Chag kasher v'sameach!

I usually don't post on Chol HaMo'eid. See you when it's all over.

"DPRK Army and People Ready for All-out Action" (Korean News)

Best bluster in the business:

Servicepersons of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea have been put on a high alert for all-out action, only awaiting an order from Supreme Commander Marshal Kim Jong Un.

Written on their military hardware is a slogan "Annihilate the U.S. imperialist aggressors, the sworn enemy of the Korean people!"

The slogan represents the DPRK army's steadfast will to exterminate the U.S. imperialists, who have inflicted untold miseries and sufferings upon the Korean nation since the intrusion of their aggression ship "General Sherman" into the Taedong River in 1866.

In the period of the last Korean War (1950-1953), the U.S. imperialists slaughtered many Koreans in a most brutal way. They killed more than 35 000 inhabitants in Sinchon County alone by way of skinning off and dismembering.

Although it has been 60 years after the ceasefire, the DPRK people's resentment against the U.S. imperialists is running higher as the days go by. Now is the time for them to finally settle accounts with the U.S. imperialists.

Should the U.S. imperialists intrude into the territorial waters, air and land of DPRK even 0.001mm, its armed forces and people will annihilate the aggressors with strong retaliatory strikes and achieve the final victory in the long-standing showdown with the U.S.

Angry Arab takes the Chavez "assassination" seriously

My take on AA up to this point has been that he is intelligent but that on the subject of Israel, "hatred is the functional equivalent of stupidity." Now I'm not so sure. He takes the possibility of some conspiracy's causing Chavez's cancer seriously enough to consult an "expert." Here is a telling bit from the reply:

In theory, carcinogens, agents that cause the initiation of cancer, can be applied as a weapon. Carcinogens are employed in experimental animals to study cancer initiation and progression. However, cancers take a (long) while to develop, and the impact of using a carcinogen cannot be carefully targeted. If applied in large doses, they can cause cancer development in multiple tissues. These uncertainties limit their usefulness as an assassination tool (if it is going to take a few years for someone to die as a consequence of their use, then they would be too blunt of an instrument).

Far more useful and clever to my mind has been the use of Polonium 210 as an assassination tool. It is difficult to detect and decays naturally over time. Arafat was probably assassinated that way.

Right, as if that old bag of corruption needed a push to help him out the door. Oh well, maybe the actual functional equivalent of stupidity is . . . stupidity.

"Venezuela accuses US of having infected Chavez with cancer virus" (PressTV-Iran)

I'll tell you something, they could not have chosen a more appropriate victim for the cancer raygun:

Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro has announced the expulsion of two US embassy officials for allegedly spying on the country’s military, accusing Washington of having infected late President Hugo Chavez with the cancer virus.

Maduro charged the US administration in a televised speech on Tuesday, after holding an emergency meeting with high military command and civilian leaders and hours before the announcement of President Chavez’s death.

Caracas accused the US embassy’s Air Force attache, Colonel David Delmonaco, and assistant air attache, Major Devlin Kostal, of trying to stir up a military plot against the Venezuelan government.

Washington confirmed that the two officials were employed at the embassy, saying Delmonaco was en route back to the US, and Kostal was in America at the time. Maduro also said that, “We have no doubt” that the President’s cancer, first diagnosed in 2011, was induced by “the historical enemies of our homeland,” a thinly-veiled reference to the US.

He compared the situation to the death of the late leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, who Maduro claimed was “inoculated with an illness.”

US State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said in a statement that Washington “definitely rejects” the assertion that the US was involved in Chavez’s illness.

On Tuesday, the 58-year-old Venezuelan leader died after a two-year battle with cancer.

Back in 2011, Chavez had accused the US of developing a technology for infecting Latin American leaders with cancer.

Argentinean President Cristina Kirchner Fernandez, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and former Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo have all received treatment for cancer disease.

“Wouldn't it be weird if they [the US] had developed a technology for inducing cancer and nobody knows up until now?” Chavez had said at the time.

A current Juan Cole paragraph

In which we learn that AIPAC wants Israel to bomb "civilian nuclear enrichment facilities."

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which ought to be a registered foreign agent, opens its annual conference in Washington today. Its three big goals right now are to make sure US government aid to Israel is exempted from the across the board budget cuts of the sequester; to make sure Israel can with impunity go on stealing Palestinian land in the West Bank; and to get permission from Congress for the Israeli Air Force to bomb Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment facilities.