threatening to attack US and South Korean ships in international waters, doncha think?
And will we need extra strong condemnations for re-commencing plutonium production and the announcement that NK no longer considers itself bound by the 1953 armistice?
North Korea test-fires yet another short-range missile.
. . . five days ago in a WSJ column. Guess who didn’t see it coming? TCM’s special envoy to the Korean peninsula, Steven Bosworth.
