Big Brother Kim

There has been a lot of speculation about Kim Jong-il's health of late, and the North Korean news agency (KCNA) has been working overtime to prove that Big Brother Kim is alive and well. Unfortunately, the KCNA's propaganda artists really need some more training. As this BBC News article points out, one picture they released had several flaws obvious even to the untrained eye.

Or so it seems. It is also quite possible that the KCNA knows exactly what it is doing and is simply trying to confuse the general public by making a legitimate photo look like a fake. Ask yourself the question of whether it is easier to splice Kim Jong-il into an existing photo and make things look pretty good at first glance, or to modify an existing photo of Kim Jong-il to introduce some inconsistencies that make people doubt the legitimacy of the photo. What better way to show your superiority to the rest of the world than by producing a "fake" photo and then proving it to be real?

Or perhaps they wanted us to think that they were smart enough to produce the "fake" photo on purpose and they produced a fake photo to throw us off the track and Kim Jong-il is really in poor health or perhaps dead.

But then again they would have to know us well enough to know that we would never buy the fake photo, so they would clearly have created the "fake" photo on purpose to confuse us.

But if we are to accept that they knew that we would know that they knew we knew that they knew that we would detect the fake photo, then we can clearly not choose the glass in front of us.