I do not speak Korean but was intrigued by this tweet from Donald Trump containing a note sent to him by North Korea’s Kim Jong Un that contain the original Korean and its English translation. The Korean version takes up so much less space, only about 50% of the English.
A very nice note from Chairman Kim of North Korea. Great progress being made! pic.twitter.com/6NI6AqL0xt
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 12, 2018
During the time when the boys and their coach were being rescued from their long stay in the caves, there was not much information about how the rescue was carried out. More details have now emerged of how they survived their ordeal in the cave and how the rescue endeavor that was much more harrowing and difficult than I had imagined. It was sad that a navy seal died in the rescue attempt.
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Jon Schwarz commented on Americans praising the generosity of the country for acts that result in the deaths and suffering of many people.
EARLIER THIS WEEK, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar celebrated the Trump administration for its treatment of immigrant children it has separated from their parents. “We have nothing to hide about how we operate these facilities,” said Azar on CNN. “It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity, what we are doing for these unaccompanied kids.”
This magnanimous claim raises an obvious question: What are the other great acts of American generosity?
The Kickstarter project deadline for meeting the goal is just three days away. If you can, please consider donating to it. You can read about the project and donate here.
With the open society under threat, the time has come to fulfill the promise of the Internet by launching an entirely new way for citizens to work together: securely, intuitively, and effectively. The time has come to build Pursuance.
The traditional news media, faced with filling in every single moment with content that will draw in viewers that can be sold to advertisers, has descended into the pattern that we see, of talking heads who are selected because it is already known what they will say and can be counted on to argue with each other without adding much useful knowledge. In this drive fro phony drama and confrontations, resources for real investigative reporting that requires a lot of digging and analysis, get squeezed out as being too expensive. As Seymour Hersh says in his book Reporter, the worst words a reporter can say are “I think”. But that is the most common phrase in these shows as people speculate about things they don’t know or try to predict the future.
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It is quite extraordinary how liberals will sign on to the notion of civility, even when that is used as a cover to not take strong public stands. Cartoonists Reuben Bolling and Tom Tomorrow take aim at his kind of advice.
Tom the Dancing Bug 1396 please don’t use the n-word
One of the extraordinary developments has been the way that the shady Iranian exile group group known as MEK has managed to buy the support of many influential people in the US in its attempt to portray itself as an alternative government to the current one. Mehdi Hasan writes about the group and its US backers.
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While people celebrated the rescue of the Thai students from the cave, a remarkable operation, this cartoon captures what has been going through my mind these past few days.
(Via)
I have written before about how getting rid of poppy production has been a major goal of US policymakers in Afghanistan. They have targeted a large number of airstrikes in the province of Helmand, seen as the major source of poppy cultivation. This is due to the belief among US policymakers that the production of heroin is the main source of income for the Taliban and that if farmers could be persuaded to grow other crops, then the Taliban would be weakened and then eliminated. Experts have cast doubts on this theory, arguing that the Taliban is not that dependent on income from the heroin trade and that there are sound economic reasons for Afghan farmers to grow poppies that have little to do with larger political issues.
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Belgium has just lost its semi-final World Cup match against France. The British have a positive genius for coming up with derogatory names for the people of any ethnicity other than white and any nation other than their own. Monty Python noticed that they had not come up with a slur against Belgians and decided to find a good one.