Being a teenager in Hawaii and going to a great high school, camping and surfing with friends on the weekends, looking forward to college and beyond…Was nice. And then, I wonder - What’s it like for a teenager in North Korea doing the same? Going to a
2/great school, hanging out with your friends everyday, learning to play rock music on guitar or the drums, looking forward to college and beyond?
“This is the first ROCK SONG in North Korea that is recorded in 2007 PyongYang.” - F. Sueyoshi
3/I don't have to wonder any more thanks to the legendary Funky Sueyoshi who has brought his love of music to North Korea and made teen-age disciples of rock-n-roll.
Pyongyang:Slapping Bass - North Korea 北朝鮮でチョッパー·ベース(平壌の世界201)
4/Pyongyang: First iPad impact on NorthKorea 北朝鮮 iPadの衝撃(平壌の世界134)
It's amazing to see these North Korean teens in the school of rock who aren't that different from American teens their age if you don't count ethnicity, nationality & ideology.
5/The world is not American. It isn't Caucasian. And it doesn’t fall under one flag. Diversity is the rule in nature. In human diversity of varying ethnic, national & ideological contours, universalities like music, friendship & love bridge our differences and bring us together.
@chadocl Keith Howard: "Moranbong disappeared for a while, and when they came back, they started to wear military uniforms. The makeup was gone. The jewelry was gone. So, you’re back to being sort of more orthodox.
We’re seeing, right now, another experiment with moving away from the
@chadocl 2/"old into something more contemporary. North Korea is rejecting itself.”
Keith Howard did his research in North Korea in 1992 and 2000. It has taken him 25 years to do this book. This book belongs to the category of "Obsolete".
“So, I was interested in being able to meet
@chadocl 3/"musicians, scholars, artists, dancers to find out how they perceive things and how they talked about things…"
The only problem is that Keith Howard last intermingled with North Koreans 20 and 28 years ago respectively. Here's what isn't included in his book:
@ABlinken
Congrats on being nominated to SoS. You've got big shoes to fill. As a Korea watcher and 2nd Gen American I have some ideas on how to negotiate with North Korea I'd like to share freely with you. How would this A-B-C for D-E-F-G deal fly?
2/It's premised on acknowledging North Korea's security concerns and meeting them 1/2 way. Both 100% and 0% denuclearization are ruled out in a Glass Half-Full Deal👇that meets both side's security guarantees 50%. This is "compromising" to achieve balance.
“Parties to an armed standoff are unlikely to holster or discard their weapons before they are confident they will not need them…” - Henri Feron
WAR AND PEACE
Why a Peace Agreement Remains Critical to Resolving the Security Crisis in Korea thebaraza.org/war-and-peace/…
2/"A peace agreement is the most solemn way of demonstrating the sincerity of all sides in seeking a peaceful resolution of the crisis…
Ending the endless “Forgotten War” is hence a critical first step in deescalating the unsustainably dangerous standoff in Korea."
3/A realistic solution to the security crisis in Korea involves seeing the horses pulling the carriage👇as the agreed-on peace agreement, the passengers as the international community enjoying security and the carriage driver as the negotiating parties. giphy.com/gifs/maudit-ma…
Ask a North Korean: Why do some North Koreans defect via Russia and not China? nknews.org/2020/11/ask-a-…
“Despite this, North Korean workers are eager to go to Russia. In North Korea, they’d be working all year long for meager wages and rations,
2/“but in Russia, they can eat well for five years while getting to see a bit of the world. They also want to help their wives, families and relatives back home by earning more money.”
3/My understanding is that North Korean workers are also eager to work in Dangdong for the same reasons, especially women getting waitressing jobs. Which if true makes this piece 👇grossly distorted, biased, false and propagandistic.
Harsh UN sanctions designed to reduce DPRK $ for its nuclear program decimates NK jobs & economy - but UN doesn’t care one bit. Many overseas workers WANT the work = $ + travel - but UN calls it “modern-day slavery” & human rights abuse. Here’s the real “human rights abuse”:
Good jobs and a thriving economy are essential for people in any country. Yet a paranoid UN/US & Western countries fear DPRK’s nuclear deterrence so much they have to kill all the jobs and strangle the economy of DPRK to reduce $ they’re that paranoid.
The DPRK is a sovereign socialist state that signed the Armistice in expectation of signing a peace deal. They got instead the US sending nukes to ROK breaking the Armistice. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. So DPRK nukes up and has the right to defend itself
The State of American Science, Technology, Engineering & Math is DISMAL
[It's the country w/ the best science, technology & brain power that wins the race, stupid]
2/“The Current State of U.S. STEM Education
What is the current state of STEM education in America? One of the most important benchmarks for measuring STEM proficiency in the United States and around the world is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Every
3/"three years it measures reading ability, math and science literacy, and other key skills among fifteen-year-olds in a large number of developed and developing countries.
The most recent PISA results date from 2015. The United States ranked thirty-eighth out of seventy-one