Grace in Division

I'm not really a good judge of these matters, but I think the South Korean government handled the question of condolences for the death of Kim Jong-Il rather well, as the Hankyoreh reports it:

Regarding the death of North Korean National Defence Committee Chairman Kim Jong-il, the South Korean government stated on Monday, “We offer our consolation to the citizens of North Korea. We hope that North Korea will swiftly regain stability and become able to cooperate in order to achieve peace and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula.”

The government also stated, “We have decided not to send a governmental delegation to North Korea. However, we will permit relatives of late former president Kim Dae-jung and late Hyundai chairman Chung Mong-hun to visit North Korea to offer condolences, in return for visits made by the North [when the two men died].” In other words, Kim Dae-jung’s widow, Lee Hee-ho, and Chung’s widow, Hyundai Group chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun, will be allowed to make visits to the North to express their condolences.

Given the churlishness of official American reaction, this was downright graceful. To say nothing of unofficial American reaction, which has been downright shameful. I hadn't intended to post a copy of the screengrab of Kim Jong-Un holding back tears as his father's body lies in state, but it might be a good counterexample to the video clips of wailing North Koreans that have gone viral in the US. Yes, Kim Jong-Il was a bad man, with a lot of blood on his hands, but so was Ronald Reagan, and any criticism of the circus that passed for his funeral was unwelcome in the US. So is Barack Obama, but his daughters will probably weep at his funeral. Yes, some of the public grief over Kim in North is staged (professional mourning is not unheard of, especially outside the West), and some of it is probably coerced, but a lot of it is probably sincere. A lot of the reactions I've been seeing seem to come from American discomfort with public displays of emotion not related to professional sports, plus the connected joy at being able to make fun of official enemies they know nothing about.

I still wonder, when I read mainstream commentary on North Korea and on Kim Jong-Il in particular, how many Americans have forgotten (or never knew) that South Korea and North Korea were one country until the US divided them, admittedly with the connivance of the Soviet Union. There are still families on both sides of the DMZ who were separated by the war and the endless state of truce, though more and more are dying off. It's been over sixty years, after all. I sympathize with my countrypeople's ignorance, since I knew very little more about Korea until the mid-1990s myself. All I knew until I met some Korean students and began to inform myself was what most Americans of my generation knew: that it was a country where college students seemed to be endlessly fighting the police in the streets. These clashes were shown every so often on TV news programs, though it was never explained what they were about. Oh, and there was a war there, named after the country, wasn't there?

It's because of that war, in which over 30,000 Americans and at least a million Koreans died (in much less time than comparable numbers died in Vietnam); because that war was deliberately forgotten in the US (we didn't "win" it, you see, and that's intolerably traumatic for us) though not in Korea; because of the continued presence of tens of thousands of American troops in South Korea; because of longstanding economic and political ties between South Korea and the US; and because the US continues to interfere in Korean affairs, often blocking rapprochement that might lessen tensions or even bring about reunification, that Americans should know more about Korea than we do. But hell, we hardly know anything about our own country, as American Korean War veterans could tell you.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, Americans are in no position to condemn other countries until they have condemned the crimes of their own government, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" as he called it in 1967. Imprisonment of vast numbers of its population? Torture? Militarization? Close surveillance of the population for traces of dissent or disloyalty? Let Americans take the log from their own eye first. That's about the only teaching of Jesus that has any real power to it as far as I'm concerned, and of course most Christians ignore it.

Grace in Division

I'm not really a good judge of these matters, but I think the South Korean government handled the question of condolences for the death of Kim Jong-Il rather well, as the Hankyoreh reports it:

Regarding the death of North Korean National Defence Committee Chairman Kim Jong-il, the South Korean government stated on Monday, “We offer our consolation to the citizens of North Korea. We hope that North Korea will swiftly regain stability and become able to cooperate in order to achieve peace and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula.”

The government also stated, “We have decided not to send a governmental delegation to North Korea. However, we will permit relatives of late former president Kim Dae-jung and late Hyundai chairman Chung Mong-hun to visit North Korea to offer condolences, in return for visits made by the North [when the two men died].” In other words, Kim Dae-jung’s widow, Lee Hee-ho, and Chung’s widow, Hyundai Group chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun, will be allowed to make visits to the North to express their condolences.

Given the churlishness of official American reaction, this was downright graceful. To say nothing of unofficial American reaction, which has been downright shameful. I hadn't intended to post a copy of the screengrab of Kim Jong-Un holding back tears as his father's body lies in state, but it might be a good counterexample to the video clips of wailing North Koreans that have gone viral in the US. Yes, Kim Jong-Il was a bad man, with a lot of blood on his hands, but so was Ronald Reagan, and any criticism of the circus that passed for his funeral was unwelcome in the US. So is Barack Obama, but his daughters will probably weep at his funeral. Yes, some of the public grief over Kim in North is staged (professional mourning is not unheard of, especially outside the West), and some of it is probably coerced, but a lot of it is probably sincere. A lot of the reactions I've been seeing seem to come from American discomfort with public displays of emotion not related to professional sports, plus the connected joy at being able to make fun of official enemies they know nothing about.

I still wonder, when I read mainstream commentary on North Korea and on Kim Jong-Il in particular, how many Americans have forgotten (or never knew) that South Korea and North Korea were one country until the US divided them, admittedly with the connivance of the Soviet Union. There are still families on both sides of the DMZ who were separated by the war and the endless state of truce, though more and more are dying off. It's been over sixty years, after all. I sympathize with my countrypeople's ignorance, since I knew very little more about Korea until the mid-1990s myself. All I knew until I met some Korean students and began to inform myself was what most Americans of my generation knew: that it was a country where college students seemed to be endlessly fighting the police in the streets. These clashes were shown every so often on TV news programs, though it was never explained what they were about. Oh, and there was a war there, named after the country, wasn't there?

It's because of that war, in which over 30,000 Americans and at least a million Koreans died (in much less time than comparable numbers died in Vietnam); because that war was deliberately forgotten in the US (we didn't "win" it, you see, and that's intolerably traumatic for us) though not in Korea; because of the continued presence of tens of thousands of American troops in South Korea; because of longstanding economic and political ties between South Korea and the US; and because the US continues to interfere in Korean affairs, often blocking rapprochement that might lessen tensions or even bring about reunification, that Americans should know more about Korea than we do. But hell, we hardly know anything about our own country, as American Korean War veterans could tell you.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, Americans are in no position to condemn other countries until they have condemned the crimes of their own government, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" as he called it in 1967. Imprisonment of vast numbers of its population? Torture? Militarization? Close surveillance of the population for traces of dissent or disloyalty? Let Americans take the log from their own eye first. That's about the only teaching of Jesus that has any real power to it as far as I'm concerned, and of course most Christians ignore it.

There Goes the Sun King

Kim Jong Il is dead, as I'm sure everybody in a position to read this blog knows by now. (Judging from what I've been reading online all day, it might be helpful to some readers if I explain that East Asian names usually put the surname first. So Kim was the dictator's surname or family name, Jong Il his given name; Jong Il Kim in Western order.) I certainly don't mourn him, but it's hard to know what to say when so many willfully ignorant people, people who know only that Kim was an official Bad Guy, are jumping for joy at the news -- especially in the US, where many people and our corporate media have been doing the Happy Dance over the guys it's safe to hate in the past year.

There are plenty of people on the Korean peninsula who have reason to hate Kim Jong Il; here in the US, not so much. He hurt a lot of people, but few if any Americans; so why are Americans so excited about his decease? Well, aside from Fidel Castro, we have hardly any Commies left to hate anymore, and for many Americans, Commies have a special place in what we laughingly call our hearts. Second, he was insubordinate, refusing to recognize that we are in charge of the world -- and worse, he played us rather effectively. This was a special slap in the face to American pride, given that we'd always thought him a joke from the day he succeeded his father in 1994, and have continued to treat him as a joke while simultaneously inflating him into a world-class threat to peace, justice, and the American way. Those are the only reasons I can think of, as opposed to pretenses.

It can't be because he was corrupt, as he undoubtedly was -- America gets along just fine with corrupt heads of state and their families. It can't be because he ran a viciously repressive state with hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, and a failed economy that periodically collapsed into famine -- America gets along just fine with the rulers of viciously repressive states etc. No, it can only be because he wouldn't take orders from us; why, he wouldn't even take orders from his Red masters in what the deranged wing of the American Right used to call "Peiping." (It was the pronunciation used by Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists.)

My first thought when I heard the news and began to see Western reactions was Suharto, the dictator of Indonesia for over thirty years. Suharto took power in a spectacularly bloody 1965 coup, epitomized by the slaughter of uncountable ethnic Chinese designated as Communists. Estimates range from half a million to two or three million or even more. It seems certain that the US was involved (via) (though given our record, US involvement would be plausible even if we didn't have other good reasons to believe it), with the CIA giving Suharto the names of labor activists to butcher. At the time, FAIR has reported,

After the scale of the massacre began to be apparent, [New York Times writer Max] Frankel was even more enthusiastic. Under the headline "Elated U.S. Officials Looking to New Aid to Jakarta's Economy" (3/13/66), Frankel reported that "the Johnson administration found it difficult today to hide its delight with the news from Indonesia.... After a long period of patient diplomacy designed to help the army triumph over the Communists, and months of prudent silence...officials were elated to find their expectations being realized." Frankel went on to describe the leader of the massacre, Gen. Suharto, as "an efficient and effective military commander."

After having pacified the country,

Suharto quickly transformed Indonesia into an "investors' paradise," only slightly qualified by the steep bribery charge for entry. Investors flocked in to exploit the timber, mineral and oil resources, as well as the cheap, repressed labor, often in joint ventures with Suharto family members and cronies. Investor enthusiasm for this favorable climate of investment was expressed in political support and even in public advertisements; e.g., the full page ad in the New York Times (9/24/92) by Chevron and Texaco entitled "Indonesia: A Model for Economic Development."

A decade later, in 1975, Suharto invaded the neighboring country of East Timor, initiating a quarter-century-long reign of terror, again supported faithfully by the US, which killed a quarter-million Timorese.

When Suharto left power, he received the harsh judgment you'd expect such a person to suffer at the hands of the American media.

In the months of his exit, he was referred to as Indonesia's "soft-spoken, enigmatic president" (USA Today, 5/14/98), a "profoundly spiritual man" (New York Times, 5/17/98), a "reforming autocrat" (New York Times, 5/22/98). His motives were benign: "It was not simply personal ambition that led Mr. Suharto to clamp down so hard for so long; it was a fear, shared by many in this country of 210 million people, of chaos" (New York Times, 6/2/98); he "failed to comprehend the intensity of his people's discontent" (New York Times, 5/21/98), otherwise he undoubtedly would have stepped down earlier. He was sometimes described as "authoritarian," occasionally as a "dictator," but never as a mass murderer. Suharto's mass killings were referred to--if at all--in a brief and antiseptic paragraph.

I believe Kim Jong Il deserves nothing less than the same kind of pitiless scourging Suharto got.

By all accounts, North Korea is a dreary, regimented society, with no civil liberties and little material security. (A good place to begin reading if you want to know more would be Bruce Cumings's North Korea: Another Country [The New Press, 2004].) At the same time, I keep getting the impression that much of what is depicted as grim regimentation is simply normal for communitarian societies, including South Korea. I remember reading a sketch of a North Korean extended family, comprising at least three generations, out for a night of karaoke, which from the description sounded just like its South Korean working-class counterpart. The massed rallies and organizing chanting also sound to me like South Korean society in the days of its dictatorship: GoGo 70, a recent South Korean film set around 1970, began with archival footage of marching soldiers, cheering crowds, and martial songs that at first I took for the North, but it turned out to the freedom-loving South. And the standard of living was higher in the North than in the South until the 1970s, partly because until then the South was run by corrupt American-backed dictatorships more interested in lining their pockets than in raising up their people. Not until Park Chung Hee's Five Year Plans (did he deliberately take that label from Stalin's USSR?) did the South Korean economy begin to take off, though as with all modernizing industrial economies, at great human cost.

But despite the occasional concern trolling -- oh worra worra, what will happen to North Korea now that Kim is dead? is his young heir-designate, Kim Jong Un, mature enough at twenty-something to take the reins of power? surely he should invite the US to step in and guide him with the same benign wisdom we've exhibited everywhere else -- I don't believe that many of the people celebrating Kim's dead give a damn about the North Korean people, or about peace on the Korean peninsula, or about anything except venting the free-floating rage and hatred they don't dare express about anything that matters. The US government is no more interested in democracy in North Korea than it is in the South, which means (at best) hardly at all; and most Americans don't know enough about either Korea to have an opinion.

There Goes the Sun King

Kim Jong Il is dead, as I'm sure everybody in a position to read this blog knows by now. (Judging from what I've been reading online all day, it might be helpful to some readers if I explain that East Asian names usually put the surname first. So Kim was the dictator's surname or family name, Jong Il his given name; Jong Il Kim in Western order.) I certainly don't mourn him, but it's hard to know what to say when so many willfully ignorant people, people who know only that Kim was an official Bad Guy, are jumping for joy at the news -- especially in the US, where many people and our corporate media have been doing the Happy Dance over the guys it's safe to hate in the past year.

There are plenty of people on the Korean peninsula who have reason to hate Kim Jong Il; here in the US, not so much. He hurt a lot of people, but few if any Americans; so why are Americans so excited about his decease? Well, aside from Fidel Castro, we have hardly any Commies left to hate anymore, and for many Americans, Commies have a special place in what we laughingly call our hearts. Second, he was insubordinate, refusing to recognize that we are in charge of the world -- and worse, he played us rather effectively. This was a special slap in the face to American pride, given that we'd always thought him a joke from the day he succeeded his father in 1994, and have continued to treat him as a joke while simultaneously inflating him into a world-class threat to peace, justice, and the American way. Those are the only reasons I can think of, as opposed to pretenses.

It can't be because he was corrupt, as he undoubtedly was -- America gets along just fine with corrupt heads of state and their families. It can't be because he ran a viciously repressive state with hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, and a failed economy that periodically collapsed into famine -- America gets along just fine with the rulers of viciously repressive states etc. No, it can only be because he wouldn't take orders from us; why, he wouldn't even take orders from his Red masters in what the deranged wing of the American Right used to call "Peiping." (It was the pronunciation used by Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists.)

My first thought when I heard the news and began to see Western reactions was Suharto, the dictator of Indonesia for over thirty years. Suharto took power in a spectacularly bloody 1965 coup, epitomized by the slaughter of uncountable ethnic Chinese designated as Communists. Estimates range from half a million to two or three million or even more. It seems certain that the US was involved (via) (though given our record, US involvement would be plausible even if we didn't have other good reasons to believe it), with the CIA giving Suharto the names of labor activists to butcher. At the time, FAIR has reported,

After the scale of the massacre began to be apparent, [New York Times writer Max] Frankel was even more enthusiastic. Under the headline "Elated U.S. Officials Looking to New Aid to Jakarta's Economy" (3/13/66), Frankel reported that "the Johnson administration found it difficult today to hide its delight with the news from Indonesia.... After a long period of patient diplomacy designed to help the army triumph over the Communists, and months of prudent silence...officials were elated to find their expectations being realized." Frankel went on to describe the leader of the massacre, Gen. Suharto, as "an efficient and effective military commander."

After having pacified the country,

Suharto quickly transformed Indonesia into an "investors' paradise," only slightly qualified by the steep bribery charge for entry. Investors flocked in to exploit the timber, mineral and oil resources, as well as the cheap, repressed labor, often in joint ventures with Suharto family members and cronies. Investor enthusiasm for this favorable climate of investment was expressed in political support and even in public advertisements; e.g., the full page ad in the New York Times (9/24/92) by Chevron and Texaco entitled "Indonesia: A Model for Economic Development."

A decade later, in 1975, Suharto invaded the neighboring country of East Timor, initiating a quarter-century-long reign of terror, again supported faithfully by the US, which killed a quarter-million Timorese.

When Suharto left power, he received the harsh judgment you'd expect such a person to suffer at the hands of the American media.

In the months of his exit, he was referred to as Indonesia's "soft-spoken, enigmatic president" (USA Today, 5/14/98), a "profoundly spiritual man" (New York Times, 5/17/98), a "reforming autocrat" (New York Times, 5/22/98). His motives were benign: "It was not simply personal ambition that led Mr. Suharto to clamp down so hard for so long; it was a fear, shared by many in this country of 210 million people, of chaos" (New York Times, 6/2/98); he "failed to comprehend the intensity of his people's discontent" (New York Times, 5/21/98), otherwise he undoubtedly would have stepped down earlier. He was sometimes described as "authoritarian," occasionally as a "dictator," but never as a mass murderer. Suharto's mass killings were referred to--if at all--in a brief and antiseptic paragraph.

I believe Kim Jong Il deserves nothing less than the same kind of pitiless scourging Suharto got.

By all accounts, North Korea is a dreary, regimented society, with no civil liberties and little material security. (A good place to begin reading if you want to know more would be Bruce Cumings's North Korea: Another Country [The New Press, 2004].) At the same time, I keep getting the impression that much of what is depicted as grim regimentation is simply normal for communitarian societies, including South Korea. I remember reading a sketch of a North Korean extended family, comprising at least three generations, out for a night of karaoke, which from the description sounded just like its South Korean working-class counterpart. The massed rallies and organizing chanting also sound to me like South Korean society in the days of its dictatorship: GoGo 70, a recent South Korean film set around 1970, began with archival footage of marching soldiers, cheering crowds, and martial songs that at first I took for the North, but it turned out to the freedom-loving South. And the standard of living was higher in the North than in the South until the 1970s, partly because until then the South was run by corrupt American-backed dictatorships more interested in lining their pockets than in raising up their people. Not until Park Chung Hee's Five Year Plans (did he deliberately take that label from Stalin's USSR?) did the South Korean economy begin to take off, though as with all modernizing industrial economies, at great human cost.

But despite the occasional concern trolling -- oh worra worra, what will happen to North Korea now that Kim is dead? is his young heir-designate, Kim Jong Un, mature enough at twenty-something to take the reins of power? surely he should invite the US to step in and guide him with the same benign wisdom we've exhibited everywhere else -- I don't believe that many of the people celebrating Kim's dead give a damn about the North Korean people, or about peace on the Korean peninsula, or about anything except venting the free-floating rage and hatred they don't dare express about anything that matters. The US government is no more interested in democracy in North Korea than it is in the South, which means (at best) hardly at all; and most Americans don't know enough about either Korea to have an opinion.

Look at You, Miss Information!

Here's another story that people should be aware of, but I can link to it. Briefly, John Caruso at The Distant Ocean saw a story from Ha'aretz claiming that another blockade-busting aid ship, the Rachel Corrie, had been negotiating with the Israeli government and would land quietly in Ashdod and allow its cargo to be shipped to Gaza from there. "The most recent messages from Halliday were said to be particularly encouraging," Ha'aretz reported.

But then, another story, from CNN this time, reported:

"We have not stopped and have no intention of stopping," said former Assistant U.N. Secretary-General Denis Halliday from aboard the vessel. "We will only stop when Israelis force us to do so." [...]

But [Adam] Shapiro said people on the ship deny that report and believe it is part of a misinformation campaign by the Israeli government.

So, be wary what you believe from the Israeli and US governments. The other day an article at the Korea Times described what is known as the "Sleeper Effect," complaining that "many South Koreans remained doubtful" about about the report, the work of "a multinational investigation team ... [which] concluded late last month that the Navy frigate Cheonan sank on March 26 due to a North Korean torpedo attack."

A vast majority of countries accepted the explanation backed by convincing evidence but many South Koreans seemingly remained doubtful. Rather, they turned to online posts, which alleged the Seoul administration fabricated evidence.

Domestic observers point out that the phenomenon is caused by the "sleeper effect," under which people tend to trust a message from low-credibility sources some time after they learned of it.

"Most people do not advocate even a persuasive message if it comes together with a discounting cue, or incredible sources, such as rumors on the Web," said a professor at a Seoul-based university.

"After some time passes, however, people forget about the source and remember just the persuasiveness of the message. Then, they believe in it and this is called the sleeper effect. I think the effect is behind the distrust on the Cheonan case."

This story appeared in the Biz/Finance section, under News rather than Opinion. But notice the sourcing. Why wasn't the professor or his university named?

Media Research, a local public opinion pollster, commissioned a survey in late May on the announcement of the sunken navy ship. To the surprise of the government, 24 percent of respondents said that they did not trust the official report.

This means that more than 10 million of the country's 48 million population are suspicious about the in-depth investigation by a multinational team, comprising both private experts and government officials.

North Korea reportedly used identity theft of South Korean people to upload a flurry of posts to contend that the South manipulated the evidence and the North had nothing to do with the case. The anonymous professor said that such a maneuver would have also played a role in creating the sleeper effect.

"Reportedly"? According to whom? And once again, why is that professor anonymous?

Now, there's very good reason to disbelieve anything worked on by low-credibility sources like the US government, or the South Korean government, or the Israeli government -- particularly when official enemies like North Korea or Iran or Hamas are involved. And while "online posts" are not necessarily reliable, sometimes they are, much to the fury of governments. Staff Reporter Kim Tae-gyu is carefully vague as to which "online posts" people were going to. And at the very end of the article, he tells us this:

Ever since the idea of the sleeper effect appeared around 60 years ago, debate has continued as to whether the phenomena take place often or is observed under only very unusual circumstances.

So, we have an anonymous professor pulling an unproved "effect" and North Korean computer hacking out of his fundament to explain away people's distrust of their untrustworthy government. That's serious journalism!

Staying with responsible and thoughtful newspaper work, longtime Korea Times pundit Michael Breen argues that South Korea should change its name so people won't confuse it with North Korea. Oh, and Kim Kardashian wants a bigger ass.

Look at You, Miss Information!

Here's another story that people should be aware of, but I can link to it. Briefly, John Caruso at The Distant Ocean saw a story from Ha'aretz claiming that another blockade-busting aid ship, the Rachel Corrie, had been negotiating with the Israeli government and would land quietly in Ashdod and allow its cargo to be shipped to Gaza from there. "The most recent messages from Halliday were said to be particularly encouraging," Ha'aretz reported.

But then, another story, from CNN this time, reported:

"We have not stopped and have no intention of stopping," said former Assistant U.N. Secretary-General Denis Halliday from aboard the vessel. "We will only stop when Israelis force us to do so." [...]

But [Adam] Shapiro said people on the ship deny that report and believe it is part of a misinformation campaign by the Israeli government.

So, be wary what you believe from the Israeli and US governments. The other day an article at the Korea Times described what is known as the "Sleeper Effect," complaining that "many South Koreans remained doubtful" about about the report, the work of "a multinational investigation team ... [which] concluded late last month that the Navy frigate Cheonan sank on March 26 due to a North Korean torpedo attack."

A vast majority of countries accepted the explanation backed by convincing evidence but many South Koreans seemingly remained doubtful. Rather, they turned to online posts, which alleged the Seoul administration fabricated evidence.

Domestic observers point out that the phenomenon is caused by the "sleeper effect," under which people tend to trust a message from low-credibility sources some time after they learned of it.

"Most people do not advocate even a persuasive message if it comes together with a discounting cue, or incredible sources, such as rumors on the Web," said a professor at a Seoul-based university.

"After some time passes, however, people forget about the source and remember just the persuasiveness of the message. Then, they believe in it and this is called the sleeper effect. I think the effect is behind the distrust on the Cheonan case."

This story appeared in the Biz/Finance section, under News rather than Opinion. But notice the sourcing. Why wasn't the professor or his university named?

Media Research, a local public opinion pollster, commissioned a survey in late May on the announcement of the sunken navy ship. To the surprise of the government, 24 percent of respondents said that they did not trust the official report.

This means that more than 10 million of the country's 48 million population are suspicious about the in-depth investigation by a multinational team, comprising both private experts and government officials.

North Korea reportedly used identity theft of South Korean people to upload a flurry of posts to contend that the South manipulated the evidence and the North had nothing to do with the case. The anonymous professor said that such a maneuver would have also played a role in creating the sleeper effect.

"Reportedly"? According to whom? And once again, why is that professor anonymous?

Now, there's very good reason to disbelieve anything worked on by low-credibility sources like the US government, or the South Korean government, or the Israeli government -- particularly when official enemies like North Korea or Iran or Hamas are involved. And while "online posts" are not necessarily reliable, sometimes they are, much to the fury of governments. Staff Reporter Kim Tae-gyu is carefully vague as to which "online posts" people were going to. And at the very end of the article, he tells us this:

Ever since the idea of the sleeper effect appeared around 60 years ago, debate has continued as to whether the phenomena take place often or is observed under only very unusual circumstances.

So, we have an anonymous professor pulling an unproved "effect" and North Korean computer hacking out of his fundament to explain away people's distrust of their untrustworthy government. That's serious journalism!

Staying with responsible and thoughtful newspaper work, longtime Korea Times pundit Michael Breen argues that South Korea should change its name so people won't confuse it with North Korea. Oh, and Kim Kardashian wants a bigger ass.