North Korea Says It Will Release U.S. Missionary
SEOUL — North Korea said Friday that it would release Robert Park, a Christian missionary from the United States who illegally entered the country on Christmas Day to urge its leader, Kim Jong-il, to shut down its concentration camps, free all its prisoners and resign.
This kind of story really bothers the hell out of me. What kind of state of belligerent naivete do you have to be in to knowingly and illegally enter a foreign nation? What do you get in return? The ability to passionately say to the congregation back home and tell them that North Korea is this and that, I’ve seen it with my own eyes? So freaken what? There’s absolutely nothing you could do about it even if you were to somehow safely enter and exit. Nothing more than a freaken self-publicity stunt, does absolutely nothing for your religion. Congratulations, Robert Park, you accomplished absolutely nothing good out of this.
This reminds me of some former colleagues of mine who, after having gone to China, were able to see North Korea’s borders in the horizon and somehow reminisced about it in a glorious and almost enchanted fashion. So what?
“I seriously repent of the wrong I committed, taken in by the West’s false propaganda,” it quoted Mr. Park as saying in an interview. “What I have seen and heard in the North convinced me that I misunderstood it.”
So now your entrance into North Korea is not only non-productive, but counter-productive. You get apprehended and in return for your freedom you have to say some stupid shit like “I was so wrong, and not only that, but the country I am from, in fact the entire Western Hemisphere, is wrong.”
“They even returned my Bible to me,” he was quoted as saying. “This fact alone was enough to convince me that there was a complete freedom of religion.”
This quote does very little to tell me anything about North Korea and tells me a lot more about this Robert Park. If it just took one man’s gracious act to represent the political and religious state of an entire nation (and you’ve effectively jumped to an absolute conclusion based on one singular and ultimately insignificant event), how the hell can you justify your own faith? What kind of shaky ground is your faith based upon? Is it because you one day prayed that you could get laid, and you did, albeit via some hooker off the street, and now you believe there’s a supernatural and personal God? Was that “fact” that God answered your prayers for some quick lay (rhetoric) enough for you to believe in the Christian God?
Toyota trouble round-up: What to do now
Problems with Toyota cars are cropping up faster than the automaker can deal with them. Following two different recalls for problems involving accelerator pedals on various models comes the revelation of braking problems in the iconic Prius.
Prius brakes
What’s the problem? Under certain conditions, particularly at relatively low speeds when traveling over rough or potholed roads, drivers have complained of a brief, but significant, delay in brake performance.
Sticky gas pedals
What’s the problem? Over time, gas pedals in some cars become sticky. At first, they just become a little harder to push down and when you lift your foot off the gas, they’re slower to come back up. In the worst case, the pedal on these cars can become stuck part way down.
Floor mat pedal entrapment
What’s the problem? In some cars, gas pedals can become stuck on the edge of a floor mat, particularly when thick all-weather floor mats are used or when floor mats are stacked on top of one another. In this case, the pedal can be stuck almost all the way to the floor, creating a particularly dangerous situation.
If you haven’t been following this stream of news, Toyota’s basically getting caught going too far into cost saving measures that had extraordinary quality control repercussions. Not any quality control, but the type of quality that could have dramatic impact on your safety. This isn’t your usual paint/AC/lighting quality issues.
By the way, the delay in brake performance means that “at 60 mph, a vehicle will have traveled nearly another 90 feet before the brakes begin to take hold.”
A textbook example of a company’s fall from glory. You spend decades building up your reputation, and in one swift action, you demolish it to ground zero. Ford and GM, rejoice.
But please do note that I’m not saying that Toyota was completely wrong to begin with here. I think the principle of cost cutting is the right thing to do. It drives innovation, for the most part, and productivity. I shutter to think about the amount of money that the US Government is wasting, for example, spending more than market value for more incompetent people in their organizations and keeping them there (and why are they getting raises when everyone else is worried about just keeping their jobs?). It’s just that this is a good reminder that while the principle of cost-cutting is noble in its own right, it is tertiary to quality and safety.
By the way, The Economist recently had a really, really awesome article on why China does not equal 1980s Japan:
Not just another fake
The similarities between China today and Japan in the 1980s may look ominous. But China’s boom is unlikely to give way to prolonged slump
I remember telling my cousins that I agree with John McCain on most of the social issues but that I’m divided on the economic issues. For example, I never agreed with the W. Bush tax cuts. Letting them expire on the rich (Obama), for me, made more sense than making them permanent (McCain), although if I had a choice, I wish Bush never made the damn tax cuts in the first place. But I was never for changing the capital gains tax, the profits made on things like stock, from 25% to 15% (W. Bush) to 20% (Obama).
And I was certainly all for making legislature that would raise taxes on investment fund manager profits (Obama would like to tax the portion of profits paid to managers of hedge funds and private equity funds as ordinary income rather than as a capital gain. That would subject it to much higher tax rates than the 15% capital gains rate currently imposed. The White House estimates the measure would raise $24 billion over 10 years.)
That’s right. The fund managers have been paying a LOWER tax rate than you did. By the way, the top 25 fund managers made $11.6 Billion in 2008 (compared to $22.5 billion in 2007), and the top fund manager made $2.5 Billion (James H. Simons), and they paid 15% on their income for I’m all for this law to fix this stupidity that encourages radical risk taking that probably contributed a cent or two to this economic crisis among other things (remember oil at $130, anyone?) This disgusts me much more than anything else in our government right now.
The Bush tax cuts has a tremendous impact on our budget for the next 10 years:
$2 trillion in lost revenue over 10 years
Compare that to:
Obama’s spending freeze ($250 billion saved through expense freeze, over 10 years)
Interest payments (we are borrowing $900 billion (out of a total deficit of $1 trillion) in 2020 just to pay interest on previous borrowing.)
$8.5 trillion in additional deficits over the next 10 years.
I don’t understand why if we keep growing our spending when the revenue’s not there to back it up. And we’re only compounding the problem when we’re basically spending a TRILLION dollars a year by 2020 JUST ON INTEREST PAYMENTS.
Obama, your problem is simple. It’s not whatever you promised to do and didn’t deliver on. It’s that nobody knows what the hell you’re trying to do. The health care debacle wasn’t that it was a bad idea. It’s that no one knew what was going on. I tried to read as much about it on my own but I still had no idea what was in it. Then we started to hear that the Republicans didn’t, either, and in fact, they were never invited to the table in the first place. Then we hear the sheer magnitude of how much this thing would cost. So the devil we know is better than the devil we don’t.
It’s that simple. No matter how good your ideas are, don’t try to stuff it down the throat of unsuspecting and law-abiding citizens without telling them what it is, especially when it costs a TRILLION dollars. (OK, so I exaggerate, mere $849 billion over 10 years).
Because the ideas you did try to communicate (you won’t be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions!) sound great, but you tell them that it costs a trillion dollars, it just won’t pass. The cost here clearly outweighs any conceivable benefit that we were able to determine from the scraps you let us glimpse over after your heavy discussions behind closed doors with your close Democratic friends.