Blog

ted, the authorities have mobilized various surveillance agencies in a severe crackdown against citizens of the country, who have faced harsh punishments if caught doing illegal acts.  

Harsher punishments and crackdowns may have a temporary crime-reducing effect. Its preventative effect, however, is limited when crime goes further underground. 

As a result, the North Korean authorities appear to be encouraging citizens of the country to turn themselves in because they consider it difficult to completely eliminate “illegal propaganda material” through harsh punishments and crackdowns alone. 

The lecture material emphasizes “forgiveness and re-entering society” over punishments in an attempt to woo people to turn themselves in.  

The material states that “we have to turn ourselves in for the crime of secretly viewing or distributing impure publications” and emphasized the need to “continue keeping [the materials] out of reach in order to rescue even one person from the enemy’s influence and ensure they join the revolutionary ranks.” 

It further states that “the party abolishes guilt for all those who turn themselves in for the crime of viewing or distributing impure publication material such as puppet movies [movies from South Korea] in order to ensure they will have no problems in their social and political lives.”  

The lecture also prompted citizens to be assertive in encouraging people they know to have consumed illegal materials to surrender themselves to the authorities. 

The materials further states that “if any of your family members, relatives or friends have possessed, stored or distributed impure propaganda materials, you must enlighten them by reminding them to confess their mistakes honestly.”

Bot of course the big stick is still there:

Meanwhile, the North Korean authorities made it clear that people will face severe punishments if they are caught even while they encourage people to turn themselves in. 

The lecture material emphasized that “plenty of people foolishly think that no one will find out their crimes of secretly watching and distributing illegal publications,” adding that “it is an act of self-destruction to reject the hand that offers to save them.”

pher was living in 1969. “Young children were running after Foucault saying ‘what about me? take me, take me’,” he recalled last week in an interview with The Sunday Times.

“They were eight, nine, ten years old, he was throwing money at them and would say ‘let’s meet at 10pm at the usual place’.” This, it turned out, was the local cemetery: “He would make love there on the gravestones with young boys. The question of consent wasn’t even raised.”

I'm not sure "make love" is quite the right phrase there.

Sorman claimed that “Foucault would not have dared to do it in France”, comparing him to Paul Gauguin, the impressionist said to have had sex with young girls he painted in Tahiti, and Andre Gide, the novelist who preyed on boys in Africa. “There is a colonial dimension to this. A white imperialism.”

Sorman says he regrets not having reported Foucault to police at the time or denounced him in the press, calling his behaviour “ignoble” and “extremely morally ugly”.

But, he added, the French media already knew about Foucault’s behaviour. “There were journalists present on that trip, there were many witnesses, but nobody did stories like that in those days. Foucault was the philosopher king. He’s like our god in France.”

Oh dear. No wonder he resisted any direct interest in his personal life.

For Sorman, Foucault’s behaviour was symptomatic of a distinctly French malaise dating back to Voltaire. “He believed there were two morals, one for the elite, which was immoral, and one for the people, which should be restrictive.”

He continued: “France is still not a democracy, we had the revolution, proclaimed a republic but there’s still an aristocracy, it’s the intelligentsia, and it has had a special status. Anything goes.” Now, though, “the world is suddenly changing,” Sorman added.

Foucault's other great claim to fame, apart from his apparent paedophilia, was his enthusiasm for the Iranian revolution, which he celebrated as signifying a new "political spirituality". That was just before they started hanging the gays.

yle=”font-size: 11pt”>In the early days of Kim Jong Un’s reign, CCTV cameras and electric barbed wire fences were installed along the entire border area to prevent defections. During that time, border patrols in each area worked independently on the construction of barriers for the portion of the border that they were responsible for guarding. This time, however, separate construction personnel were dispatched in order to ensure that patrol duties conducted by the border patrol are not impeded.

So the barriers originally installed to prevent defections are now being massively strengthened to prevent any incursion of the virus. And all that electricity, when the supply for domestic consumption is sporadic at best.

At least there's no problem with the cement supply.

supporters of the Syrian people’s struggle for democracy and human rights take these attempts to “disappear” Syrians from the world of politics, solidarity, and partnership as quite consistent with the character of the regimes these people so evidently admire. This is the “anti-imperialism” and “leftism” of the unprincipled, of the lazy, and of fools, and only reinforces the dysfunctional international gridlock exhibited in the UN Security Council. We hope that readers of this piece will join us in opposing it.

This is particularly relevant now after the exposure of Edinburgh professor Paul McKeigue, who was in regular contact with someone he thought was a Russian agent (but wasn't), and shared his fervent belief that the CIA and MI6, along with all sorts of Western-funded NGOs, were part of a campaign to blacken the image of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. Others in this particularly vile coterie include Bristol University's David Miller, and the appalling Vanessa Beeley.

Blossom at Alexandra Palace:

Christopher Helin – San Francisco, 1928. "Stutz two-door five-passenger sedan."

[Photo: Shorpy/Christopher Helin]

citizen on matters of public concern, which is precisely what I have done.”

Samantha Harris, Hughes’s lawyer, said that “like faculty around the country who express views that are out of step with the prevailing orthodoxy on campus, Professor Hughes has become the target of an online pressure campaign.” This involves an effort to get students to file complaints about her with the university and “take her down,” Harris explained, quoting one Twitter user.

It looks like Hughes – armed with a lawyer – is not taking this lying down.

Via email, Hughes said it’s “just sad that we have reached a point in society where difficult issues cannot be freely and openly discussed without resort to personal attacks and calls for censorship.”

The marketplace of ideas, she added, “has broken down and increasingly, university faculty are terrified to speak out on a wide range of important issues for fear that — as seems to be happening here — they will draw criticism from their students and their institution will throw them under the bus.”

Hughes is a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance, which launched recently to defend professors’ academic freedom from attacks from the political left and right. Her case, she said, demonstrators “precisely why the AFA was founded and is so necessary.”

Harris, Hughes’s lawyer, said that URI is “obviously within its rights to criticize” Hughes’s views, but that the university’s statement seems to imply that the article may not be protected by the First Amendment “because she somehow failed to show appropriate restraint in the expression of her opinion. This simply is not the case.”

Some more details on Mun Chol-myong, the North Korean spy extradited to the US earlier this week:

A North Korean spy who has been extradited to the U.S. was among other things North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's liquor runner. The portly leader has a well-known penchant for whiskey and cognac.

Mun Chol-myong (55), who was extradited from Malaysia last week, is allegedly a member of North Korea's spy agency and worked in Singapore and Malaysia for 10 years. He was arrested in Kuala Lumpur in 2019 after U.S. federal prosecutors indicted him on charges of money laundering to bypass sanctions against the regime.

According to an indictment, Mun purchased large quantities of liquor from three companies in Singapore to be sent to North Korea. In September 2016, he ordered 604 bottles of Remy Martin French cognac, Chivas Regal Scotch whiskey and Johnny Walker Black and Gold labels from one company and paid US$103,186.

The next month he bought another 571 bottles from the same company for $96,270.

In February 2018, Mun bought 400 bottles of whiskey and wine from another Singaporean company and paid $86,000.

That's a lot of money for top-level booze, in a country now going through its worst economic crisis since the mass starvations of the 1990s. But as I've said before, there's no way the suffering North Koreans will get to hear of how the Respected Comrade conducts himself in private – not since the South Korean government blocked those propaganda balloon flights.

Ray Charles and the Raelettes, from 1961.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq80fW90laE&w=550&h=309]

A commendably contrite response from the eponymous Jack:

I guess if you say so
I'll have to pack my things and go.

The song was originally written and recorded by Percy Mayfield in 1960. There've been loads of covers since. This, from Bizimkilər, a "musical project/orchestra" from Azerbaijan, is one of the best:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKhbI2XUob4&w=550&h=309]

ath squads massacred Armenians, with only 388,000 left in the empire by 1923 from 2 million in 1914.  […]

According to genocide scholars, denial is the final stage of genocide. Levon Avedanian, coordinator of the Armenian National Committee of Lebanon (ANCL) and professor at Haigazian University in Beirut, said that for Armenians, the denial of the Armenian genocide by Turkey is a continuation of the genocidal policies.

“In that sense, recognition by Turkey and by members of the international community is an essential step on the long path of restoring justice, which would inevitably include, in addition to recognition, reparations and restitution,” he said.

As a Democratic presidential candidate, Biden tweeted on April 24 last year: “If elected, I pledge to support a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide and will make universal human rights a top priority.”

In his “quick take” of March 22 on the possibility of Biden making good on his campaign promise next month, GZero’s Bremmer summed up the situation this way: “A lot of things going wrong for Turkey right now. They just pulled their country out of the Istanbul Conventions, European agreement that meant to protect women. And (Erdogan) also just sacked his new central bank governor. … The economy is not doing well. … he’s cracking down on the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, the HDP. … But the big news, is that Erdogan is about to face another diplomatic challenge.”

Erdogan has declared that “the stain of genocide on our nation is out of the question.” Part of the reason, apart from the blow to Turkey's national pride, is surely the impossibility for Islamists like the Turkish president of acknowledging that the first genocide of the modern era (with the exception of the Herero and Namaqua genocide by the Germans in Namibia) was perpetrated by Muslims on Christians.