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Showing posts from July, 2014

2014-07-18, Day 1: Shanghai Austrian Economics Summit

I had an INCREDIBLE time at the Shanghai Austrian Economic Summit 2014, organized by Kenli Schoolland and Li Schoolland. Thanks to them for inviting me again. The conference was extra special this time because I was joined by three of my Freedom Factory colleagues. We had so much fun getting lost in Shanghai, bonding, and meeting and greeting so many people. Yeonmi Park definitely stole the show. As several people at the summit mentioned--they talk about freedom, but she actually had to escape to it, at the risk of death. It was a busy week for her, with three speeches in seven days (Freedom Factory's "A Change is Gonna Come, a speech at Korea University, and the summit in China). She loves the many opportunities she has to travel abroad to speak, but this one was especially poignant because she was an illegal alien in China during 2007-09 after her immediate family escaped from North Korea. This time, she was a free woman, and loving it! As for me, it was wonderful. I also ga

2014-07-15 Guest speakers at Korea University

2014-07-15  Yeonmi Park was the main speaker at Prof. Marcus Cole's Comparative Law Class at Korea University earlier today. I was her warm-up act and assistant, doing my best to add to her presentation without interrupting the flow. www.patreon.com/fsi21 It was special in many ways:

Let's not shake hands (Korea Times, July 2, 2014) by Casey Lartigue, Jr.

Let's not shake hands By Casey Lartigue, Jr. While there are many things that I love about Korea, there are two things that drive me crazy. One is that, in my observation, most Korean men don't wash their hands after using the bathroom. I know some people get defensive about non-Koreans commenting in a negative way about Korean culture and life, that they want to attack the messenger and the messenger's native country. So I will start by clearly stating that many men in America don't wash their hands either. According to the Website  Stop Handshaking , while 92 percent of adults in America say they wash their hands in public restrooms, an observational study of 6,076 adults sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) found that only 66 percent of men actually washed their hands in public restrooms (88 percent of women did so). As an aside, I am curious how they "observed" that many peopl

2014-07-01 Happy Birthday, Joo Yeon Cho!

Can it be true? I have known Joo Yeon Cho for less than 9 months? Incredible! But I guess that's the way it is with Joo Yeon. I'm not surprised to see so many birthday messages coming from all over Korea and the world. She works for a company that could crush me and everyone I know, but she still calls me "Boss."^^ I checked my emails, she first emailed me back on October 14, and I was surprise d to see it was 2013, not 2012 or even earlier. She wanted to join as a volunteer at the Mulmangcho School. I quickly recognized she was a special lady. She didn't know it, but I had already decided that she would help me with a special project I had planned with Praise Ju that I was going to launch two days later. They hit it off, and the project took off! We are collaborating again--she started off as the first Academic Adviser in the Teach North Korean Refugees Project, and she is now our first External Coordinator. As I posted a few days ago, she regularly blows u