Life in Pyongyang

NPR talks to an American back from a recent second visit to Pyongyang, who says that life seems relatively normal, at least in that city:

On what has changed since Lee's last trip to North Korea

I have to point out that I've only been in Pyongyang, which is the showcase capital. This is a city of elites, and so I'm only getting that side of the picture. It's like only going to Manhattan, rather than seeing the rest of the United States.

That said, it's surprising given what we hear about the sanctions how things have progressed. Everybody has a smartphone — sometimes two. Everybody is on their phones. They're all playing video games. They're doing what we do with our cellphones as well, they're checking the news, messaging their friends.

There's quite a bit more English, which is interesting. English is the main language that children learn here. There's certainly a lot more cars, which is surprising given the concern about fuel shortages.

I did some shopping today ... and it's just amazing the kinds of products that they have on the shelves. [That] certainly wasn't the case when I started coming to North Korea. So, in some ways, life has improved for the people of Pyongyang.

That said, I think that things are still incredibly difficult in the countryside. They have a chronic food shortage, and that's only going to get worse, of course, with the tightened sanctions.

I didn't expect that bit about English, either.

And even with state controlled media, it seems they are not being whipped into a frenzy (or if the attempt is being made, it's not working?):

It's amazingly calm. You would be surprised at how calm things are here, and I have to say that like most North Koreans, I've been largely cut off from the screaming headlines that we've been seeing. I didn't have Internet access for several days. And, as you probably know, most North Koreans don't have Internet access. They get their news from their own state media, so unless they read about it in their own state media, or see it on the evening news, they're not very aware of it.

To be honest, it's remarkable, we are not seeing people who are preparing for war. They've had a month, really, of some big anniversaries. They celebrated May Day. I did go to a May Day celebration in the park, where they were singing and dancing and drinking.
But they're getting ready now for a busy season of rice planting in May, so they're gearing up for that. They are completely unfazed, it seems, by all the rhetoric that we're hearing overseas.

Plain packaging win (it seems)

Are there tears in the Sinclair Davidson, Tim Wilson and John Roskam households this morning?

Because Sinclair may have to put his passport back in the draw after getting some international invites to talk at tobacco sympathiser meetings about how plain packaging doesn't really work (the signs are that governments just don't believe him);  Tim looks likely to have been proved completely and utterly wrong in every respect  about his warnings while he was on the tobacco funded IPA's payroll; and similarly John Roskam's institute might get less funding from tobacco and have to go asking for Gina for more.  

Because - it looks very likely that the WTO has decided that Australia (and any other country that wants to do it) can do plain packaging on tobacco and not be an illegal barrier to trade.

Yes, laugh out loud

It's not that often that I do laugh out loud at a short tweeted video, but the one here, which looks like it has been retweeted a huge number of times already,  really does look so bizarre I could not help it.

Self serving mush

Gee, Chris Kenny is a political commentator well worth ignoring, isn't he?   Here is the start of his excuse making ramble in The Australian today on the state of politics:

Wandering around the US last month I was reminded about the less than compelling place that partisan politics has in our daily lives. 

Even in the Democrat heartlands of California and Hawaii, whether in the big cities or the back blocks, Americans didn’t mention politics or their new President unless I raised the topic. They were — to use a phrase — relaxed and comfortable; just getting on with their lives.   [My note:  it's hardly common in any country, is it, to ask a tourist to discuss what they think about your country's politics?]

 This, of course, should be no surprise and it merely confirmed my instincts as I mulled over what we are told are tectonic shifts in the political mood in Western liberal democracies.

Brexit, Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and even Pauline Hanson are often characterised as evidence of a far-right, populist upsurge. This analysis often veers into patronising or demeaning references to the voting public.   [Yes Chris - protestor bashing, redneck rallies for Trump spouting know lies were just typical examples of all political rallies from the last 50 years, hey?]

If this were true, what could be the trigger? Why would this be happening? And where will it take Australian politics? [Gee, what might Chris think is the reason - oh yeah, the Lefty political/media class has gone completely nuts and out of touch.  Like the significant majority of American voters for actually voted for Hillary, I suppose, you moron.]

Perhaps much of the political/media class has misjudged what is going on. Maybe this is less a case of the public mood shifting than voter realisation that the political/media class has shifted from a once centrist axis.

 And so on and so on.   A predictable worthless commentator if ever there was one.

Yet another post about the Guardians 2 movie I didn't care for much

Oddly, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 opened overseas a week ahead of the USA, and hence there are some reviews from there only coming out now.

I found myself just about in complete agreement with the very mixed review in the New York Times, and was happy to read this out to my son over breakfast, citing vindication for the comments I had made to him about the Yondu killing spree section of the film:

At times, Mr. Gunn’s ambitions badly backfire. Like the first movie, this one is jammed with action-driven sequences, some wildly bloated and most of them cartoonish. For one fight, though, he cranks the music and lets the screen bleed as the ostensible good guys kill one villain after another, the casualties falling to the sound of a head-bobbing song. Tonally, the episode feels unpleasantly sour and wrong for this young series, which is best when it goes light; it’s a bummer watching another director attempt the kind of smiling sadism that not even Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino can always pull off.

Interest piqued

I'm far, far from being a Christopher Nolan fanboy, but I have to admit, the new trailer for his forthcoming Dunkirk has a very pleasing look of realism about it.  (In reality, there probably will be plenty of CGI in it, but if you can't tell, it doesn't matter.)



Of course, it may look great but still have no emotional connection to the audience, and he did write it himself (which is a warning sign, given he and his brother did the God awful dialogue in Interstellar.)   But the claim is that Dunkirk is actually light on dialogue.

We shall see....

Nothing if not inconsistent

Are Republican congressmen (well, there was barely a female to be seen) just not that bright?   Because I thought the optics of them guffawing over their Obamacare repeal at the White House was clearly bad - especially when the long term consequences look certain to hurt the poor and give tax cuts to the rich.   There will be no excuse that they did it with some sort of regret, but it just had to be done as an economic necessity, as other Right wing policy sometimes sells itself.  No - the history books will show they celebrated, essentially just because they finally got enough on their own side to vote for an ideologically driven, but socially harmful, law.  Congrats, boys...

And as for Trump:  well, we know he's an narcissistic, immature idiot who just thinks a win's a win and that's all that matters.  But to go from celebrating with Ryan to praising the Australian health system??   Could he possibly be any more intellectually inconsistent?   Well, I guess it takes an intellect, first of all...

Adam throws a tantrum

Adam Creighton, being of a libertarian mind, cannot bring himself to support the idea that banks or investors should base decisions on taking the largest environmental issue the world has seen into account.   Libertarians are stupid this way - either they are greedy rich grubs who spend part of their squillions protecting their income by ridiculing the idea that there is any problem with CO2 at all (see Koch brothers), or even if they do believe that climate change is real and that the precautionary principle means there should be action against it, they can't be bothered being concerned about nothing much being done about it (because "big government", or "I hate Hillary Clinton," or something..see Nassim Taleb.)   And if it's a matter of it taking harm to a mining company to help ensure coal burning stops adding to CO2 - well of course that's offensive, because "you're stopping someone making money".

Hence Adam spends his time criticising Westpac today, because it said it won't finance Adani.

Given that it seems most economists think that Australian banks are relatively well placed financially, I am not at all confident that Adam's criticises are accurate or fair.   Some of his criticisms are obviously ideological, and I would need someone with a better understanding of banking systems and regulation to parse it before I trusted his assessment.

An entry exam too far

Last weekend, I posted about the rather extraordinary story of romantic deception that was in the SMH magazine.

Today, we have a more oddball tale of deception in what sounds more or less like a private pre-spy school in Washington DC.  (Who knew they existed?)

Long story short - a guy ingratiates himself with staff at such a school, and with retired spies more generally, with stories that he used to work in some agency or other, killing bad guys and so on.  Some young male students fall for his stories that he may be recruiting them for his still active covert group, but some of the training involves visits to his apartment.  (Uh-oh.)

Then, Levin began inviting his protege back to his Arlington apartment building to practice drawing a weapon — shirtless. Soon, the man said, Levin began fondling him and giving him prostate exams, telling him the inspections were key to his recruitment. Levin also washed him in the shower, according to the alleged victims’ lawsuit, which was filed by lawyers Tamara Miller, a former Justice Department deputy chief, and Peter Masciola, a retired brigadier general.

Although Levin told him that he was free to refuse, the Arlington man said he did not want to imperil his candidacy for the clandestine organization or risk losing out on government jobs.

About the same time, Levin had persuaded a second young student at the Institute of World Politics to get in the shower, under similar pretenses, the lawsuit says.

The whole story is interesting though, because of the way it suggests that retired spies don't really talk in detail to each other about places they worked for, and what they did.  Which makes it conveniently easy to concoct a past.

As someone in comments after the article says:

The general impression, from reading this story, is that there are a bunch of stupid people in the IC.

(I also how hope that the pun in the title to this post is now appreciated.)

Two other points about Guardians 2

*   The Washington Post has an article noting that the movie really doubles down on the use of retro pop music, and it did feel a tad excessive compared to the more restrained use in the first movie.  The article criticises this whole genre of movie as getting a bit lazy:

When needle drops have been curated carefully and deployed judiciously, they can enhance a film’s atmosphere and its characters’ unspoken feelings. Too often, though, they’re lazy ploys to earn the audience’s buy-in, or to signal the connoisseurship and impressively arcane tastes of the filmmaker. Music that should be used to convey added layers of environmental and emotional information is instead used simply for nostalgia appeal and self-congratulation.

Yes, I concur.

*  Has anyone else yet mentioned that Ego's origin story seems to draw on the idea of a Boltzmann Brain?  Let me Google it - yes, someone at IMDB has already commented on this.  (It is very hard to be first on the internet!)

Speaking of China

The BBC is reporting that morning in Beijing currently looks like this:

Makes me want to cough just looking at it.

And how bad is the air quality?  Spectacularly bad:

Beijing's environmental agency said that as of 11:00 local time (03:00 GMT), the PM2.5 reading - which measures pollution in the form of small breathable particles - was 500 micrograms per cubic metre.

The WHO says the maximum safe level should be 25 micrograms per cubic metre.

A good survey of the rise of China

This review of a book on Asia's rise contains an interesting summary of what has been going on with China.   Some things of note:

Asia is the world’s largest continent and home to 4.4 billion people. But its story is disproportionately about China’s economic growth. Beijing’s official statistics are notoriously unreliable, but by most reckonings, China became the world’s largest economy (measured by purchasing power parity, PPP) in 2014. What isn’t so well known is how astonishingly fast the end came for the 140-year reign of the American economy as the world’s largest. According to numbers Rachman cites, China was just 12 percent of the size of the US economy in 2000 and only half as big as late as 2011. Such meteoric growth has been enough to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, finance the US deficit, and still allow China to increase its military spending at double-digit rates every year for two decades....

Rachman links China’s newly aggressive policies to President Xi Jinping, noting that the month after he took office “Chinese military aircraft entered Japanese-controlled airspace for the first time since 1958,” and that in his first eighteen months Xi “paid more official visits to the People’s Liberation Army than his predecessor had done in a decade.” Xi has paid equal attention to building public support for his newly assertive policies, bolstering decades of Communist Party propaganda that China, at long last, is claiming its rightful place as a world power after more than a century of foreign humiliation.

This “aggrieved nationalism” coexists with an equally strong feeling of insecurity within the Chinese government—a dangerous mixture. The Communist Party’s legitimacy no longer rests on ideology but on economic growth, which is slowing. The Party is convinced that the West fomented the string of so-called color revolutions demanding democratic governance that took place during the 2000s—from Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan to Lebanon and Iran. It fears and expects similar subversion in China. Outrage at elite corruption was a common feature of these movements, and corruption is rampant in China. So Xi has launched a vigorous campaign against it—conveniently jailing many of his political opponents. The difficulty, as Rachman points out, is that “arresting more than one hundred thousand people…risks creating political instability by another route.”

Scenic Norway

This photo appeared on Reddit recently, noting the unusual and spectacular setting for a soccer field in Norway.   (I am interested in what the buildings on the point beyond the field are, as well.  Looks like a lighthouse keepers house?)   No wonder there seems to be a surge of interest in Norway as a scenic wonderland.

Another rule of thumb

A politician (or political adviser) unduly obsessed with immigration and how it's wrecking the place (and allegedly so unfair on those already here) is never a good sign.

The case in point:  Steve Bannon.

The trouble with wisdom teeth

Forgot to post this last week: an article explaining why so many of us moderns need our wisdom teeth out:

Sarah Zhang: I’d like to begin with where your book ends, which is the modern scourge of impacted wisdom teeth. Our ancestors had wisdom teeth, they did not have dentists, and they did not have so many problems. Aside from possibly being over-diagnosed, why are impacted wisdom teeth a uniquely modern problem?

Peter Ungar: It’s a uniquely modern problem because we don’t grow our jaws long enough to accommodate our teeth. It turns out that nature has selected our jaw length on the basis of what it expects us to be doing during the period of time the jaw is growing. The more frequently you put force on the jaw, the longer the jaw grows. Nature has to guesstimate how long your jaw should be for teeth of a given size. Today we don't achieve that because we’re eating mush as kids.

I don't think my diet was particularly mushy, but these things are relative, I suppose...

Inheritance taxed

Adam Creighton does something relatively useful today (don't worry, he's bound to say something stupid or otherwise objectionable tomorrow) by doing some straight reporting on what a visiting Japanese banker says:

He said Japan’s “40 to 50 per cent inheritance tax (on) wealthy people” helped keep a lid on inequality in Japan, which made politics more stable. It capped house price growth too. “Here people have a strong incentive to buy a house for kids, whereas less so in Japan,” Mr Yoshizawa said.

He also said the financial sector could learn from Japanese banks, which have not been caught up in fraud and mis-selling scandals that have cost major US and European investment banks up to $320bn in fines since the financial crisis.

“In Japanese culture staff have a long-term commitment first of all. And the compensation system is flat,” he explained. “There’s less incentive to make a quick result.”

Colbert should apologise

While it is, of course, ridiculously hypocritical that anyone on the alt.right (or even those who decline to criticise them) should criticise Colbert for using an insult because they say it is politically incorrect, it's still true that Colbert should apologise to his audience for using an insult that no one should use.

There's nothing politically correct about my attitude to this:  I've always disliked the insult because it is juvenile and can be readily be taken by any truly homophobic and violent gay basher to be sympathetic to their attitude.

Update:  reading my link above, which seems to suggest that Colbert should never use any form of gay jibe for the relationship between Trump and Putin, I think that is a step too far.  There are fine lines to be drawn here, to be sure, but I don't really have a problem with a comedian mocking Trump and Putin by pretending they are gay lovers, especially given their reputation as uber heterosexuals (and in Putin's case at least, outright homophobic.)    But an insult based specifically on a homosexual sex act is different - it suggests (as Putin himself presumably thinks) that a particular sex act itself is degrading, but only when done by two men.  By specifying it as being about a homosexual sex act, it is too easily read as either directly or indirectly mocking homosexuality itself.

I suspect Colbert will apologise.

Ketamine and depression

It's pretty surprising how people use drugs for their hedonistic pleasure, but it takes so much effort for scientists to properly understand what said drug is doing in the brain. 

Not very funny

Here's another thought that I choose to speak in the open here:   there seems to me to be a disproportionate number of gay people in stand up comedy in Australia at the moment.

I could be completely wrong - stand up comedy has never been my thing, really.   The modern version is too crude, and (with few exceptions) involves too much self disclosure and seems too much of an attempt at self therapy. 

But on the ABC, you get to see comedians on panel shows and that's where I have the impression there seem to be a lot of gay stand up comedy.

And the trouble is, I don't find any of them particularly witty or funny.  I don't think it's a gay bias thing - I've always found Stephen Fry can be funny and witty, although I think some people do go over the top in their admiration of him.  Ellen Degeneres - well, I think she is a bit over rated, but she can be witty and a basic likeability is undeniable.  

But Tom Ballard - I find him hard to warm to.  Rhys Nicholson - can't see the wit there.  Josh Thomas - maybe he doesn't count as a stand up comic, but I was very underwhelmed by what I saw of his dramedy TV show.  Hannah Gadsby - surely a case of attempted public therapy, lasting years and years now.   Seems uncomfortable in anything I see her on.

But perhaps I should warm more to Gadsby, as she has decided to give up stand up and actually sounds as if she has reached a sensible position about gay identity:

The knotty complexities of the contemporary identity conundrum has been one of the thoughts weighing heaviest on Gadsby.

"I've come to realise I don't like the word queer, for myself at least, because it takes that concept of identity beyond sexuality, in my mind. I guess I was born under the star of Nanna. I realise at the moment there's quite a lot of pressure to declare how you identify, particularly in the LGBT community, so to be totally honest, I probably identify as 'Grandma'," she reveals. "The idea of Queerness - with a capital Q - is about making a statement, so I don't identify as that because I never set out to go, 'Oh I want to be different.' When I was a kid, being not normal was incredibly dangerous and unsafe, but I was powerless to change that, so I was just, y'know, not normal, in a sort of generic, none specified way. I desperately didn't want to stand out. I think that's why I've always been friends with old ladies - even though I'm not that old."

 To be fair, I should point out that I have no idea whether I would find stand up by many of our straight comedians very satisfying, either.  But I did watch some of a Kitty Flanagan stage show on Stan, and she was OK.   I like Tom Gleeson's comic persona of the moment, too.  

Not sure why so much of the younger set seems to be gay, though...

Lukewarming danger

I liked this article at New Republic, making it clear that scientists have been warning of the disingenuousness (and therefore danger to good policy) of the lukewarmer argument on climate change for years.   It is right that should be an outcry against the New York Times hiring one.