For a Monday

 

Robert Hall, another hostage held with previously murdered John Ridsdel, was killed by Abu Sayyaf. The jungles of the Philippines remain untorched:

A Canadian man being held hostage for months by a militant group in the Philippines has been killed, sources say.

Al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf had warned it would kill Robert Hall today if it didn't receive a ransom of some $8 million. 

Sources close to the situation in Jolo, the island where the al-Qaeda-linked group is based, and within Philippine security confirmed Hall's death early Monday to CBC News. 

A spokeswoman with Global Affairs Canada said Ottawa is aware of the reports, and is "pursuing all appropriate channels" for more information. 

Hall, from Calgary, had been held since Sept. 21, 2015, along with former mining executive and fellow Canadian John Ridsdel, who was killed by the group in late April. Ridsdel and Hall were abducted from a seaside resort along with a Filipino woman and a Norwegian man.

The condition of the remaining hostages is not known.

North Korea is as likely to be a functioning one-party state open to trade as China, the aggressive paper tiger, is:

North Korea's nuclear capabilities and ambitions often make headlines, but recently the country has focused more on building national strength in more conventional, yet equally threatening ways. 

Last month, for the first time in decades, North Korea opened its doors to outsiders for the North Korea Workers Party Congress. 

At this Congress, the idea of Kim Jong Un's "byungjin," or a two-sided push toward economic and nuclear development, was discussed.

Black markets already exist and they do so because the Kim dynasty is a cruel one that would rather nuke Japan than let its own people feed themselves.

Whoever wrote this needs to re-examine everything he's heard about the rogue state.


Also:

North Korea is sending active servicemen as construction workers to the Middle East, Radio Free Asia reported last Thursday.

A source said increasing numbers of soldiers are sent to the region through North Korean construction firms Namkang and Cholhyon.

Namkang has about 800 workers in Kuwait and 750 in Qatar who come from the Army corps of engineers, according to the source. Cholhyon has also increased numbers of servicemen working there since it first sent about 70 soldiers to Kuwait in 2010.

Of its 3,200 workers in Kuwait, 30 percent are soldiers.

The regime tells soldiers to grow their hair before they are dispatched to the Middle East to disguise them as civilians, RFA said.

The regime is probably using soldiers because it does not have to pay them for their work and they are easier to control than civilian laborers.

**

As the profits fall or become harder to repatriate, the benefits to Pyongyang of maintaining those overseas enterprises will fall, and the risks will also rise. As workers are pushed to their emotional breaking points, the risk of defections and mass protests will increase. To preempt that risk, the regime will withdraw workers from high-risk locations, which will further depress its revenues and raise pressure on the earners that remain. Examples include the withdrawal of North Korean students from China and a report that the regime is keeping its fishing boats in port to prevent defections, or perhaps more of those embarrassing “ghost ship” incidents. (Seafood exports had been a key source of revenue for Pyongyang, but evidently, if the state can’t export seafood for cash, the nutritional needs of the North Korean people don’t justify sending the fishing fleet out.)

And:

To see a free society yield to its most cowardly impulses is to realize that our liberty will never be taken from us without the help of collaborators among us. Sadly, North Korea’s injury to our freedom to express ourselves in our own country has healed slowly. It may last as long as North Korea does.

G-d- right. 


Look no further than history repeating itself.


Yesterday, some people got shot, blahblahblah.

For Europe, that's a week-day. In Africa, that might get a hashtag. In North America, candlelight vigils and colourful signs are great ways of showing the world how impotent and shallow one is.

Where people would benefit from serious self-reflection of their decadence and naivety and arrive at some concrete conclusions like cultures that arrest women for being raped, that fling men from roofs (because the Koran g-d- says so), that praise women-killing Taliban, that murder directors, that threaten pontiffs, riot over cartoons they haven't seen, that murder or threaten other cartoonists, that beat homosexuals and Jews, that repeatedly kill people in countries where they find succour and are generally just antithetical to the ideals of classical liberalism (which have been casually chucked into the dustbin of post-modern Western social practice), they instead find ways to deny, obfuscate, double-take and Make it! ALL! ABOUT! THEM!

When you get flattened by the people who definitely won't bake your wedding cakes, no one will turn around and look.

Why bother?




In Canada, scientific research is often privately funded. That sentence was free. This panel is not:

The Liberal government has named an independent, nine-member panel to review billions of dollars in federal funding for a variety of research-granting councils.

Science Minister Kristy Duncan says the goal of the six-month study is to find better ways to make the most of funding for fundamental research.

Stop trying to make yourselves relevant, Feds. It's too expensive.




How embarrassing:

Here’s an interesting example of possibly politicized research findings getting blown out of the water: Conservative political beliefs not linked to psychotic traits, as study claimed.

Researchers have fixed a number of papers after mistakenly reporting that people who hold conservative political beliefs are more likely to exhibit traits associated with psychoticism, such as authoritarianism and tough-mindedness.

As one of the notices specifies, now it appears that liberal political beliefs are linked with psychoticism.

 Oh, heavens to Betsy! Whatever will I do with posts like this or this?

But considering the rabid nature of the fact-hating reactionary left, perhaps that was a conclusion anyone could have grasped.



 
The Penguins won the Stanley Cup. Good for them.




Now, some happy news:

Two Austrian nuns have become honorary Korean citizens due to their lifelong charitable work in a leper colony. 

(With thanks)