Chinese probe succeeds at lunar landing

But this public relations move backfired when 1.3 billion Chinese television viewers became outraged to find out you actually cannot see the Great Wall of China from the Moon. Beijing reacted by blaming American imperialism and then declaring a no-fly security zone over northern Australia.

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Megan Fox moves to Korea to research role as sexy MP along tense inter-Korean border at DMZ

I'll translate this later when I can.

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(UPDATED) Kia WTF ad...

I'm not sure what they're smoking down in Brazil, but it makes them come up with things that would not go over well in the United States.

Courtesy of Huffington Post, we get word of this Kia of Brazil (?) advertising campaign that won a silver at the Cannes Creativity Awards.

Above is the offending picture (click it to enlarge and read the text). The idea is that the small-size Sportage SUV has a dual-zone climate control, so the two sides of the car can have very different temperatures, exemplified by one side being kiddish, and the other side very adult.

The other ad in this series makes the point with more clarity and less controversial. It depicts a cartoonish prince charming coming in to a castle, declaring in the upper left frame that he will break the spell that has the princess in a deep sleep by kissing her. In the upper right frame, in a style more reminiscent of the cover of romance novels, he is approaching her with both their tongues out, ready to Freedom Kiss.

In the middle left frame, the re-cartoonized prince (who looks a little like a slim version of Bob of Bob's Big Boy) is declaring to the re-cartoonized princess (who does look a bit younger than the steamy romance novel version of the princess) that he has come to rescue her. In the middle right frame, with her finger enticingly on her mouth, she declares, "Oh, it's my Prince Charming and his huge stallion."

Okay. In the lower left frame, the re-re-cartoonized prince takes the princess's hand and dreamily says, "Indeed, my beloved lady." (Lady, so she's of legal age, I guess.) But in the lower right frame, the romance novel version of the princess, whose dress is falling off and practically revealing her boobs, asks if the prince has any interesting ideas on how she can show him her gratitude.

Okay, then. One side is kiddish, and the other side is adult. Dual themes of the same scene. But in the prince-rescues-princess sample, there are no hints at something untoward. Not so with the ad way up above, where at the very least, it seems to be promoting the idea of teachers and students becoming sexually involved. At worst, it inserts the very icky suggestion that an adult figure might look at young and innocent schoolgirl as a sex object.

[source]

Okay, this Brazil and France, where, I'm guessing, anything goes, relative to the US (or South Korea). But in America where pedophilia and sex with minors are are very serious issues, this is offensive. Some two-thirds of the HuffPost readers think so, anyway.

Frankly, I can't imagine this fitting in with the old adage that there's no such thing as bad press. It's one thing to sell sex (and loads of people say they're offended by that, but it always manages to get attention), but it's another to seem to pander to pedophiliac proclivities. Really, even if that was not the intent of the ad creators, it's such an obvious conclusion for just about any reader, and I can't see how Kia can get out of this without distancing itself from this ad and apologizing. That is, if this news gains traction.

UPDATE:
Prompted by a comment from gbnhj at The Marmot's Hole, I went looking for news that Kia had denied they had anything to do with this ad campaign. At this site I found a denial by Kia:

Kia Motors America (KMA) has become aware of an offensive piece of advertising material that was created by an ad agency in Brazil that KMA has no business relationship with and has never worked with. This ad was not created in the U.S. by Kia Motors America or any of its marketing partners and does not reflect the opinions or values of KMA or Kia Motors Corporation. The ad is undoubtedly inappropriate, and on behalf of Kia Motors we apologize to those who have been offended by it. We can guarantee this advertisement has never and will never be used in any form in the United States, and our global headquarters in Seoul, South Korea is addressing the issue with the independent Brazilian distributor.

That site says the advertising company broke the rules by submitting an ad campaign that was not actually run, and they appear likely to get the prestigious award yanked. In an earlier posting, they had harsh words for Kia, along with some interesting background on other award-winning ads' boorishness (see below for an example involving Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in a Reporters Without Borders advert, with the caption, "Censorship tells the wrong story").

That actually reminds me of a gag series I'd been planning for a future post, one inspired by an old gag on Jimmy Kimmel Live: inappropriately pixelated pictures of Kim Jong-il.

That's right. I'm fourteen years old.

UPDATE 2:

Instead of getting back to work, I perused a number of posts at the very interesting BNET advertising blog, The Tagline, which included this bit of Hitler-themed artwork at right. In fact, I had written a post on this back in September 2009, with a title I am embarrassed to have written but which still cracks me up. 

Glorious Dear Leader and Brilliant Comrade Thought Bubble Contest #2

I'm taking a bit of a break from the Yŏnpyŏng-do nonsense while I prepare a post or two on it. In the meantime, check out Joshua Stanton's thoughtful essay at One Free Korea on what to do, as well as The Marmot's helpful links (here and here) and some background into the resignation of the Ministry of Defense.

Instead, I'm going to continue with my well-earned distraction in the form of the Glorious Dear Leader and Brilliant Comrade Thought bubble Contest, round 2. (The probably funnier round 1 is here.)

I've added another blank slate for my readers, this time with the thought bubble coming from Kim Jong-un. Just what must be going through his mind?

Okay, the humor potential isn't quite as potent when KJU is doing the thinking, but it's not hopeless.

Well, that's what I'd be thinking. Except I'd say lame.

Well, that's what it looks like he's really thinking.

Yeah, I know. So far it's mostly fart jokes, fat jokes, and Kim-Jong-il's-number-2-son-is-gay jokes. Let's just return to what brought us here in the first place.

The original for this one was a tad NSFW.

Just sayin'.

All dressed as school girls.

Timely and topical.

I wonder if drunk people do just lie around in the Pyongyang equivalent of Shinchon? Is there a Pyongyang equivalent of Shinchon?

It's not a Kushibo post unless there's something about English teachers.

Okay. Have at it.

Glorious Dear Leader and Brilliant Comrade Thought Bubble Contest #1

Here's the picture. It's from Yonhap (duh!) and — that look! — it's just screaming for its own thought bubble captions.

So I added some thought bubble space and started imagining what was going through Kim Jong-il's head.

There are hundreds of ideas.

Now it's your turn. Have at it. Email them to me if you think they're worthy of Monster Island (and remember: we have no standards).

They couldn't be any worse than these.

Okay. I'll stop now.

Okay, now.

UPDATE:
I just can't help myself.

Actually, I'm assuming genital warts are countable nouns. Anyone able to offer any insight on that? If not, I'll have to change it to herpes sores, but that just doesn't pack the same punch.

At the risk of dictating what's funny, this one has a good payoff if you know the references.

As you may have already guessed, good taste is not a factor in this contest. This one confirms it.

This, is an homage.

Some Americans angry about Muslims who died at Ground Zero

This was inevitable:

NEW YORK (AFP) — Fresh from her comments condemning the building of a mosque so close to the site of the World Trade Center towers that were destroyed on September 11, 2001, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has chosen a new target in her bid to prevent sacrilege against the so-called "Ground Zero" site: Muslims who were killed in the terror attacks of 9/11.

"I think it was highly insensitive that dozens of followers of Mohammed chose to die in a place that is sacrosanctimonious to Christians and Judeos," she tweeted. "I recognize Islamics' right to die, but they should have chosen a less sensitive location. Emotions are just too raw."

She repeated her sentence about Muslims having a right to die, then turned to the camera and gave a two-second wink.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich echoed her sentiments. "It's easy to speculate that Muslims stuck up in the towers were praying to Allah after the planes hit," he said in a speech to an Atlanta gathering of Daughters of the American War On Terror. "That's the same Allah that the bin Ladenites were chanting to when they crashed the planes. Really, why should we be concerned about their feelings when they would be so brazen as to worship the same false prophet as bin Laden and Imam Ralph. Christianity, and by that I mean evangelical Protestantism, is under attack."

Writing in the New York Post, pundit Adam Goldberg openly opined that the Muslim dead might actually have been in on the massive terror attack. "We already had nineteen Muslimites killing themselves on the planes, so it's not hard to imagine a few dozen more sacrificing themselves in order for Islamic fifth columnists to claim their co-religionists were also victims of 9/11. They're just that sneaky. And when it comes to getting a slew of virgins in the afterlife, people have died for far worse reasons."

The news that Muslims had died at Ground Zero angered David Schmidt, organizer of a "No Mosque Here" demonstration. "Mohammed was a child-diddling pig!" he shouted before grabbing a baseball bat and running after a man wearing a kufi that turned out to be a Nike jogging cap.

Dalip Singh, a Manhattan resident who works three blocks from Ground Zero, was visibly annoyed when he learned that Muslims had died in the 9/11 attacks. "Why did they have to die there? Couldn't they have made it to Thomas Street to croak? Every time the Muslims make trouble with mainstream America, at least three of us Sikhs get killed. It really sucks."

The Anti-Defamation League, long a supporter of interfaith dialogue, sought to reach out to local imams about officially moving the location-of-death of the dozens of Muslims killed in the 9/11 attacks. "Perhaps we could say they were all on United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, far from the raw nerves of Ground Zero," Rabbi Simon Rheins suggested. "Think how much more peaceful it'd be for their families to imagine they met their maker in a grassy field than the asbestos-filled streets of New York."

The founder of the Institute for Islamic-American Justice, however, was angered by the outrage. "Look, this is nonsense," said Imam Mohammed Zargarpour in a cell phone interview. "If we Muslim Americans want to die in terror attacks, that's our right as citizens of the United..." he said before the call was apparently dropped. The FBI later issued a press release stating that Mr Zargarpour was being questioned over threats to air transportation.

Governor Palin made clear she would not relent on this divisive issue. "If I'm elected president in 2011, I will pass a Constitutional appendment forbidding Muslims from dying at Ground Zero, and I call on our possibly Kenya-born president to do the same." She then boarded a plane headed for Orange County, California, to investigate claims by columnist Michelle Malkin that Disneyland's "It's A Small World" ride contains several depictions of Arabs.

AES will bring crackdown to Vancouver

After suggestive pictures were posted online of half pipe snowboarding Olympic bronze medalist Scotty Lago being faux-llated™ by a young woman who may possibly be of Korean descent, Anti-English Spectrum founder and bad foreigner eradication crusader Yie Eun-woong announced he would take his fight on the road to Vancouver, Canada, site of the Winter Olympics that were stolen from Pyongchang. 

"We must do whatever we can to rid British Columbia of illegal, low-quality English teachers," said Mr Yie in a cell phone interview he conducted from his koshiwon. I will go to Canada and follow these prospective teachers to determine if they are in the country illegally and what brand of condoms they are throwing away."

Mr Lago's agent said the manhunt was ridiculous. "Mr Yie has no jurisdiction here and no business conducting a manhunt against Scott, because there's no way he would ever end up being an English teacher for anybody in Korea," he said. "Unless the Pepsi endorsement deal falls through."

For his part, Lago went home to New Hampshire as soon as the photos were revealed on TMZ.com. "I don't think Mr Yie can find me here," he said by phone. "Seabrook is very hard for Koreans to pronounce."

The identity of the bronze biter has not been established — early reports said it was Michelle Kwan, Kristi Yamaguchi, or possibly Connie Chung — but one reporter spotted the incognympho™ in the hallway in front of Mr Lago's hotel room about an hour later. With a disappointed look on her face, all she had to say was, "half a pipe is right."

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Eighty-year-old nanas in wheelchairs tired of getting frisked at the airport

Proponents of racial profiling argue that when such-and-such racial/ethnic group is more likely to be involved in some crime like drug trafficking or terrorism, it makes sense to for the the police, the Feds, or the TSA to target members of those groups in higher numbers. 

A favorite icon of the pro-profiling crowd is the proverbial eighty-year-old nana in a wheelchair, who is being taken aside and patted down by the authorities while mean-looking hombres from Colombia or Egypt who smell of gunpowder and coke move unimpeded to their destination. It's an oft-repeated meme designed to point out the silliness of the idea that anybody could be a terrorist or a drug trafficker. 

The elderly lady trying to get to her grandkid's birthday was a highly effective symbol, I thought. Little did I know that these women actually were suffering from an inordinately high number of "extensive searches," a euphemism for treatment by airport security that is only about two shades better than how prisoners of war stateless enemy combatants are rendered at Guantanamo Bay. And I'm not talking a handful — it's hundreds every day.

Well, if you've ever had a curmudgeonly elderly neighbor who would just as soon stab your volleyball that went into her yard with a knitting needle rather than give it back, then you won't be surprised to learn that the old ladies are mad as hell and they aren't going to take it anymore.

That's right. The 80-year-old wheelchair-bound nana so heavily scrutinized at the airport has had enough. Indeed, wheelchair-bound octogenarian grandmothers have become so beleaguered that they have formed a nationwide lobbying organization so that the TSA will stop harassing them: Committee to Restore Ordinary Nana Existence (CRONE).

At left is Mabel Perkins of Palm Beach, Florida, the founder of CRONE. She has grown tired of being held up by "dumb-ass TSA workers" who think she has condoms full of cocaine shoved up her butt. "I've missed four flights to see my kids," she says. "And that's four flights too many." When she read that other senior citizens were also being held up due to them being targeted for extensive security checks, she knew she needed to spearhead an organization aimed at bringing back racial profiling "to get those PC nincompoops off our backs."

But, she makes clear to her Black neighbor and close friend at the Sea Coast Senior Living Center, she's not including elderly Black women in her list of who the heat should be turned back onto. "Just the young men," she explains, "and women who look skanky." She would also include Hispanics, and Whites with long hair, but probably not Asians (unless there's a war with North Korea, then all bets are off).  

One of CRONE's first experiences in the national spotlight came last summer, when they provided legal assistance to eighty-three-year-old Iris Knudsen of Anoka, Minnesota (below). Mrs Knudsen was given a one-year suspended sentence for disorderly conduct after she refused to let TSA workers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport examine her girdle for C-4.

Though the case resulted in a conviction and a requirement that Knudsen register as a sex offender, CRONE considers this a victory: Federal prosecutors had pushed for life imprisonment for the Democrat-registered voting rights advocate. 

Perkins is very serious about her mission. She has notebook after notebook detailing thousands of episodes where seniors lost their dignity and sometimes their purse. 

On page twelve of the notebook she shows me is a photo of ninety-year-old Rosa Chung of Daly City, California. Mrs Chung has reportedly been strip-searched thirteen times in the past three years. 

In the margins are notes from an interview with Mrs Chung's relatives, who brought the case to Perkins's attention. "It's very disturbing," says granddaughter Linda Chung. "We think she's beginning to like the attention."

Perkins got me in touch with one Olive Baumann of Englewood, Colorado, who says she's frequently taken aside and frisked thoroughly before she's able to get on an aircraft. When asked if her anti-war paraphernalia may be part of the reason, she replied: "Well, duh! That's why I have them."

Okay, okay. Time to come clean. The above was all a little joke. Actually, I'm quite happy that racial profiling is being set aside and everyone gets scrutinized as much as they do. Clean-cut Timothy McVeigh and his all-White co-conspirators, for example, wouldn't have triggered any of the racial profiling checks (but Jordanian-American Ibrahim Ahmad was tracked down to Amman because it was initially assumed that a Middle Easterner — especially one leaving Oklahoma City that day and heading for Jordan — must be behind the blast).

And then there's folks like Orange County resident Adam Gadahn or John Walker Lindh, American supporters of al Qaeda who would blend in very nicely if they shaved off their beards. The same is true of many light-skinned Muslims of Lebanese or European, or even far North African descent. Some of them have blond hair and blue eyes even!

Yep, al Qa'ida in fact had reportedly planned to use such "European-looking" hirabi to do terrorist attacks.

So it's not just Arabs (Iranians, by the way, are not Arabs) or people we might think "look Arab." A terrorist can look like any one of us. Yes, even an Islamist terrorist can look like any one of us. See, by making sure that everyone has a somewhat equal chance at being carefully scrutinized, they can't use our own prejudices against us.

What I'm saying is that whining about apocryphal 80-year-old nanas in wheelchairs being frisked is wrongheaded (though any contact should be conducted professionally and with dignity) because our security at airports needs to be across the board, not just against those we fear the most. Terror organizations are looking for weak points, and using racial profiling would be a foolish exercise in narrowing our security focus.

[above: Scrutinizing even retired grannies as part of the War on Drugs™ is necessary to catch drug mules like this woman, if she is still in this line of work in fifty years. Which she might be. I mean, despite her gorgeous looks and her Oscar nomination for Best Actress, they haven't exactly been knocking down Catalina Sandino Moreno's door. Just sayin' is all.]

So to summarize, what I'm saying is that relying primarily on racial profiling would be idiocy for a number of reasons: 

1. First, al Qaeda is already in a position to get around such profiling by using European-looking operatives for their taks. People who don't look any more "Muslim" or "Arab" than Ben Affleck or Johnny Depp. Al Qaeda has already reportedly been discovered years ago to be working on this with great seriousness.  
2. Second, racial profiling of "Muslim-looking people" (whatever that means) ignores that fact that there are other terrorist threats. In the UK, for example, there was until very, very recently the threat of Irish Catholic nationalists blowing things up in London. And in the US, until 9/11, far and away the largest terror attack ever to occur was by a bunch of clean-cut White guys born and bred in America. 
3. Third, treating a group of people with hostility because of what they look like is a very good way to engender hostility from some of them, especially the ones who didn't feel that way in the first place. This is true of almost any group, Muslim or otherwise.

A similar argument could be made for "Latin American" drug dealers. I am by no means saying that we should ignore the fact that Islamist terrorists (or Latin American drug dealers) remain such a massive threat to American security. But they are not the only threat, and we can't always tell who they are just by looking (and they know that).

* We in the West have co-opted the term jihad and jihadist when the very use of those words may be causing our own goals to become murky even among those who aren't supporters of armed struggle with non-Muslims. Some prefer the terms hirabah and hirabi in lieu of jihad and jihadist.

Here's an interesting bit from NPR on the subject:

Professor Douglas Streusand says that's why U.S. officials should stop using the term altogether. Streusand is an Arabic and Farsi speaker with a doctorate from the University of Chicago. He teaches Islamic history at the Marine Corps Staff College in Quantico, Va. In a paper written for and circulated among top military brass in the Pentagon, Streusand argues that describing Islamist militants and insurgents in Iraq as "jihadists" is hurting U.S. policy.

Why? Because according to Streusand, "for a Muslim, jihad is a good thing. It literally means striving in the path of God." By describing insurgents or terrorists as "jihadists," he argues, we imply we are fighting meritorious Muslims. To make the point clearer, he says it would be as if al-Qaida called its enemies "freedom."

His suggestion? Use Islamic legal language. The term he suggests is "hirabah" —literally, an unjust form of warfare.

Yeah, calling bin Laden and his minions jihadists seems like the wrong tact if we just end up inadvertently praising them as "strivers in the path of God." The best parallel with Christianity I could think of was someone trying to bash those among the Christian faithful for their support of the War on Terror by calling them "Christian soldiers." Well, that simply would not have the negative ring that was intended, would it?

Calling them hirabi (committers of hirabah) would be much more fitting to Muslim audiences as it rolled off the tongue of President Obama or UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: they're a bunch of unjust fighters, pirates, and spreaders of disorder, a serious punishment in the Qur'an.

If nothing else, I would like to see hirabah/hirabi replace jihad/jihadist in our rhetoric about these murderers and would-be murderers. It may end up making little difference to the people already in these groups, but to people on the sidelines, it might underscore the bad-faith acts of these killers and bringers of mayhem, bringing a clearer perspective to why it is that their actions are wrong even though they are of the same faith.