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Posts Tagged ‘Kim Jong-Un’

Kim Jong-un Directs Farmers To Stop Growing Tall Corn

by Bunk Five Hawks X ( 135 Comments › )
Filed under Communism, Food and Drink, North Korea, Politics, World at June 25th, 2014 - 1:00 am

Kim Jong Un Corn Mandate

Even well-off families Can Only Add a Handful of Rice to Their Corn Meal Porridge
Corn (maize) long ago replaced rice as North Korea’s staple food. North Koreans call corn meal “corn rice”. The well-to-do eat steamed rice; for others, corn is their staple food. Depending on a family’s economic status, the rice-to-corn ratio varies. Well-off families don’t use more than 50% corn; as the household budget becomes more strained, corn’s share grows.

Mrs. Kang Un-hui (alias) of Pyongsung city in South Pyongan Province has not so far had to worry about food thanks to her husband, who is a police officer. However, now only her husband gets a food ration. It has been several months since the food ration ended for the three other family members. Even so, they are not starving, but the quality of their meals has fallen sharply. Long ago, they only ate steamed rice. Last year, their meals were half corn and half rice. This year they struggle to be able to mix a handful of rice into the corn meal.

Says Mrs. Kang: “These days, if you’re not pretty rich, the quality of your meals worsens. Now, a family that can afford corn meal is doing well. It’s gotten to the point that it’s hard to have corn meal with even one handful of rice. If our family is like this, other families will be even worse-off. Apart from North Koreans of Chinese origins, everybody is like this. Even so, that does not mean we should complain. My husband has steady work, and I’m just grateful that he can keep his position. I hope that the country’s food situation will improve quickly and we can receive our food rations in the usual way.”
[Source: http://goodfriendsusa.blogspot.com/2012/07/north-korea-today-no-462-july-4-2012.html ]

Okay, the image (Kimmy Crack Corn?) is an obvious photoshop intended for political snark, and I’m not going to post the source in order to protect their anonymity. The story dated 4 July 2012, quoted verbatim, is unaltered.

But there is something odd in that report, and it has to do with rice and corn.
Lookee here:

Grains Comparison[Source]

So why is corn (maize) disparaged as a staple in North Korea when it has three times as many calories and more nutrients? Is it because it’s a crop cultivated in the Americas? I dunno, Babs, but I do know this.
The U.S. don’t raise no rice-fed cattle.

North Korea’s sparse agricultural resources limit agricultural production. Climate, terrain, and soil conditions are not particularly favorable for farming, with a relatively short cropping season. Only about 17% of the total landmass, or approximately 20,000 km2, is arable, of which 14,000 km2 is well suited for cereal cultivation; the major portion of the country is rugged mountain terrain.[1] [Wiki]

That means North Korea has approximately 12% of its landmass good for growing grains, and it grows mostly rice. The government takes most of the rice away from the private subsistence farms.

So much for the Workers’ Paradise. Eat dirt, peons.

Kim Klux Klan

by Mojambo ( 2 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Bigotry, Headlines, JUCHE!, North Korea at May 15th, 2014 - 9:10 am

Charles Johnson aka the Race Detective,  could not be reached for comment.

by Lloyd Billingsley

“It would be perfect for Obama to live with a group of monkeys in the world’s largest African natural zoo and lick the breadcrumbs thrown by spectators.” Barack Obama “still has the figure of a monkey while the human race has evolved through millions of years.”

That may sound like a memo from the Ku Klux Klan but was actually part of a May 2 diatribe from North Korea. The Communist regime in Pyongyang also called Obama a “clown,” a “dirty fellow” and somebody who “does not even have the basic appearances of a human being.” Further, “He is a crossbreed with unclear blood,” and a separate article called Obama a “wicked black monkey.” The White House called the racist screed “particularly ugly and disrespectful” and the media response proved of interest.

Reporters did not compare it with other aspects of North Korea, easily the vilest and most repressive regime on earth and a slave state. As a recent book shows, the Communist regime maintains a network of forced labor camps and aims to eliminate the “seed” of class enemies through three generations. Rather, the preferred comparison was the United States. The Washington Post, for example, said the North Koreans were “pulling language right out of the American 1850s.” That was more than 150 years ago, before the Civil War. Reporters could have found more recent examples from the true inspiration of North Korea, none other than Karl Marx himself.

As Thomas Sowell noted in Marxism: Philosophy and Economics, Marx called German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, a “Jewish ni***r,” based on his “cranial formation” and hair growth. His paternal grandmother or mother, Marx said, was “crossed with a ni***r” and “the fellow’s importunity is also ni***r-like.”

That business about “cranial formation” derives from Marx’s passion for phrenology, pseudoscientific quackery that extrapolates character from the shape of the head. The ever-superstitious Marx insisted on subjecting all new adherents to a phrenological examination, with particular attention to any bumps. In the cranial test one can hear echoes of the North Korean contention that Barack Obama lacks “the basic appearances of a human being.”

One doesn’t hear much about Marx’s phrenology, nor about the racism and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, denied by Stalinists like Paul Robeson but described in great detail by Robert Robinson in Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union. Russians referred to Patrice Lumumba University (now renamed People’s Friendship University of Russia) as a “monkey zoo” and Robinson found Soviet racism blatant and pervasive. He escaped and wrote an anticommunist classic that journalists have avoided and which the President of the United States has doubtless never read, if he knows about it at all.

Ugly and disrespectful as it was, North Korea’s racist attack on Barack Obama elicited less comment than the Donald Sterling episode. The longtime owner of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers was overheard saying he didn’t want his mistress to associate with black people nor to bring black people to his games. President Obama called the comments “incredibly offensive,” and the story took over the media, with NBA boss Adam Silver banning Sterling from the league for life.

Nobody should look for an NBA franchise in Pyongyang but the issues with that regime go to the heart of what the left is. The socialist vanguard somehow escapes the conditioning and false consciousness that afflict the masses. Then in power, the vanguard is supposed to be immune from normal human passions, along with bigotry, racism and hatred. The vanguard of course, retains all that, which empowers repression, persecution, ethnic cleansing and mass murder campaigns. Those have been the hallmark Marxist totalitarian states from Stalin’s USSR to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, to the North Korea of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jong-un.

That vile Communist regime calls the President of the United States a “wicked black monkey” who belongs in a zoo and lacks the basic appearance of a human being. Despite a response from the White House, the episode draws less media attention than Donald Sterling. And the default media response is to compare North Korea’s racist attack on Barack Obama with America in the 1850s.

This is what happens when journalists tacitly accept socialist superstition and remain ignorant of the actual record of Communist states. In its racist attack on president Obama, North Korea is simply being true to their Marxist roots.

Juche: Life inside the Orwellian Hermit Kingdom

by Mojambo ( 42 Comments › )
Filed under Cold War, JUCHE!, North Korea at January 21st, 2014 - 7:00 am

Life in North Korea makes life in Stalin’s U.S.S.R.  seem like living in Switzerland.  Socialism leads to Communism which leads to Stalinism which leads to genocide.

by Maureen Callahan

Life inside the surreal, cruel & sheltered North Korea

North Koreans clean up in front of one of the 34,000 statues of Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il, while grandson Kim Jong Un pals around with American D-list reality stars.

In so many ways, Dennis Rodman seems the diplomat North Korea deserves: defiant, unpredictable, irrational, unhinged.

Yet the comic aspects of his so-called “basketball diplomacy” — the drunken defense of dictator Kim Jong-un on CNN; serenading Kim with “Happy Birthday”; gifting him with several bottles of his own liquor, Bad Ass Vodka; allowing his “Dream Team” ofmotley ex-and wannabe NBA players to lose to the North Koreans — has turned the most brutal regime in the world into a punchline for late-night comics.

Lost among the jokes is the suffering of the average North Korean — the 24.7 million who live in abject poverty in the world’s most isolated nation.

North Korea’s human-rights record has been condemned by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the United Nations. Aside from saber-rattling, the government maintains little communication with the outside world.

The nation has so little electricity that, in the ultimate metaphor, nighttime satellite imagery shows North Korea gone dark, the only country in the world not illuminated. Travelers are only allowed to move within a circumscribed part of Pyongyang and are chaperoned and surveilled by government officials.

So: What do we really know about life inside the Hermit Kingdom?

Steven Seagal Behind the Curtains

In North Korea, a ballpoint pen is considered a luxury item. Men make it to their mid-20s without knowing that women menstruate, or what menstruation even is. The use of anesthesia for surgery is a fairly recent development. There is no sex education. You can marry for love, but only within your own social caste — determined by birth and generational loyalty to the regime.

In the fascinating feature called “Ask a North Korean” on the site NKNews.org, a series of four defectors have answered questions submitted by readers from all over the world. One asked what North Koreans do for fun.

“People do not have much in the way of individual pastimes under the totalitarian system in North Korea,” wrote Mina Yoon, a 20-something who defected in 2010. “The idea of ‘free time’ is not really common. Then, even if you do have free time, there aren’t many things to enjoy anyway.”

Mina’s family was lucky: they were one of the few families to have a TV, a gift to her father for his work performance. Children from all over would crowd into her living room, bribing her with what little food they had. And all they had to watch, like most North Koreans, was the lone state-run channel. Some daring souls would watch smuggled DVDs from the West, covering their windows with blankets — a transgression that, if discovered, still means hard time in a labor camp.

Not that long ago, it was a crime punishable by death.

“I will never forget the time when a group of friends and I gathered, covering the window with a thick duvet and fastening two or three locks to the door so we could watch Steven Seagal action movies,” defector Ji-Min Khan wrote.

[……..]
This is a radical notion for a country that punishes defectors with the threat of execution — and even if they escape, they must live with the fear that their families will be killed. The entire nation is a hive of East German-era paranoia, where anyone — from a neighbor to a family member — may be a spy or informant, ratting you out for an ill-advised criticism or complaint.

Jae Young Kim, another defector, wrote of a North Korean proverb: “The bird listens during the day and the mouse does at night.”

“You’re always being watched,” he writes. “From a young age, I learned to think of the potential consequences of everything I might say, before I said it. . . Criticism of the leaders is something that can lead to someone being sent from their city to the countryside; to a prison camp, or even worse.”

An Assigned Future, Rationed Food

Other infractions that have serious consequences: Girls cannot ride bicycles; it’s considered lascivious. Religion is a threat to the state and is banned; instead, children are raised to worship the late Kim Il-sung, who was made “president for life” four years after his death, in 1998, by his son and successor, the late Kim Jong-il. There are 34,000 statues of Kim Il-sung in North Korea, and all wedding ceremonies must take place in front of one.

All citizens must hang government-provided portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il in their homes, and once a month, the police come by to inspect them. All, too, must wear uniforms, and their future careers are based on caste and dictated by the government.

When she was in kindergarten, Mina Yoon was told she would become a doctor. “The teachers made sure that when anyone asked me about my dreams, I would answer: ‘I will study hard and be a medical doctor when I grow up. My dream is to make North Korean people healthy and well, and bring joy to Gen. Kim Il-sung.’ ”

But that was just propaganda. Had she not gotten out, she would have worked in a factory.

Jobs often come without salaries. Those who do get a paycheck, earn, on average, between $1,000-2,000 a year. Food and clothing are rationed by the government.

[…….]

“The majority of North Koreans believe completely in the regime,” says Barbara Demick, a Seoul-based journalist and author of “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.”

“They are barely surviving,” she says. “Only the rich can afford to eat rice. They’re in a chronic state of food shortage.”

The average citizen eats twice a day — a manageable state of affairs for citizens who lived through the great famine of the ’90s, which reduced millions of people to eating tree bark and plucking undigested kernels of corn from animal excrement.

Starving in the Countryside

In September 2008, Demick became one of the few Westerners to travel beyond Pyongyang.

“I saw people who appeared to be homeless sleeping in the grass along the main street,” she writes. “Others squatted on their haunches, heads down, apparently having nothing else to do at 10 o’clock on a weekday morning. Walking barefoot along the sidewalk was a boy of about 9 years old wearing a mud-stained uniform that hung below his knees . . . older people sifted through grass on their hands and knees in search of edible weeds.”

One of Demick’s subjects, a young female doctor, was forced to strip apart the few clothes she owned to use as makeshift sanitary pads — no napkins or tampons were provided at medical school.

During the famine, this young doctor struggled to treat starving children as her own hospital went without heat and hot water. She eventually defected.

“She was only out for one hour when she saw that dogs eat better in China than doctors in North Korea,” Demick says. “Defectors very quickly realize their life is a lie. They’re modern-day Rip Van Winkles — they’ve woken up and been dropped into the modern world.”

Over the past several years, three North Koreans have been jailed for attempting to assassinate defectors who fled to South Korea. Since 2002, in the wake of the great famine of the 1990s, between 1,000-2,000 North Koreans a year flee — usually crossing the semi-porous border to China, then South Korea.

[……]
But life inside North Korea is so desperate, Peters says, that they’re willing to take the risk. “They think, ‘If I’m a bride, at least I’ll have enough to eat.’”

Wonder at the Outside World

Once beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom, North Koreans cannot believe what the outside world has to offer. Unfamiliar with modern plumbing, they don’t know how to flush toilets. Water that runs all day, every day, astonishes, as does the abundance of food.

And then comes the larger realization: These people have freedoms.

“I have sat with refugees in farmhouses on the Chinese border, and they’re watching South Korean TV, and they see cellphones and fashion and washing machines, and their jaws hang open,” says Demick.

[……..]

Meanwhile, what must North Koreans, the most homogenous society in the world, make of this nearly 7-foot tall pierced, tattooed, boa-wearing basketball player, probably the first black man and American they’ve seen in person?

“North Koreans would highlight the suffering of blacks in America, and say ‘Here is a disaffected black American who has suffered,’ ” Peters says. “There is a reason they want to put him in the state-run narrative, but the rank and file would be extremely puzzled.”

And Kim’s basketball diplomacy isn’t going to be enough to staunch the flight of young people, who increasingly suspect the world outside must be better than within.

“Kim Jong-un has made it clear that even though his father was brutal, he will be even worse,” Peters says. “And his father was a very cruel man.”

Read the rest – Life inside the surreal, cruel and sheltered North Korea

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Juche: The North’s special actions “will reduce all the rat-like groups and the bases for provocations to ashes!

by Phantom Ace ( 9 Comments › )
Filed under Communism, Headlines, Humor, JUCHE!, North Korea, Progressives, South Korea at April 23rd, 2012 - 9:21 pm

As much as I despise the North Korean regime, they have top grade propaganda. From wonders in the sky, to weeping bears; their Juche statements are classic comedy gold.  Now North Korea is threatening to wipe out South Korea’s government in 4 minutes!

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — North Korea’s military vowed Monday to launch unspecified “special actions” soon meant to reduce South Korea’s conservative government and media companies “to ashes” in less that four minutes, in an escalation of its recent threats.

North Korea regularly criticizes Seoul and just last week renewed its promise to wage a “sacred war,” saying South Korean President Lee Myung-bak had insulted the North’s April 15 celebrations of the birth centennial of national founder Kim Il Sung.

[….]

The North’s special actions “will reduce all the rat-like groups and the bases for provocations to ashes in three or four minutes, (or) in much shorter time, by unprecedented peculiar means and methods of our own style,” according to the statement by the special operation action group of the Korean People’s Army’s Supreme Command.

The power of Juche! You got to love it!