'How one man escaped from a North Korean prison camp'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/16/escape-north-korea-prison-camp

His first memory is an execution. He walked with his mother to a wheat field, where guards had rounded up several thousand prisoners. The boy crawled between legs to the front row, where he saw guards tying a man  to a wooden pole.
Shin In Geun was four years old, too young to understand the speech that came before that killing. At dozens of executions in years to come, he would listen to a guard telling the crowd that the prisoner about to die had been offered "redemption" through hard labour, but had rejected the generosity of the North Korean government.
Guards stuffed pebbles into the prisoner's mouth, covered his head with a hood and shot him.
In Camp 14, a prison for the political enemies of North Korea, assemblies of more than two inmates were forbidden, except for executions. Everyone had to attend them.
The South Korean government estimates there are about 154,000 prisoners in North Korea's labour camps, while the US state department puts the number as high as 200,000 ...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Last Refuges of Great Art

Image
The 'art world' should be ashamed that one of the last refuges of artistic beauty and value is not in the art world, but in the art produced by the artists of the video game industry ... I think there is more beauty and value in a single screenshot here than in all the works of the "Tate Modern" put together: http://www.videogamer.com/wii/secret_files_tunguska/screenshot-4.html (And there's plenty more like this out there.) Even the garbage bin is beautiful The rich, expansive virtual worlds created by video game artists are, in a loose sense, 'virtual art galleries' - they're often 'larger' than 'real' art galleries, you can comparably 'explore' them, and every virtual detail is almost like a small piece of art in its own right. If you're ever in London, try this "experiment": Visit the National Gallery (for its classical paintings collection) in the morning, and the Tate Modern in the aftern
Read more

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis and the 'Wet Look'

Image
An Aquatic Ape I think the strongest 'circumstantial evidence' supporting a partial form of the (controversial)  aquatic ape hypothesis * is something I don't think I've seen mentioned before: The simple fact that we find  wet Homo sapiens sexually attractive. If you think about it, doesn't it seem a bit arbitrary? E.g. would gorillas find other wet gorillas sexy, or would rats find other wet rats sexy? How universal is this? If we consider the concept of sexual choice ** in evolution, then if our ancestors were once partially evolving "in that direction", then we might expect that they may have felt  a mate choice preference  for the entailed characteristics of a hypothetical "aquatic ape" (such as the 'wet look', as well as finding smooth, hairless skin comparatively more attractive, as we do). To consider this argument, look at a picture like the one above (or  this ,  this ,  this ,  this , or  this ) ... then (for men now) t
Read more