Topic: United Nations

This is a bit out of date, but that General Assembly resolution I was working on passed. The text of the resolution is still not available on the UN website, but I'll post it once it's up.

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Topic: The Mission

Unfortunately, due to the NYC transit strike, I missed last night's marathon holiday banquet. Something new under this ambassador, the banquet consisted of a lavish buffet, a raffle at which dozens of gifts were given out, and a hired master of ceremonies who conducted interviews and game show-like activities in between speeches by just about everyone. The entire affair lasted a grueling four hours, I'm told, and for obvious reasons most of it took place in Korean, so it was hard on my speechwriting colleague.

On a different note, one of the diplomats just dropped by my office with an odd holiday gift: a yearbook-sized, fake-leather-bound 2006 "Cyprus Diary" with gilt pages. Essentially a glorified day-runner, it's obviously a production of the government of Cyprus, and includes a map of the European Union (which Cyprus recently joined), a map of Cyprus itself (undivided), and pages of basic info about the country, including a lengthy section on "The Cyprus Problem," which I haven't read.

So far, though, I'm still waiting on a new wall calendar. Last year we got one from the Korea National Tourism Organization (whose URL, , has a grammatical error) and an even bigger one from Asiana Airlines. With a week to go, though, all I've got is an awkward little "Dynamic Korea" desk calendar from the Korean OverSeas (sic) Information Service.

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Topic: Terrorism

Shameful. Just shameful.

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Topic: Korean Culture

Daniel alerts me to this strange bit of news about why Hong Kong police see the 1,500 South Koreans in town as the major threat to the WTO negotiations there. Most of the piece is about South Korea's rice subsidies, but it begins with a recap of Korean WTO protests past:

At the 2003 WTO summit in Cancun, Mexico, activist Lee Kyung-hae stabbed himself to death after unfurling a banner that declared "WTO kills farmers." Early this year, in November, two more farmers committed suicide by drinking insecticide.

What the hell? I mean, this is not India, where farmers have committed suicide rather than face impossible debts. They may have seen suicide as the only way to get the moneylenders to back off, thus saving their families from starvation. Nor are Korean farmers facing anything like the destruction that confronted Quang Duc, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who immolated himself in 1963 to protest the repression of his religion and his country. It's true that Korean farmers are clinging to a declining way of life, but this has largely to do with South Korea's shift from agrarian poverty to industrialized wealth. I was startled, too, that South Korean protesters would cut off their fingers to protest Japanese claims to Dokto/Takeshima, a tiny hunk of rock in the East Sea/Sea of Japan.

So what motivates Koreans to mutilate or kill themselves for what seem like mid-level political scuffles? I honestly don't know.

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Topic: United States

According to Condoleeza Rice, the Bush administration today changed its position on torture, finally determining that the UN Convention against Torture, which bans "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of prisoners, applies even to US personnel even outside of US territory — an interpretation that has been glaringly obvious to everyone else all along.

Let's just hope that we actually adhere to this new public policy. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to discover that while we're now officially swearing off such behavior, it's still going on in secret.

Update: Sadly, it looks like I (and much of the media) jumped the gun on this one. My friend Daniel Kleinfeld posted a couple of clarifying links in the comments, including this one, which explains that Condi's language has been in use by the administration for some time and does nothing to stop or prevent the continued torture of those we have imprisoned without anything resembling due process.

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Topic: Society

A group called The Atheist Agenda, out of the University of Texas at San Antonio, has gotten national media attention for its "Smut for Smut" program, in which they set up a table and offered to give pornography to anyone who traded in a Bible or another religious tome. It's a stunt, clearly, but meant to demonstrate that there's a lot of dirty business in the Bible, which makes it a questionable basis for morality.

The group's president, Thomas Jackson, was recently interviewed by Tucker Carlson on MSNBC's The Situation, and it turns out (no surprise) that Jackson has thought through his position more carefully than Carlson. Said Jackson:

Morality is not derived from religious texts. Religious texts actually contradict each other. If you read the Bible, it contradicts itself on nearly every page. And the fact that people can decide which one to go with shows that they are getting their morality from somewhere else ....

[Morality is] based off of things that are good for society. If citizens murder each other, this is bad for society. And you see this across the board in many nations.

Several religions have stumbled upon this, but it's not the religious text that's bringing this to people. They are finding this on their own, and societies that don't find this don't survive.

Brilliant. This is a very clear summation of an argument that I've often had with religious people who believe that morality is only possible if you believe in God. Indeed, this is so obvious that Talmudic rabbis differentiated between those laws between man and man whose purposes could be rationally understood, and those between man and God, which may or may not lend themselves to human understanding.

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Topic: North Korea

So the new American ambassador to South Korea, Alexander Vershbow, announced his presence by calling North Korea a criminal regime.

Okay, so North Korea did manage to poke America in the eye, which is what triggered Vershbow's harsh words. North Korea insisted that the US lift economic sanctions, threatening to walk out of the negotiations if we didn't. So Vershbow as explaining why we weren't going to back down on this issue:

This is a criminal regime, and we can't somehow remove our sanctions as a political gesture when this regime is engaging in dangerous activities such as weapons exports to rogue states, narcotics trafficking as a state activity and counterfeiting of our money on a large scale.

Nevertheless, it was totally unnecessary to poke back. We could have said simply that the sanctions, like everything else, could be discussed at the Six-Party Talks once North Korea has dismantled its nuclear program.

Unfortunately, as has so often been the case with the Bush administration, we seem to have decided that a tough stance was worth more than actual progress. What did we gain with our tough talk? If North Korea walks out on the negotiations, we will have succeeded in highlighting our impotence on the Korean Peninsula.

Whatever happened to walking softly and carrying a big stick? At the moment, our big stick is looking stretched and fragile in Iraq, and still our government insists on shouting when a few quiet words would do.

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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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