Who picks up the tab at a power lunch.

[_MeDotOrg]

Sometimes when talking about North Korea, it's helpful to take a refresher course:



The satellite image is of the Korean peninsula, centered on the border. Just south of the border Seoul looks like an exploding star, with light emanating out to all of the outer provinces. In the north, the lights of Pyongyang would be that of a single suburb of Seoul, and the lights of Pyongyang dwarf the rest of North Korea.

1912 is the birth year of of Kim Jon Un's grandfather Kim Il-sung. It is year one in the North Korean Calendar. So look at that image realizing that you are looking at the fruits of the Kim family since 1912. The same family that is willing to see its own people starve for their own hubris and protection is asking that a foreign nation foot the bill for their hotel accommodations during the negotiations.

At an island resort off the coast of Singapore, U.S. event planners are working day and night with their North Korean counterparts to set up a summit designed to bring an end to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.

But a particularly awkward logistical issue remains unresolved, according to two people familiar with the talks. Who’s going to pay for Kim Jong Un’s hotel stay?

The prideful but cash-poor pariah state requires that a foreign country foot the bill at its preferred lodging: the Fullerton, a magnificent neoclassical hotel near the mouth of the Singapore River, where just one presidential suite costs more than $6,000 per night.

The mundane but diplomatically fraught billing issue is just one of numerous logistical concerns being hammered out between two teams led by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin and Kim’s de facto chief of staff, Kim Chang Son, as they strive toward a June 12 meeting.

Now 6 grand a night is chump change when it comes to 'denuclearization', but it is also the kind of thing that gets resolved before a summit is officially announced. If there is a game of poker going on here, Kim Jon Un knows that when Trump said the summit was back on, he now will pay a greater political price if the summit is called off again. Trump now needs the political fig leaf of the summitt actually occurring, a positive Presidential initiative that would deflect attention away from the Mueller investigation. Kim knows this, and it gives him a bit of an edge in negotiations prior to the summit actually taking place.

[_honorentheos]

These are good points, MeDotOrg. I'm reminded that this same graphic writ global paints a terrible picture for the legacy of western colonialism in general. For example -



Many parts of the world that served as proxies during the Cold War are dark on this map. So are places that are just uninhabitable like central Australia. Focusing at the contrast between nation-states I don't know that there is something positive to say about what we could be doing differently or better, but we certainly have some sins in our collective histories that our own privilege allows us to forget even as others can't. More people live without electricity in Africa than on any other continent. Egypt along the Nile River, Morocco, most of Nigeria, and parts of South Africa stand out in start contrast to rest of almost a quarter of the Earth's land mass. And while terrain certainly plays a role, I think it also helps add to your point. Strong men leaders who seek to elevate themselves at the expense of their people leave their people in darkness, figuratively and literally. When we, as the supposedly enlightened west, take advantage or participate in sustaining those strong men wherever they may be, we make ourselves complicit in perpetuating that darkness, too.