John McCain must be wishing Gustav will go away. The tropical storm is gaining strength and headed for the U.S. Gulf Coast. Forecasters say it will be a hurricane before the end of the day.

Two reasons for McCain to worry. One: If Gustav hits Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal, the GOP's young rising star, might cancel his speech at the Republican convention in Minneapolis next week. Jindal has already declared a state of emergency in preparation for the storm's landfall. And two: Katrina hit New Orleans three years ago this week. If the storm veers just to the right of its current path, it could hit make a direct hit on the city. And the last thing McCain wants is a crisis in the Crescent City reminding everyone how incompetent the Bush administration's response in 2005 was. That sound you hear is the Obama campaign readying spots featuring Bush, McCain, and the infamous "heckuva job, Brownie" line.

Living under a totalitarian regime requires a daily suspension of disbelief. Nowhere is that more true today than in North Korea, where otherwise ethical people contort themselves into untenable moral positions because they’ve bought into the oft-repeated notion that their country is “Paradise on Earth.”

That's just a snippet of Kim Hyun Sik's fascinating secret history of Kim Jong Il in the latest issue of FP. As the Dear Leader's former teacher, Kim offers a rare portrait of the dictator as a young man, and the suspension of reality that he demands his countrymen participate in every day.

An important element of that effort is, of course, fear, but also a bombardment of propaganda. The California Literary Review recently published a handful of incredible propaganda posters from North Korea, and you might imagine that there's a common theme: Death to the United States. More posters have recently been compiled in this volume by art collector David Heater.

Here are some of the best posters from the CLR's collection with translations:

“When provoking a war of aggression, we will hit back, beginning with the US!”

“Let’s extensively raise goats in all families!”

“Do not forget the US imperialist wolves!”

Madonna, lover of all types of attention, kicked off her world tour on Saturday. Guess we know how she'll be voting in November:

The BBC reported that the two-hour show took a political turn when, in a lead-in to a remixed version of "Like a Prayer," a video sequence showed flashing images of destruction followed by pictures of Hitler, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and then Senator John McCain. Senator Barack Obama popped up in another video interlude, but his montage included Gandhi, John Lennon and Al Gore. The tour arrives in North America on Oct. 4.

In other seriously dumb arts news, Visit London featured a portrait of notorious English murderer Myra Hindley in a promotional video at a London 2012 event in Beijing. Can't wait for those games!

Say it ain't so:

Ireland's drinks industry is suffering from withdrawal with pubs closing at the rate of one a day, as the party years of the Celtic Tiger boom become a blurred memory. The economic downturn allied to a changing drinking culture has led to 400 pubs closing over the past year, according to Michael Patten, chairman of the drinks industry representative body.

(Hat tip: Passport reader Eric Jon Magnuson)

On this August Friday afternoon, you're surely looking for a distraction or two if you are unlucky enough to be at the office like the rest of us. Look no further than FP's latest (first?) interactive quiz: Spot the Fake Drug. Given a choice between real medicines and counterfeit ones, can you recognize the dangerous fakes?

And check out Roger Bate's fascinating -- and disturbing - (subscribers-only) look at the growing global fake drug trade in the latest issue of FP. He reveals how counterfeiters in India and China mix chalk and dust into phony Viagra pills and cancer meds that are sold around the world. After taking the quiz, you may be more worried than ever about these fakes winding up in your neighborhood pharmacy.

FP contributor John Shoven is getting some much-deserved attention this week for his work on age inflation. Earlier this year, Shoven wrote in Foreign Policy about why we shouldn't fear the aging of the world's baby boomers:

The reason lies in the misleading way in which we measure age. Typically, a person's age has been determined by the number of years since his or her birth. We are so accustomed to measuring age this way that most of us have never given it a second thought. Thanks to the medical revolutions of the past century, however, life expectancies have been radically prolonged. Since 1960, the average Chinese person's life span has increased by 36 years. Over roughly 40 years, South Koreans have seen their lifetimes extended by an average of 24 years, Mexicans by 17 years, and the French by nearly a decade. Given these drastic changes, our conception of what qualifies as "old" has itself become old-fashioned.

Measuring age not by years since birth, but by mortality risk has huge implications for Social Security benefits. In 1940, a 65-year-old American man could expect to live 11 more years; today, he can expect to live 17 more years. Being 65 simply isn't what it used to be.

In a new working paper, Shoven and his co-author Gopi Shah Goda expand on this angle, producing this fascinating chart showing that if Congress had started adjusting benefits to mortality risk instead of traditional age measures in 1940, the percentage of the U.S. population receiving full Social Security benefits would be cut in half by 2050:

If Congress had enacted these changes in 2004, we'd already be looking at a 3 percentage point drop in the next few decades.

FAROOQ NAEEM/AFP/Getty Images

The U.S. foreign-policy establishment has always been a little queasy about Pervez Musharraf. The question of whether the now-former Pakistani president could be trusted -- and if so, how much -- has dominated conversations around Washington since the war on terror began. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid summed it up today when he told the NYT that since 9/11 Musharraf "continued to provide cover to the Taliban, but still managed to convince the Americans for many years that it was not a double game." Neat trick.

For all the uncertainty over the years about Musharraf's true colors, his country's future today is even more unclear. His successor might not put U.S. priorities at the top of the to-do list, and moveover, the machinations going on in Islamabad right now are opaque. And with the next Pakistani president having to contend with a growing insurgency in the tribal regions, a powerful intelligence service run amok, and a wary (and entrenched) military, the one thing we know is that he (or she, if you believe ruling coalition leader Asif Zardari) can count on a lot of headaches in his or her future.

So, does establishment Washington have a good handle on what the United States can or should do in Pakistan if everything goes to hell?

In a word, no. In the latest FP/Center for American Progress Terrorism Index, released today, the only consensus about Pakistan, according to more than 100 of America's top foreign-policy experts, is that the country is going to pose a problem going forward. More than half now consider Pakistan the next al Qaeda stronghold:

But while they agree that Pakistan is now a main front in the war on terror, they have little idea what to do about it. Asked whether the U.S. military should go into Pakistan without permission to arrest top al Qaeda leaders, a whopping 65 percent of the experts -- who have served as national security advisor, director of the CIA, and in top-leve posts at the Pentagon -- said they were unsure what the United States should do. With so much at stake, that level of uncertainty is alarming.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can't get a break at home. His newly approved interior minister, Ali Kordan, has been in office for just over a week, and a fake diploma scandal has only gained steam, complete with demands that the minister resign.

When there was a debate in parliament earlier this month over Kordan's qualifications for the post -- he's previously served as Iran's deputy oil minister and in the Revolutionary Guards -- Ahmadinejad had to go so far as to announce that Ayatollah Khamenei personally supported him, a rare (and extreme) strategy. Key to the issue were damning accusations about Kordan's honesty, with MPs claiming that Kordan lied about receiving an Oxford University law degree. So, Kordan produced his "diploma" (at right) and, with Khamenei's critical backing, sailed to approval.

Problem is, Oxford has now said the diploma is a fantasy. Have a look at the document Kordan produced: He must have made quite the impression at the university, seeing as how they saw fit to claim that his "research in the domain of comparative law... has opened a new chapter, not only in our university, but to our knowledge in this country." (Go ahead and ignore the misspellings and punctuation errors.)

When the the obviously faked diploma hit the Web, it caused a popular firestorm in Iran, with calls for Kordan to step down immediately if he can't produce the real thing. The Iranian Web site that first revealed the bogus document has now been blocked inside the country. Some analysts even think Ahmadinejad may have set Kordan up to embarrass his likely rival in the next presidential race, Ali Larijani. Kordan is a former aide to Larijani, who is also speaker of the parliament and looking slightly worse for the wear as the controversy continues. Stay tuned.