The Evil Men Do

One of the most hellish places on earth, perhaps the most hellish place there has ever been on earth, is North Korea. Bill Keller of the New York Times has written a review of a book written about a man who managed to escape one of the prison camps in what is a prison camp of a nation, and his account is horrific:

I’ve just read Blaine Harden’s “Escape from Camp 14,” the harrowing story of a young man’s flight from one of the slave labor camps where as many as 200,000 political unreliables — a category that includes not just those who run afoul of authority but their relatives for three generations — are sent to be starved, tortured and ultimately worked to death. The political camps are just part of a larger network of detention sites designed to crush any spark of free will.

Harden’s story of Shin Dong-hyuk differs from the best previous refugee narratives — “The Aquariums of Pyongyang” by Kang Chol-hwan, Barbara Demick’s “Nothing to Envy” — because Shin was in every sense a product of Camp 14. Born in captivity to a pair of inmates picked by camp commanders for a loveless bit of procreation, Shin grew up with no awareness of anything beyond the electrified fences. He is like the boy-narrator of Emma Donoghue’s novel “Room,” whose entire world is the backyard shed where he and his kidnapped mother are held captive. Except that the boy in “Room” knows love.

Harden’s book, besides being a gripping story, unsparingly told, carries a freight of intelligence about this black hole of a country. It explains how the regime has endured longer than any of its bestial prototypes: longer than Hitler, longer than Stalin, longer than Mao, longer than Pol Pot. The tools are enforced isolation, debilitating fear, dehumanizing hunger and utter dependence on the state. By the time he was a teenager, Shin had watched a teacher beat a 6-year-old girl to death for hoarding five kernels of corn; worse, he had betrayed his own mother and brother, and had witnessed their public execution without remorse.

Yet Shin, who is not exactly a master escape artist, manages to evade the state’s controls, and along his stumble to freedom he encounters many others who — not in words, certainly, but in practice — are defying the system. What strikes you is how the shackles of totalitarianism are being corroded by bribery, barter and black-marketeering, including a thriving cross-border trade with China. It’s still a crushingly oppressive regime, arbitrary and brutal. But more often than you would imagine, need trumps fear.

Harden’s narrative is reinforced by more systematic studies. When David Hawk of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea researched the first edition of his camp exposé “The Hidden Gulag” in 2003, some 3,000 North Koreans had found asylum in the South, including several score of former political prisoners. When he returned for the second edition, just published, the pool of refugees was 23,000, and included hundreds who had endured detention. The updated report is a vivid chronicle of horrors, illustrated by crisp Google Earth photos that make the slave camps as palpable as suburban real estate on Zillow.

North Korea is a vivid, if extreme, illustration of what happens when materialistic atheism is wedded to absolute power and leftist ideology. We witnessed it throughout the twentieth century in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Communist China, Cambodia, Cuba, and dozens of other loci of misery and cruelty around the world. Combine power and leftism with the lack of any basis for moral restraint in the leaders of a state and the result is pure evil. North Korea is but the most current instantiation of the rule.

Fibonacci in Nature

Here's a lovely video that illustrates how the geometry of nature so often exhibits the Fibonacci sequence:

The mathematical order in nature is astounding and quite inexplicable if it were just produced by blind chance. Everywhere one looks one sees why physicist Sir James Jeans once remarked that God must be a mathematician. Mathematics permeates the architecture of the universe, a fact which would be very odd if there's not behind it all a mathematical mind.

How Hollywood Hates America

Ann Coulter explains why America, which would love to love Hollywood, doesn't. The reason is because Hollywood hates America. Here's Coulter:

Americans love movies and would like to love Hollywood, but I suspect they are getting a little sick of Hollywood hating them. By "them," I mean:

• Southerners (as portrayed in A Time to Kill, Deliverance, Easy Rider, Talladega Nights, Pulp Fiction, Raising Arizona and Law & Order)
• Residents of small towns, except the Hamptons and Malibu (Footloose, The Last Seduction, Pleasantville and Law & Order)
• Christians (The Virgin Suicides, Easy A, Seven, Straw Dogs, Carrie and Law & Order)
• Connecticut WASPs or their equivalent (Ordinary People, Far From Heaven, Caddyshack, Trading Places, The Ice Storm, every single movie on "Lifetime: TV for Women" and Law & Order)
• Priests (Primal Fear, Stigmata, Priest, Godfather III and Law & Order)
• Conservative politicians (The Contender, Good Night, and Good Luck, The West Wing, any movie by Oliver Stone and Law & Order)
• The rich -- but never rich trial lawyers, rich environmentalists, rich educators or rich-off-the-taxpayer politicians (Titanic, Sleeping With the Enemy, Wall Street and Law & Order)
• Businessmen (Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, The Insider, Silkwood, Michael Clayton, every John Grisham adaptation, even The Muppets, where they reunite to save their old theater from a greedy oil tycoon! And Law & Order).

Southerners are dumb hicks, presumptively Klanners. Residents of small towns are narrow-minded xenophobes, presumptively Klanners. Christians are hypocrites and anti-everything (even dancing!), presumptively Klanners. Businessmen are cheating, soulless vermin, presumptively Klanners (unless they are in a Hollywood-approved business like making solar panels). And Connecticut WASPs are dull, sexually neurotic snobs who beat their wives and molest their daughters. Presumptively Klanners.

Hollywood's heroes are just as odd. Moviegoers flocked to a film about a prostitute who was not only gorgeous and charming but disease-free because they wanted to see a Cinderella story. We know Pretty Woman's winsome streetwalker was as plausible as a talking bear, except we've always wanted to see a talking bear.

It was the same with The Da Vinci Code. That movie mocks the most sacred belief held by a majority of Americans -- the divinity of Christ -- but we ignored that because we just wanted to see an exciting Hollywood thriller.

Out in America, the country is fairly bristling with crosses and American flags, but in the Hollywood oeuvre, those symbols appear rarely, and when they do, they generally show up as signifiers of White Supremacists or child-molesting Connecticut WASPs. In real life, there are a lot more girls wearing cross necklaces than teenagers with Che Guevara posters in their rooms, a peculiar staple of Hollywood movies.

There's more at the link. If you watch movies you'll get a few chuckles out of Coulter's roast of the narrow-minded bigots who make so many of them - unless, that is, you've been somehow brainwashed into believing that Hollywood really does accurately portray America.