Eat Like a Martial Arts Master and Increase Your Willpower

Image via chrisbeetlesfinephotographs.com

BY NELSON AGUILAR

Deep in the crevasses of the Songshan mountain range, an Indian dhyana master established the first Shaolin Monastery in 477 AD, seeking to spread the relatively new teachings of Buddha at the time. This monastery then bred the Shaolin monks, who are now popular for their incredible feats with Chinese martial arts, particularly with Shaolin Kung Fu.

Since then, Chinese dynasties have been both built and destroyed, but the lives of the monks have persevered through both progress and persecution.

Modern Shaolin monks are popular and known throughout the world, which is evident from their presence even on the silver screen—especially in martial arts films. More than a million people per year visit Shaolin in order to capture a small glimpse into the simple yet extraordinary life of a Shaolin Monk.

The allure of the Chinese monks hinges on the relatively unchanged lifestyle that they have lead for hundreds of years. They follow strict schedules, which include waking up extremely early (5 a.m.), followed by constant strenuous and physically punishing training sessions and bouts of meditation.

One habit of the monks’ lives that is key to their success is their well-known vegetarian diet. Like every other aspect of their lifestyle, the diet is centered around Buddhist ideals, like purity and simplicity. The traditional diet of the Shaolin monks consists primarily of rice, vegetables and fruits—all of which are grown in the confines of the temple. While what they eat is no secret, it’s rare to get a glimpse into the actual meals, as most temples bar technology from being used inside.

Enter Reddit

Redditor pie5135 is a Korean-American student currently taking a gap year in China at a secretive martial arts school/temple for four months. He posted a guide to eating like a Martial Arts Master, including what, when, and how to eat in order to use your body to its full potential.

In the thread, pie5135 described a bit of the foreground of the martial arts school, mentioning that his master is one of the last genuine descendants of the original Imperial Guard of China. Out of hundreds of applicants, only 20 are selected at a time to experience and train with him.

He then goes on to break down his dietary experience into two sections—theory and rules.

Theory

• We are designed to eat as if food was scarce.
• Half the digestion process is manual.
• Food should not be a mystery.

Rules

• Chew 30 times per bite. Your food should become into something similar to a liquid or porridge before you digest it. Use all sides of your mouth to prevent soreness in your jaw. Chewing helps your body break down food much easier because of enzymes that break up and increase the surface area of the food.
• While you’re chewing, put your utensils down. This allows you to focus on your current bite, without having to prepare for the next one. This also gives your body more time to digest the food.
• Eat everything on your plate. This actually encourages you to put less on your plate, because we usually tend to overcompensate and smother our plates with too much food. As a general rule, start out by only putting about 1/2-2/3 of the amount you’re accustomed to eating.
• Think before you attempt for seconds. If you want more food because you’re hungry, it’s fine to take more. If you want more food simply because you want to taste more food, it’s better to lay off the seconds. Give your body time to get full before you try for seconds, as unnecessary extras might result in a food coma. Forced bites are not good.
• Eat everything with chopsticks, including rice. Chopsticks are ideal for gathering the right bite sizes.
• Set up a time limit (around 20-30 minutes) within which you cannot finish your food. You have to finish afterwards. The slower, the better.

The meals are divided into portions in terms of weight, which is 1:1:2 with vegetables, tofu, and rice. They also have eggs, tofu and broth, which is made by both the students and cooks that they have at the monastery…

more…

https://mind-hacks.wonderhowto.com/how-to/eat-like-martial-arts-master-and-increase-your-willpower-0144967/

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Who Is Interested In A Conflict In North Korea?

by Tyler Durden

Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

In case of war with North Korea, the US would face a military challenge as perhaps never before in the last seventy years. This is why a conventional deterrence is actually more important than the nuclear one if we break down a realistic war scenario. The downside is that the DPRK is fully aware that if it responded to a US attack, even in a limited way and only on military targets, it would be flagged as an aggressor, paving the way for a larger foreign intervention.

To answer this question, it is necessary to examine what would entail a US attack on North Korea. Suffice it to say that as the neocon Senator John McCain has admitted, the US would be unable to defend Seoul (as well as its US bases nearby) in the first 24 to 48 hours of a conflict. A city of 20 million inhabitants, together with military bases containing thousands of soldiers, would suffer untold loss of life.

The United States would certainly suffer huge losses, revealing weaknesses that could be exploited in future conflicts, a consideration that would need to be considered if contemplating shooting down DPRK missiles.

China would certainly not be happy to risk a humanitarian catastrophe on its own border, not to mention being eventually forced to intervene to defend its ally (there is a treaty between the two countries). Japan and South Korea would be hit hard, being clearly exposed to a North Korean retaliatory attack; so they clearly do not want a war with Pyongyang. The great truth about the Korean Peninsula is that despite the fact that every country flexes its muscles and seems ready to act, no one wants this eventuality, as no one could win this war, and everyone would suffer devastating effects both economically and militarily. This is not to mention the popular uproar that would arise from so many civilian deaths, let alone were there to be a nuclear escalation.

In the Korean peninsula, we are faced with a great strategic game in which the DPRK becomes more difficult to attack with each passing day, thanks to its conventional forces rather than its nuclear power. This is something that western planners tend to ignore in order to avoid accentuating the power of the DPRK. Unfortunately for them, this is something that is far too well known to US soldiers, and especially South Koreans, which is why a real attack on the DPRK is absolutely out of the question for Seoul.

Finally, there is a worrying aspect to consider for the DPRK’s opponents, namely the alleged ways in which the DPRK preserves and launches its conventional forces. In the parade on April 15, a large availability of solid-fuel mobile platforms was displayed. This creates two great advantages: the first being the ability to launch a missile within a short space of time, thereby minimizing the risk of detection during such things as refueling operations; and the second, of course, being the ability to launch a missile and then quickly change position (shoot and scoot). With mobile launchers, it is impossible to track and hit all such systems in a preemptive attack. This is without factoring into the equation the North Korean submarines that are said to be able to launch medium- and short-range SLBMs with conventional or nuclear warheads.

An indication of the confusion that prevails amongst military planners regarding North Korea can easily be seen with the story of USS Carl Vinson. Ships with significant attack capabilities, Trump said a few days ago, were sailing towards the DPRK with the intention of inducing Kim to talks through military intimidation. However, the reality was that the carrier group was actually thousands of miles away, continuing to navigate in the opposite direction. Even without this ridiculous situation, US military leverage hardly works with the DPRK for the reasons explained above.

With this unprecedented gaffe, the United States is at least divided internally on what to do, sending a troublesome message to its allies, leaving them with the following set of questions: Is Trump really in control of the armed forces? Can his words be taken seriously? Is he consistent with his intentions? The first 100 days of the Trump presidency raise these questions, and in difficult scenarios such as the one that obtains in the Korean Peninsula, they take a heavy toll. At the end of the day, in Korea we are faced with a lot of smoke and mirrors, threats and promises. But realistically, no one wants an actual conflict…

more…

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-02/who-interested-conflict-north-korea

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Monks with guns

image edited by Web Investigator -Members of the Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power Force) listen to a speech by Ashin Wirathu in Colombo, September 2014. Wirathu, a radical monk, is accused of stirring violence against Muslims. Photo by Dinuka Liyanawatte/Reuters

Westerners think that Buddhism is about peace and non-violence. So how come Buddhist monks are in arms against Islam?

Michael Jerryson is an associate professor of religious studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio. He is co-founder and co-chair of the Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence Unit through the American Academy of Religion, and co-edits the Journal of Religion and Violence. He is the author of Buddhist Fury: Religion and Violence in Southern Thailand (2011).

The recent violence in southern Thailand began on 4 January 2004, when Malay Muslim insurgents invaded a Thai Army depot in the southernmost province of Narathiwat. The next day, after the burning of 20 schools and several bomb attacks in a neighbouring province, the Thai government declared martial law over the three southernmost provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat. Shortly after, two Buddhist monks were killed during their morning alms, and a third injured. In these provinces, the majority population is Muslim, and Buddhists are a minority. By the summer, journalists and scholars had written articles about the insurgents and the role of Islam in the violence. But since Buddhism was associated with peace, no one thought to investigate the role of Buddhism. How could a Buddhist monk participate in the violence? Yet clearly, Buddhism was involved in the conflict.

In Pattani’s capital district, the My Gardens Hotel is popular with tourists. I had gone there to collect people’s opinions on the killing of Buddhist monks. On this day, the hotel was nearly vacant, the lobby empty, save for two police officers, who were devout Thai Buddhists. As I wanted to get their perspective on the ongoing violence, the three of us sat down together. They explained that they were periodically stationed at the My Gardens Hotel because insurgents had begun to bomb local businesses. Economics, they said, was an important factor behind the current violence. Poverty was creating a desperation that deepened the crisis.

But when I asked them about the attacks on Buddhist monks, their cool analysis changed to passionate outrage. They said that murdering a Buddhist monk was the very worst thing a person could do – and if they caught the perpetrators, they would kill them. The expression of such rage, and their justification for violence in response to an attack on Buddhist monks, was shocking. I, like many, had thought that Buddhists were peaceful and that their religion abhorred violence.

Such an association of Buddhism with peace is neither accidental nor unusual. The vast majority of introductory books on Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy do not mention Buddhist violence. Instead, they associate Buddhism with pacifism and non-violence. Think of the many books on Buddhist meditation, the 14th Dalai Lama and his advocacy of non-violence, and the peace work of Buddhist activists such as the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (whom Martin Luther King Jr nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967). It’s no surprise that many Westerners think of Buddhism as a non-violent religion, dedicated to inner peace and harmony, not violent politics.

As a result, when travelling into the Thai conflict zone, one is prepared to encounter Buddhists working to quell the violence. Surely monks would be engaged in interfaith dialogue while Buddhist volunteers applied the principles of loving-kindness (metta-karuna) and compassion to heal their community’s fears and anger? But the police officers’ retaliatory rhetoric clashed with any such assumptions. And their view is not unique.

On 16 October 2015, a head monk at the prestigious Marble Temple in Bangkok posted on his Facebook page his outrage over the latest attacks on Buddhist monks in southern Thailand. Phra Apichart Punnajanto argued that the situation required a violent response: for each Buddhist monk who is attacked, Buddhists should burn down a mosque. Punnajanto was not the first monk, nor the last, to justify violence for Buddhism.

Thailand is over 93 per cent Buddhist, the second most Buddhist country in the world, behind Cambodia. Yet this religious demographic is inverted within the three southernmost provinces (formerly the Islamic kingdom of Pattani), which are over 80 per cent Malay Muslim. The violence since 2004 marks the most recent chapter in a centuries-old conflict between the Thai government and the southern region. Over the centuries, Malay Muslims have fought for political independence. This recent episode was mired in political motives, corporate corruption with the local fisheries, and a decades-long drug trafficking problem in the area. Although the bombings, beheadings and killings have reduced over the past year, they have not stopped. More than 6,500 people have been killed in the conflict. The majority of the victims are moderate Muslims, though these numbers do not capture the impact the violence has had on the minority Buddhist population. Many Buddhist families have faced violence or have been intimidated into leaving the region altogether…

more…

https://aeon.co/essays/buddhism-can-be-as-violent-as-any-other-religion

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What A War With North Korea Would Probably Look Like

by Soren Dreier

Author: Tyler Durden

Back in 2013 during the last major flare up between the U.S. and North Korea I wrote an extensive analysis on the North Korean wild card and how it could be used by globalists as a catalyst for international economic instability titled ‘Will Globalists Use North Korea To Trigger Catastrophe?’ As I have warned consistently over the years, like Syria, North Korea is a longstanding chaos box; a big red button that the elites can press any time they wish to instigate a chain of greater geopolitical tensions. The question has always been, will they actually use it?

Well, it appears that under the Trump administration the establishment might go for broke. I have not seen U.S. war rhetoric so intense since the second invasion of Iraq, and all over missile tests which have been standard fare for North Korea for many years. With whispers by Trump aides of a possible 50,000 boots on the ground in Syria, and open discussion of preemptive strikes in North Korea, this time kinetic conflict is highly likely.

Yes, we have seen such military pressures before, but this time feels different. Why is an aimless quagmire war with massive potential global financial repercussions more likely under Trump? Because Trump ran under a nationalist conservative banner, and he will forever be labeled a nationalist conservative even if his behavior appears to be more globalist in nature.

Rhetoric is often more psychologically powerful in the minds of the masses than action. Therefore, everything Trump does from now on will also be labeled a product of the “nationalist conservative” ideology; including all of his screw-ups. And, with Trump in office the establishment is perfectly happy to pursue actions once considered taboo, because demonizing conservatives and liberty proponents is one of their primary objectives.

When the real insanity starts, liberty movement activists will gnash their teeth and scream at the top of their lungs that Trump is “not acting like a conservative,” so how can conservative thinking be blamed by extension? But these people just don’t grasp the thought processes of the human mind. No matter how much we try to separate ourselves from the Trump-train if (or when) he goes full-bore globalist, our efforts will be futile. The mainstream media has spent considerable time and effort making sure that all of us are lumped in with the so-called “alt-right.”  Remember, I tried to warn the movement about this long before Trump won the election.

Currently, there are questions as to whether or not a naval task force is en route to North Korea.  I would not trust the latest reports that all units are headed to Australia when Vice President Mike Pence is in Japan yesterday saying “the sword stands ready”.  Could this be more posturing or a precursor to a strike scenario? I am reminded of the U.S.S. Maddox which was sent to patrol the waters off of Vietnam, the same destroyer that reported an attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats which was used as justification for the initiation of the Vietnam War. As it turned out, no such attack actually occurred.

The presence of a U.S. fleet off North Korea could only be intended to instigate further aggression, not defuse the situation.

So, if war with North Korea is inevitable given the circumstances, what would such a war look like? Here are some elements I think are most important; elements that make the war almost unwinnable, if winning is even the purpose…

North Korean Air Defense

The North Koreans spent the better part of the last war with the U.S. being heavily battered by air bombardments. They have had plenty of time since then to consider this problem and prepare. Even the most gung-ho American military minds are forced to admit that using only air based attacks in North Korea is not practical. And where we have been spoiled by steady video streams of laser guided hell dropped on Iraqi and Afghani targets in the past, don’t expect things to go so easily in North Korea.

While North Korea is still rife with economic problems (like every other communist and socialist nation), they still have an industrial base and produce many of their own arms. This includes and extensive missile net backed by a maze of radar systems. Their air force is by all accounts obsolete, but as I have mentioned in the past, advanced missile defense is the wave of the future. It’s cheaper and can render expensive enemy air force and naval units impotent…

more…

http://sorendreier.com/what-a-war-with-north-korea-would-probably-look-like/

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Caste lives on, and on

image edited by Web Investigator

Indian society deludes itself that caste discrimination is a thing of the past, yet it suffuses the nation, top to bottom

by Prayaag Akbar is a writer and journalist. He is the former deputy editor of Scroll.in, and his first novel Leila (2017) is out in India. He lives in Mumbai. 

In October 2016, a young man walked into a flour mill in Uttarakhand, a state of northern India where the mist-wrapped mountains of the outer Himalayas begin. He was Dalit (Sanskrit for broken, scattered, downtrodden), a relatively recent collective identity claimed by communities across the nation that are considered untouchable in the caste system. Present in the mill was a Brahmin schoolteacher – Brahmins are the caste elite – who accused the Dalit man of having defiled all the flour produced there that day, merely by his entry: notions of purity and pollution are integral to caste. After the Dalit man objected to the insult, the schoolteacher took out a blade and slit the Dalit’s throat, killing him instantly.

The incident caused uproar in the national press. Dalit groups in Uttarakhand staged a series of protests. The Brahmin schoolteacher was arrested, along with his brother and father, who had threatened the murdered man’s family if they went to the police; booked for murder and criminal intimidation, the men were also charged under the ‘Prevention of Atrocities’ act – a vital part of the Indian Penal Code that prohibits a range of violent and non-violent action against members of the lowest castes and tribes.

After the initial flurry of limited upper-class angst – followed by self-congratulation (at the foresight of the lawmakers for how the state machinery kicked into gear to protect the lower-castes) – the violence was then safely imagined as belonging to a distant, retrograde realm, where things would soon change. Silence followed, then forgetting. There was no discussion of the deep-seated convictions and codes that enabled this gruesome act, or how each Indian life was linked to it: the key to living in a caste society is to distance yourself from its most horrifying manifestations.

The American documentary Meet the Patels (2014) illustrates yet another dimension of caste that Indian society has trained itself to ignore. Made by an Indian-American brother and sister team, Geeta and Ravi Patel, it relates how ‘Ravi’, on approaching 30, decides to leave his Caucasian girlfriend and marry a girl of the Patel caste to fulfil a lifelong demand made by his parents. Endearing and witty, the film shows in granular detail Ravi’s painful quest to find a suitable wife, and thereby silence his parents (who are no ogres, I might add, but a hardworking couple of distinctively Indian humour and charm).

Most striking is that at no point do the Patels realise that they are making a film about the endogamous (same-social or same-ethnic) strictures vital to caste. Ravi is a seemingly assimilated Indian American. In speech, bearing, even ambition (he is a comedian and actor), he transcends the bounds of traditional Indian society; still, a lifetime of conditioning ensures that he feels the pressure of endogamy so deeply that he will overturn his life to search for a Patel mate. He travels to huge conventions where young men and women can meet Patel members of the opposite sex. He allows his parents to set up a string of dates. He visits astrologers: and he does all this out of filial duty, never interrogating why his parents demand this of him. Endogamy is shown as a trait of Indian society, not caste society. Yet the documentary stands as a revelatory exposition of how caste exercises control between generations; how, without a whisper of violence or even punishment – simply, the fear of disappointing your parents – caste ensures its own survival, even in lands and cultures distant from its place of genesis.

It is unsurprising that the Patel siblings are unaware that they are, in effect, making a film about caste. Many Indians watching this movie would experience the same blindness. As caste has been globally castigated as a social evil, upper-caste Indian society has found numerous ways to refer to caste without explicitly mentioning it. In everyday language, media and advertising, proxies include ‘community’ and ‘family background’. Endogamous pressure is condoned as vital to Indian society because it preserves the community (few modern Indians would admit to wanting to preserve the caste group). Another linguistic proxy for lower-caste groups is ‘different’. These proxies carry the full range of meanings that caste categorisations do, and are used in a variety of situations, from school and job interviews to a landlord meeting prospective tenants.

This sleight of hand lets Indian society permit itself the feel-good release of loudly castigating brute incidents of caste violence, even as it perpetuates a self-serving mythology about the nature and limits of caste. As we will see, caste is both varna(hierarchy) and jati (endogamous groups). The failure to break caste stems in part from India’s unwillingness to examine how just how jati feeds into varna…

more…

https://aeon.co/essays/how-india-deludes-itself-that-caste-discrimination-is-dead

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Trump Uses Nukes: VT Teams Rush to Site of Nuclear Bunker Buster in Afghanistan

By GPD on April 13, 2017

Will collect soil samples, witness statements as Trump’s professed love of nukes becomes a reality

 

Trump’s first use of nuclear weapons, soon to be unleashed on Syria Arab Army, according to NSC sources:

For those within 15 miles of the blast area or downwind:  Please remove yourself from the area for 72 hours or up to 2 weeks.  Bring no food or water, wash throughly, wash clothing in water from well outside the blast area.  Wear a dust mask  More information to come:

Control of the press and the puppet government in Kabul makes this possible.  Afghanistan has become a testing ground for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons by the United States.

This is the cover story, one America has used over and over, first its fuel-air bombs or “daisy-cutters” and now the MOAB, a weapon Trump would never touch as nuking Afghanistan is an old neocon play used many times.  Our investigations in Afghanistan have revealed the nuclear poisoning of that country from not only indiscriminate use of semi-depleted uranium munitions but the use, on at least 8 occasions, of tactical nuclear weapons.  This is the cover story:

The US military has dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb in the American arsenal on an area of eastern Afghanistan known to be populated by Daesh (ISIL) terrorists, according to the US Defense Department.

A GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB), also known as the “mother of all bombs,” was dropped at 7 pm local time Thursday, the Pentagon confirmed.

The Pentagon confirmed the strike was the first time the enormous bomb had been used in combat.

Now hear the truth from Press TV 2012

US Used Micro Nukes in Afghanistan and Iraq Wars:  An interview with Gordon Duff, Senior Editor of Veterans Today

…the US has produced approximately 600 micro nukes, some of them smaller than a soccer ball, with the capability as low as a single ton of TNT dialable up to 40 tons of TNT. There is evidence that those weapons have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan. Studies have found uranium 235 to be in the bodies of the population there.”

The United States’ use of powerful genetic weapons such as depleted uranium on the battle field is in violation of every conceivable international law, says an analyst.

Depleted uranium has a half-life of 4.5 billion years and has thus earned the title “The silent killer that will never stop killing”.

Shells, bombs and cruise missiles tipped with depleted uranium and tungsten easily pierce through heavy armor and fortifications. Air, water and soil are also contaminated when such weapons are used.

Dr. Doug Rokke, the ex-director of the Pentagon’s Depleted Uranium Project, says there is no way to totally decontaminate an area hit with uranium. (Editor:  Comprehensive video from 2002, demonstrating our decade plus DU cover up.  Please forward and watch as much as possible.)

YouTube – Veterans Today –

Serious long-term health problems caused by the use of depleted uranium in bombs can range from cancer to leukemia and genetic mutations.

The United Nations has prohibited the manufacture, testing, use, sale and stockpiling of depleted uranium weapons.

The US dropped thousands of depleted uranium bombs on the Iraq city of Fallujah in 2003, which killed thousands of people.

A great proportion of all births in Fallujah since the strike have suffered from abnormalities and the rate of mutation among newborns is higher than what was found in Japan after America attacked the Asian country during the Second World War.

Press TV has conducted an interview with senior editor of Veterans Today (VT) website, Gordon Duff, to further discuss the issue.

The video also offers the opinions of two other guests: political analyst and writer Linh Dinh, and peace activist Max Obuszewksi.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Gordon Duff, when we are speaking about the reasons why not a single country has gotten rid of its nuclear weapons, some people are saying this is about nuclear superiority, a kind of deterrence as our guest Linh Dinh there was saying as well, the issue of guaranteeing the security of a nation when it comes to how officials describe it. Basically what do you think are the reasons and could you say that there is any strategic value in keeping nuclear weapons?

Duff: Well there are a couple of different levels to look at this. We left two nations out, Pakistan and India, and they are of the highest risk of nuclear war than any two nations on earth.Most people don’t know that since 1982 Brazil has held between ten and twenty nuclear weapons that they have developed.

Japan has an interim nuclear capability in that they are sitting on tons of enriched uranium at a facility in a…prefecture…and bombs that are ready to assemble but not assembled.

They have decided though that they have the capability not to exercise that capability, which is in interim standing, that some have suggested would be a position that they could live with involving Iran.

The issue that is brought up by a previous speaker, however, is that we have thoroughly seen in the last year that nuclear power itself can be as harmful as nuclear weapons.

That although nuclear weapons supposedly have secured peace through mutual assured destruction, every nuclear facility in the world leaks radiation and the nuclear industry is so powerful it suppresses bad news…

more…

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/04/13/trump-uses-nukes-vt-teams-rush-to-site-of-nuclear-bunker-buster-in-afghanistan/

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The Impossible Quest for North Korea’s Ever-Elusive Hangover-Free Booze

by Josh Schollmeyer

On the mornings when my head pounds the hardest after a long night of drinking, I often think of two things: Will I throw up the Gatorade I just spent two hours building up the stamina to get from the refrigerator—and why couldn’t last night’s bender have been in Pyongyang?

Maybe it’s all relative, considering the crazy shit the Kim family typically gives itself credit for — e.g., the ability to control the weather, the discovery of a unicorn lair and the lack of a need to urinate or defecate — but inventing a hangover-free North Korean booze doesn’t seem that insane. First of all, there’s a British dude who’s made it his life’s work to rid the world of hangovers by 2050 via something called alcosynth, a mere 33 years away. Plus, repressive regimes have had moments of ingenuity in the past. Two recent examples: The Soviets pioneered Lasik, and the Cubans allegedly discovered a vaccine for lung cancer.

And so, despite a hemisphere-to-hemisphere eyeroll from the international media when North Korea announced in January 2016 that it had developed a kind of liquor that was all party, no cleanup, it seemed plausible enough. (Admittedly not as plausible: The DPRK’s earlier claims that some of the medicinal properties contained therein could also successfully treat SARS and AIDS.) Moreover, the regime credited the ginseng that infused the booze (called Koryo Liquor) as the hangover cure-all — a claim that also isn’t as bat-shit crazy as it seems, since scientists have long studied ginseng’s health benefits. A fact from WebMD, not state-run media.

The ginseng in question is considered legit as well — an actual North Korean-produced good many people would go out of their way to purchase and something the rest of the world would gladly import, if not for the draconian international sanctions imposed because of of Pyonyang’s nuclear program.

Calling bullshit (or propaganda) on the idea that you can’t get hung over in North Korea would be as easy as me downing a bottle of Koryo and seeing what happens in the morning. But therein lies the rub: In all the coverage of it (and pretty much everyone in the world covered it — an outrageous promise that was easy to both laugh at and dream on), it appeared as though no one could ever get their hands on it. In fact, by my count, there have been only four people who have come close — and three of them were these American soldiers who went to the DMZ and came back with a red-label, off-brand version (i.e., not Koryo, but something similar and definitely of DPRK origin):

The other is Elliott Davies, a world traveler who chronicles his continent-hopping on the website Earth Nutshell. Unlike the trio of American military personnel, he got the real thing — 86-proof Kaesong Koryo Insam Liquor. “It was purchased from a supermarket in Pyongyang where I was told I was the second foreigner to be allowed inside,” he writes on his site.

“A plaque on the entrance denoted the dates both Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un had overseen the store. It’s illegal for foreigners to handle local currency. To pay, I had to line up, receive a receipt, then head over to the currency exchange booth offering unofficial, black market North Korean Won rates to make the payment before heading back to collect my goods and finally back to the booth to collect my change in three different currencies, almost certainly wrong, as usual.”

“The alcohol was also a smash hit with the Korean People’s Army General who searched by luggage on departure from North Korea in Sinuiju,” he continues. “Smiles weren’t derived effortlessly in North Korea, but after the General discovered this magical box, it resulted in one of absolute approval… which was quickly wiped from his face when I refused to offer it as a bribe.”…

more…

https://melmagazine.com/the-impossible-quest-for-north-koreas-ever-elusive-hangover-free-booze-d83410ac0877

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