The first really good Hitchens article in a while (North Korea is the subject)

[jimmy olsen]

Number of Hispanic Asians in the US in 2000 was Asian  119,829. (page 10)

Probably just confused Filipinos.

Nope.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_Philippines#Major_foreign_languages

The use of Spanish began to decline after Spain ceded the islands to the United States in 1898. Under U.S. rule, the English language began to be promoted instead of Spanish. After the country's independence in 1946 and during the administration of Ferdinand Marcos, many of the old Spanish-speaking families in Philippines migrated to Spain and Latin America. In 1940, there were six million of people with Spanish speaking skills in the Philippines. The 1950 Census stated that hispanophone Filipinos made up 6% of the population. In 1990, the census reported that the number had dwindled to just 2,500 but last census in XXI century has shown a increase up to 3500 aprox.

[Pat]

Still lots of them with spanish names though. But yeah, they don't speak spanish, except the spanish incorporated into the local vernacular (the numbers are in spanish, for example).

[The Larch]

Nope, sorry G.

Latino/Hispanic is an ethnocultural term not a racial one. There are White Latinos, Black Latinos and Native American Latinos.

Hmm...if a Spanish speaking South American of Japanese descent moved to the US I wonder what they would put down on their census form?

Latino is a race. Or rather a sub-race. 'Caucasian' is the broad race. Whites are....white. Very pale northern originated folk.
The lines of course are not exact and many Spaniards, Italians, etc... are white these days but meh, the stereotype is they're all swarthy.
This has been covered in court cases before, Indians are unquestionably caucasian but according to US vs. Bhagat Singh Thind not white.
But I was just joking on, I don't give a crap.
I'd imagine your said oriental hispanic would put down Japanese though, then he wouldn't be counted amongst the hispanic menace.

Don't be so fucking ignorant.

For once, I agree wholeheartedly with my hermano Timoteo Ortiz. 

[derspiess]

Still lots of them with spanish names though.

That always struck me as odd.  Everyone has a Spanish name (first name & surname) but few speak the language.

[jimmy olsen]

China offers $10 billion in foreign aid to North Korea.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gIOQlm5GJnyxIY5nMCY2w-WtAJTA

China arranging foreign investment deal for N.Korea

(AFP) – 4 hours ago

SEOUL — China is arranging a huge foreign investment deal to revive North Korea's faltering economy amid an international drive to coax Pyongyang back to nuclear disarmament talks, a report said Monday.

Beijing is helping the communist state obtain more than 10 billion dollars in investment from Chinese banks and multinational firms, the South's Yonhap news agency said.

The deal was discussed a week ago when North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il met China's senior communist party official Wang Jiarui, it said.

A North Korean body known as the Korea Taepung International Investment Group plans to conclude the deal in March, Yonhap said, adding that Chinese capital would account for 60 percent of total investments.

Yonhap did not give any further details on what the investment plan would involve.

It said China was brokering the deal because North Korea is demanding economic aid from Beijing along with other incentives before returning to the six-party nuclear forum which the North quit last April.

South Korean officials were not available for comment.

"China could provide humanitarian aid to help North Korea revive its economy before six-party talks resume," Dongguk University professor Kim Yong-Hyun told AFP.

"However, any massive economic assistance or investments from China may come only after it gets strong commitment from Pyongyang about denuclarisation."

Chinese and North Korean nuclear negotiators held several days of talks in Beijing last week aimed at restarting the forum chaired by China since 2003.

Media reports said Pyongyang was sticking to its two conditions for coming back: a lifting of sanctions and a US commitment to discuss a formal peace treaty.

Washington, Seoul and Tokyo say the North must return unconditionally and show commitment to scrapping its nuclear programme before other issues are dealt with.

Tough United Nations sanctions brought by the North's pursuit of ballistic missiles and atomic weapons have hurt its economy, restricting the communist state's access to international credit.

The nation has relied on foreign aid to feed its people since it suffered a devastating famine in the 1990s.

In recent years the regime has tried to reassert state control over the economy by restricting private markets, which sprang up after the state food distribution system collapsed in the famine years.

Last November it decreed a currency revaluation to flush out private wealth but analysts said the move backfired disastrously, intensifying food shortages and fuelling inflation.

The North is relaxing some curbs on the markets because of mounting public anger, South Korea's spy agency has said.

[jimmy olsen]

I just got this book yesterday, and I've read the first part and North Korean ideology is even more batshit insane than I'd previously thought.

[Monoriu]

I just got this book yesterday, and I've read the first part and North Korean ideology is even more batshit insane than I'd previously thought.

Some examples perhaps?

[jimmy olsen]

I just got this book yesterday, and I've read the first part and North Korean ideology is even more batshit insane than I'd previously thought.

Some examples perhaps?

Basically, ethnic Koreans are so morally pure that they are like children and thus have constantly been taken advantage of throughout history by foreigners, who are all intrinsically evil. Koreans being children, need a strong mother figure to take care of them and that's were Kim Sung Il and Kim Jong Il come in. They're consistently described in maternal terms in internal propaganda. That's of course in strict contrast to the paternal underpinnings of Confucianism.

This all goes back to the fact that Kim Sung Il was an uneducated hick who knew nothing about Marxism. Myres puts forth that the educated classes (a small minority of the country), had by the mid '30s been co-opted by the Japanese authorities and bought into a lot of their racial and nationalist theories. That though the average peasants suffered immensely under Japanese rule, the support for the government and the war was genuine among the elite.  Unlike the government of Syngman Rhee which prosecuted many of these collaborators, the government of Kim Sung Il employed them wholesale, including those who had worked in the propaganda apparatus.

It is thus unsurprising that the propaganda of the DPRK and fascist Japan is so similar. They simply removed the references to the Japanese and Korea being part of one pure race and put Korea on a pedestal all on it's own, while putting to the forefront the invented national myths of the 1920s that the first generation of Korean nationalists had come up with in an attempt to undermine Japanese rule. Most of these myths however were merely stolen from Japan and put into a Korean context.