Bookworm Room

Two stories at the British Guardian caught my eye.  The first is the Guardian’s announcement that its readers think Private Bradley Manning deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.   You’re not imagining things.  Britain’s Left — at least that portion that answers unscientific online newspaper polls — thinks that the man who stole thousands of classified [...]

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North Korea assumes presidency of U.N. arms control conference http://dailycaller.com/2011/06/29/north-korea-assumes-presidency-of-u-n-arms-control-conference/#ixzz1Ql1gXN44 “Bare months after the U.N. finally suspended Libya’s Col. Muammar Qaddafi from its Human Rights Council, North Korea wins the propaganda coup of heading the world’s disarmament agency,” the executive director of UN Watch Hillel Neuer said in a statement protesting the move. “It’s asking [...]

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Clearly, predator nations smell blood in the water — and that blood is Obama’s manifest inability to cope with predator nations.  At least, that’s how I read this, from BNO News at 9:30 ish p.m. PST: N. Korea says it is no longer bound to the armistice which ended the war and says the peninsula [...]

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I few hours ago, I read the Twitters on “peculiar earthquakes” in the Korean Peninsula.  Now I know why they were peculiar:  the North Koreans are testing nukes.  Oh, joy.  I hope the White House’s “grave[] concern” translates into intelligent action.

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Didn’t Biden say Obama would be tested within months of taking office? The State Department says that North Korea has launched a rocket, following through on its promise of a launch despite international criticism. State Department spokesman Fred Lash confirmed the launch, saying it occurred at 10:30 p.m. EDT Saturday. “We look on this as [...]

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I have increasingly less doubt that Israel’s raid into Syria was intended to knock out some sort of three way nuclear transaction involving Syria, North Korea and Iran.  This is especially true given the absence of huffing and puffing from anyone, including Syria, about what Israel did.  Syria wants to keep the event low profile, [...]

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If you want to learn a little bit more about North Korea, which seems to have something at least approximating real nuclear bombs, check out all the information Laer has gathered on the subject. I’m still feeling green around the gills and emotionally horrible from reading it. This is a truly terrible society.

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Thomas Lifson writes a remarkably sanguine article in which he posits that the recent fizzle-pop out of N. Korea was not a show of strength, but a last ditch effort to keep the N. Korean army in line: Any dictator who can allow a million or two of his 20 million countrymen to die of starvation, rather [...]

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Whatever the word is, it’s nice to see the Japanese showing some in the current North Korean crisis: Over Chinese and Russian objections, Japan introduced a draft Security Council resolution Friday that would impose sanctions on North Korea for its series of rocket test-launches and also order a halt to its development of ballistic missiles. [...]

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If you’ve ever wondered what the reductio ad absurdum of socialism is, I think North Korea must be the answer.  Certainly the many pictures that Russia’s top web designer took during a recent trip there make it seem like the closest thing the real world has to Orwell’s imagined 1984.  This picture and its caption, [...]

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