중앙데일리

Yongin: land of spirits

The hills and streams of Yongin, south of Seoul, are calm as they bask in the sunshine. Everything green in Yongin is greener under the June sun, and everything red is redder. The hills and mountains rise one after another, and the valleys are deep and cool. And there is no threatening rockiness on the high elevations. Gazing out at the hills and lakes, one wonders whether this could be heaven on earth, but Yongin has an image as being …

June 04,2003
Congressmen and gas

While U.S. president George W. Bush was heading towards Evian, France, via St. Petersburg, Russia, aboard Air Force One, another military aircraft was lifting off from Washington. Among its passengers were six congressmen, including Curt Weldon, who had been assigned to go to Pyeongyang by the Bush administration. Their visit was the first official visit to North Korea by congressmen since the end of the Korean War. The timeliness of their…

June 03,2003
Being of mixed blood

Why do we feel grotesque when we see a human face illuminated by a flashlight in a dark place? The answer is simple: We live on a planet where the sun shines from above. Thus, our brain and eyes show an aversion to images created by a beam of light from below. Television producers create ghostly images by making use of the phenomenon. The problem of mixed blood is a similar phenomenon. Koreans who cherish a homogeneous race are inclined t…

June 03,2003
Group thinking

Wouldn’t you think that people with the same interests would be in perfect agreement? Social psychologists say that it does not always turn out that way. A typical example is the attack on the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in 1961, when the Kennedy administration tried to upset the Castro regime, only to fail. The president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, ordered 1,500 Cuban defectors to attack the bay on the southwest coast of Cuba. …

June 01,2003
The search for lukewarm

A fool walks into a shower and turns on the water. Naturally the water is cold, but the fool doesn’t wait for the water to warm up and turns up the hot water. Then he is startled and nearly scalded and turns the water back to cold, which of course makes the water icy. On and on the fool goes, back and forth between hot water and cold. That is the concept of the Nobel Prize-winning, University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman’s “Fo…

May 31,2003
The forgotten climber

Half a century ago, on May 29, 1953, at 11:30 a.m., two men reached the top of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain at 8,850 meters (29,100 feet). Of the two, Sir Edmund Hillary, now 83, became the greater celebrity. But Tenzing Norgay, a sherpa who was at that time 39, was known by only a few people outside his region. Sherpas are a mountaineering people who hail from Nepal and North India, and have been expert mountaineering g…

May 29,2003
Rx: Rest and good aides

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton was one of the most successful presidents in the history of the United States; The economic boom of the 1990s was his crowning achievement. But a crisis that Mr. Clinton faced after only eight months in office was probably the biggest threat to his administration except for the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The press and the Congress allowed the former governor of Arkansas, one of the most rustic areas in the …

May 28,2003
Spy games

Major nations in the world have their own intelligence agencies with good sources of information. The United States has its Central Intelligence Agency, England has MI6 and France has the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure. These intelligence centers have no political power, but do have strong information, analysis and research capabilities. Developing nations, on the other hand, seem to give their intelligence agencies too much …

May 27,2003
Shedding the ‘3 poisons’

The distance from Namdaemun to the Blue House is about five minutes by car. But if you travel the distance by taking three steps and then kowtowing on the road, it would take more than five hours. The trip from Buan in North Jeolla province to the Seoul city hall is about four hours by car, but doing the “three-steps-and-a-bow,” it would take about 60 days. The differences between driving and the more arduous journey are speed or slowness,…

May 26,2003
The politics of films

Is it the intention of the political sector and the economic agencies to publicize the controversy whether Korea should further open its film market? Is that why senior administration officials and politicians are dropping hints, making the film industry nervous? The first shot was fired on May 9 by Representative Kang Bong-kyun at the National Assembly’s main session. Mr. Kang said, “In order for a swift signing of the bilateral investme…

May 25,2003

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