Topic: North Korea

Slate today has a photo essay on North Korea. Nothing earth-shattering here, but notice that every single picture emphasizes collective activity. In North Korea, no one is ever alone.

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Topic: Korean Culture

The Korean Cultural Service in New York has announced two wine-tasting events that will have a Korean angle:

Wines of the World: On Wednesday, December 7, the 92nd Street Y will hold a lecture and tasting of international wines, including wines from Korea.

Taste of Korea 2005: Munbaeju, Korea's Wine Treasure: On Thursday, December 8, at the Korean Cultural Service, will be a tasting of Korea's "important intangible cultural property number 86-ga," munbaeju. Click Korea describes munbaeju as "a traditional liquor made of malted wheat, rice, and millet which originates in the Pyeongyang region of North Korea. It is famous for its fragrance[,] which is said to resemble the munbae rose, hence its name. The alcohol content is around 40%." More entertaining is this blurb from the government website of the Jung-gu district of Seoul:

This is the alcoholic emitting the perfume of fruit of Munbae tree(similar to pear). April or May is the proper time to make it and it takes approximately 4 months to mature. The characteristic of Munbaeju is to make the fragrance of fruit be emitted without using Munbae fruts at all. There are two ways of making; one is to use yeast and the other is to use white chrysanthemum. The color is light yellowish brown and it is a kind of Soju with 40 degree of alcoholic ingredient. At present, a person who possess the skill to make it is Lee, Gichun, who received the brewing skill continued to his farther from his grandmother.

Sic, which is probably how you'll feel if you get drunk on the stuff. As for "the alcoholic emitting the perfume of fruit of Munbae tree," that would've been an improvement over the alcoholics emitting the perfume of soju, kimchi and cigarettes, a heady bouquet often found on the Seoul subways early Sunday morning, as stuporous salarymen made their way home after a night spent sleeping it off at the bathhouse.

Hey, you think the Jung-gu government is hiring English editors?

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Topic: United Nations

The New York Times today devotes its lead editorial to bitch-slapping John Bolton, claiming that his bluster and bullying are derailing a reform process that the United States actually supports and giving ammo to those who oppose serious change. In my view, the Times is pretty much right on.

(Oh, and I just got a call from one of the diplomats asking me what is meant by the sentence, "America's most successful U.N. ambassadors ... have known how to harness American power to patient, skillful diplomacy." I had to admit that this one threw me a bit as well. Are we using patient, skillful diplomacy to drive American power or vice versa? The language supports the first interpretation, but that doesn't make much sense conceptually. Anyway, an odd sentence, but a forceful editorial.)

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Topic: North Korea

Reuters is reporting that North Korea is ready to scrap its nuclear program in exchange for better relations with the United States, Japan and South Korea. This is a bit of a shift from the DPRK's earlier stance that it would give up its nuclear weapons only if it received a light-water nuclear reactor for power generation, something the United States has been understandable reluctant to provide.

As is so often the case with North Korea, the information arrived in a roundabout way: South Korea's Grand National Party, the main opposition party, announced in a public statement that Ambassador Ning Fukui, China's envoy to Seoul, had said that North Korea was ready to dismantle its nuclear program.

No one yet knows the source of Ambassador Ning's view, or even whether he really said what he's been quoted as saying. If it's true, however, it bodes well for future talks, which will probably start up again within the next month or so.

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Topic: Politics

It's widely understood that if you want to control a country, you need to control its media. The disastrous rise of Serbian nationalism wass aided and abetted by Yugoslav state television, while in Rwanda the call to genocide was put out over the radio.

The United States has a more diverse and complex media market than either Rwanda or Yugoslavia, of course. But in the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing reports on the conservative takeover of American radio, starting with the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987:

Introduced in 1949, [the Fairness Doctrine] required TV and radio stations to cover "controversial issues" of interest to their communities, and, when doing so, to provide "a reasonable opportunity for the presentation of contrasting viewpoints." Intended to encourage stations to avoid partisan programming, the Fairness Doctrine had the practical effect of keeping political commentary off the air altogether. In 1986, a federal court ruled that the doctrine did not have the force of law, and the following year the FCC abolished it.

At that point, stations were free to broadcast whatever they wanted. In 1988, several dozen AM stations began carrying a show hosted by a thirty-seven-year-old college dropout named Rush Limbaugh.

This leaves open the question of why conservatives have exploited the post-Fairness Doctrine media landscape so much more effectively than liberals. But if you've ever wondered why the tone seemed to change in Washington sometime around the first Bush administration, the abolition of the Doctrine is the reason. It has opened the door for people like Mark Levin, "a lawyer turned talk show host who specializes in right-wing name-calling (he called Joseph Wilson and his wife 'finks,' Judy Miller 'a rat,' Ted Kennedy 'a lifelong drunk,' The New York Times the 'New York Slimes,' and Senator Charles Schumer 'Chucky Schmucky')." That kind of invective has become painfully common in our political discourse (the left does it too, though usually with more wit and tact, and to much smaller audiences).

How can this trend be countered?

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Topic: Nepal

It is generally in times of stress and trouble that people turn to messiahs, but the Nepali "Buddha boy" is something stranger still: a messiah who will submit to scientific verification.

The 15-year-old has been sitting under a peepal tree for six months, supposedly without eating or drinking. He has also been bitten by a snake — twice. Not surprisingly, he's become an object of pilgrimage (and attendant donations and commerce), and some have come to believe he's the reincarnation of the historical Buddha. Now local leaders are going to allow scientists to study the boy, though without touching him. If nothing else, they can watch to verify whether he indeed remains in meditation all night.

It's stories like these that remind me just how different and alien Asia was when I lived there. It made me remember an incident on our visit to Patan (scroll down to "Is It Real?"), in the Kathmandu Valley:

A boy in the square pointed us toward a monumental carved doorway into the courtyard of an adjacent palace. "Come see! Ritual!" he shouted. Inside the courtyard we discovered a mostly Nepali group of spectators ringing a troupe of masked dancers who shivered and twitched to the rhythms as several young men played bell cymbals and an older man drummed and crooned a strange wordless chant. In the center, one dancer paid elaborate homage to the bloody severed head of a buffalo, next to which an assistant held a butter torch. Eventually the dancers were all given swords covered in tikka (colored powder used for rituals), and they began a slow, whirling group dance.

I can make guesses as to what the ceremony was about, but what stands out is its very strangeness — the wild, matted hair of the masks; the old men underneath dressed as tribal women with earings and bracelets and necklaces; the hypnotic clang of the cymbals and the ragged line of the old man's wordless singing; the raw power of the sacrificed head still trickling blood.

It was moments like that, or being told matter-of-factly about reincarnations and miracles at Kopan Monastery, that made us realize we had stepped into a different world that seemed to function by different rules than the ones we knew and accepted.

I didn't believe in miracles, and I still don't, but it was also ridiculous to imagine that all these earnest monks were simply lying. So what was going on? I don't know. Indeed, if you're looking to not-know, I strongly recommend a visit to the Indian subcontinent. There is value in discovering the limits of your own explanations for things. Ideally, instead of lunging for some new set of explanations, one can learn to accept a level of ambiguity, complexity and obscurity. The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know.

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Topic: United Nations

Slate has an article about the conflict over top-level domain names on the Internet. It's an abstruse subject, but essentially it comes down to this: there's a group called ICANN that administers top-level domain names (that is, the URLs we type to go to web addresses, including .com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov, and country codes such as .us, .cn, .kr, and so on). ICANN is a California-based nonprofit, and this is what makes the rest of the world nervous. Countries like Iran and China worry that leaving the top-level domain system under US control puts them at risk of having their web traffic meddled with, and they would like to have greater control of that traffic themselves.

The latest round of chatter on this subject has been generated by a recent summit in Tunis, at which the idea was floated that the UN should take over ICANN's job. Enthusiasm for this notion was reportedly low.

There are two interesting concepts in the Slate article, and I would love to hear from readers who know more about this subject than me whether either one makes sense.

The first is that top-level domains could be administered by some kind of distributed peer-to-peer system like BitTorrent:

Countries that choose to house Torrent servers would receive a random piece of the DNS pie over a closed P2P network, with mirrors set up to correct data by consensus in the case of corruption or unauthorized modification. No one country would actually physically host the entire database.

Is this actually plausible?

Secondly, the article argues that top-level domains are headed for eventual obsolescence. How realistic is this idea? Will other modes of communication make .com irrelevant? If so, how soon will this happen?

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Topic: Islam

In the December 1 New York Review of Books, William Dalrymple takes an illuminating look inside the madrasas. Just as Peter J. Boyer's New Yorker article a few months back drew important distinctions between Christian fundamentalists and Evangelicals (see this earlier post), Dalrymple points out that few of the al Qaeda terrorists who have mounted attacks on targets in the West are products of the notorious madrasa system, which some have labeled as terrorist training camps.

In fact, the madrasas vary widely, as one would expect. Even the most militant, however, tend only to produce foot-soldiers in regional conflicts — Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan — while the terrorists that attack the West tend to be sophisticated, Western-educated and anything but poor:

It is now becoming very clear ... that producing cannon fodder for the Taliban and educating local sectarian thugs is not at all the same as producing the kind of technically literate al-Qaeda terrorist who carried out the horrifyingly sophisticated attacks on the USS Cole, the US embassies in East Africa, the World Trade Center, and the London Underground. Indeed, a number of recent studies have emphasized that there is a fundamental distinction to be made between madrasa graduates — who tend to be pious villagers from impoverished economic backgrounds, possessing little technical sophistication — and the sort of middle-class, politically literate global Salafi jihadis who plan al-Qaeda operations around the world. Most of these turn out to have secular and technical backgrounds. Neither bin Laden nor any of the men who carried out the Islamist assaults on America or Britain were trained in a madrasa or was a qualified alim, or cleric. (Emphasis added.)

Dalrymple goes on to explain that bin Laden and his gang are in fact impatient with the kind of nitpicky Islam promoted by the Taliban.

Understanding these distinctions is increasingly important, and Dalrymple's article is a useful read for anyone who hopes to get past stereotypes and truisms and gain a realistic picture of what is, and what is not, part of the terrorist threat that America faces.

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Topic: United Nations

Demonstrating his fine leadership skills, John Bolton is once again charging in to declare that everyone else's work is totally worthless. Wonkette has a little rant about his latest shenanigans.

I suppose that bullying and browbeating have worked so well on Iraq, Iran, North Korea and the Security Council that the Bush administration couldn't possibly choose a different tactic for the UN, where there's an opportunity to browbeat the entire world at once. Too bad you can't browbeat hurricanes, though.

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Topic: United Nations

Secretary-General Kofi Annan is asking for $1.6 billion for renovations to the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. According to the Daily News, this will involve building a temporary conference center (or centre, in UN-speak) on the North Lawn.

The current price tag is 55 percent higher than the original estimate because lawmakers in Albany are pissed off about the Oil-for-Food scandal, so they've been sitting on permit applications for a cheaper renovation. Considering that the United States provides 22 percent of the UN's regular budget, Albany's delaying tactics will ultimately cost the American taxpayers more money while doing nothing for New York City or State except spreading the word that we're less hospitable than we could be.

Meanwhile, it seems like the rumored temporary relocation of the United Nations to Brooklyn is not a going concern.

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