- The stories just continue to get better and better in North Korea. When a certified kook like Kim Jong Il is your leader, the bizarro tales are certain to abound, but this latest rumor might be the most peculiar one yet. According to anti-government activists, well-trained government agents from the regime of Kim Jong Il have been stealthily slithering around the country, targeting dissidents for assassination using poisoned needles. These conspiracy theorists have pointed to the unusual death of a 46-year-old South Korean pastor living in Dandong, a Chinese city near the North Korean border, after he was found unconscious in the street with his face and fingers badly discolored before dying. The pastor was reportedly active in an underground railroad that helps North Koreans escape to China. However, a spokesman for the South Korean Foreign Ministry, Kim Jeong Ok, said that an initial autopsy showed no signs of poisoning and that the family declined a second autopsy. The next day, a South Korean involved with missionary work in the Chinese city of Yanji was minding his own business on a sidewalk waiting for a traffic light to change when he felt a pinprick in his lower back. He collapsed to the sidewalk and reportedly hard a man muttering behind him in Chinese, "Sorry, sorry." The man survived the attack, but his story lends more credence to the growing list of allegations about such needle-wielding operatives terrorizing those inside and outside of North Korea. South Korean intelligence officials lent further credence to the stories earlier this month when they announced their own operatives had foiled an attack in Seoul in which the intended weapon was a poisoned needle. The target of the attack was Park Sung-hak, an activist who had launched balloons into North Korea carrying anti-government leaflets. Taken together, the three attacks are being hailed as signs of an increasing belligerent North Korean intelligence and security effort willing to go to any lengths to silence critics. Some observers have suggested that the attacks might be the handiwork of Kim Jong Un, son and heir apparent to Kim Jong Il. What makes North Korea so great (or a terrorist organization posing as a state) is that there are so many possibilities for the person behind these (alleged) attacks…………
- Did Tiger Woods pirate another golfer’s caddie or did that caddie approach Woods and his agent, Mark Steinberg, about the job of his own volition? If you believe the story as told by Woods on his website - the only “source” he ever provides information for - caddie Joe LaCava wanted to leave Dustin Johnson, one of the most talented young Americans in the game, to work for a former legend who hasn’t won in two years and is clearly on the downslope of his career. "This was an important decision, and I wanted to think about it carefully," Woods said in the story. "Also, out of deference for the FedEx Cup Playoffs, I decided to wait until they were concluding to have substantive talks. We then spoke to Joe and came to an agreement. Joe is an outstanding caddie, and I have known him for many years. I've personally seen the great job he did for Freddie (Couples). I'm anxious for us to be working together." Johnson didn’t exactly sound like he expected the move, nor did he or his agent point to any tension or troubles that may have forecasted the split. "Needless to say, Dustin and I were completely surprised, as they have enjoyed a great relationship and have been very successful together," agent David Winkle said. "Nonetheless, we think highly of Joe, both as a caddie and a person, which is why he was hired in the first place. We wish him nothing but the best with his new employer." To be fair to Woods, LaCava had not caddied for Johnson for long. He was the longtime caddie for Couples but their relationship at ended in the summer because Johnson was looking for a caddie and Couples' playing schedule was being reduced because of his health. One party who clearly didn’t see the change from Johnson to Woods coming was Woods’ former swing coach Butch Harmon, who has not been shy about criticizing Woods since their own relationship soured. "The thing that bothered me the most was T.W. not calling Dustin and asking if he could talk to Joe," Harmon explained. "That's the way it's done. I'm a little disappointed with the way Tiger handled it. But I'm not surprised." Woods’ post on his site didn’t deny that version of events, stating Woods talked to Johnson after LaCava informed his employer he was leaving. Of course, Woods has been searching for a permanent caddie since breaking off Steve Williams this summer after 13 years together. Their acrimonious split provided plenty of headlines for a short span and now LaCava will step into Williams’ oversized, cantankerous shoes. Now the question is whether his new boss will make enough money to keep his new gig as profitable as the one he just left………….
- Let this be a lesson to all losers on reality television shows on any network, but especially those on basic cable: Know your role and stay in your lane. Allow lead actress Patti Stanger of Bravo’s Millionaire Matchmaker to serve as an example for all of you with her imbecilic comments while appearing on Bravo's Watch What Happens Live. Stanger, whose job seems to consist of sifting through vapid, Botox-ed SoCal bimbos and matching them up with overly tanned, plastic, WASP-y millionaires, felt for some reason that the show was a great venue in which to unleash her inner anti-Semite and gay stereotyper. Bravo made the regrettable decision to allow Stanger to go beyond her skill set and take phone calls from viewers and then did a terrible job of screening the calls, which led to a caller asking Stanger how she felt about open long distance relationships and monogamy. Stanger replied, "In the Gay world, it will always be open." She asked the caller, a man named Dustin, if he was gay. He answered in the affirmative and Stanger replied, "There is no curbing the gay man." At that point, anyone with any self-awareness at all or an IQ above 42 would realize they were venturing into dangerous territory and pull the rip cord, but not Stanger. She turned to host Andy Cohen, who is openly gay, and said, "I have tried to curb 'you people.'" Wow……“you people.” Generalize much, P. And who exactly are you to “curb” anyone? Not content with her pre-existing bigotry contribution to the show, Stanger then told another caller, "First of all, you're very handsome, I thought you were straight." How she knew a caller was handsome is curious, but linking handsome and straight seemed to befuddle Cohen. He chimed in, "I don't know why being straight is a compliment." Once she was done bashing homosexuals, Stanger then went full-on anti-Semite by declaring, "Jewish men lie." Memo to you, P.: All men lie. All women lie. Everyone lies. No one tells the truth all the time, you tool. Her last bit of dating wisdom didn’t target a specific sexual orientation or race, but rather an entire city full of women. Stanger announced that New York women are "angry" and should be avoided by certain men. The Twitter world - clearly populated by people with nothing better to do than tweet in response to some pompous, self-aggrandizing reality show kook - lit up with anti-Stanger comments and some went so far as to ask for a boycott of Cohen’s show, Watch What Happens Live, which premiered after the show carrying Stanger’s moronic remarks. If only someone could have seen all of this coming from someone as brilliant and worthwhile in the world as Stanger…………
- Maybe the United States really is scaling back in waging unjustified, decade-long wars across the globe. The promises have been handed out like coupons for a free kids-sized ice cream cone on Halloween for as long as U.S. forces have been in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Now, there are actual plans and dates on how those efforts will be dialed back. Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick, the U.S. Army’s service's personnel chief, said in a recent interview that the Army will soon embark on a plan to cut 50,000 troops, or 8.6 percent of its soldiers, over five years. The cuts, scheduled to begin in March, will bring the Army's total force to 520,400 active-duty soldiers by October 2016, according to an Army Times report. Why now? “We feel that with the demand going down in Iraq and Afghanistan, and given the time to conduct a reasonable drawdown, we can manage (the force reduction) just as we have managed drawdowns in the past,” Bostick explained. The plan as laid out by Bostick is to conduct the reductions in two phases, with the first covering the 22,000 troops added three years ago to support the troop surge in Afghanistan. Another 27,000 troops that were added in the Grow the Army program, begun in 2007, will be cut in the second phase. Where will these displaced soldiers and officers go? The Army plans to achieve its target number through a number of options, including retirements, buyouts and voluntary and involuntary separations, Bostick said. Add war and unnecessarily propagating it to the expanding list of things America is no longer lapping the rest of the world in………….
- There is a fight in the world of science and it is pitting scientists against the publishers of Britain’s influential Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World. A news release magnanimously touted the release of the tome’s latest edition as “the Greatest Book on Earth.” Climate scientists do not seem to agree and one angry science dork fired off an e-mail to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. calling the book a “fiasco.” The atlas (whose name derives from The Times of London) is under attack for its depictions about the speed at which Greenland’s glaciers are melting. This scientist worried that a map in the atlas, along with news accounts repeating an error in the news release, could lead to another tidal wave of climate-change controversy. The release claimed that Greenland had lost 15 percent of its permanent ice cover from 1999 to 2011. That percentage represents 125,000 cubic miles, enough melted ice to raise sea levels three to five feet. Along with the figures in the release, the map in the atlas itself indicated that significant portions of Greenland’s coastline had become ice-free. Geologists were already on edge because of the drama over an exaggerated claim about the melting of Himalayan glaciers in a 2007 United Nations report. That report became the weapon of choice for global warming skeptics and made the battle to win over undecided individuals that much tougher. In light of the atlas’ release, angry climate change scientists have gone on a media tour speaking to any show, columnist or host who will talk to them and sounded the same message: Greenland has not lost 15 percent of its ice cover in recent years. The angry scientists pegged the number at one-tenth of 1 percent and made it abundantly clear that nobody at the atlas had consulted them. “It was a case where, really, the community came together really fast with both barrels blazing,” said Mark Serreze, director of the snow and ice center in Colorado. “Everyone had some real bad memories of this whole fiasco that had to do with Himalayan glaciers. No one wanted to see that again.” Oh no, not the glaciers error in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Climate Change again. HarperCollins subsidiary Collins Geo, publisher of the Times atlas’s 13th edition, hasn’t exactly stood its ground against the criticism. The company apologized for the news release and says it is “urgently reviewing” the map of Greenland. Their backtracking comes after initially firing back at the scientists in a statement released on Sept. 15. “We are the best there is,” an unidentified Harper Collins spokeswoman said. “We are confident of the data we have used and of the cartography.” That stance changed after Theodore Scambos, a glaciologist at the center, reverse-engineered the error and theorized that a mapmaker at the atlas had mistaken a center’s map of the ice’s thickness for one showing its extent. Collins Geo has yet to explain exactly what did happen, but there is truly nothing like a quality climate change controversy to get science back into the spotlight……….
No comments:
Post a Comment