INTERVIEW: Meet Park Sang Hak, North Korea’s ‘Enemy Zero:’ Sending balloons aloft with leaflets and memory sticks, a dissident enrages Pyongyang. South Korea isn’t too happy with him either.

HERE’S A ROUNDUP ON THAT SAN FRANCISCO PLANE CRASH. According to reports on Twitter, everybody made it out a live, though some people were hurt.

TRYING TO TEACH in an underclass culture. “What happened to large numbers of American blacks between the beginning of WW2 and 1970? Before WW2, blacks, mainly in the South at the time, led aspiring, family-oriented, church-going, bourgeois lives (despite social segregation). How and why did this subcultural transformation happen?”

Well, it’s happened to a lot of people over that era, not just blacks — we live, after all, in an era where open espousal of bourgeois values is transgressive. But the more marginal the community’s socioeconomic status, the more valuable bourgeois virtues are, and the more damaging their loss. If you want particular outcomes, you should emulate the behavior of those who achieve them. But all too often, people reject it instead. That rejection may be ego-soothing, but it’s damaging nonetheless.

VIDEO: The Sara Jordan Project, with my brother Jonathan on guitar, at the Amsterdam Cafe in 1996. I shot this video. Not bad, despite the substandard lighting, which forced me to go with a profile shot mostly. Single camera, with an old Sony VHS-C camcorder that was state-of-the-art in 1996.

THIS IS GOOD: More and more Americans are becoming concealed-carry permit holders. “We’re only halfway through 2013, and it already looks like plenty of states are on track for their biggest permitting years on record.”

HAVE ENOUGH SEX AND YOU’LL LOOK 36: 43-year-old Heather Havrilesky asks: How did I end up growing old?

But if you look at her picture you’ll see that she looks kinda like Kristin Davis. Related thoughts on aging here.

UPDATE: A response.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Regular sex can make you look 7 years younger, researcher says.

FURTHER SUPPORT FOR MY THEORY THAT JOHN KERRY WAS NAMED SECRETARY OF STATE TO MAKE HILLARY’S UNINSPIRED TENURE LOOK BETTER IN RETROSPECT: State Department: Yeah, despite our denial, Kerry was on his yacht during Egypt upheaval.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 58.

FAST AND FURIOUS: Police Chief Killed With Gun “Lost” In ATF Tracking Program. “A high-powered rifle lost in the ATF’s Fast and Furious controversy was used to kill a Mexican police chief in the state of Jalisco earlier this year, according to internal Department of Justice records, suggesting that weapons from the failed gun-tracking operation have now made it into the hands of violent drug cartels deep inside Mexico.” I don’t think it was a “failed gun-tracking operation” at all.

WELL, I DUNNO, IT’S ALREADY EXPLORING THE MARIANAS TRENCH: Experts: John Kerry’s credibility could sink with boat flap.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Shale Gas Is Fracking Green.

Ask a green what he or she thinks about fracking, and you’re likely to get an earful of criticism about methane leaks, poisoned groundwater, and climate change disaster. But a new report from the ecologically minded Breakthrough Institute (BI) makes the case that shale gas actually has a net environmental benefit. Nevermind the boosts to our energy security, and economy that fracking provides; the controversial drilling process is worth embracing on green merits alone.

Natural gas’s biggest green qualification is the extent to which it displaces coal as an energy source. Burning coal emits roughly twice as much greenhouse gas into the air as natural gas. Thanks to the shale boom, we’re getting less of our electricity from coal-fired power plants and more from natural gas. The BI notes, “From 2008 to 2012, annual coal consumption for US electric power declined, on average, by 50 million tons.” That’s something greens should be cheering, and it’s mostly thanks to fracking.

But natural gas doesn’t just beat coal on carbon emissions. The BI explains why, at the local level, shale gas does less harm than coal.

Read the whole thing.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: A Jobs Report Only A Central Banker Could Love.

AT AMAZON, warehouse deals in Kitchen & Dining.

Also, today only: Magellan RoadMate 1700LM 7-Inch Portable GPS with Lifetime Maps.

THE STATE DEPT. LIES ABOUT JOHN KERRY’S YACHTING: Thurston, We Have A Problem.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Only 47% of Adults Have Full-Time Job. “If today the same proportion of Americans worked as just a decade ago, there would by almost nine million more people working. Just in the last year, almost two million Americans have left the labor force. With a majority of the population not holding a full-time job, it isn’t surprising that economic growth has been so weak.”

Romney’s 47% number keeps coming up. They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please. . . .

Related: 54 Months: Record Stretch of 7.5%+ Unemployment Continues. “Since January 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, the United States has seen 54 straight months with the unemployment rate at 7.5 percent or higher, which is the longest stretch of unemployment at or above that rate since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started calculating the national unemployment rate.”

MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD NOT GOING PEACEFULLY: Post-Coup Violence Spreads In Egypt. “Two days after Egypt’s military replaced the country’s president, it sent soldiers into the streets to quell demonstrations, as a week of tensions between Islamists and the military transformed into deadly confrontations that heightened some Egyptians’ fears of civil war. . . . At least 30 people died in violence across the country, with another 1,076 injured, officials said.”

THE ANSWER, ALAS, IS PROBABLY because they’re fatter.

LIFE IN OBAMA’S AMERICA: Part-Time Jobs Up, Full-Time Jobs Down. “This is the ObamaCare effect. Obama’s health care law incentivizes employers to drop workers to below 30 hours per week in order to avoid incurring liabilities or fines. Or, if the employer is near the 50 employee mark, to trim down to below 50 to escape ObamaCare altogether.”

We heard a lot about “McJobs” during the George H.W. Bush recovery. Nobody seems to be using that term much under Obama.

AS I KEEP SAYING, THE GOP NEEDS TO CAMPAIGN TO MAKE AMERICAN ABORTION LAWS “MORE EUROPEAN.” BBC: European Abortion Rules. Imagine, for example, what people would say if Texas tried to impose this rule:

Between 12 and 18 weeks of gestation, the women must discuss the procedure with a social worker. After 18 weeks, permission must be obtained from the National Board of Health and Welfare.

Abortions must be performed by a licensed medical practitioner and, except in cases of emergency, in a general hospital or other approved healthcare establishment.

That’s what it would take to make Texas’s laws as restrictive as Sweden’s.

JAMES TARANTO: Who’s the Most ‘Racist’? What a new poll does and doesn’t tell us.

Blacks are more likely (by 7 percentage points) to think most blacks are racist than to think most whites are. Moreover, they are 11 points likelier than liberals (regardless of race) to think most blacks are racist, and 9 points likelier than Democrats. And blacks are 3 points less likely than liberals to think most whites are racist.

All of which suggests that the people likeliest to believe most whites are racist and most blacks are not are those who are both liberal and white. Which reinforces a point we’ve made often in this column: that a lot of what drives the futile debate over race in America is white liberals’ psychological need to feel morally superior to other whites.

And to silence them.

ANN ALTHOUSE HAS A SUGGESTION ON PATERNITY:

Now, here’s a proposal, based on all the attention Obamacare has given to women’s health. Let’s require health insurance to cover vasectomies. Then there will be some surgery that men have a right to choose. How’s that for a pro-equality policy? Men can freeze their sperm beforehand and thereafter have perfect control over when women get hold of their reproductive powers.

Interestingly, though, doctors often ask married men for their wife’s permission before they’ll perform a vasectomy. When people talk about “reproductive freedom,” they generally mean women’s reproductive freedom.

UPDATE: A somewhat dismissive response. From the comments: “When it comes to sex, women have rights; men just have responsibilities.”

PHOTOGRAPHS OF Revolutionary War Veterans.

AUTHENTIC FRONTIER GIBBERISH.