Mid-Week Post

Lots to talk about on this the first day of November ...



South Korea president Moon Jae-In refuses to accept that North Korea is a nuclear power:

(Sidebar: this Moon Jae-In.)

South Korea will never tolerate North Korea as a nuclear state, nor will Seoul have nuclear weapons, President Moon Jae-in said on Wednesday, as China pledged to work on denuclearization after setting aside a dispute with Seoul over an anti-missile system. 

Yes, about that:

A tunnel under construction at North Korea's nuclear test site collapsed and as many as 200 workers could have been killed, a Japanese news report said Tuesday.

About 100 people were trapped inside when the unfinished tunnel at the North's Punggye-ri nuclear test site collapsed, and an additional 100 people could have been killed while trying to rescue those trapped as a second collapse occurred ...

**

Before North Korea had nuclear weapons, the anticipated casualty count in the event of a renewed conflict on the peninsula was in the hundreds of thousands. Instead of war, Clinton chose the Agreed Framework, promising billions of dollars in aid for a North Korean nuclear freeze.

“This is a good deal for the United States,” he said at the time. “North Korea will freeze and then dismantle its nuclear program. South Korea and our other allies will be better protected. The entire world will be safer as we slow the spread of nuclear weapons.”

The North Koreans negotiated in bad faith, however, offering false promises to convince the U.S. to unwittingly subsidize their nuclear program. The country began enriching nuclear material, and North Korea conducted its first nuclear test a little over a decade later. North Korea has since continued its steady march to becoming a fully-armed nuclear power.  

Moon's leftist pride will not allow him to accept the incredibly obvious: North Korea is already a nuclear power (albeit a crude one) and that China is aiding it.

I suppose that is irrelevant in the grander scheme of things but there will be no peace on the Korean Peninsula and Moon's pro-North Korean policies will be to blame.


Also:

Chinese police arrested several North Koreans dispatched to Beijing on suspicion of plotting to murder Kim Jong Un’s 22-year-old nephew, South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported.

Two of seven North Korean agents were arrested over the alleged plot to kill Kim Han Sol, whose father Kim Jong Nam was assassinated in Malaysia earlier this year, the newspaper said, citing an unidentified person familiar with North Korean issues.

And:

US President Donald Trump will not visit the Korean demilitarized zone when he travels to South Korea next week, a senior US government official said Tuesday.

Speculation had been rife that Trump may visit the de facto border between the two Koreas to send a message to Pyongyang amid its nuclear and ballistic missile threats.

But the official cited scheduling issues and said the president will instead visit a major US military base during his Nov. 7-8 trip to South Korea.

A day after deliberately running down eight people on a bike path (five of whom were old school friends), the "lone wolf" (there seem to be several packs of these guys) laughs at the carnage:

Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, 29, told police he is pleased with his actions and is unapologetic for the attack, sources tell CBS News. One source said Saipov made "no bones" about the attack, which killed 8 people and injured at least 11.  

Investigators also discovered 10 to 15 pieces of paper with writing in Arabic praising the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. One note said "ISIS will endure," sources say.

Authorities also recovered knives at the scene.

Saipov was allegedly driving a Home Depot rental truck when he deliberately drove onto a bike lane along Manhattan's West Side Highway. He drove for several blocks before slamming into a school bus and coming to a stop. Police say he exited the vehicle and shouted "God is great" in Arabic before being shot by police and taken into custody.

Wow.


This guy seems to have blended into society very well:

Sayfullo Saipov, 29, was notorious for his behavior at the Farm Boy Super Fresh Supermarket on Getty avenue in Paterson, NJ, the manager said.

“Every time he came here he was always erratic or arguing with the cashiers,” she told The Post about the terror killer. “He would get angry very fast…. he would break the cans, dumb things.”

The manager, who declined to give her name, said Saipov was very rude to the cashiers, and called them “uneducated.” ...

“Soda was the problem. He would come here and buy soda,” the manager said.

“He would give us a hard time on the 12-pack Canada Dry — if it was one price he would want his own price. It was always the soda, always a problem with the 12-pack of cans. Always a problem.”

Just like this guy:

The imam of a Vancouver mosque is under fire for calling on Muslims to send “money, weapons and expertise” to Palestinians to fight “Zionists” in Israel.

And this guy:

An Ontario man who travelled to Syria to support an Islamic militant group will spend another two years behind bars after pleading guilty to a terror charge, his lawyer said Tuesday.

(Sidebar: that will show him.)


And these guys:

Swedish authorities said Saturday that a 39-year-old man from Uzbekistan, who was known to the national intelligence agency, was the suspected driver of a truck that ploughed into a crowd in Stockholm on Friday, killing four people.

The announcement brings to three the number of attacks in less than four months by an assailant believed to have links to the Central Asian country.

This needs to be said:

So two hours after the attack, Governor Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio and other New York bigwigs assembled for the usual press conference to give the usual passive shrug - this is the way we live now, nothing to be done about it, etc, etc. Every so often in New York, as in London as in Stockholm as in Berlin as in Nice as in Brussels as in Paris as in Manchester as in Orlando, your loved one will leave the home and never return because he went to a pop concert or a gay club or a restaurant or an airport, or just strolled the sidewalk or bicycled the bike path. "Allahu Akbar"? That's Arabic for "Nothing can be done". So Andrew Cuomo ended with some generic boilerplate about how they'll never change us:

We go forward together. And we go forward stronger than ever. We're not going to let them win...We'll go about our business. Be New Yorkers. Live your life. Don't let them change us.

But they are changing us. I've written before about what I've called the Bollardization of the Western World: the open, public areas of free cities are being fenced in by bollards, as, for example, German downtowns were after the Berlin Christmas attack, and London Bridge and Westminster Bridge were after two recent outbreaks of vehicular jihad. This is a huge windfall for bollard manufacturers - Big Bollard - and doubtless it's a huge boost for the economy, if your town's nimble enough to approve the new bollard plant on the edge of town, or if your broker is savvy enough to divest your tech stocks and go big on the bollard sector. As I write, Geraldo is on Fox demanding to know why this bike path wasn't blocked off with concrete barriers.

Why? Why does every public place have to get uglified up just because Geraldo doesn't want to address the insanity of western immigration policies that day by day advance the interests of an ideology explicitly hostile to our civilization? Instead Geraldo wants to tighten up vehicle rental. Why? Why should you have to lose an extra 15 minutes at an already sclerotic check-in counter because Hertz and Avis and UHaul have to run your name through the No-Rent list? Why should open, free societies become closed, monitored, ugly, cramped and cowering?

And Bollardization doesn't even solve the problem, does it? Last week I was tootling through Williston, Vermont, which has just reconfigured its highway system to run green-painted bike paths down the center of the streets. And the thought occurred to me that, once you've bollarded off every sidewalk, what's to stop jihadists mowing down cyclists? After all, if the eco-crowd are installing them in the middle of the roadway, they're kind of hard to bollard off. And then a second thought occurred: As inviting a target as bike paths are in enviro-poseur communities, they're even more inviting in genuine bicycling cultures such as the Netherlands or Scandinavia.

And now eight people are dead and dozens more injured - at the hands of a guy who came here in 2010 because he won a Green Card in the so-called "diversity lottery". Why was that stupid program not suspended on September 12th 2001?

How does an @$$hole like Saipov get to reside in the US and not - let's say - an engineer who doesn't explode over cans of ginger ale?

I guess there some things for which one will never have an answer.




Terrible:

At least three people have died in a 14-vehicle pileup that sent a wave of flames down Hwy. 400, prompting motorists to run for their lives, Ontario Provincial Police said Wednesday.

Police said the number of fatalities may rise as they reach more vehicles involved in the fiery crash late Tuesday night south of Barrie.

Just remind one's self that it's only money:

Notice of a $200 fine related to Morneau’s villa in France was posted Tuesday to the website of the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner.

(Sidebar: that will teach him!)

**

David Dodge, who led the Canadian central bank between 2001 and 2008, thinks Poloz should focus more on the long-neglected issue of financial stability and take the opportunity to raise rates now that the economy is running more or less at potential. Poloz kept his benchmark rate at 1 per cent last week and indicated he’s in no rush to tighten, given that he still sees signs of wage and inflation slack.

Also - watch this go pear-shaped:

U.S. tech giants including Google, Amazon and Microsoft have held more than 100 separate meetings with influential members of Canada's Liberal government over the past 12 months, Radio-Canada has learned.

Some critics say those meetings raise ethical issues in light of the government's controversial agreement with Netflix.

Radio-Canada, the French-language arm of CBC, pored over the federal lobby registry and found Amazon had 99 registered communications with decision-makers, while Google had 37, including one with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his two closest collaborators: chief of staff Katie Telford and principal secretary Gerald Butts. Microsoft, Netflix and Facebook also had meetings with federal officials.

Today in government corruption news:

Alberta's privacy commissioner is investigating why 800,000 emails were deleted by employees in four government ministries.

(Sidebar: Monkey see, monkey do.)




Why not just hammer out a cheque and screw the pretense already?

The national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women placed some of the blame for the inquiry’s slow progress squarely at the feet of the federal government, in an interim report released Wednesday.

The national inquiry began its work in September 2016, but has since been plagued by criticisms that it has moved too slowly and has failed to communicate effectively with survivors and families. 

Several high-profile resignations from the inquiry have made headlines in recent months.

The interim report, intended to illustrate the inquiry’s progress to date, includes a list of challenges the organization has faced. They include the federal government’s failure to give the inquiry contact information for participants in the pre-inquiry process, which the report claims “has left families and survivors frustrated and confused about how to become a witness.”

**

The inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls wants governments to create a national police force that would address persistent questions for families and survivors.

Um, like the RCMP?

Seventy per cent of the perpetrators in Canada’s cases of murdered and missing aboriginal women are indigenous, the RCMP commissioner has confirmed.

A brave and cogent response to a fat ingrate:

Mehak Saini said Monday she's standing up for voices silenced during an acrimonious debate that engulfed the Halifax university after the student union pulled out of Canada 150 celebrations in solidarity with Indigenous Peoples.

"As an immigrant, I celebrate this country and its values and the freedom of speech," said Saini, who immigrated to Brampton, Ont., from northern India when she was nine years old. "I'm proud of this country."

Student leader Masuma Khan tabled a motion to opt out of Canada Day festivities, calling the celebration an act of ongoing colonialism.

In response to criticism, the student council executive said on social media she would not stand with "privileged white people," or be proud of "over 400 years of genocide," with the hashtag "whitefragilitycankissmyass."

Khan's comments sparked controversy and prompted a complaint against her, which the university has since dropped, in part due to concerns about violent and hateful messages she was receiving. 

Many people on campus and beyond defended Khan's freedom of expression and political speech, including the Ontario Civil Liberties Association and a group of 25 law professors from Dalhousie's Schulich School of Law.

But Saini said some students disagreed with Khan but refrained from voicing their dissent out of fear of being labelled a racist.

"She's using discrimination and power as a tool to silence us," she said in an interview. "There is no place for racism, period. Not from a minority, not from a majority."

Russians criticise Putin's attempt at vague humanity:

President Vladimir Putin on Monday called the unveiling of the first Kremlin-promoted monument to the victims of political repression an important step toward preventing oppression in Russia, but critics accused the government of hypocrisy given the continued lack of political rights.

“We and our successors should remember the tragedy of repressions and the reasons that caused them,” Putin said during the rainy evening ceremony. The memory serves “as a powerful admonition against their repetition.”

The Russian president, who ordered the construction of the monument, the “Wall of Sorrow,” three years ago, described political repression as a crime, but stressed that future generations should remember the victims without bringing the country to renewed confrontation by “settling scores.”

About 40 critics, many of them veterans of the struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union, accused the Kremlin in a petition they released on Facebook of trying to whitewash the present.

“The current Russian government, in sponsoring the opening of the monument, is trying to pretend that political repression is a thing long since past,” the petition read. “We state with certainty that Russia’s current political prisoners are worthy of our help and attention no less than the victims of the Soviet regime are worthy of our memory and respect.”

This is from an autocrat who admires Stalin.


Just ... wow ...


Also:

When Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known as Lenin, was 21, famine hit Russia’s Volga region, near the Ulyanovs’ hometown of Simbirsk. Vladimir’s sister raised money for the relief effort and visited the sick. But Vladimir, nearly alone among Russian radicals, scorned the effort to save lives. The future Lenin hoped that a truly enormous death toll would weaken the czarist regime—so the more starvation, the better. 

And now,  how did modern man survive when Neanderthals did not?

For decades, modern human scientists assumed there must have been something wrong with the Neanderthals – or something right with us – that led to their extinction. Maybe H. neanderthalensis had bad genes that made the species more vulnerable to disease. Maybe the climate changed quickly and they couldn’t adapt. Maybe modern humans were smarter, more innovative, better at coming up with new ways to control territory and secure food. Acres of ancient archaeological sites have been excavated and libraries of academic journals filled by scientists seeking an explanation.

“It’s like everyone is searching for ‘just so’ stories about why one species led the other to extinction,” said Oren Kolodny, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford University. But Kolodny wondered: What if there is no “just so” explanation?

In a new paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, Kolodny and his colleague Marc Feldman test a more basic hypothesis – that the extinction of the Neanderthals was simply a consequence of population dynamics and bad timing. In most cases, it turned out, this was enough to account for the disappearance of our hominin cousins.