Korea

I’m in an odd mood today. All sorts of strange news stories are catching my eye. From Speigel:

It all started when Karl Szmolinsky won a prize for breeding Germany’s largest rabbit, a friendly-looking 10.5 kilogram “German Gray Giant” called Robert, in February 2006.

Images of the chubby monster went around the world and reached the reclusive communist state of North Korea, a country of 23 million which according to the United Nations Food Programme suffers widespread food shortages and where many people “struggle to feed themselves on a diet critically deficient in protein, fats and micronutrients.”

I’m thinking that those rabbits probably wish they hadn’t taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

From Fox News:

A growing number of major underwriters around the world strongly suspect that communist dictator Kim Jong-Il’s regime is running an elaborate major insurance and reinsurance scam on them, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars or more.

The alleged fraud involves a wide variety of North Korean industrial and personal calamities where insurers have been presented with perfect government-controlled documentation of accidents, including deaths, along with carefully gathered photographic evidence, all compiled in a startlingly brief time.[...]

To get North Korea’s side of the story, FOX News approached the regime’s official insurance representative in London, Song Ryon Ko, at his home. Song refused to discuss the issue and hastily closed his door.

Britain’s Foreign Office says the lack of firm proof of fraud is why it hasn’t taken action on the reinsurance issue, although British diplomats say they are aware of it. But as the British government is trying to put limits on Kim Jong-Il’s nuclear weapons program, the lack of an official British reaction could also be an attempt not to rock the boat, as well as to protect its diplomatic presence in Pyongyang.

In the words of Homer J. Simpson, “D’oh!!”

Via Donklephant, I found this post at DefenseTech:

You’re thinking, [Richter] 3.6, 4.2, in that neighborhood. Seismic scales, like the Richter, are logarithmic, so that neighborhood can be pretty big.

But even at 4.2, the test was probablya dud.[...]

3.58-3.7 gives you a couple hundred tons (not kilotons), which is pretty close in this business unless you’re really math positive. The same equation, given the US estimate of 4.2, yields (pun intended) around a kiloton.

A plutonium device should produce a yield in the range of the 20 kilotons, like the one we dropped on Nagasaki. No one has ever dudded their first test of a simple fission device. North Korean nuclear scientists are now officially the worst ever.

New York Times story here

I also hear that Netflix is gearing up for a run on Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s…erm…masterpiece, Team America: World Police by folks wanting to learn about the psyche of Kim Jong Il

I bet folks in Honolulu enjoyed seeing this news item this morning:

A North Korean missile launched on Wednesday was aimed at an area of the ocean close to Hawaii, a Japanese newspaper reported on Friday.[.]

[D]ata from U.S. and Japanese Aegis radar-equipped destroyers and surveillance aircraft on the missile’s angle of take-off and altitude indicated that it was heading for waters near Hawaii, the Sankei Shimbun reported, citing multiple sources in the United States and Japan.

There was a collective sigh of relief Tuesday when word got out that the North Korean long range missile failed to go very far. However, knowing that it was actually aimed at/near someplace in particular is somewhat unsettling.