The idea behind the Samsung SPH-W7100's 100-decibel alarm is that it can be used to alert others if the owner is attacked or feels in danger. 

Great, all the more reason for muggers to go after iPhone users. 

Yeah, but they're probably going to revert back to their original plan for the bill to be released in June (since little Kushibo was so cute, people would be hoarding their money instead of spending it):

Actually, this rendering of the much revered Shin Saimdang looks a bit off. The stamp below is based on the classic portrait of this ideal Confucian wife and mother, often called Ŏjin Ŏmŏni (어진 어머니, or "wise mother"). Frankly, I think would look better: more attractive without being too MILFy. 

For past discussions on Korea's newly re-designed 1000-won and 5000-won bills, go here and here. 

[The above silliness was inspired by Stay Puff, who has some good ideas on the new bill as well, in addition to some inspiration for who to put on the 100,000-won bill, if they ever make one (they were going to but then changed their mind).]

UPDATE: 

Mark ("outpost of tranny") has my favorite so far. Well, actually, my favorite so far would be the actual omanwon bill that can buy me a dozen real cups of Joe at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. 

Specifically, visits to Hyundai pages at Edmunds.com are up 27% compared to the same period a week ago, with an increase of 86% to pages featuring the Genesis. Hyundai said it saw a doubling of traffic on its own website around the day of the Oscars compared to the previous weekend.

The LAT explains:

... The Academy Awards telecast ranks second only to the Super Bowl in terms of advertising exposure, said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University. Hyundai saw similar jumps in online traffic when it ran Super Bowl ads this year touting the Genesis, noted Kelley Blue Book, which runs an automotive site at www.kbb.com.

Kinda puts the naysayers' comments in a different light, but we'll have to see if the eyeball translate into buyers.

I'm beginning to like the idea of State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) to decriminalize the sale of marijuana under state law and then tax the sh¡t out of it. Proposed Assembly Bill AB 390 would basically treat pot like alcohol, even applying an age limit of twenty-one to buy it. 

Of course, the tax is a fee:

Until a different fee is determined pursuant to Section 34032 there is hereby imposed a fee of fifty dollars ($50) per ounce (avoirdupois) for the sale of marijuana sold at retail in this state on or after the date determined by Section 25406 of the Business and Professions Code.

I have never smoked marijuana in my life, except as a second-hand bystander, so I have no idea how much it costs. Is $50 per ounce too high a fee for people to pay for the privilege of smoking legally? Will there still be an underground trade of illegally produced and untaxed marijuana?

Those details would have to be worked out later, but tax-and-toke Democrat Ammiano is saying that marijuana has long been California's number-one cash crop (which is saying a lot when it's coming from the number-one agricultural producer in the country), and Sacramento is losing out on $1 billion per year in tax revenues. 

To make this Korea-related: I support the idea of making light drugs legal, such as marijuana. Their prohibition has by no means stopped their use but instead has engendered a lawless world that provides them through whatever means are necessary. 

South Korea, on the other hand, is nowhere near that point, so it would be stupid to do the equivalent of raising the white flag. And maybe then all the drug-addled English teachers in Korea would head back to California. 

Oh, and I'd been spelling it Dean Gross all this time. Double holy crap!

The deadliest thing depicted here is the little tiny man to the left of Scud-A. He's a little tiny man with big dreams and even bigger hair. (Please note that I took the high road and made no mention of how these things look terribly phallic or how someone or other might be compensating. Kushibo is all class.)

So what does the Washington Post use as a photo to go along with its story about North Korea saying it's preparing to launch a satellite that many believe is actually a test of a long-range missile? Little kids in South Korea playing near missiles (below with original caption).

 South Korea children play beside South Korea's Hawk missiles at Korea War Memorial Museum in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2009. North Korea says it is in full-fledged preparations to shoot a satellite into orbit, its clearest reference yet to a launch that neighbors and the U.S. suspect will be an illicit test of a long-range missile. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Nice. Is it any wonder that so many Americans still think M*A*S*H represents real life in Korea nowadays?

It's just too expensive, they say. Specifically, they blame declining ad revenue and debt from providing this expensive service at no additional cost to subscribers. 

Will the ten million South Koreans now getting the service for free be willing to pony up an extra 10,000 won a month to watch TV during their daily commute? My guess is that some of them will. 

Heck, if I'm willing to pay $20 a month for the data service that allows me to surf the Internet on my iPhone from anywhere within the AT&T network (which does not include most of Arizona north of the Grand Canyon — including the North Rim), I'm sure others will see this as a must-have service, now that they've gotten used to it.

It's fitting that he would be the chief executive of the world's longest city, a place which he works hard to make better (though like any politician, he has his critics). So it was no surprise when I read this old bit of news from a year ago about Mayor Mufi trying to block the DVD release of Superbad, which included fake Hawaii driver licenses, à la McLovin. 

If you're ever in Hawaii and want to do the whole movie/TV locations tour, stick with "50 first dates," "Lost," "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," etc. I'm pretty sure Momona Street is in a bad part of town.  

Some people don't like to eat food that still has its head on. It's not very Martha Stewart. But animals were once living creatures, and we shouldn't be so glib as to pretend they weren't. And come on, isn't decapitating it before you eat it much worse? Grow a pair! 

(Although, I must admit, this trout looks especially sad. Maybe when he was caught he was thinking of his wife and all those kids he spawned. Maybe he regretted not getting that teaching credential. Ah, but in life, he was a predator, feeding off of smaller fish, so in fact, his death is rather ironic, don't you think? He died as he lived! [an eerie feeling of ironic foreboding rises on the back of kushibo's neck, compelling him to take a peek out the window to make sure some Godzilla-like creature is not ravaging its way through Honolulu, devouring the citizenry as it makes its way up Kapahulu Avenue].)

But it's easy to forget amongst all that hubbub that there are many Japanese opposed to the workings of the shrine, not just the visits by Japanese leadership (which some say violates the separation of church and state while others say, like the Koreans and Chinese, that it is part of the whitewashing of Japan's past aggression), but also the enshrinements themselves. 

Among them are the relatives of eleven servicemen and civilian employees of Imperial Japanese forces, who said the Yasukuni shrinekeepers had "infringed on their human rights to respect their loved ones and cherish memories of them by unilaterally enshrining them collectively without the relatives' consent." Each of the nine plaintiffs was seeking ¥1 million (roughly US$10,000).

[left: Ryuken Sugawara, leader of the plaintiffs, speaking to reporters in Osaka]

The Osaka District Court shot down their lawsuit, saying such rights are out of the range of legal protection. The lawsuit had also targeted the Japanese government, whom the plaintiffs said was complicit because it "has helped Yasukuni Shrine over many years by providing information on the war dead." 

This is no small issue. A large number of Koreans and Taiwanese, who were Japanese Imperial subjects during the war, are also enshrined there, much to their relatives' dismay (although I'm fairly certain at least a few of the Korean and Taiwanese dead would have been proud to be enshrined there, in line with how the educational system had inculcated some colonial subjects). 

Christians and others in Japan who don't follow the Shinto faith also are offended by the enshrinements. That brings me to what I feel is the best parallel I can think of in the United States, where the Mormon Church "baptizes" Jews who were killed in the Holocaust, effectively Mormonizing them posthumously. 

Jewish leaders have generally been quite offended by this, and the LDS (Latter-Day Saints, as the Mormons are called) has said after negotiations that they would stop, but it seems they have backtracked on that promise. Extending the parallel even further, Mormon media reprints stories of Jewish people who have come to peacefully accept what the LDS is doing. 

After reapportionment based on the 2010 census, the non-DC seat could go to a different state, but for now the addition of the two states is likely a wash. The WaPo says the number of House seats has not been increased since 1913, one year after Arizona and New Mexico became states. Alaska's and Hawaii's admission to the Union in 1959 did not change the House numbers (but of course, two Senate seats were added for each of the "freak states"). 

Were the territory of Guam and/or the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (which includes Saipan) to get Statehood, something similar to 1959 would likely take place. If the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, with four million residents, were to become a state, not providing for additional House members would mean several states would have to take a hit.

For that milestone, talk to me in about twenty-five years, when not only will I already be fifty, but I might actually be ready to admit it. 

Rather, this is about hitting the 50K mark in my Sitemeter hits. 

Of course, this is only since November 2005, well over six months after I'd been blogging strong, but I figure those uncounted hits from before November 2005 probably cancel out the hits after November 2005 that are from me going to my own blog a few times each day. Sure, that might not sound very scientific or precise, but if it's good enough for voting officials in Minnesota and Florida, then it's good enough for Monster Island. 

I knew that the 50,000 mark was coming this week, but I forgot to pay attention, and now it's a few hundred past that, so I can't go back to Sitemeter and figure out who it was (I'm on the free edition, so it only records the past 100 visits). I wanted to give Rantburg a shout-out for putting me over the edge (a picture of Secretary of Commerce-designate Gary Locke's "hot wife" Mona Lee on my post got linked to this Rantburg rant), but the surge I got from Rantburg readers didn't come until after the milestone was reached. 

So, mysterious visitor whose name is known only to God and Sitemeter's premium package, thank you. If I ever figure out who you are, I'll buy you a Coffee Bean beverage of your choosing, redeemable at any Honolulu or Seoul Coffee Bean, as long as I'm there. 

Now, this may seem like no big deal. As of this moment, for example, The Marmot's Hole has had 5,187,312 hits (of which I'm about 23.1% of them), a hundred times greater than mine. This, of course, represents a longer period of tabulating (six years versus three years) and mine covers a period of around two years when I was on prolonged hiatus ("in retirement"). 

During that non-blogging period, I only got about twenty or thirty hits a day, not from regular readers or people who linked to my blog via comments I left elsewhere, like before and after my retirement, but from people Googling this or that, especially "Corea versus Korea" or Korean nudie pics. 

So that means that rather than getting only 1% of Marmot's traffic, I might actually be getting 2% or 3%. On some days 5%. And that makes me the Hyundai (or Apple) of the Korea blogosphere, baby! All I need to do is invent the equivalent of an iPod, and I be stylin'. 

Please click on the Google Ads so I can buy some coffee. Grazie, mahalo, 고마워요, ありがとう.

MSNBC reports that Daniel Hansol Oh (오한솔) has confessed to molesting three girls besides his accuser, according to Fullerton police. He is being held in lieu of $250,000 bail.

The Orange County Register reports that Oh, who is pursuing a master's degree in music, was arrested during a music class. They said the alleged molestations were reported to police this past December. She said they had been occurring from the time Oh began teaching her in December 2003 until December 2006.

The OCR confirms that the victims are all "Korean," as I suspected (see original post below), though it is not clear if they were Korean-American or Korean immigrants. 

As I also surmised, embarrassment was an impediment to victims coming forward, which is hardly a surprise. Says Fullerton police sergeant Mike MacDonald: "In one case, the victim didn't report it because she didn't want to bring embarrassment to the family." 

The OCR says police are bringing this to the public's attention because Oh may have been teaching up to fifteen girls during that period. Anyone who may have been victimized by Oh is asked to contact Detective Kathryn Crum of the Fullerton Police Department at 714-738-5327.

I have a friend of a friend who was an experienced hiker in Korea but succumbed to injuries sustained in a fall when he was hiking alone. He had planned to try to do the 212-mile-long John Muir Trail in ten days by himself, from Yosemite Valley to Mt Whitney at the eastern edge of Sequoia National Park, but everyone he met advised against it. 

When he didn't show up for his flight home, authorities scoured the John Muir Trail. Ironically, they were looking in the wrong place, as he had ended up heeding all the advice and was instead roaming around on a much less strenuous two-day hike in the Yosemite backcountry. A tragic loss of a good friend to many people.

There is a word of warning that conditions in the American wilderness can get a lot more treacherous than in South Korea. Yosemite's peaks are higher than even Mt Hallasan, South Korea's tallest mountain at 1950 meters. I've seen it suddenly snow in the summertime, and thunder and lightning are common occurrences. And don't get me started on the physical conditions of the cables used to make it to the top of Half Dome.

Of course, many Americans themselves are not immune to dangerous ignorance. The desert claims lives of tourist passers-by every year, people who didn't heed warnings about keeping liquids in the car, just in case, and not going off the beaten path. 

[above: Probably the most photographed natural rock in the world.]

I know from all the technical doodads that there are a few "regulars" who make daily or weekly visits to this blog. Some have me listed in their Google Blogs list or their burnfeeders. 

Now, I make no secret of my preference for the old-style official Romanization system that was in place prior to the World Cup in 2002, which was a variant of McCune-Reischauer. I think it was simple yet much more accurately reflected how words are really pronounced in Korean, especially those consonants that tend to change sounds depending on where they are within a word. Thus kogi is a better representation of 고기 than gogi, because those two ㄱ's are not pronounced the same. Similarly, I prefer Pusan over Busan, Taegu over Daegu, and Taejŏn/Taejon over Daejeon. 

But I understand why some people would prefer the new system (it's officially Revised Romanization of Korean, but let's call it the NAKL system, after the National Academy of the Korean Language, which proposed this rehashing of an older, inadequate Romanization system). After all, there is no messing with diacritic marks (i.e., the breve over the o and u [ŏ and ŭ] and the consonants were usually written in an easy-to-use (but not easy to accurately pronounce) one-to-one correspondence. 

So at least there is some consistency. But what gets me is when people take Romanization matters into their own hands and come up with some really confusing — and often downright weird — concoctions. 

Gyenari is one such example. By the looks of it, it can only be 계나리, which is rendered kyenari in McCune-Reischauer. Not sure what that's supposed to be, since there is no word 계나리 in the . 

Of course, I don't know every word in Korean and not every word is listed at Yahoo!, but I can't help but imagine they mean , which would be kaenari in McCune-Reischuaer and gaenari in NAKL (and which would sound like kyenari/gyenari if there were such a word). 

Kaenari is forsythia in English, referring to a beautiful yellow flower that explodes across the hillsides and throughout the cities every spring, along with 진달래 (chindaellae/jindallae; azaleas) and cherry blossoms. 

So I go to Gyenari's website, and sure enough they have an explanation of their name in the ABOUT US link:

Named for the flower that blooms once a year, Gyenari Korean BBQ & Lounge (pronounced jin-AR-ee) brings a distinctive brand of flavorful Korean barbecue cuisine beyond Koreatown and into the thriving culinary scene in Culver City.

Huh? Gyenari is pronounced "jinaree"? There's no word 지나리, 진아리, 지날이, or 진알이, the only possible things that would spell "jin-AR-ee" in Korean. 

Really, if they can't even figure out their name enough to get it authentic, what hope is there for their food? I hope I'm wrong and restauranteur Robert Benson (of the Kimhae Bensons, I'm sure) does know what he's doing. In the meantime, I shall enjoy one of Honolulu's ubiquitous sundubu (순두부; tofu stew) eateries. [UPDATE: Benson-shi, watch your fingers.]

Sundubu tchigae (literally: soft tofu stew), Korea's perfect food. Not as spicy as it looks, and chock full of wholesome ingredients, unless they put MSG in it.

The war resulted in at least 620,000 military deaths and untold tens or even hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. The South was devastated, much of it burned to the ground and rendered "simple waste and destruction." 

Slavery was a central theme of Lincoln's political life. He famously told of his experiences at a slave auction in New Orleans, describing a "comely mulatto girl" at a slave auction and how the bidders were able to make an "examination at the hands of the bidders," who "pinched her flesh and made her trot up and down the room like a horse" so they could see "how she moved." Despite being a pornographer, Lincoln was handily elected and then re-elected by a majority of Northerners. 

Proponents of racial profiling argue that when such-and-such racial/ethnic group is more likely to be involved in some crime like drug trafficking or terrorism, it makes sense to for the the police, the Feds, or the TSA to target members of those groups in higher numbers. 

A favorite icon of the pro-profiling crowd is the proverbial eighty-year-old nana in a wheelchair, who is being taken aside and patted down by the authorities while mean-looking hombres from Colombia or Egypt who smell of gunpowder and coke move unimpeded to their destination. It's an oft-repeated meme designed to point out the silliness of the idea that anybody could be a terrorist or a drug trafficker. 

The elderly lady trying to get to her grandkid's birthday was a highly effective symbol, I thought. Little did I know that these women actually were suffering from an inordinately high number of "extensive searches," a euphemism for treatment by airport security that is only about two shades better than how prisoners of war stateless enemy combatants are rendered at Guantanamo Bay. And I'm not talking a handful — it's hundreds every day.

Well, if you've ever had a curmudgeonly elderly neighbor who would just as soon stab your volleyball that went into her yard with a knitting needle rather than give it back, then you won't be surprised to learn that the old ladies are mad as hell and they aren't going to take it anymore.

But, she makes clear to her Black neighbor and close friend at the Sea Coast Senior Living Center, she's not including elderly Black women in her list of who the heat should be turned back onto. "Just the young men," she explains, "and women who look skanky." She would also include Hispanics, and Whites with long hair, but probably not Asians (unless there's a war with North Korea, then all bets are off).  

One of CRONE's first experiences in the national spotlight came last summer, when they provided legal assistance to eighty-three-year-old Iris Knudsen of Anoka, Minnesota (below). Mrs Knudsen was given a one-year suspended sentence for disorderly conduct after she refused to let TSA workers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport examine her girdle for C-4.

* We in the West have co-opted the term jihad and jihadist when the very use of those words may be causing our own goals to become murky even among those who aren't supporters of armed struggle with non-Muslims. Some prefer the terms hirabah and hirabi in lieu of jihad and jihadist.

Here's an interesting bit from NPR on the subject:

Professor Douglas Streusand says that's why U.S. officials should stop using the term altogether. Streusand is an Arabic and Farsi speaker with a doctorate from the University of Chicago. He teaches Islamic history at the Marine Corps Staff College in Quantico, Va. In a paper written for and circulated among top military brass in the Pentagon, Streusand argues that describing Islamist militants and insurgents in Iraq as "jihadists" is hurting U.S. policy.

Why? Because according to Streusand, "for a Muslim, jihad is a good thing. It literally means striving in the path of God." By describing insurgents or terrorists as "jihadists," he argues, we imply we are fighting meritorious Muslims. To make the point clearer, he says it would be as if al-Qaida called its enemies "freedom."

His suggestion? Use Islamic legal language. The term he suggests is "hirabah" —literally, an unjust form of warfare.

Yeah, calling bin Laden and his minions jihadists seems like the wrong tact if we just end up inadvertently praising them as "strivers in the path of God." The best parallel with Christianity I could think of was someone trying to bash those among the Christian faithful for their support of the War on Terror by calling them "Christian soldiers." Well, that simply would not have the negative ring that was intended, would it?

Calling them hirabi (committers of hirabah) would be much more fitting to Muslim audiences as it rolled off the tongue of President Obama or UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: they're a bunch of unjust fighters, pirates, and spreaders of disorder, a serious punishment in the Qur'an.

If nothing else, I would like to see hirabah/hirabi replace jihad/jihadist in our rhetoric about these murderers and would-be murderers. It may end up making little difference to the people already in these groups, but to people on the sidelines, it might underscore the bad-faith acts of these killers and bringers of mayhem, bringing a clearer perspective to why it is that their actions are wrong even though they are of the same faith.

UPDATE: 

Mayor Dean Grose steps down over controversy (see below).

Still, it's disappointing that people looking for something "funny" to associate with the President have already begun resorting to racist caricature. The above picture is one example. Dean Gross, the mayor of Los Alamitos, a western Orange County community, emailed that graphic of the White House lawn turned into a watermelon patch. It included the headline, "No Easter Egg hunt this year." 

When one African-American businesswoman who had received the email, Keyanus Price, complained about such depictions, she gave the mayor an earful. Gross replied: "The way things are today, you gotta laugh every now and then. I wanna see the coloring contests." That just upset Price more and she took it to the press, after which Gross apologized. 

Said Price:

I have had plenty of my share of chicken and watermelon and all those kinds of jokes. I honestly don't even understand where he was coming from, sending this to me. As a black person receiving something like this from the city freakin' mayor — come on.

Racial stereotypes surrounding the US's first acknowledged African-American president (I'm pretty sure there were others, but they weren't saying) have brought out the stupid in some White people and the hypersensitivity of some Blacks. The cartoon below, in response to a crazed chimpanzee being shot dead by New York's finest, prompted some to suggest that the editorial cartoonist was comparing Obama to a primate, evoking memories of particularly nasty racial slurs about Blacks from the past. 

Actually, he is a primate. We're all primates. Some high-level Catholic clergy are double primates. Anyway, I don't think the monkey in the cartoon was supposed to represent Obama, but just to be safe, it would have been better if the NYPD had shot a rabid dolphin instead. 

People can be too sensitive about perceived racial slurs. I first noticed that in Korea when White people were complaining to me about children on the street yelling "Hello!" at them, calling it hate speech (I'm not making that up [UPDATE: see this link]). 

Then there is the New Yorker cartoon that tried to cram as many stereotypes and innuendos about the Obamas as possible into one page. Lots of people thought they were perpetuating stereotypes rather than mocking them. Boy, have I ever been there. 

Anyway, these things can be like the proverbial monster in the jungle: you'll know it when you see it. The White House lawn turned into a watermelon patch? Come on! You can't get any more obvious about that being offensive. 

That Mayor Gross didn't intend for it to be offensive doesn't make it any less egregious or racist (yes, there are loads of people of all races who think they aren't racist, but they are). It's right up there with Miley Cyrus doing the chink-eye bit: I think it reveals a deeper bigotry looming just below the surface — a bigotry neither the mayor nor Miley intended to let out, if they even know it exists.

What if the tables were turned, we ask ourselves. How would Mayor Gross or Miley Cyrus like it if Asian-Americans or Blacks started to... started to... Oh, geez, what could minorities do to make fun of Whites? Dance badly? Screw up a math question? That's the problem with trying to go after the dominant group: the media perpetuates too few stereotypes about them, and even when some negative generalization gains traction, other races have so much exposure to the many exceptions to the stereotype that it does no real damage. 

Maybe all Asian people should shout "Hello!" when they drive by one. 

Sigh. Hopefully B. Hussein Obama will throw up on a Japanese prime minister soon and we can all move on. 

UPDATE (Friday, February 27, 2009):

Mayor Dean Gross Grose has announced that he will resign from his post due to this controversy (Los Angeles Times story here). The Orange County Register quotes the mayor:

“The attention brought to this matter has sadly created an image of me which is most unfortunate,” he wrote. “I recognize that I've made a mistake and have taken steps to make sure this is never repeated.”

Some Orange County residents were "disgusted" that a public official would send a overtly offensive and racist email, while others are saying that "what was intended to be a joke has spiraled out of control."

Well, I don't know if racist humor amounts to a harmless joke, but I do agree that some things have gotten out of hand. The mayor found a smashed watermelon outside his office on Thursday, prompting the police to patrol both his office and his home. 

UPDATE #2 (same day, but much later):

Local station KCAL-TV says that Grose will remain on the Los Alamitos city council. They also report that he said he "wasn't aware of the racial stereotype that Blacks like watermelon." WTF?! If you really didn't know about that stereotype, why did you think the picture was funny in the first place? You are either full of sh¡t, Mr Grose and don't deserve to be in local government for that reason, or you really are telling the truth and you are too clueless to run a city. 

To make this Korea-related, the groundwork for the development of seedless watermelons is credited to Korean-Japanese U Changchun (우장춘, or Woo Jangchun), a man whose father may have been involved with the Ŭlmi Incident, the Japanese-led assassination of the Chosǒn-era Queen Min. I like seedless watermelons; when I was about six, my friend's brother had me convinced that eating watermelon seeds would make you pregnant. 

In reference to the continued use by chinboistas (chinbo, or progressive groups) of images of Shim Misun (Shim Misŏn, 심미선) Shin Hyosun (Shin Hyosūn, 신효순), two middle school girls tragically killed when they were run over by a US military armored vehicle in June 2002 in an incident that sparked angry anti-US protests later that year, he states:

I have to question the sanity of those who constantly invoke this incident, as it's not used to preserve the memory of those two girls, but rather to encapsulate a victimization complex that is so vital to the national psyche.

Oh, they are not insane whatsoever (and no, it's not part of the national psyche, but a key part of the modus operandi of the pro-Pyongyang left). They know exactly what they are doing.

At the core of many of the chinbo (진보/進步; "progressive") groups are individuals who are directly getting marching orders from Pyongyang. The goal is to whip up so many people against the US that the ROK government will demand the removal of USFK, which dramatically tips the balance of power on the peninsula in the North's favor.

On other fronts, in the things one might not recognize because they are in Korean, they also try to whip up so much anger toward the ROK government that people will topple the government.

[above: Students rushing off to protests aimed at toppling the government of Syngman Rhee during the so-called 4.19 Movement, referred to sometimes as the April Revolution, in 1960.]

This is not some pie-in-the-sky dream. This kind of popular "toppling" has in fact happened twice. But it did not lead to the revolution Pyongyang had wished, nor a weakening of South Korea. It led to another strong dictatorship in the 1960s and it led to a democratically elected government in the late 1980s.

The hoped-for removal of US forces has not happened in South Korea, but it did work in the Philippines and it is starting to work in Okinawa, where forces are moving to Guam, where there are also local agitators against the US military.

Anyway, the goal of the people behind the scenes is to spread disinformation and provide imagery such that the average Korean who does not suspect or does not want to believe in such pro-Pyongyang machinations, demands removal of USFK or takes to the streets to force out whoever's in the Blue House.

This is not to say that the Kwangju Uprising did not have legitimacy. Although I'm sure there were a few Pyongyang operatives within the rank and file, the majority of the people were fighting for a legitimate cause (and the government's side was overreacting on a belief that almost everyone in Kwangju was a pro-Pyongyang enemy of the state).

Anyway, you can see it with the Mad Cow protests. A legitimate beef (one's own government setting aside in-place safety regulations at the behest of their economically dominant ally) which reasonable people can get behind, distorted and manipulated by disinformation (an irrational fear of a rapid spread of Mad Cow Disease) that itself had some basis in reality (documentation of illegal use of downer cows in the United States and the US's own inadequate Mad Cow screening, as well as other health issues), bundled together in order to reach a critical mass.

Now here's the key: What was the goal? If you think it was to spread anti-Americanism then you have missed the point. Anti-Americanism was merely one of many tools to manipulate public sentiment toward the final goal, which was the ousting of President Lee Myungbak.

This same kind of thing plays out again and again. Each potential issue, regardless of its merits, must be pushed as far as it can go to see which has the potential to resonate with the larger public that is not accustomed to going out and protesting or even attending candlelight vigils. Like blasting solid rock with high-pressure water hoses to see where the one fissure is that will — if the pressure remains high and constant — eventually be the crack that splits the rock in half.

They thought they may have found it with the deaths of the two middle school girls — which was not a mere accident because it involved high degrees of negligence on the part of USFK, which was daily creating a deadly hazard where sleep-deprived soldiers were operating unwieldy machines while using faulty or out-of-order equipment including those used for communications (it was literally an accident waiting to happen, but the fault was with the commanders, probably not the two men who went on trial).

They thought they had it with Mad Cow, where legitimate complaints about the president scrapping legitimate health measures in a quid pro quo to get the US-Korean Free Trade Agreement passed were mixed in with (and eventually overshadowed by) frenzied claims about the real dangers posed by BSE (Mad Cow Disease). In time, some other issue will come up in the future, and these old issues will also be rehashed, too, because maybe the magic formula lies not with one issue, but with a critical mass of issues.

But the vast majority of Koreans has no interest in this. The deaths were tragic, and a lot of reasonable people were angry, but most Koreans don't want the USFK to pull out over this. Each and every South Korean president, from both left and right, has insisted that USFK is needed for South Korean security (Roh Moohyun so much so that he nearly committed political suicide to send troops to Iraq, though his slow-motion deployment was very ham-handed).

That's why we see candlelight vigils in favor of the hard-core protests with rock-throwing and tear gas volleys (though violence can still erupt, as well as graffiti). Anyone can grab a cup and a candle and join a peaceful vigil. Public transportation will take you there.

[above: Not far from my house is Kwanghwamun, which was ground zero for the Mad Cow Protests. Throughout the summer, there were nightly confrontations between the protesters and the police, with many police vehicles being vandalized like this one. Typical of the graffiti is what you see at right, "MB OUT," referring to President Lee Myungbak by the initials of the two characters of his given name. Below that is a slightly bewildering one: "MB = Pedophile." I guess they were testing that one to see if it would pick up traction; it didn't. If I hadn't been so busy, I would have stuck around and taken more pictures.]

And those citizens carrying candles may not realize that their participation is a tool for the ultimate goal of the political arsonists behind the scenes. The tens of thousands of candlelight villagers, many portrayed as meek young girls, are meant as cover for the true vigilantes: the hard-core who we saw in 2008 trying to provoke reactions by the staid and stoic riot police who long ago were participants in the tear gas-infused operas of lore, destroying government buses carrying those soldiers, blocking traffic, writing the graffiti that was to whip up the masses to take down Caesar, er... President Lee.

Sigh. The ultimate goal of this post is to provide some perspective and to point out the meaning of the fact that not only did the vast majority of the public not join in, but they condemned the protests and bought up the supposedly Mad Cow-tainted beef in record numbers. That meaning is that these perpetual protesters in Korea, as per usual, do not represent the whole of Korean society.

South Korea is a nation with a still-powerful enemy that works through many ways and many channels — some overt but many clandestine and insidious — to bring about their ultimate goal. I hate that I sound like some paranoid right-winger when I say things like this, but to anyone who chooses to look objectively behind the headlines, this stuff is just plain obvious.