The Secretary General of the United Nations cashes in!

I am mildly disgusted that Ban Ki-moon has lent his good name to a book about how to study like the Secretary General called "Study Like an Idiot and Dream Like a Genius" (바보처럼 공부하고 천재처럼 꿈꿔라). Mr. Ban, you're the leader of an international organization with an army vast resources at its disposal, and your main task is to overcome the legacy of corruption left by your predecessor. And so you lend your good name to a quickie book about how to study, which rabidly ambitious parents who don't know any better are going to buy in the millions, read and force their children to read? Why not write a straight autobiography? You are a great man, how could you lower yourself to this level? This book seriously lowers your credibility, and seeing you, who I thought was one of the most respectable and classy politicians in Korea, going straight into the gutter with this exploitative book, I'm disappointed. How would the rest of the world feel if they knew this is the kind of junk you do to make money?

Hagiography for Ban Ki-moon

My computer has crashed twice while trying to write this, and I think the Korean CIA is doing it, so I'll keep it short and sweet. check out this article from The New York Times that tries to make Korea out as some sort of mystical land where tradition and modernism meet, and remember that Korean traditional culture was effectively destroyed by the Japanese during the colonial era, and what's is left now is whatever is useful to the government in stirring up irrational nationalism to distract people from the nation's real problems, like an education system fit to collapse. Read this and know that every time the article mentions ancient traditions, feng shui, ginseng farming and prophecies, the real life of almost all Koreans consists of watching TV, listening to soulless pop music, talking on their cell phones and hanging around department stores. Basically, every time the article says 'feng shui master', think 'civil war buff'. and when it says '22,000 practitioners of feng shui, or pungsu in Korean, as well as a few Buddhists' think '2,000 senior citizens on group tours to see Ban Ki-moon's home town, drink sweet potato liquor and buy chestnuts from farm stands, as well as a few fervent nationalists looking to fervor it up'.