President takes a peek at what real income redistribution looks like

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Alternate headline: Statist-in-Chief sees results of full-blown statism


The President in South Korea looking northward:

After squinting through binoculars into a nation frozen in time, US President Barack Obama reeled off a contempt-laden and startlingly frank indictment of North Korea.

The Stalinist remnant of the Cold War was, in Obama's eyes, nothing but a nation which cannot make "anything of any use", "doesn't work", and even its vaunted weapons exports were hardly state of the art.

"It is like you are in a time warp," Obama said Sunday, after he toured a rocky border post in the demilitarised buffer zone that has split the Korean peninsular for longer than he has been alive.

"It is like you are looking across 50 years into a country that has missed 40 years or 50 years of progress," Obama marvelled later, after taking a helicopter back to teeming, prosperous Seoul, just 25 miles (40 kilometres) away.

Of course, any lessons learned or meaningful take away regarding the ultimate folly of a top-down, command-and-control economy will be completely lost on him. Sees no parallels to his own disastrous Department of Energy loan program. Just not doing it correctly, he must assume.




And dig this paragraph from the article:

Earlier, he had told some of the 28,500 US troops stationed in South Korea they were performing honoured service at "freedom's frontier" and brought news of annual college basketball playoffs from home.

(italics, ours)

Such are the pervasive and insinuating effects of North Korea's collectivism, our Commander-in-Chief, while he's over there, doubles as a sort of Pony Express rider? Weird.


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CNN loves them some parades...

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... especially as a backdrop for coverage of a brutal communist dictatorship.







It's just so much easier than having to address the more usavory aspects of North Korea.


And towards the end of this 3 minute clip, cue the obligatory useful (Western) idiot.


H/T: Ed Driscoll

Chart of the day... and quiz

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Just a one question quiz and it shouldn't be that difficult at that:

Question: Which country is the totalitarian police state and which is the constitutional liberal democracy that respects property rights and the rule of law?



Yeah. So easy we're not even going to give you the answer.


What's that you say? How can a country have a prosperous economy when that country is embargoed against by virtually the rest of the civilized world? Good point, perhaps. Maybe the leaders of this Stalinist gulag-nation should be asking themselves that question whilst pondering why it is they have no trading partners.


The same rule applies with respect to what we learned in kindergarten as it does to geo-politics and the global economy: Don't be a dick.


H/T: Big Government

So, the guy pictured is some sort of deranged lunatic, right?

Not so fast, explains Secular Apostate.





The dog-eating perve of the peninsula has very rational reasons for behaving the way he does.

Deadspin commenters... they'll be here all week.

Writes Deadspin:

Michigan Stadium, opening after renovations, will again be the nation's largest with a capacity of 109,901. They've still got a ways to go to catch Pyongyang's Rŭngrado May Day Stadium, which seats 150,000.

Steve U:
Of course, attendance at Rungrado only approaches capacity on Dollar Dog Night.

Babcocksure:
wow, 109,901, that's amazing...I didn't know you could fit that many arrogant douchebags in one place.

bevraj ofchoice:
Finally, the UAW brass have a suitable site for their company softball games.

FavreFAIL:
Well on one hand you have a secretive, chaotically run regime with millions of feverishly devoted followers who worship it as though it were deity, and on the other you have North Korea.

don't-forget-where-you-:
Seats 109,901? Are they renaming it the Palindrome?

Of Nukes, Norks and other assorted madmen

"Nothing more wonderfully concentrates a man's mind than the sure knowledge he is to be hanged in the morning."

B-Daddy breaks down how best to deal with the nuclear threat posed by both North Korea and Iran and shows admirable restraint with respect to describing the proclivities of the little dog-eating perv of the peninsula.

Check it out here

Be it ever so feeble, the retro-active march of justice grinds...

So, what do the Norks, the Peloponnesian War and the U.N. Security Council all have in common? Secular Apostate will clue you in, here

A long-awaited return engagement

So the President and Kim Jong Il walk into this bar...

B-Daddy of The Liberator Today has been out of circulation for a while but he's back. In his return post, B-Daddy offers some rare insight into what is really going on behind the scenes at the U.N. with respect to North Korea's nuke program testing. Please click here. We think you will enjoy it.

Ya Think?

Another bad day for the Olympic torch yesterday as Chinese students clashed with anti-Beijing protesters and where one man, a North Korean defector, attempted to immolate himself as the torch made a stop in Seoul, South Korea.

Story here also prompted the line of the day:

“Today, the Olympic torch begins its first-ever run through North Korea, where the flame was assured a trip free of anti-Chinese protests.”

(ed. note: This line appears in the print version of today’s paper but not in the attached electronic version.)