North Korea is determined to be paid attention to

No matter how we try to ignore it in favor of oil-producing countries.

In a surprising admission, North Korea's hard-line Communist government declared publicly for the first time today that it has nuclear weapons. It also said that it will boycott United States-sponsored regional talks designed to end its nuclear program, according to a North Korean Foreign Ministry statement transmitted today by the reclusive nation's wire service.
  NY Times article

What's surprising about that? No matter how much they jump up and down and shout about their nukes, we pretend not to notice.

The statement, considered a definitive policy pronouncement, said that North Korea is pulling out of the talks after concluding that the second Bush administration would pursue the "brazen-faced, double-dealing tactics" of dialogue and "regime change."

Not an unreasonable conclusion.

President Bush, in his State of the Union message last week, avoided the confrontational rhetoric of past speeches in which he branded North Korea as member of "the axis of evil," alongside Iraq and Iran. This time, in his only reference to Pyongyang, he merely said that he was "working with governments in Asia to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions."

But in today's statement, Pyongyang zeroed in on Dr. Rice's testimony last month in her Senate confirmation hearings, where she lumped North Korea with five other dictatorships, calling them "outposts of tyranny."

Mexed missages.

"We advise the U.S. to negotiate with dealers in peasant markets it claims that are to its liking or with representatives of the organization of North Korean defectors on its payroll, if it wishes to have talks," the statement said.

Funny, too.

With, um....unique...fashion-sense.

While surfing for that photo of Jong (who never seems to be wearing anything else - I picture his closet to be like J's in Men in Black - hanger after hanger of the same suit of clothes - only khakis), I stumbled upon this interesting page that makes me wish I had spent more time talking to the man at the little mercantile in the Catskills.

It was during the lead-up to war in Iraq, and I had become accustomed to thinking that most people over the age of fifty-five living in rural parts of the country were Republicans and strong supporters of the Bush agenda. I almost dreaded what the old guy was going to say to me, with that pinched up look on his face. What he said was this: "I hope that asshole doesn't get us into war." And then he told me that he was a Korean War vet, and complained bitterly that nobody even remembers there was a Korean War. Nobody ever mentions it. We talk about WWII and jump right to Viet Nam. And he's right. Now that MASH isn't on TV any more. And strangely enough, even then people didn't really talk about that war. The war in MASH was simply entertainment. We Americans truly are ingenious. We can turn anything into entertainment.