Teaching English in my sleep -- to the Korean occupation forces

I dreamed that Korea invaded. They just sort of massed in the hills and mountains overlooking the city (the dream place looked a little like Kyoto) and then filed in. The young soldiers were polite and seemed a little sheepish, so you almost felt a little sorry for them. Since the occupation was non-violent, there was no violent resistance, either, but there were some arguments along the lines of "Hey! Whaddaya think you're doing? This is stupid!" Young women were deployed too as soldier/spokespersons for the occupiers. For some reason they had decided to use English rather than Korean or Japanese as the occupation language. I became busy talking with the Korean spokeswomen over how the meaning of various edicts changed when there was no article as opposed to the definite or indefinite article.

Peace through Parks

Throughout the last hundred years, there have been proposals for Peace through Unilateral Disarmament, Peace through Love, Peace through Strength, and Strength through Peace. Wars rage on.

I propose Peace through Parks.

First of all, note that many, (most?) but not all, of the world's many wars originate in border disputes. Russia-Georgia, the Falklands, Israel-Palestine, and others come to mind. By resolving all outstanding border disputes, war is less likely. Imagine if the property lines between you and your neighbors were not clearly defined, and you were all armed to the teeth and had some long-standing grudges. If you could at least agree on the property line, you could build a fence there and relax tensions.

Secondly, note that the world can use as much greenery, preservation of nature, and parkland as it can get. Areas not exploited by humans are needed in every biome to preserve biodiversity and other Gaian systems.

Basically, therefore, the proposal is to turn all disputed territory into international peace parks -- natural areas where human presence is prohibited.

To work best, such a system would need some kind of sanction or push. Most of the world's nations would have to be sick of war and push the rest to agree to settle their border issues. They could block countries from having a vote in the UN General Assembly until they had resolved all disputes. Alternatively, countries with unresolved issues could be kept out of the latest trade agreements or the WTA.

There could be a multi-stage process for this. The flowchart would go something like this, as follows. Nations would report their borders to the UN or another mediating authority. In cases where they disagreed, where two entities claimed the same territory, they would be given a chance to resolve it by mutual agreement, submit it to binding arbitration, or agree to remove all personnel and installations from the disputed area and allow it to revert to nature, either for perpetuity or for a century at a time. If you choose the century option, simply suspend all arguments and agree to discuss this issue again in 100 years time. The default option of creating international parklands would be the preferred wherever possible.

Returning to our neighborhood analogy, you don't need to necessarily settle disputes with a surveyor's clear line. You can take the area between your line and their line, and grow a big hedge there, a stand of bamboo, or whatever grows there, an impenetrable brush, perhaps.

How would this look in its actual implementation? Let's start near home, in Japan. Japan's claims to Sakhalin and some of the Kurile Islands would either be agreed to, resolved in favor of one of the parties, or the whole area would just be turned into a vast nature reserve. Where the sea is involved, the old 12-mile limit or a similar rule would probably be best. Bears and perhaps wooly mammoths would again roam and rule the land. Displaced persons would be compensated for the loss of their property. Call it a stimulus package, or create a system to generate income from the area to repay the displaced or to fund the compensation board.

Also involving Japan, the Takeshima/Dokdo/Liancourt rocks/islands and the waters around them would make a good nature reserve. This place is a wasteland not worth the investments made in it (and certainly not worth fighting over). The fishery resources around it benefit both sides the most if the area is preserved as an undisturbed breeding ground to help sustain fish stocks in the open ocean. The resources on the immediate sea floor can be saved for another century. There are similar disputes with Taiwan and China, and between China, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and others, which can all be settled in the same way, by creating nature reserves.

More complicated cases arise where large populations, third parties, or different cultures are involved, such as the Basques, South Ossetia, the former Yugoslavia, Kashmir, Tibet, and the Amazon. Without self-determination and devolved autonomy to indigenous people, this would not make much sense. In other words, it's better to give autonomy to Kashmir, or make it a nation (or two) than for India and Pakistan to settle the dispute by evacuating Kashmir.

Let's take some extreme and potentially absurd cases. What if Mexico were to claim California, Texas, Colorado, and the rest of the southwest United States? The disputed area is probably too big to be considered as a park. Suppose then that, in addition, the settlement went Mexico's way, and these areas were returned to Mexico. This might seem to be a nightmare scenario, but would it really be so bad? Adding 60 million or so "Anglos" to Mexico's population would instantly make it a bilingual country. The wealth of the north combined with the labor force in the south could create a potent economic superpower. The northerners would demand better governance than has sometimes come from Mexico City in the past. If the northerners didn't feel they were getting a fair deal, they would secede again, or perhaps parts of the south would, repeating history in a different form. The America that didn't fight and win the war with Mexico would be different but possibly better, and no worse than the America that did not fight and win the war with Canada. By this I mean that people tend to be prejudiced in favor of their own timeline and not consider that an alternate history could have been better or worse.

In the case of Israel/Palestine, we often hear of the two-state solution and less often, the one-state solution. Other integers must be considered. The no-state solution would evacuate the entire area permanently and plant lots of cedars. Property-owners and refugees would be compensated for their inconvenience and loss. In many cases you would have to compensate both an Israeli claimant and a Palestinian claimant to the same property. This would still be cheaper and more humane than continued human occupation of the area. Fortunately, there is a ready source of income to fund this project. The incorporated park of "HolyLand" would be a continuing site of religious pilgrimage for many centuries, and the high admission charges would insure that the displaced Israelis and Palestinians would be well-compensated in their new homes in the countries of their choice in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, or Australia. Visitors to the HolyLand park would find it as hard to imagine the park grounds were once a battlefield as visitors to EuroDisney do. The park would be governed by a council composed of Jewish rabbis, Muslim ayatullahs, Christian priests, Buddhist monks, Sihks, Hindus, and members of other religions, with most employees being neutral Buddhist monks and secular scholars. Religious sites would be operated in a secular manner as museums most days, with multi-religious sites holding Islamic functions on Fridays, Jewish functions on Saturdays, and Christian functions on Sundays. Visitors to the park would be issued a sackcloth robe and would be required to bring their own food and water since all vestiges of electrical and water infrastructure would have been removed. Complex chemicals and technologies, such as lighters and matches, would not be allowed, while simple substances such as salt, oil, and soap would be allowed to be carried inside the park. These austere measures and strict policing would reduce the chance of violence.

That's a no-state solution, but what of a three-state solution? This solution could also work with a rump Israel, a rump Palestine, and the neutral third state enveloping the middle land and all shared religious sites. Rather than being abandoned, a variation on this would be for the central state to be a secular union of the peaceful, moderate members of both communities, with the 30-50% of radical Zionist Israelis in their own "Zion" enclave, the 30-50% radical Islamicist Palestinians in their own enclave, and the moderate ones of both communities who just want to get along in the largest group. This would not be a peace park but would have to be free of explosives and automatic weapons, and be highly policed. Unlike the area today, civilized life might have a chance of succeeding (without religion).

The nation-state-based world order may not be the most ideal, but until a transcending and unifying idea takes its place, it would at least be better for it to function peacefully.

Inspiration for peace parks comes from the DeMilitarizedZone between the two Koreas, one of East Asia's richest wildlife reserves. The experience of Chernobyl after 1986 also suggests what much of the abandoned world parkland may look like as it restores itself.

Rather than being imposed worldwide from above by the community, people could encourage their countries to drop their territorial disputes and/or convert lands in disputed border areas into national parks.

Warning: It may make people angry when you propose turning their entire country into a wilderness area.

Oh, Dear Leader!

"There is nothing wrong with Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. The plasticized corpse of the Dear Leader
continues to sit upright and preside over an important ongoing
cabinet meeting, and he will continue to guide our nation for
eternity," a North Korean government spokesperson affirmed Wednesday.

-fikshnl DPRK Nuws Riliys

Point of Contention (with the Deer-Leader)

Daily Yomiuri front page for Monday, March 7.
Top Headline:

CHINA MILITARY BUDGET TO LEAP 18% IN 2007
Compiled from news services

BEIJING -- China's military spending, a point of contention with the United States, will jump 17.8% this year, a spokesman for the National People's Congress said Sunday.

China's military spending is an obsession for Japan and the US, especially the Cheneys, even though as the world's most populous country, China has a relatively small military budget and has not projected power beyond its neighbors Korea and Vietnam since the 1948 revolution. Consider that it has a population about double that of the US and Europe combined, and that it borders over a dozen countries which include nuclear-armed Russia, nuclear-armed India, nuclear-armed Pakistan, and possibly-nuclear-armed DPRK. Meanwhile, the US has the sacred right to arm itself to the teeth in order to defend itself against the ever-present risk of invasion from Canada and Mexico.

Aside from that, notice that the first sentence reports it from the US point of view, not as an objective fact. They literally cannot write one sentence with putting the US ruling elite's perspective in. This is very odd since it is a Japanese newspaper reporting on China, which should have nothing to do with the US.

Is the US news ever reported that way? Of course not. Have you read "Donald Rumsfeld, in a move applauded by the Chinese leadership, was replaced today."? That would be very odd reporting. But that is what we have every day.

This is compiled from AP and AFP-Jiji(!) wire services, so either they phrased it that way, or the writers at the Yomiuri are such good imperialist subjects that they spontaneously embedded their submissive fascist thinking into the story unconsciously or consciously.

The story has nothing whatsoever to do with the United States. They might as well interject about how the pope, Al Capone, or the Dear Leader feels about it. You would recognize it as propaganda if the newspaper said Stalin, the Central Committee, or Chairman Mao will be sure to disapprove of this news. Most people are so brainwashed that they will read that and not even consciously notice how they are being told what to think. People in the Soviet Union and China had to learn how to read between the lines of the official media, and we need to learn that the official media (the organs of state power) can be those which are privately operated for profit, too.

If the writers were to add how American neocons such as Mr Cheney or Rumsfeld had spoken out to warn of a danger of rising Chinese militarism --which we have no evidence of-- that should be several paragraphs further down in the article.

Journal of Contemporary Comparitive Snackology: Corn Tea Field Notes

I have been looking for ginseng tea, but I can never find it anywhere. It has dropped out from the top ten tea drinks to somewhere below the top forty, with lots of English teas and herb teas covering the shelves of the stores. I couldn't find ginseng tea, even in the Korean stores, so I decided to settle for corn tea -- also a yellow vegetable -- and try that. It's cheap, too.

Corn tea is nothing like corn soup. It has a roasted toasted flavor, but isn't like corn flakes or doritos, either. It tastes a lot like mugi-cha 麦茶, roasted barley tea, (which is a popular summer drink in Japan) but with a naturally sweeter, corn-like flavor after the first mugi-cha-impression.

It's no substitute for ginseng tea, but not bad. I wonder if the ancient civilizations of central america also discovered this drink.

The Korean name for it is oksusu-cha 옥수수차. The packaging you can see has added Japanese to the Korean for marketing to the one or two million Koreans in Japan and anyone else in Japan who might like to drink it.

Kim's Grocery: No mushrooms for export today

It's been a week now since our neighbors, the Kims, allegedly set off their first nuclear test explosion. I say "allegedly" because statements by the DPRK authorities have a very low probability of being true. Almost everything they ever say is a lie. (There are so many more ways to lie than to tell the truth, after all.) I won't report those here; you can find them elsewhere. You can look up Megumi Yokota and a few dozen other kidnapped Japanese slaves, the agreement on a non-nuclear Korean peninsula, and various other pacts over the years.

We also cannot believe the reports of other intelligence agencies. If Iraq taught us anything, it taught us not to believe that something is true just because 3 or 4 national intelligence agencies are saying it is so. Although several agencies confirmed the North Korean statement, they all did so with widely varying numbers. The Russians, in particular, seem to have been tipped off in advance, like the Chinese, and just reported the number the DPRK gave them rather than look at their seismographs.

The US has been slow to confirm that it was a nuclear test, and only yesterday claimed to have found an atmospheric sample consistent with a release of radioactive gas. We don't know if this was cherry-picked intelligence, though, one sample out of a hundred, or what. We certainly cannot trust American integrity or competence (in this administration).

The half-kiloton yield was more typical of a test of a suitcase-bomb or some small artillery nuke. Every state that has tested a nuclear weapon before now has had at least a 9-kiloton explosion. Recall that the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki was a 22-kiloton weapon, and most modern(?) nuclear weapons are in the megaton range. Is it consistent with the personality of Kim Jong-Ill to explode the tiniest possible micro-nuke, or would he want to make a big bang? He would want to make a big bang, so either it was 1) a dud, 2) a conventional explosion to feign that he had worse weapons than he really does, the strategy that misfired for former CIA agent Mr Saddam Hussein, 3) they didn't have enough enriched uranium or plutonium, and had to conserve the core material, or 4) they are even more advanced than we thought, and are making suitcase nukes for export now.

I would say that it was either a dud, a fake, or their only ready-to-go model. Newsweek seems to be talking up the option number 4 above.

The only thing worse than listening to DPRK propaganda is to hear people talk of opening negotiations with the DPRK. This may be a rare issue that the Republicans understand better than the Democrats, probably because like the Kim Jong-Ill entourage, Republicans are also driven by hatred. As much as I hate the un-elected ambassador John Bolton, he sort of understands North Korea. They hate his guts because they can't mindfuck him like they could Jimmy Carter or Madeline Albright. The DPRK leadership are people more like Asian versions of Dick Cheney. They really believe their own propaganda, you see. It is a scaled-up model of what Jim Jones was doing, but more Stalinist in tone. It really doesn't matter what they say. They will say and have said anything and everything. It also doesn't really matter what you say to them either. If you say anything, it can just be conditionals: "If you do A, we will do B. If you do X, we will do Y." However, that may just restrict your options. By saying military options are unthinkable, it actually gives them leverage, because they can always hold Seoul hostage. Regarding "negotiations," there really is no reason for the second-generation politician Dear Leader to meet his second-generation politician counterpart deer-in-the-headlights (cheer)leader. Nor is there reason to send Condoleeza "Birth-Pangs" Rice, the so-called international peacekeeper and destroyer of worlds, aside from the slim hope that Kim may hold her hostage! (It's worth a try!)

As odious as DPRK is, however, there is plenty of blame to go around for the state of proliferation. A Q Khan may have set up nuclear weapons programs in two dozen small countries. Khan is a sort of Johnny Appleseed for developing nations' nuclear weapons programs, and is protected by Perv now, under house arrest, a national hero to Pakistanis. In the long run, his shadow may dwarf that of small-time pirate Osama binLaden. Perhaps the US or UN should insist that he be handed over for an international tribunal, where the extent of who he sold to could be determined.

Quite a lot of the blame for gutting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty also has to go to the US, which is still busy designing and building new nukes even as it dismantles old nukes, and claiming the right to weaponize space with nukes, too. It is the same kind of non-leadership that was shown on the Kyoto climate treaty. It has always been clear from the earliest days, that the nuclear-armed states would have to climb down if they ever expected the rest of the world (all more insecure than the Permanent 5) to not arm themselves. They have been blowing the world off for 50 years.

It seems more and more that we will have to drift into another Hiroshima or Nagasaki before the non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament efforts are really given the attention they deserve. It may be impossible to bottle that genie, so maybe we should start designing more dispersed non-cities and building earth-sheltered housing for the day when 65 countries, 23 companies, and 12 terrorist groups all have suitcase nukes.