Kim Jong-un dances to dangerous tune

While Kim Jong-un is threatening the nuclear destruction of US cities, North Korea's elite can't get enough of US popular culture.

Arriving shortly after the North Korean People's Army abandoned a 60-year-old armistice agreement with the South, I found rollerblades throughout the streets of Pyongyang and a population humming theme songs from US movies. While the outside world judges the credibility of North Korea's war threats, in Pyongyang there are few signs of elevated tension. Kim Jong-un's bellicose rhetoric masks a country where creeping change and internal pressures are threatening the Kim dynasty's strength.

Amid ultimatums to the US military, North Koreans are bopping to the Rocky theme song performed by Moranbong, a new band of 16 women in sexy military uniforms. If North Korea had a billboard chart, let alone voting, Moranbong would take out the top 10 spots. Their success is due to the sponsorship of new leader Kim Jong-un and their repertoire of Hollywood theme songs and Disney tunes seems closely tailored to the leader's tastes.

In the streets of privileged Pyongyang, North Korean children have at last discovered rollerblades. On North Korean TV, military hardware and party faithful parade through Kim Il-sung Square. In real life, the square is full of whizzing children. My visit has been highly choreographed by local government guides so I see what they want me to see, but I don't see a country seriously preparing itself for all-out war.

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My travel companion, a Tokyo-based advertising executive, thinks the Kim dynasty is the most successful brand he has ever seen. It is is predicated on stoicism and unity in the face of external military threats and the personality cult of former leaders Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Kim Jong-un must now freshen the family brand to include his own image.

This will be much more difficult for him than it was for his father. Kim Jong-il had 14 years to learn the family business before he took power whereas Kim Jong-un had only a year's training. The control of propaganda and information that his father enjoyed is rapidly diminishing for Kim Jong-un. In the first year of his reign, mobile phone subscribers in North Korea increased from 950,000 to 1.7 million. Citizens can't access the internet or call overseas, but they can pass information more quickly within North Korea. More information is trickling in about the outside world. All of this gnaws at the regime's total control of what North Koreans see and hear.

A North Korean consumer culture has been spurred by the manufacturing revolution in China. In Pyongyang there are signs of a timid transition to a market economy. Beside propaganda billboards papered across the city are advertisements for cars. Near the North Korean Parliament building, which this week appointed economic reformer Pak Pong-ju as Premier, a new shopping centre rises. By Kim Il-sung Square, a joint venture Austrian coffee house company serves lattes to those with hard currency. Like their Swiss-schooled leader, North Koreans elites have caught a whiff of the finer things in life and are hungry for more.

In North Korea's increasingly deforested countryside workers on collective farms are simply hungry. The price of rice has doubled in the past year and prehistoric agricultural methods limit productivity. Chinese-style agricultural reform is rumoured, but will be difficult. The last major North Korean reform, a currency revaluation in 2009, was disastrously executed. Everywhere I go there are signs of burgeoning black markets.

Kim Jong-un is aware of the cost of isolation from the outside world, and must keenly feel the creeping pressures upon the economy and regime. If he is to reform, he first needs credit with conservative military hardliners and party senior officials who might disapprove of his penchant for US movies and basketball. A victory over the US military, whether real or manufactured, might go a long way to firming his grip on power.

There are plenty of risks in this brinksmanship. The new government in Seoul, elected by South Koreans who suffered the indignity of the Cheonan incident and who increasingly demand their own nuclear weapons, could over-react to provocation. The inexperienced Kim Jong-un might miscalculate his efforts. Or Jong-un's gambit might fail to placate his opponents, perpetuating regime instability in a country that now has crude nuclear weapons. The US will not want to reward North Korea for its ready-made crisis and will adopt a harder line.

On New Year's Eve, Moranbong played a concert for Kim Jong-un to celebrate North Korea's first successful satellite launch. Party and military elite watched rocket launches and missile trajectories projected behind the musicians. In an Asia fraught with festering nationalism and strategic uncertainty, the leader of the region's most anti-US regime welcomed 2013 with a stage full of Disney characters and the strains of It's A Small World After All.

James Brown is the Military Fellow at the Lowy Institute.



Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/kim-jongun-dances-to-dangerous-tune-20130405-2hc6o.html#ixzz2PebDyjHP

Proof that the opposition rebel fighters in Syria are using Child Soldiers.

[youtube]Yl81Ykx8z18[/youtube]

Pretty disturbing, tbh. I mean that fucking AK-74 is nearly as big as him!

Interesting way of putting it.

Wasn't the yanks that mined roads, it was the VC and Khmer Rouge.

But don't let facts get in the way of a good prejudice.

It's a lovely piece of historical revisionism, but not factually correct. To deny that Nixon waged a secret and constitutionally illegal war in Laos and Cambodia shows your own prejudice.

The Americans dropped 5 million tons of cluster bombs on Laos, an estimated 30% of which did not explode immediately on impact. The coolest things about cluster bombs is that they are small and look like toys, so that kids pick them up & rattle them around a bit only to have them explode in their faces.

Can't find the picture, but apparently some of North Korea's missiles could make it to Darwin.

This the picture you're after?


Yeah, apparently their longest range missile could make it to Darwin, but it's more likely to be shot down by the time it reaches the Philippines. Would probably fall somewhere on Indonesia though, is my guess.

:lol: Love how that has gone viral. :lol:

Nazi hunter criticises Australia in report

From: AAP April 07, 2013 10:47PM

THE Israel branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre has criticised Australia and several other countries for failing to do enough to bring perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice.


The centre's 12th annual report on efforts to hunt down Nazis accuses a raft of nations of failing to prosecute or investigate alleged Nazis.

"The most disappointing result in a specific case during the period under review was the decision by the Australian High Court to reject the extradition request submitted by the Hungarian authorities for Karoly (Charles) Zentai, who was accused of the murder in November 1944 of 18-year-old Peter Balasz," it said.

The Los Angeles-based centre said Zentai allegedly killed the Jewish teenager "whom he caught on a tram without the yellow star required of all Jews," and took part in manhunts for other Jews in Budapest in 1944.

Only the United States scored an "A" on the report; Canada, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Serbia each got a "B".

At the bottom of the table it gave Australia, Austria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Norway, Sweden and Syria "F" grades.

"Countries like Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Ukraine consistently failed to hold any Holocaust perpetrators accountable, primarily due to a lack of the requisite political will," the report said.

It added that Sweden and Norway "refuse to investigate, let alone prosecute, due to a statute of limitations."

At the top of the centre's list of most-wanted alleged war criminals is Alois Brunner, who is accused of being a key operative for Adolf Eichmann and of responsibility for the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews.

Born in 1912 and last seen in 2001, Brunner lived in Syria for decades, the centre said, but acknowledged the chances of his still being alive were "relatively slim."

The report came as Israel prepared to observe Holocaust Day from sundown on Sunday, with the entire nation coming to a standstill for two minutes of silence on Monday to remember the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust in World War II.

To coincide with the commemoration, Tel Aviv University on Sunday released its annual report on global anti-Semitism, which it said climbed sharply last year.

"A considerable escalation in the level of violent and vandalistic acts against Jews was recorded in 2012," it said.

"The combined number of 686 such acts represents an increase of 30 per cent over the 2011 figure of 526."

The report said the largest number of attacks took place in France, where 200 incidents occurred, followed by the United States (99) Britain (84) and Canada (74).

It said the fatal shooting of three Jewish children and a rabbi at a school in the French city of Toulouse in March 2012 had sparked a wave of copycat attacks.

It "triggered a wave of copycat violent incidents against Jewish targets, mainly in France - one of the worst experienced by the community."

The report also said far-right parties exploited European economic woes to push "a clear anti-Semitic agenda."

"In Hungary and Greece, as well as in Ukraine, vociferous representatives of these parties openly incite in parliament against local Jewish communities," the survey said.

"Blatant anti-Semitic and anti-Israel expressions appeared to ignite violent activity in Hungary, and a significant rise in desecration of cemeteries and Holocaust memorials was recorded in Poland."



http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/nazi-hunter-criticises-australia-in-report/story-e6frf7k6-1226614463258

You can't allow these people to die peacefully in their beds, even if they're 90. So many of their victims never had the chance to get old.

Whatever North Korea are planning, I wish they'd hurry up and put us all out of our misery before X-Factor starts again.

So apparently North Korea are planning a missile launch for tommorrow. Watching on with held breaths will be the rest of the world.

This whole episode is just a ruse to distract people from the real issues in Israel.

Kim is a puppet of the Zionist regime and the US and world Jewish banking industry is behind all this.

If missiles fall on Seoul don't forget who the real culprits are. Israel and the US.

Do you have enough tin foil, son?

I wouldn't be surprised tbh...lol

And Heineken, you didn't smell the sarcasm... lol

I thought he might be being sarcastic, but it's hard to tell on this forum sometimes nowadays.

:lol: :lol: :lol:

Well...someone doesnt need to be a puppet directly for other external factors to take advantage...yes that includes Zionists i guess.

The bizarre thing is having Americans...with their many bases and soldiers stationed around the world and massive nuclear arsenal...lecturing anyone on anything to do with militarism.

Its classic doublespeak...their Defence Department is more concerned with Offense...sadly their over extension only provokes paranoid rogue states like NK. The hypocrisy also erodes any moral highground they used to have.

10 years ago the US invaded Iraq under the misnomer of having 'weapons of mass destruction'. Now we know that NoKo has nuclear warheads....and it's a cat and mouse arms race where we're all going to end up living like Chernobyl.

Also they did so in iraq under the pretense of a "preemptive strike"....now they have done that what is stopping an isolated, totalitarian regime using the same rationale?

Scary to open that door, now others may feel justified should they feel threatened by...oh i dunno...having stealth bombers and what not flying over and being stationed on bases across the border and in nearby waters. As NK are...

Militaristic states like the US and Israel are major hypocrites and are sowing the seeds of their own destruction ...

After Cyprus, is Slovenia the next eurozone domino?
Date
April 10, 2013 - 2:13PM

Successive Slovenian governments have refused to privatise the country's banks, which made disastrous loans to politically connected business interests and now threaten to drag the country centre stage in the eurozone debt crisis.

A span of unfinished apartment blocks in the Siska complex on the outskirts of Ljubljana is emblematic of the former Yugoslav republic's woes, just as many such ghost neighbourhoods in Europe's debt-choked south stand testament to the depth of the broader continent's economic problems.

The rows of buildings, housing 833 flats in all, stand mostly empty, casualties of a property boom turned bust and a subsequent recession. Alongside, Vegrad, a company once led by a well-placed politician, also planned to build a hotel, but got no further than digging an enormous hole. An apt symbol, as Slovenia comes under growing pressure to seek a bailout to fill a financial hole, just as Cyprus did last month.

The countries are different in many ways, but they have at least two things in common: like Cyprus, Slovenia needs to recapitalise its biggest banks, and it does not have the money to do so.

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Slovenia was the only former communist state to refuse to sell most of its state-owned banking system after the fall of communism, so now it is taxpayers alone who must foot the bill of healing lenders after years of political influence and bad management loaded them down with bad loans equal to about a fifth of the economy.

Joze Damijan, an economics professor who was development minister in 2006, said state ownership meant a number of people and firms got special treatment from the lenders because of ties between political parties and the banks' management.

In the case of the Siska project, Vegrad borrowed from Slovenian banks - it owes 107.8 million euros ($134 million) to the largest lender Nova Ljubljanska Banka - then defaulted.

Vegrad's CEO was Hilda Tovsak, a former top official in the conservative Christian Democrats, who Damijan said benefited from her connections.

"The power of the director of Vegrad was very big. She had connections everywhere," he said.

A court sentenced her to 14 months in prison last month for arranging bids with two other construction firms for an airport control tower in 2008. She is also being tried for using money from a Vegrad-linked mutual fund in 2009 and 2010.

Tovsak has denied wrongdoing in both cases, and no evidence has been produced that Tovsak or Vegrad acted unlawfully in connection with the Siska loans. Her lawyer said she was not available to comment for this article.

Damijan left the government after only three months when he found that a plan to sell NLB was being undermined by political pressure to keep it in state hands where politicians could continue to exert control.

"I resigned because it became clear that there will be no privatisation of NLB, that the state was determined to even increase control over it," he said. "It was already clear then that the state was a bad owner."

Media have reported that other bad loans are stacking up for the bank: 187 million euros owed by builder SCT, 100 million by construction firm Primorje, and 115 million by investment firm Zvon 1 Holding. All three firms are now bankrupt.

NLB disputes those figures but has given no other details, saying it cannot reveal client information.

Bailout?

Slovenia and Cyprus both joined the EU when the bloc launched its "big bang" expansion, opening the door to 10 mostly ex-communist countries in 2004, which then swapped their currencies for euros a few years later.

But while banks in Cyprus suffered heavy losses due to large Greek bond holdings, Slovenia has virtually none.

And Cyprus faced criticism for hosting an offshore banking sector that was eight times the size of its economy by luring depositors, especially from Russia and Britain, who sought to avoid high taxes at home. Slovenia's bank sector is just 1.4 times as big as its economy, less than half the eurozone average.

But the source of the two countries' problems are similar. One was the cheap funding that poured into Slovenia, Cyprus, Spain, Ireland and other eurozone periphery states that helped inflate real estate bubbles.

In Slovenia's case, this was exacerbated by a lack of adequate oversight in the state-owned financial system.

"There was excess liquidity which blurred the judgment of some," said newly appointed central bank governor Bostjan Jazbec who will take over in July. "It is clear that in Slovenia we were not very successful in the management of the state companies."

The two countries also share the same vulnerability through their banks. According to the IMF, Slovenia will need to recapitalise its three largest, which are majority or largely state owned, by a total of 1 billion euros this year, or about 3 per cent of GDP.

Last year non-performing loans reached 14.4 per cent of the banks' loan books.

Repeated protestations by Ljubljana officials that "Slovenia is not Cyprus" echo other countries' efforts to calm markets before they too were forced into bailouts.

And while Slovenia still has access to international markets, investors have pushed its borrowing costs to above 6 per cent, not far from the 7 per cent considered unsustainable for a country to fund itself.

An opinion poll by Delo Stik in March showed 48 per cent of Slovenians believed the country would not survive without international help, versus just 44 per cent who thought it could.

"They say Slovenia is not like Cyprus, but I'm afraid things may get just as bad," said a woman named Nada, 63, who works part-time in a garden centre. "They just told me this week that there is no work for me for at least two months. Who cares about flowers at a time like this?"

Mixed signals

Prime Minister Alenka Bratusek, who took power after a wave of protests against graft and austerity helped topple the previous government, is pushing ahead with a plan to create a "bad bank" to quarantine 7 billion euros in non-performing loans, most of which are burdening three main lenders, NLB, Nova KBM and Abanka Vipa.

The government must also inject up to 1 billion euros in new cash into the banks to lift their value and then sell them, although no date has been mentioned.

That cash must come from an overall 3 billion euros the government must borrow, a goal complicated by the crisis in Cyprus.

Conflicting statements from the top don't help, either.

Former Prime Minister Janez Jansa, ousted earlier this year, has said Ljubljana must issue a bond by June 6 or it would not be able to pay back a 907 million euro treasury bill coming due.

Last week, however, new Finance Minister Uros Cufer said the country could hold on until autumn to wait until markets calmed.

Cufer also said Slovenia could sell a major state asset this year. He gave no details, but the government has big stakes in the country's biggest telecommunications, fuels and insurance companies worth about 780 million euros at the moment.

Analysts are not sure who to believe. Although Slovenia sold enough debt at the end of 2012 to create a cash buffer that could last until about September, they said delaying a new debt issue until the last minute would be unwise.

"Post Cyprus, I think managing market and depositor sentiment is key ... Waiting for September or October is probably not a good thing," said Standard Bank head of research Tim Ash.

"They need to remain ahead of the market by really showing they have reform plans in place and can address the issues without resort to a Troika bail-out. Even then, it might not be possible."


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/world-business/after-cyprus-is-slovenia-the-next-eurozone-domino-20130410-2hkkg.html#ixzz2Q3MAPm15

Edited by Joffa: 10/4/2013 08:03:29 PM

Lion Air passenger plane crashes off coast of Bali

Peter Rolfe, Jessica Evans Herald Sun April 13, 2013 6:24pm

A PASSENGER plane carrying more than 100 people has crashed into the ocean off the coast of Bali.

It is believed the plane slid off the runway at Ngurah Rai Airport, near Denpasar, where it was scheduled to land late this afternoon before landing in water.

Reports from Indonesia indicate the passengers have survived the crash and been relocated to a nearby hospital.

It is not yet known if any Australians were on board the Lion Air plane.

It is not yet known what caused the plane to crash.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/travel/news/plane-crashes-off-coast-of-bali/story-e6frezi0-1226619817622

The Aerodynamics Of Nihilism
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-12/aerodynamics-nihilism

From Mark Grant, author of Out of the Box

We live in a world now which may be described as, "Nothing Matters."

"Nothing matters until the day that it does and then everyone asks why it didn't matter before."
-The Wizard

The money pours in each month from America, Europe and Japan and overrides anything and everything else. With pre-payments and calls the estimated amount of money provided by the Fed for the world's monetary supply is approximately $100 billion every month. It is not just the American banks that are the recipients of the hand-out but the foreign ones who ship it back to Europe or buy European sovereign debt courtesy of Mr. Bernanke. I suspect that if the American taxpayers were aware of the scheme that the citizens would not be pleased but then what the Fed is doing is not generally part of polite conversation in America and so it is not discussed.

Yields on European sovereign debt are at incredibly low levels given the underlying economies. Europe trumpets the cause as renewed faith in the European Union but that is a highly unlikely conclusion. Again, it is the "Central Banks Effect" that feeds that stove of consumption and lowers yields, raises the stock markets and has created a world-wide bubble in every asset class on earth. The economies in Cyprus, Greece, Spain, Slovenia, Portugal, Ireland and Italy are all in serious decline but; "Nothing Matters."

The "Stalin Axiom" has taken over the world. It is not the data but how the data is counted!

The unemployment rate in America is not 7.7% but 11.6% if all you do is add in the people that have supposedly left the workforce. Did you think these people had retired? Gotten rich in the stock market and were making plans for St. Tropez this summer? Moved to Costa Rico for the winter? No, they have left the workforce because they are now on the public dole and those that are working are picking up their tab.

In Europe sovereign debt ratios do not include guaranteed liabilities, contingent liabilities and every asset under the sun is marked, "Risk Free." The problem, of course, is that many of these liabilities, oft times called "investments" by the Europeans, are now coming around for payment and the "not counted" does not change the "not paid," I can assure you.

Still, "Nothing Matters!"

The financial crisis of 2008/2009 was caused by Easy Money. Too much credit, too many undocumented loans, too much cash available that could be used for stupid schemes; this was the root of it. Sub-prime mortgages were the trigger but the core of the problem was copious amounts of cash that had to be utilized somewhere. The machine ran and ran and kept running right up until the day when it broke and then the good intentions were the pavers for Hell.

Now the world will not wake up. You may be assured of this. That is not how it works or will work. What will happen is that the world will be woken up. It will be a Wham-Bam type of moment that will spin the markets around on a dime. The frightening thing is that there is more Easy Money around now than before the 2008/2009 fiscal crisis. Way, way more capital available now than then. In the first fiasco the money was provided by the banks and now it has been provided by the Central Banks who have created it out of pulp and water but by any measure that you would like to use; we have more credit now than then in the system.

The most likely "moment" will not happen in the United States but in Europe. It may be a bank or a sovereign nation that can just no longer afford to pay its bills. The lure of Easy Money undoubtedly has a very strong appeal but there are always consequences for its use. Just because a great many liabilities are not counted in Europe does not mean that they do not have to get paid. There is the rub and it always takes some time to boil to the surface.

The pot is on the stove, the water is boiling. Soon the top will get blown off and people will pay attention. In the meantime enjoy the ride but be smarter than the mob and remain prepared for when the ride comes to its startling conclusion!




Edited by blacka: 14/4/2013 11:14:04 AM

What if the Zionist conspiracy is just cover for a greater Mongolian conspiracy?

Pfft, dont make me laugh. Our conspiracies are bigger than their conspiracies.

:lol: :lol: :lol: