Jeffrey and I are in Chicago (well, Oak Lawn, IL) for a friend’s wedding. A nearby motel advertises, I shit you not:
bq. *The Four Hour Nap.*
Have a nice weekend.
*Update:*
Jeffrey has kindly supplied “some”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/images/889.jpg photographic “evidence.”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/images/888.jpg
This is worse than I “first thought.”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1363/shorter-david-ignatius
Can anyone think of any events at all concerning North Korea that have been left out of this little narrative? Like, say, the ones Philip Z “glossed over”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1364/shorter-philip-zelikow?
Treasury *applied the new tools to North Korea in September 2005,* when it put a bank in Macao called Banco Delta Asia on the blacklist. There was no legal proceeding — just a notice in the Federal Register summarizing the evidence: Banco Delta Asia had been providing illicit financial services to North Korean government agencies and front companies for more than 20 years, according to the Treasury notice.
*snip*
Wham! [Pow! KaBlammo!] The international payments window shut almost instantly on Pyongyang’s pet bank. Transactions with U.S. entities stopped, but the Treasury announcement also put other countries on notice to beware of Banco Delta Asia. The Macao banking authorities, realizing that they needed the oxygen of the international financial system to survive, took regulatory action on their own and froze the bank’s roughly $24 million in North Korean assets. And around Asia, banks began looking for possible links to North Korean front companies — and shutting them down.
Wham! indeed. Not just a shitty 80s band, I guess.
“So far,”:http://relapse.com/splash/DF_splash.html anyway.
I don’t usually link to stuff like “this”:http://sadlyno.com/archives/4921.html, but Sadly, No! made me laugh out loud by providing tips for Michelle Malkin et al RE: their Iraq “reporting.”
For those of you with lives, Malkin and other like-minded -idiots- geniuses have been carrying on for quite some time about the MSM’s alleged penchant for ignoring good news in Iraq.
Anyway, this tip is hilarious:
TIP: When you’re building up to your big ‘gotcha’ moment — i.e., the revelation that, like you’d said, either three or two or at least one of the four mosques that Jamil Hussein and the liberal MSM claimed were “burned” were, in fact, undamaged (or in your recent, less precise phrasing, “not destroyed”) — it’s better if you don’t go visit one and then attempt a revelatory camera pan on a firebombed mosque with a giant hole blown in it
So to begin with, there’s that. Plus, Michelle, your most recent, even narrower term apropos the mosques in question, “still standing,” seems to set the bar pretty low. People might suspect a bit of a shell-game when they see Hussein’s original statement — that four (4) mosques (four mosques) were burned (were burned) — countered by an upspiraling succession of flapdoodle claims that, au contraire!, all, or several, or at least one of the mosques were not in fact ‘toppled,’ ‘destroyed,’ ‘obliterated,’ ‘crushed by a 900-foot-tall Frankenstein,’ ‘atomized,’ ‘blown clear into orbit,’ ‘crumbled into a chasm straight down to the earth’s core,’ and/or ‘eaten by interdimensional space wombat-squid,’ as the so-called “Iraqi police captain,” the nonexistent Jamil Hussein, so outrageously claimed via the so-called “Associated Press” — who are therefore and for that reason in league with terrorists.
Making your Monday more tolerable…
[via “Atrios.”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_01_28_atrios_archive.html#116999474939061159 ]
Speaking of “music”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1327/2-minutes-to-midnight, according to a “KCNA article”:http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2007/200701/news01/19.htm#9 titled “Great Vitality of Music-based Politics:”
bq. The music-based politics of the Workers’ Party of Korea has brought about a great turn in the development of the Korean revolution and its validity and indestructible vitality is being displayed to the fuller as the days go by. Kim Jong Il, who set forth a unique idea that a genuine music should meet the demand of the times and contribute to the mission of the times in the early period of his revolutionary activities, has wisely led the work of creating famous art pieces representing the times at each stage of the revolutionary development.
Of all those songs, this one is too good to be true:”All Servicepersons and People Will Become Human Bullets and Bombs.”
Lest you think that music doesn’t matter, the article adds:
Startling miracles and labor feats are being made in many units from the beginning of the year. These are unthinkable apart from brisk mass cultural and artistic activities.
The working people of Korea are registering signal successes in all working sites of the socialist construction such as the agricultural and power, coal-mining, metal industry and rail transport sectors, singing louder the songs of struggle and advance.
The music-based politics is certain to bring earlier the building of a great, prosperous powerful nation.
“Jane has inspired me”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1357/now-approaching-midnight to cite another “musical reference”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_clock#In_music to the BAS Doomsday Clock.
p{float: right; margin-left: 10px}. !/images/2.jpg!
The picture speaks for itself, but those few of you who are not familiar with the song can click “here”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Minutes_to_Midnight for more information.
I actually saw a documentary on metal the other night which fittingly had interviews with members of Iron Maiden, along with some old-school footage of them playing live with Paul Di’Anno.
And, just FYI, the Iron Maiden font was a top candidate for the font for the title of this blog. That would have been sweet.
*Update:*
Turns out that NRO, of all places, published “an article”:http://www.nationalreview.com/miller/miller200409150615.asp about 2 years ago celebrating the 20th anniversay of the _Powerslave_ album. Here’s that author’s take on the track I wrote about:
bq. The second song is one of Iron Maiden’s most familiar: “Two Minutes to Midnight.” It’s an anti-nuke tune whose politics aren’t exactly to my liking. Although the lyrics admit that “blood is freedom’s stain,” they also suggest that during the Cold War, both sides were deluded. The title is a reference to the *Doomsday Clock, whose main purpose is to serve as a propaganda tool of the Left.* None of this means that the boys in Iron Maiden are Commie symps — they aren’t — but a piece of me always has wished this song had been about Dunkirk or something. Still, the hooks are catchy and the lyrics are such that I enjoyed deciphering their meaning when I was 14 years old.
Loser.
Jeffrey “recently wrote:”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1325/administrivia
bq. Paul and I have been friends since we were office mates at CSIS a long, long time ago. (And, yes, we did accomplish some things despite sharing a tiny, windowless box. For example, we refused Steele Means an internship. We also conducted serious research into whether Fugazi and the DC dancepunk scene are more derivative of Television or Gang of Four. And yes, there is a correct answer to that question.)
This reminded me of the time we left work early to see Fugazi play on the mall as part of the DC Folklife Festival. I distinctly recall Ian MacKaye telling the crowd that some Smithsonian people were concerned that the band (which they had never heard of) might not be able to fill the tent in which they were supposed to play.
Those concerns were, needless to say, unfounded.
Get back to work, nerds.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has recently started his “own blog”:http://www.ahmadinejad.ir/. There’s a link to the English-language site. [“RFE/RL via Payvand News”:http://www.payvand.com/news/06/aug/1152.html].
FYI, Ahmadinejad’s 60 Minutes interview, which aired last night, can be found “here.”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/09/60minutes/main1879867.shtml
Kim Jong-il has had “his own blog”:http://users.livejournal.com/kim_jong_il__/ for a while and seems to have resumed updating it.
You’re reading this blog. Or writing for it.
bq. It’s kind of like them changing the name of the movie. It’s stupid. “Oh we don’t want to give too much away.” Of course you do! You want people to know they’re coming to see people trapped on a plane with snakes.
–Samuel L. Jackson, “_Time_ interview.”:http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1186739,00.html