A Second Hand Conjecture

Blogger FangKC queried the archive of the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece, and discovered that 19 countries and organizations have been officially accused of hurting the feelings of the Chinese people. You can anticipate some such as the Japan and United States, others are quite unexpected.

No Comments »

So, did you enjoy the much discussed post-American world order? Hope you didn’t miss it. Surely it didn’t lack for advertising.

But if you did happen to step out for a moment, we just lived through the end of market capitalism, the death of the dollar, the collapse of American power, the cultural and political atrophy of the West, the rise of Eastern dictatorships to world leadership, and petrocracy as the vanguard political philosophy of the future.

Bill Emmott notices that a lot of this isn’t exactly plausible in historical context, and that with the collapse in the price of oil, a strengthening dollar, an even worse European recession and the unavailability of predicted competitive alternatives to American power…the post-post-American moment may be upon us.

(HT: Thomas P.M. Barnett)

No Comments »

According to an expose in Japanese magazine Shukan Taishu, Kim Jong Il instituted a training program in sexual espionage for the DPRK’s female secret agents. They’ve been used to seduce and entrap everyone from foreign government officials to defectors.

1 Comment »

Premium iron ore is expensive in the days of the mineral wars, and Japan’s industry needs a lot of it. So,  Japan is looking at an inventive new way to minimize steel production’s iron appetite.

No Comments »

Kim Jong Il as Colonel Sanders by Jonathan Barnbrook (photo: acb | The Null Device)

North Korea is already a formal necrocracy (government by the dead), given that Kim Il-sung –who has been dead since 1994– remains the titular head of state there. But according to Waseda University professor Toshimitsu Shigemura in Japan, Kim’s son and successor in power Kim Jong Il has been dead himself since 2003. Shigemura has a number of family contacts which might validate a rumor which has been circulating since a period of peculiar diplomatic activity which attended Kim the Younger’s alleged death.

According to Shigemura, the role of leader is being filled by a number of body-doubles in an elaborate international charade which would seem unlikely in any other country. However, such a ruse seems completely plausible in the hermit kingdom, in which even more ludicrous fantasies are routinely employed to justify government policy and loyalty (for instance the state maintains that the birds of the country sang praise in Korean, when Kim Jong Il was born).

Evidently Japanese intelligence was concerned enough that former Prime Minister Koizumi had held a summit with a body double in 2004, that they considered voice-printing Kim and the suspected double. Only the prospect of political embarrassment for Koizumi made them hold off. With Koizumi out of office, I wouldn’t mind them doing as much now to clarify the issue.

No Comments »

It’s not the one you might think. The most interesting observation:

“Not to be overlooked is the massive economic cost of reintegrating an antiquated North Korean economy into the modern economic world. The contrast between a backward North and a modern South recalls the challenges of reintegrating East Germany with the modernized West, a process that severely inhibited economic growth all across Europe for nearly a decade and which has lingering side effects that persist even now. South Korea and China will inevitably bear the brunt of these costs, but the second-order effects on the U.S. economy deriving from decreased demand for the U.S. treasury securities might threaten yet another hit on an already strained U.S. credit market.”

2 Comments »

Oh hells yeah.

1 Comment »

Japan runs the world’s second largest economy with 17 cabinet ministers. Ghana, one of the world’s poorest, currently has 70. Why? Ben Ofosu-Appiah examines the question and argues the need for the dramatic downsizing of African governments. Shakara then offers an interesting counterpoint.

No Comments »