 Wednesday, September 10, 2003
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Now here's one of the more clever ideas I've come across: turn your laptop display into a 3D monitor using nothing more than cellophane. Via Ned Batchelder.
'Course, the software to create the images might be pretty interesting.
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The sight and sound of South Korean people chanting in unison with North Korean cheerleaders:
doesn't particularly bother or threaten me as much as it seems to other commentators. "We want --" shout the cheerleaders at a soccer match in Taegu -- "unification!" shout the South Koreans.
It's fair, and it's understandable that at a far deeper level than politics Koreans do want to be reunited. And, the odd idiot excepted, my experience has been that most Southerners do indeed understand how dangerous the Communist government is, and therefore desire an umbrella of US protection. The attitude seems to be best summarized by Shin Sang-ok, a movie director who was kidnapped by the North in 1978, made movies for Kim Jong-il under duress, and ultimately escaped in 1986:
"The North Koreans were all talented and good people," he [ told Philip Gourevitch, in the article quoted below]. "Just two hundred or so were evil, and they were all in charge."
Additional comments on Tacitus.
UPDATE: Part of me thinks that the visit of the cheerleaders and athletes is a wonderful thing: they will return having seen an incredibly prosperous South Korea, awash in material goods, with a happy, well-fed people. Perhaps they will tell others in the North, and start the sort of subversive story-telling that ultimately led to the fall of the Soviet Union.
Part of me fears for their lives.
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Washington Post: After eight years away from newspapers, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Berkeley Breathed is creating a new comic strip called "Opus," starring his beloved penguin of the same name.
Yeah!
(Via Peter O'Kelly)
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Last week I mentioned an interview with Philip Gourevitch, who's written an article on North Korea for the New Yorker.
The interview doesn't really do the article justice: entitled "Letter From North Korea," the lengthy article is extraordinary, and traces North Korea's peculiar development from its first contact with Americans in 1866 through its division after World War II, the Korean War, and the subsequent Communist dictatorship which followed. Gourevitch interviews a number of North Korean defectors who tell horrifying and all-too-credible tales of torture, starvation, and, ultimately, cannibalism:
"My oldest son's wife and two of their children died of hunger. Two grandsons were starving--eight and ten years old. They went to a noodle seller and begged. They ate and fell asleep on the shop floor. Then the owner killed them with an axe to put their meat into the nodles because pork was very expensive at the time."
Gourevitch discusses the contradictions of this Communist regime, so like the others: that to ostensibly create a classless society North Korea now has perhaps the most rigid caste system in the world; that in spite of its national philosophy of self-reliance (juche) North Korea is completely dependent on the outside world, including the US, for food and energy; that in the name of protecting the people it starves them in order to arm its military.
It's a pity the article isn't (last I looked) online.
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Today this blog is two years old.
Yes, it's true that I started this the day before September 11, 2001. I had intended it at the time to be purely technology-focused; but like a whirlwind the attacks a day later thrust my writings back into the domains of politics, foreign policy and national security. Lots of us, like LGF, who I gather in real life is a Mac-based Web designer, experienced a similar thing: an awakening, or in my case reawakening, of political consciousness.
Anyway: I have a lot more to say, and it's going to take me a lot longer than two more years to say it. I expect the blog will continue its fairly eclectic selection of topics, from Korea to Iraq to digital security technology to web services to the future of computing, and the future of the United States and the world. Really.
And if all that sounds like an odd admixture, well, that's me: English major, software architect, novelist.
Hope you enjoy it.
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Aug Oct
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