Provocation of the day

"Celebrate Human Achievement", says Cato:

Environmentalist groups and celebrities are celebrating “Earth Hour” tonight. They ask that you turn your lights out for an hour, to call attention to global warming.  Folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute suggest that “this sends the wrong message — to plunge us all into darkness as a rejection of technology and human achievement.” In fact, they point out that it’s Earth Hour every night in North Korea, where people lack basic freedoms, as well as affordable, reliable access to many human achievements, such as electricity. Check out this famous photo of environmentally conscious North Koreans observing Earth Hour all night, every night:

CEI rejects the rejection of technology. They have declared the hour between 8:30 and 9:30 tonight to be “Human Achievement Hour.” To join the celebration, just turn your lights on tonight and enjoy the human achievement of light when we want it. And watch CEI’s short video history of human achievement here.

Wilco.

Quote of the day

"In the days leading up to an interview with ABC News’ Charlie Gibson, aides were worried with Ms. Palin’s grasp of facts. She couldn’t explain why North and South Korea were separate nations and she did not know what the Federal Reserve did. She also said she believed Saddam Hussein attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001."

Andrew pounces.

Capitalism, market economy slowly take root in N. Korea

WASHINGTON POST -- Kim's government in the past two years has closed some large markets, shifted Chinese-made goods to state-run shops and ordered that only middle-aged and older women can sell goods in open-air markets, to try to limit the number of North Koreans who abandon government jobs for the private sector. But capitalism seems to have already taken root. U.N. officials estimate that half the calories consumed in North Korea come from food bought in private markets, and that nearly 80 percent of household income derives from buying and selling in the markets, according to a study last year in the Seoul Journal of Economics.

Private markets are flooding the country with electronics from China and elsewhere. Cheap radios, televisions, MP3 devices, DVD players, video cameras and cellphones are seeping into a semi-feudal society, where a trusted elite lives in the capital Pyongyang. Surrounding the elite is a suspect peasantry that is poor, stunted by hunger and spied upon by layers of state security.

In the past year, the elites in Pyongyang have been granted authorized access to mobile phones -- the number is soon expected to reach 120,000. In the border regions with China, unauthorized mobile phone use has also increased among the trading classes. And unlike most of the mobile phones in Pyongyang, the illegal phones are set up to make international calls. Chinese telecom companies have built relay towers near the border, providing strong mobile signals in many nearby North Korean towns. Those phones have become a new source of real-time reporting to the outside world on events inside North Korea, as networks of informants call in news to Web sites such as the Seoul-based Daily NK and the Buddhist aid group Good Friends.

Affordable electronics are also cracking open the government's decades-old seal on incoming information. Imported radios -- and televisions in border areas -- are enabling a substantial proportion of the North Korean populations to tune in to Chinese and South Korean stations, as well as to Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, according to an unpublished survey of newly arrived defectors in South Korea. It found that two-thirds of them listened regularly to foreign broadcasts.

(via Perry)

Greedy private investors resist government redistribution and regulation

Horror of horrors, they're even bribing public officials!

Neocon humor

Quoth Michael Goldfarb:

In the course of Donald Morrison's review of Au Revoir to All That by Michael Steinberger, we learn that McDonald's is the largest private employer in all of France, which is sort of like being the largest provider of health insurance in North Korea, but nonetheless, it feels like a major triumph for American culture and cuisine.

I once ate at the McDonald's right next to the Arc de Triomphe. My quarter pounder tasted like hegemony.

(ht Will)

Link blag

Daily Beast: What's in the torture memos?

Cato: Obama and The Interrogation Memos: The Right Decision...

Critics, such as the one featured in this Politico article, fail to comprehend terrorism as a strategy. Thus, they are locked into counterproductive policies like secrecy and torture.

Let’s start with the strategic logic of terrorism: By goading strong powers into overreaction and error, terrorism weakens those powers and strengthens itself. Among other things, overreaction and misdirection on the part of the strong power draw sympathy and support to terrorists as it confirms the terrorist narrative that they are in a struggle against evil powers.

(more)

Yglesias and Frum marvel at conservative paranoia.

Raising the drinking age to 21 didn't save lives.

Ordinary E.D. Kain examines what the Iraq war is and isn't.

Politico: Sarah Palin offers bipartisan fundraising appeal.

Yglesias: D.C. should allow taller buildings

2006 NYT: North Korean Defectors Take a Crash Course in Coping

Radley wonders why lefties don't volunteer to pay more taxes

David Friedman has a very simple idea for getting smaller government in the U.S.

Reason: Government is to blame for the housing crisis.

Daily Beast: After gay marriage... comes gay divorce. The humanity of the story is comforting, in a way. But it's also a reminder that we need to repeal DOMA for this to work.

Trip down memory lane

TMV:

Do we in the outside world have it wrong about Kim Jong-il? While most of the planet regards him as a ruthless totalitarian who rules the equivalent of a nation-sized concentration camp, North Korea’s fanatically controlled state press tells a different story. On the occasion of the his 67th birthday, the Korean Central News Agency published this article lauding the historic achievements of the ‘Dear Leader,’ who it says miraculously protected the nation from the evil imperialists led by the United States.

Take a stroll back to the radical ideology of the Cold War by reading this article, which says in part:

“The Korean people and the world’s progressives are today lauding Kim Jong-il, who demonstrates the dignity and national power of socialist Korea around the world and guides the cause of victory and freedom from imperialism, as the greatest leader of the present era.

“Every step of the way, the Korean people have smashed the hostile and desperate moves of the reactionary U.S.-led imperialist forces. In the decisive battle in defense of the country, they have thereby wrought a historic miracle and achieved the greatest victory ever won by the Songun revolutionary strategy of General Secretary Kim Jong-il.”

It's like a living mini souvenir of the Cold War, for nostalgia sake.