Mid-Week Post

Oh, ye who weep...

Yep.


Moving on...


Some guy who got his job off of his dad mimics concern for the middle-class he intends on ripping off:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested Wednesday that Donald Trump was propelled to the presidency in part by a sense among voters that too many citizens were not sharing in America’s prosperity.

Trudeau went further to say that his own government is seized with that same issue. With just a few words, Trudeau hinted at what could become the framework for a new Ottawa-Washington relationship, the single most important relationship Canada has in the world.

“The fact is we’ve heard clearly from Canadians and from Americans that people want a fair shot at success,” Trudeau told 16,000 high school students gathered in the Canadian Tire Centre, the arena where the NHL’s Ottawa Senators play.

... says the guy who was handed his current job and has never held a real one in his privileged life.

An astute observer of the American political scene might suggest that the electorate wanted a change after eight years of several failed Obama policies and grew tired of the contempt and disconnect of liberal elitists who just last night bathed in tears of defeat and the sweat of paranoia.

Someone might even apply such thinking to Canada and wonder why a slim minority elected a head of hair for prime minister.

Perhaps he should head to Uncle Fidel while someone else worries about the fate of NAFTA.





Children of North Korean women and Chinese men now outnumber North Korean defectors:

Figures show that the children of North Korean women and Chinese fathers now outnumber young North Korean defectors.

The Education Ministry on Sunday said 1,249 children of North Korean defectors who were born in China went to school in South Korea as of the end of last year, outnumbering the 1,226 students who were born in North Korea. And as of September, 52.1 percent of children of North Korean defectors who go to school here were born in China. 

A spokesman for a human rights group said, "The fact that there are more children of North Korean women with Chinese rather than North Korean fathers is proof of the human rights abuses the women suffer when they escape to China." This often includes a kind of indentured marriage that is little better than sex slavery, with Chinese men "buying" the women from border traffickers. 

"I escaped to China trusting a broker, but ended up being sold for money and had to endure all kinds of abuse as I was dragged from one location to another," one defector recalls. "Some women who are sold into sexual slavery are stripped naked and locked up so that they cannot escape." 

The children these women have with Chinese men are frequently unable to get legal protection or go to school in China because their mothers are considered illegal immigrants or their fathers refuse to register them as their own.

Is Trump's victory bad for Russia?

According to polls, Russians are growing tired of wars that largely dominated the national political agenda for the last two years. The Russian economy is in decline. And, what’s more, the latest parliamentary election has demonstrated growing political apathy — a serious problem during the upcoming 2018 presidential election.

Should Putin decide to run, he will have to deal with all these internal challenges and — were it not for Trump’s victory — serious pressure from Western capitals, particularly from Washington. Facing such challenges, being labeled as an outcast by the Western world, would he be able to remain Russia’s beloved and successful leader for eight more years?

And now, eight things you may not know about vowels:

1. ENGLISH HAS MORE VOWELS THAN THERE ARE LETTERS FOR THEM.

A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y are the letters we define as vowels, but vowels can also be defined as speech sounds. While we have six letters we define as vowels, there are, in English, many more vowel sounds than that. For example consider the word pairs cat and car, or cook and kook. The vowel sounds are different from each other in each pair, but they are represented by the same letters. Depending on the dialect, and including diphthongs, which are combinations of two vowel sounds, English has from nine to 16 vowel sounds.