South (Korea) Park

While I'm still trying to rid myself of the stink of American politics, I've been fascinated by politics taking place across a Big Pond. No, not the Atlantic, but rather the Pacific.

South Korea is about to ouster their President, Park Geun-Hye. If it were happening in America, we would be frothing at the mouth with media attention. Why? Well, the words "cult," "Samsung," "assassination," and "Viagra" are all involved. Let's try to make sense of it, shall we?

Note: I took East Asian History 1500-present in college. The country whose names I had the most trouble with were North/South Korea. So to make things easier, I'm going to give a terribly Americanized version of each major figure's name after the first use, and then use that American version going forward. I'm sorry if this offends my (I'm-sure-they-exist) Korean readers, but it'll be easier on American readers.

In order to understand everything, we have to start chronologically. Park Geun-Hye (Let's call her Jenny Park)'s parents were Park Chung-Hee (Charlie Park) and Yuk Young-Soo (Sue York). Very long story in four sentences, Charlie Park was the leader of a coup d'état that created a dictatorship in South Korea in the 1960s/1970s. He was the elected president for most of those two decades, but he also created the dangerously empowered Korean CIA and created a highly authoritarian new constitution. He did some good things (made South Korea a much stronger economy and stronger army), but was still a dictator. Many Koreans consider him the best president ever, while many younger Koreans think of him as a dictator.

His wife, Sue York, was assassinated in 1974 by a North Korean sympathizer in a messier, more botched version of the Lincoln assassination — her husband was giving a speech in a theater, but the assassin shot all his rounds at him wildly, only hitting her. Charlie Park himself was assassinated five years later in 1979 by the director of the Korean CIA (!) inside the Blue House presidential compound (the Korean version of the White House). Think of Charlie Park's assassination as the South Korean version of the JFK assassination — it was a where-were-you-when-you-heard event for South Korea, as I understand it.

So when Jenny Park's mom, Sue York, was assassinated, she was befriended by a former police officer turned cult leader named Choi Tae-min (I'll call him Tim Joy) who told Jenny that Sue had appeared to him in a dream. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we know that the American embassy considered him to be a Korean Rasputin to young Jenny Park. Jenny also became very close friends with Tim's daughter, Choi Soon-sil (Sunny Joy).

Zoom forward several decades, and Jenny Park has become South Korea's 11th president. Sunny Joy's now-ex husband had once served as Jenny's chief of staff. The more pressing issue was that Jenny and Sunny regularly talked about policy and shared confidential material. Sunny used her friendship with help from Jenny's staff to extort roughly $75 million from major conglomerations, possibly including Samsung, into her own foundations. Sunny also pressed a major South Korean university into changing their admission rules to get her daughter into the school. Jenny's staff, now under arrest for corruption, say they were following Jenny's orders. Sunny is under arrest, too. It's important to note here that the South Korean Constitution grants immunity to presidents like Jenny while they're in office.

So Jenny, already an unpopular leader, became even more unpopular amongst South Koreans once the news of her colluding with Sunny broke in October. Her approval rating dropped to around 5 percent (!) and is lower among the youngest in South Korea, roughly 1-2 percent. By comparison, Trump and Clinton's approval ratings are usually in the 30-50 percent range.

Major protests took place across the country last month, drawing 1-2 million people each Saturday for the last few weeks (There has been some violence, but the crowds are trying very hard to show how peaceful they are and are cleaning up after themselves before dispersing). The American equivalent of those numbers are 6-12 million people. Jenny gave a speech on Tuesday to say she would step down if the South Korean Congress wants her to and if they work with her for the transition process. She also didn't admit to wrongdoing, sort of pulling a "I did what I thought was right, but I should have managed my terrible staff better." South Korea's Congress: Nope, you're just avoiding impeachment, which is going to happen as planned.

Think that's crazy? There's more, because you may be wondering how Viagra works into all this. On Wednesday, after her big speech, Jenny's staff admitted to buying 360 Viagra pills using government money. The excuse was that her staff was making a trip to Africa, and wanted to treat altitude sickness, but they ended up never using the drugs. (Sometimes South Korean doctors prescribe Viagra-style drugs for climbers. Jenny's staff was not climbing in Africa.)

This story is wild, and there's nothing really like it. If you think our politics are scandalous already, imagine what it would be like if he were as corrupt as Park Geun-Hye.

Broken Campaign Promises

One of the three major chants you heard at Trump rallies is already a broken promise. You can make an argument that all three are likely to be broken. In order, those three chants were: Build the Wall, Lock Her Up and Drain the Swamp.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the Trump administration announced they would not be pursuing charges for Clinton for either the email scandal or for the Clinton Foundation. He won't seek a special prosecutor as he said during the second debate. He won't Lock Her Up. There's no way of sugarcoating this or pretending it's not a broken promise. It has the benefit of making Trump look like the one extending the olive branch, but he's also the one who was pressing the issue in the first place. It means his rhetoric was hollow, which was kind of what his opponents said all along.

Further, on the Drain the Swamp chant, most of his administration is insiders so far. I can think of one to two outsiders, but almost everyone else has been a sitting legislator or a recently involved political leader. More on this when I get back to talking politics in a week or two.

Finally, the Build the Wall chant is another (economically) nationalist chant. But now he's saying it could just be a fence. That's not a "big, beautiful wall."

He's not even president. If these three major chants at his rallies mean nothing to him, then what does?

This Ain't Checkers

I was in the chess club as a high school freshman. Then, as a sophomore, there was a schoolwide call to organize the Chess Club the next year. I was the only one who showed up. So with all that in mind, I have LOVED the coverage by FiveThirtyEight's Oliver Roeder of the ongoing chess showdown between No. 1 Magnus Carlsen of Norway and No. 7(ish) Sergey Karjakin of Russia. Here's his story on the final matches.

The two played 12 regular games, lasting up to 7 hours. They ended in a tie, with 10 draws and each winning a game. That sent it to chess overtime, which is a faster version: 25 minutes a side, but four matches total, with each on white twice. If they were even after that, they'd go to crazy fast chess: 5 minutes a side, each gets a turn at white. If they were even after THAT, they'd go to "armageddon" chess: 5 minutes for white, 4 for black, but a draw is a win for black.

Luckily, they never had to go to crazy fast chess or armageddon. The first overtime of four faster versions of chess settled it. The first overtime game was a blah draw. The second was a draw, but Carlsen had chances to capitalize on and couldn't. The third game was where the fireworks happened, when Karjakin's time was running down, and he made an error that brought about eventual checkmate. The fourth game was a matter of Karjakin, one of the best at playing defense, trying too hard to play offense and getting caught by Carlsen. The "Mozart of Chess" won the World Championships again. I'm sorry for these three paragraphs, but I've loved following it — it's like the Olympics or the World Cup in that I only care for like, two weeks every 2-4 years.

Summary Judgments

Oh, man. I spent so many hours playing Super Smash Bros, and now Melee is 15 years old. Now I feel ancient. Thanks, passage of time.  •  •  •  I watched so many episodes of Double Dare as a kid. So that made the oral history of the Double Dare obstacle course a worthwhile read.  •  •  •  I don't have any running stories, since I'm not running until mid-January. My season is over this year.  •  •  •  Oh, the kids have been fighting lately. Evie will extend her arm out and flap at Roland. Roland will complain that she hit him. Or later, Roland will jump on the couch over and over, increasingly close to her until his arm or leg flops on her. Then she'll push him in the face. She's more aggressive of the two, but Roland is good at emotionally manipulating her. They need to teach classes to only children who grow up to be parents on how to deal with this, because I am not ready.