North Korea Foreign Ministry says talks with Pompeo ‘regrettable,’ accuses US of unilateral demands for denuclearization

• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo journey to Pyongyang appears to have hit a snag, with a North Korean official calling his visit “regrettable.”
• The statement accused the U.S. of making unilateral demands.

North Korea says high-level talks with a U.S. delegation led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were “regrettable” and has accused Washington of trying to unilaterally pressure the country into abandoning its nukes.

The statement by an unnamed North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman on Saturday came hours after Pompeo concluded two days of talks with North Korean officials led by Kim Yong Chol.

The statement says that the United States betrayed the spirit of last month’s summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by making unilateral demands on “CVID,” or the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of North Korea.

It says the outcome of the follow-up talks was “very concerning” because it has led to a “dangerous phase that might rattle our willingness for denuclearization that had been firm.”

The Dance starts anew as the Norks continue to spin their side of the negotiations as of course we shall spin our view of them. The issues however do not change.

Sanctions will remain, War Games can be scheduled tomorrow and aggressive action by the Norks can easily be answered by more than games.  The U.S. has 3 Carrier Groups and two additional AirWings stationed in striking distance.

The Norks can dance all they want their position is a binary one. Disarm and join the World, or Fire Missiles and face the consequences.

The fact that those are the only two choices will not stop the dance however. The Norks will push, hem and haw, for as long as they can.

We hold our breaths and wait and see….. more than that there is nothing the people of the world can do, but before Trump leaves office it will get settled.

The North Korea issue is not going away and naturally we all want to see peace prevail but how do you deal with the communist lunatics that run that country?

Foreign Ministers in London for the G8 summit issued a stern warning to North Korea yesterday that there would be “further significant measures” taken if a missile test went ahead. British Foreign Secretary William Hague conveyed the stark message as Pyongyang claimed it had “powerful striking means” on standby. Both South Korea and the US believe the rogue state is preparing to test-fire a missile designed to be capable of reaching Japan and the American territory of Guam in the Pacific.

I don’t think this rhetoric from Hague the Vague will have any sort of meaningful impact on the  Pyongyang loons, do you? Perhaps the only way to really sort North Korea out is some sort of intense Chinese diplomacy, but they seem to want to play a long game on this one. Will it erupt into a regional war? Or is it just bellicose propaganda aimed at the poor people who suffer under this despotic regime? Might this end in a mushroom cloud?

And Russia too.

Nope, no idea. I can’t even think why we have an embassy in North Korea. For the record, the Foreign Office has declined to evacuate embassy staff, who must be really chuffed about that.

David Cameron: ‘fact’ that North Korea has ‘technology’ for nuclear strike against the UK

Yeah, and Saddam Hussein’s WMD arsenal was on standby and could be deployed in just 45 minutes. Enough people were swayed by that obvious lie that Blair had his way and the Iraq catastrophe unfolded.

David Cameron has said that it is a “fact” that North Korea has the technology to reach the UK with a nuclear missile.

So here we are today, and still the warmongers so casually lie. Now we’re supposed to believe that North Korea’s primitive technology can make for nuclear strikes against the UK and US. That Cameron said this is evidence only of how deeply stupid they think we all are.

Small politicians try to look big by exaggerating the size and the danger of their foes.

Actually, this alone qualifies as a QOTD, a lesson to be well remembered. But there’s more …

The West’s ridiculous attitude to North Korea is an example of this. I have been there, and can report that this bankrupt, starving statelet is so poor it cannot even warm its own government buildings and must have used up much of its petrol reserves to stage the funeral of its deceased leader.

Its rulers are trapped in their palace. If they show weakness, they will be torn to pieces by their hungry, disillusioned subjects. Above all, they need a way out. If we do not help provide one they will, in the end, have to collapse into the arms of China.

Why should we want that? Yet we continue to portray this sad survival as a major power and adopt a high moral tone in our dealings with it. Yes, it can still do harm – but it is much more likely to do so if we maintain our current policy.

– Peter Hitchens

Above all, they need a way out. I suspect this applies to many regimes who have been hemmed in initially by their own wickedness, then by foreign foes either too stupid to know what they are doing or on the lookout for gargantuan enemies against which they can appear big. When North Korea finally collapses, and it will one day because no tyranny can last forever, we might rue the day we hemmed them in with fleets, minefields, missiles and thousands of soldiers. In the aftermath of the Korean War, and while North Korea could rely on the USSR and China for necessary support, this may well have been prudent. Now, it is collapsing. Doing everything we can to offer a way out might just be the sensible thing to do.

Grief and sympathy are normal human emotions. When we lose a close member of family to death, whether accident or illness, we are touched with an emotion which is peculiarly human. it is a singular thing to be human, and it shows in how we grieve. True grief is reserved for those closest to us, a family member; a loved one from outside the immediate family. Being human, we also can feel sorrow at the death of a pet animal, because they have shared our lives; despite the knowledge that they, being animal, whether dog, cat, horse, tortoise, cannot possibly have shared our emotions.

When another human dies, one who is unknown to us, we cannot feel the same grief because we have not invested any mental capital in the unknown’s life, and therefore we are divorced from the need to grieve for one who is, and now was, unknown. That fact is why I detest the false shows of emotion for people who have died in the full glare of media publicity. For example, the murder of Joana Yeates bore a whirlwind of public grief, with memorials planned seemingly all over Devon and Somerset, yet she was just an ordinary woman who died. Or was it just the time of year when nothing much else was happening, so the newspapers and the tv went berserk over this murder? I would remove, from my critique, any memorial or ceremony to those of our Armed Forces who died whilst on active service, notwithstanding the fact that we are, in Afghanistan; in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and for entirely the wrong reasons!

I write of grief, of death, for two reasons. The first is that old age and death comes for us all. The silly rituals of vain women the world over in their stupid and ludicrous search to regain the flush of youth in their appearance has me asking myself has the world gone mad? We have women supporting, with cash, a multi-billion dollar industry in cosmetic products, including the injection of what is a deadly poison into their faces in the hope that ‘wrinkles’ will disappear. And in a country not too far away, people are dying because they have only contaminated water to drink! We now even see adverts for men showing how they too can regain their toned skin etc., but only if they use Product A, or as a last resort, Product B. The reply to my earlier question is of course that the world has gone mad, but we haven’t noticed yet!

The second reason for writing of grief is to express my sorrow for the 18 million souls who still have to exist and endure under the brutal dictatorship of the North Korean military. The pictures of the seemingly overwhelming grief spatter all over our newspapers and screens, yet we do not see the other photographers, the ones who systematically photograph the crowds of ‘mourners’ in the hope of catching a ‘dissident’ who isn’t quite as grief-stricken as he should be. The garish and revolting ceremonies, for a ‘leader’ who was no more than a figurehead for a regime which holds around a million of its citizens in concentration and re-education camps, should be banished without delay to a history shelf, and only discussed when the North Korean nightmare finally ends, when a subjugated people finally get their own chance to settle their own lives, hopefully by ending, swiftly and brutally, the lives of their oppressors!

Well said John McCain!

U.S. Senator John McCain has said the world is better off now that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is dead. 

McCain, a Republican lawmaker who was his party’s nominee for president in 2008, said that Kim subjected his people to ‘dire poverty and cruel oppression under one of the most totalitarian regimes the world has ever known.’ ‘The world is a better place now that Kim Jong-Il is no longer in it,’ McCain said.

McCain’s political colleagues, including GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, have joined the prominent and outspoken senator in saying bluntly that Kim will not be missed after decades of oppression and threatening the world with his nuclear programme. But McCain, the top-ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee who was tortured as a prisoner during the Vietnam war, didn’t pull any punches.

He said, ‘I can only express satisfaction that the Dear Leader is joining the likes of Gaddafi, Bin Laden, Hitler, and Stalin in a warm corner of hell.’

Amen to that. Pity Romney could not have been a bit more direct but then again that’s what I expect from him.

Try not to weep for him think of him as he once was…

Team America – I’m So Ronery by Videogeezer

Commie dictator and all-round North Korean madman, Kim Jong-il, is dead. He keeled over on his way to give ‘field guidance’ apparently. How nice to have some good news for a change!

Phew, that was close.

Just as the US winds down it’s presence in Iraq, along comes North Korea to fill the void by “developing a missile able to hit the US“. Doubles all round at Pentagon Inc. and giv’em another few trillion.

‘Intelligence’ (no laughing at the back) suggests that the North Koreans are developing a mobile ICBM, pointing out that such a unit would be easily concealed. Cripes, that’s really scary.

Given that the last test they carried out, of the Taepodong-2, ended with that plopping into the Sea of Japan in failure, we can file this report under BS. Ahead of that test, prospective C-in-C Newt Gingrich demanded that the Norks be blasted with missile-zapping orbiting death rays. The problem is, that programme went billions over budget and never worked before being scrapped. As I said, file it all under BS.