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People often ask me “how do you write all those blog posts?” Well, here’s the secret: you keep a rolling list of non-timely posts so that if you are traveling, or uninspired, or if it’s just a slow news day, you have something to post. One sadly inexhaustible source of evergreens is the “kook file” [...]
Economists have a disconcerting habit of studying their own models for so long that they lose track of reality; one such tendency is to focus on “efficiency” to the exclusion of all other values in human relations. Political scientists do the same thing with concepts like “regime preservation.” But understanding that all professions suffer from [...]
The newspaper headline pretty much says it all: Dictator Kim Il Sung compared to Mandela At the Kim Il-sung centenary celebration at the North Korean embassy in Pretoria, Deputy Minister of Police Maggie Sotyu was the most recent South African politician to stick her foot in her mouth, drawing “father of the nation” comparisons between [...]
Back in December we posted the “Mother of all ‘Not Satire’ Pieces,” the ANC Youth League’s extraordinary homage to the late Kim Jong-il. The piece elicited considerable feedback, most of it private, along the lines of “it’s amazing anyone is still around who could write like that” (except expressed in more vivid language—which maybe explains [...]
I know that at some point we’re going to have to stop all these “not satire” posts but the death of Kim Jong-il appears to have unleashed a torrent of commentary that is beyond imagination. We’ll skip the condolences from Bashar Assad (Kim Jong-il made “a great contribution to the development of the friendly relations [...]
In the previous post, we began to parse the leaked Panel of Experts report; here, we continue that discussion, focusing on North Korean methods for circumventing the sanctions. One way of circumventing the sanctions is to play around with product categorizations, which are necessarily imprecise. For example, in a report that had not our knowledge previously [...]
