Bloodthirsty Liberal

Then what, pray tell, was the whole imperial thing all about?

Japan has a problem, a lack of children, and it seems likely there will be even fewer in the future.

Japanese researchers have now warned of a doomsday scenario if it carries on this way with the last child to be born there in 3011 and the Japanese people potentially disappearing a few generations later.

Academics from the city of Sendai, which was hit hard by last year’s tsunami, calculate there are now 16.6 million children under the age of 14 now in Japan.
And they say that number is shrinking at a disturbing rate of one every 100 seconds.

So if you do the mathematics, as they did, then the country will have no children within a millennium.

Another study recently showed Japan’s population is expected to fall a third from its current 127.7 million over the next century.

…

The question everybody asks is why is there a lack of children?

The answer seems to lie in several reasons.

One reason is the cost. Japan is an extremely expensive country and getting a child through college can wipe out a family’s finances.

But research shows it goes much deeper than that as the Japanese state does throw a lot of money at people with children.

Another argument is that there are more effeminate men now called “Herbivores” there who are either not interested in sex or women don’t find masculine enough.

Then some suggest many young Japanese people prefer “virtual” friends with a robot or on the internet, while others suggest their fascination with comics rather than relationships is the cause for a lack of babies.

A study was released earlier this year in which it showed Japan’s young people are shunning the idea of marriage and having children.

The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research study also showed one in four unmarried men and women in their 30s had never had sex, and most young women preferred being single.

It also showed over 60 percent of unmarried young men didn’t have a girlfriend, and nearly 50 percent of women of the same age weren’t dating.

If that wasn’t bad enough, young Japanese people are also, it seems, increasingly not interested in sex.

A survey by the Japan Family Planning Association found that 36 percent of males between 16 and 19 had “no interest” in sex.

If I recall my teenage years correctly, that just can’t be true. Unless the nuclear disaster fried more than a few fish and birds.

But there’s something to the “Herbivore” idea. Except for the odd yakuza, Japanese men don’t present as all that masculine, do they? The women (some of them) more than make up for it in presenting as feminine, but all their wiles aren’t going to work on a nation of Ryan Seacrests.

Anyway, don’t look for Japan to be a bulwark against China expansionism:

“Japan will be more likely to prioritize healthcare than international security,” Brad Glosserman and Tomoko Tsunada wrote in Foreign Policy Magazine. “Older societies are typically more risk-averse, and Japanese — ‘reluctant realists’ at the best of times — will be increasingly unwilling to put their most precious resource, their young, in harm’s way,” they said.

What an irony that the 21st century may play out between these countries as the 20th did, with roles reversed.

Seriously?

Add this twist to the scourges of human trafficking and flesh peddling: Pills sold as Viagara-style performance enhancers that contain the powdered tissue of aborted fetuses and dead infants.

South Korea has seized nearly 17,500 of the bizarre capsules from tourists’ luggage and international mail since last August, according to the state-run Korea Customs service said in a statement Monday. The capsules were made in northeastern China in a stomach-turning process in which dead babies’ bodies were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder, the Korea Customs Service said.

And that’s not all! Order now and you get more!

The pills, which are typically smuggled in by ethnic Koreans living in northern China, aren’t just creepy, the contain “super bacteria” that is hazardous to human health, the statement said. South Korea began cracking down on the drugs last year after a television network aired a documentary accusing Chinese pharmaceutical companies of collaborating with abortion clinics to make the pills from human fetuses and the remains of dead infants, accordiong to The Wall Street Journal.

In parts of China, consumption of human placentas is believed to help revive blood supply and circulation, according to the China Daily report. In addition, many believe the fetus is a “tonic” for disease has kept the pills in demand, according to the China Daily, which reported Beijing has been investigating the matter as well. But the latest use of fetal tissue is as a sexual performance enhancer, according to a report in the Global Times, a tabloid published by the official People’s Daily.

Sexual performance? You need to have sex to have sexual performance!

And while you don’t need women to have sex, for some of us, it helps!

Chinese dissident escapes Turmoil and intrigue bubble in China Where is blind Chinese activist Chen? The importance of Chen Guangcheng
The issue of forced abortions — and in some cases, forced sterilizations — in China has seized the spotlight in recent days with news of escaped activist Chen Guangcheng.

Chen, a blind, self-taught lawyer, rose to fame in the late 1990s because of his advocacy for what he calls victims of abusive practices, such as forced abortions, by Chinese family planning officials. He investigated forced abortions and sterilizations in eastern China — a practice China denies — and helped organize a class-action lawsuit on behalf of victims, for which he served four years in prison.

…

About 13 million abortions are performed nationwide each year, the commission has said — about 35,000 a day. It is unknown how many of those are coerced.

But the one-child policy has been blamed for abuses. In some cases, advocates say, fetuses identified as female are aborted, or midwives strangle a female infant with the umbilical cord during delivery, identifying the baby as “stillborn,” according to All Girls Allowed, a nonprofit group that aims to end female “gendercide,” educate abandoned girls, rescue trafficked children and defend women’s reproductive rights.

Other females are abandoned, left to die or raised as orphans.

…

Last summer, Xinhua reported that “millions of Chinese men of marrying age may be living as frustrated bachelors by 2020″ because of the gender imbalance. In 2010, China’s sex ratio at birth was 118 boys for every 100 girls, the news agency said.

…

The one-child policy could contribute to China’s high rate of female suicide, according to All Girls Allowed.

China is the only country in the world where the female suicide rate is higher than that of men — some 500 women a day, the group said, citing statistics from the World Health Organization and the U.S. State Department.

In its 2009 Human Rights Report, the State Department noted that “many observers believed that violence against women and girls, discrimination in education and employment, the traditional preference for male children, birth-limitation policies, and other societal factors contributed to the high female suicide rate. Women in rural areas, where the suicide rate for women was three to four times higher than for men, were especially vulnerable.”

Sometimes the consequences are even more severe. In October 2011, a woman who was six months pregnant died during a forced abortion in eastern China, according to Women’s Rights Without Frontiers.

Last month, a woman in the same region was forced to undergo an abortion while nine months pregnant, the organization reported. The baby was born alive, but then was drowned in a bucket, according to the organization. A photo of the infant’s body floating in the bucket was circulated on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, sparking widespread outrage.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough. In every way, I’ve had enough. Melamine in the infant formula wasn’t bad enough. Now they’re coming after the unborn—and even the recently born. And everyone else from the sound of it.

UPDATE
What was I just saying?

Vegetable sellers in China have been caught spraying cabbages with a formaldehyde solution to keep them fresh in transit, the state news agency Xinhua has reported.

Xinhua said the practice had been common in eastern China for years.

The agency said it was being done because most farmers cannot afford refrigerated trucks for cabbages.

Formaldehyde is a toxic cancer-causing compound often used as a disinfectant and for embalming.

It can irritate the skin and cause breathing and digestive problems.

Cabbage is a staple food in China, often used as a filling in dumplings, but also stir-fried or pickled.

In recent years the country has faced a series of food safety scandals, including the lacing of baby-milk with the industrial chemical melamine.

…

[Formaldehyde] has also been reportedly used to soak some dried seafood to make it appear more fresh and plump.

[Bleeping] China, man. Remind me to order Japanese next time I crave a dumpling.

I pray the commies my corpse don’t bake:

If you are looking for a book that brings a corner of modern China alive—a book filled with humor, family squabbles and ordinary life in a large city in a one-party state—look no further than “The Little Red Guard.” The focus of this delightful family memoir by Wenguang Huang, a Chinese-born writer now based in Chicago, is a simple wooden coffin that a lowly member of the Communist Party, the author’s father, had secretly built for his mother in the mid-1970s, as a present for her 73rd birthday. She had been pestering her son for a coffin in preparation for her death, though she showed no sign of dying. The coffin, hidden by a tablecloth and painted with a fresh coat of black lacquer each year, became the family’s unwelcome and dangerous guest.

Natural death cannot be controlled by China’s Communist Party, but disposing of a body can. Burial is outlawed as a feudal, superstitious practice; cremation is considered modern and officially approved. But as Mr. Huang’s grandmother keeps saying, if you end up as a jar of ash or the leftover dust from the bottom of a furnace, there is no way you can join your ancestors and loved ones on the other side in the next life.

You may wonder why Grandma was in the need of a little reeducation in the collectivist spirit:

Her parents, as we learn, were rich landowners. As was the custom, her feet were bound at the age of 6. Her husband and most of his family, also rich landowners, died when a tuberculosis epidemic swept through central China in the 1930s. Their farmland was flooded by the Yellow River, their livestock was taken by the invading Japanese and famine turned them into beggars.

Come 1949 and the communist victory, Grandma Huang and her young son were given the exalted status of “poor peasants.” Their suffering, the author writes, turned out to be a blessing. Automatically they became members of the “true proletariat,” and the opportunities of the new society were open to them and members of their family—a job in a factory, an education, housing, food rations, status.

The author of this memoir, the son of Grandma Huang’s son, describes his father as a “poster child of the revolution.” His photo was pinned on the factory notice board year after year as a model worker and later as a model Communist Party member. At one point Grandma Huang observes that, when the author’s father was invited to his son’s school to speak, it was a lucky thing that the family had lost its fortune before the revolution. “Otherwise,” she said, “you could have been standing on the stage with a big dunce’s cap to receive public denunciations.”

Boy, I’ve never heard that anywhere else that one’s morality is judged by one’s income level have you? The same person can be considered a “dunce” or a “true proletarian” merely on the whims of fate. It doesn’t matter who you are. Good thing that doesn’t happen here, huh?

But back to Grandma’s coffin:

The coffin cost a small banquet of delicacies and the best rice wine for the carpenters who built it inside the Huang’s two-roomed house over a weekend. Apart from Grandma, the family can’t stop worrying that the illegally made coffin will undermine their revolutionary credentials, bring shame on them and lead to their downfall.

…

In the end, it is the father who suffers as his world collapses. Toward the end of his life he was told by the Party that he was to be rewarded for devising a money-saving program at his state factory with promotion and a better wage. Instead the promotion went to the girlfriend of the local Party secretary, and the firm’s bosses split his wage rise among themselves. Embittered and exhausted, he died of a heart attack in 1988, ahead of his mother. Thirteen months later Grandma Huang died. She never made it home to Henan Province, but lay in her coffin with the ashes of her son at her feet. Her funeral procession of three vans and a truck set off at 4 a.m. through Xian city to avoid the police to a burial site beside an abandoned brick factory.

What a depressing and dehumanizing story. It almost smacks of O. Henry in the unexpected twist at the end—O. Henry mixed with the gruesomeness of Poe. And the pitilessness of Camus. And the indifference of Kafka.

After 1.4 million, it’s a rounding error (or a statistic, as Stalin once said):

Another 100,000 people may have to move away from China’s Three Gorges Dam due to the risk of disastrous landslides and bank collapses around the reservoir of the world’s biggest hydroelectric facility, state media said Wednesday.

The Ministry of Land Resources says the number of landslides and other disasters has increased 70 percent since the water level in the $23 billion showcase project rose to its maximum in 2010.

Some 1.4 million people already have been resettled as a result of the huge project on the Yangtze River. Authorities may move another 100,000 people in the next three to five years to minimize the risk of casualties from such threats, ministry official Liu Yuan told China National Radio in a report posted on a government website and carried by state newspapers.

He said 5,386 danger sites were being monitored and that work was beginning on rockfalls and landslides at 335 locations around the lake.

Borrowing from Michelle Obama, China says to the population equivalent of Erie, PA, “Let’s move!”

Curiouser and curiouser:

Bo Guagua, the Harrow- and Oxford-educated son of Bo Xilai, was slipped out of his luxury flat near Harvard University late on Thursday night, in a pre-arranged pick-up by law-enforcement officers.

Wearing a dark jacket and pulling a roller suitcase, the 24-year-old, who was preparing for final exams of a postgraduate degree, was driven away in a dark SUV by a besuited officer wearing a badge.

“He did not look frightened, but he seemed anxious to go with them,” a source told The Daily Telegraph. “He had clearly been expecting it”. Mr Bo was accompanied by a female friend.

Speculation was mounting that the younger Mr Bo may have sought protection from American authorities. The FBI’s Boston office declined to say if the man was one of their agents. It is understood that he was not from the local or university police departments.

He was picked up at about 10pm on Thursday, after his female friend told the doorman to expect a visitor and gave him an electronic key fob to let him into the underground car park. She is believed to have left later in Mr Bo’s Porsche, after collecting more luggage.

Throughout the day a group of Chinese men were parked conspicuously in front a fire hydrant outside, breaking a basic American road law and suggesting they were unfamiliar with the country’s rules.

Mr Bo’s father, a charismatic senior Chinese politician once tipped as a future premier, was purged by the ruling Communist party this week while his mother, Gu Kailai, was detained on suspicion of murder.

…

Mr Bo has been studying for a $90,000 (£56,610) Master’s in Public Policy at Harvard’s prestigious Kennedy School of Government since 2010 and was due to begin his final exams at the start of May.

He is said to have taken a more serious approach to his studies since being embarrassed by leaked pictures of parties at Oxford, from which he graduated only after being disciplined for poor work.

Harvard peers said Mr Bo, who retains a slight English accent, often spoke in classes about China but would dodge questions about its lack of democratic reform.

Isn’t that bloody typical? So many powerful Chinese want to tell you how awesome China is, but “dodge questions” about totalitarian rule. It’s not so hard to be a world power when you throw even the merest hint of opposition in jail. History is replete with examples. Get back to us when you have a free and open society, ruled by liberty and justice, not the Communist Party.

But we’re happy to host infamous foreign celebrity relatives. Bo can just fall in line behind Auntie Zeituni and Uncle Omar.

PS: Did you know that the last president of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, died a recluse in 2001 in Foxborough, Massachusetts, just south of Boston? I remember reading his obit in the paper, and it was just so incongruous to learn that a figure from the headlines of the past lived in obscurity in the shadow of the New England Patriots football stadium.

On the whole, I don’t like Anonymous and I don’t like hackers.

But they have a point:

The attacks targeted 485 websites, including some run by the Chinese government as well as trade groups and other official bodies. Hacked sites were replaced with a message urging Chinese people to use online tools to avoid government tracking and censorship.

Hackers post a message on the target websites that said: “Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall.”

A list of the websites that were attacked was posted to Pastebin, a website often used by Anonymous to publish details of its attacks. In a separate Pastebin post, Anonymous explained its motives for the attack.

The message began: “Hello, we are Anonymous. All these years the Chinese Government has subjected their people to unfair laws and unhealthy processes. People, each of you suffers from tyranny of that regime.”

And the Chinese government responded the way you knew they would. No, not with tanks, though they would if they could:

According to Chinese news services, government officials have denied that any attacks have taken place, despite the Anonymous message being visible for some time on some websites, while others were taken offline completely.

What’s the Chinese equivalent of Baghdad Bob, Hunan Hu?

Unless you’re in China:

Poisonous fumes were preventing efforts to rescue 17 Chinese miners trapped underground for three days, according an official and state media.

On Thursday, a gas blast at the coal mine in the northeastern province of Liaoning killed five miners outright, injured another and trapped 17 others.

“At the scene, there is still no way for rescue,” a Liaoning provincial mine safety official, who declined to be named, told AFP.

“The carbon monoxide level is very high,” he said.

…

Authorities had detained the owner and three managers of the Dahuang Number Two Coal Mine where the accident occurred, Xinhua said. State media said previously that the mine was operating illegally.

China’s mines are known for being among the world’s most deadly due to lax regulation, corruption and inefficiency, and accidents are common as safety is often neglected by bosses seeking quick profits.

Just last month, 15 miners were killed and another three injured when a tramcar derailed in a coal mine in central China.

I’m very sorry for them and their families. But you have to wonder if their days weren’t numbered:

Tobacco-related deaths have nearly tripled in the past decade and big tobacco firms are undermining public efforts that could save millions, a report led by the health campaign group the World Lung Foundation (WLF) said on Wednesday.

In the report, marking the tenth anniversary of its first Tobacco Atlas, the WLF and the American Cancer Society said if current trends continue, a billion people will die from tobacco use and exposure this century – one person every six seconds.

…

In China, tobacco is already the number one killer – causing 1.2 million deaths a year – and that number is expected to rise to 3.5 million a year by 2030, the report said.

No offense, but isn’t 3.5 million a rounding error in the Chinese population? Don’t they have like a hundred cities of that size no one’s heard of? In any case, whether it’s due to tobacco, carbon monoxide, or just plain soot, breathable air may be China’s rarest commodity.

I admit to a little confucian (get it?); I thought “coup” was the new Assistant Undersecretary of the Chinese Communist Party:

Groundless rumours of a coup that have swept Beijing in recent days are a sign of nervousness after the sacking of political star Bo Xilai exposed rifts in China’s ruling Communist Party, analysts say.

Bo had been tipped to join an elite group of leaders who effectively run China later this year, and his downfall — announced last week in a brief official dispatch — is the biggest drama to hit the Communist Party in years.

But the news has been only lightly covered by China’s tightly controlled state media, opening the way for lurid online speculation involving a crashed Ferrari, gunshots and even tanks rolling into central Beijing.

“People are nervous, there’s not much information available,” Bo Zhiyue, an expert on Chinese elite politics at the National University of Singapore, said Thursday.

“They are hungry for new information, and if there’s nothing new, they will make up new information.”

And I thought Bo didn’t know Diddley:

His sacking came weeks after his former right-hand man and police chief Wang Lijun reportedly tried to defect to the United States in a dramatic event that remains shrouded in mystery.

The incident sparked speculation about Bo’s future, but his sacking still came as a shock, as the party normally likes to maintain an appearance of unity, which it believes is crucial to preserving stability in China.

Once you’ve lost your Wang and been sacked, it’s all over. (What can I say, it feels like summer today.)

Export them to China as a delicacy [via Jungle Trader]:

Jellyfish are lovely creatures to behold underwater, as their gelatinous, tentacled bodies undulate in the currents. They are also a nuisance and a hazard. They can sting swimmers and clog fishing nets.

But, along the coast of the southern U.S. state of Georgia, jellyfish are a valuable export, which end up on dining tables across Asia.

Early on this chilly February morning, most everyone in the tiny coastal town of Darien is still asleep, but on the docks of Marco Seafood, along the Darien River, there’s plenty of activity. The shrimp trawler, Kim C. King, has just moored, and nearly 100 workers are ready to start processing last night’s catch of jellyfish, which the locals call jellyballs.

…

The jellyfish are dried, preserved and packaged before being sold to a seafood distributor that ships them to Japan, China, and Thailand.

There, dried jellyfish are a delicacy, used in soups and salads.

TK says they’re crunchy. “Actually they taste a little like the gristle of a chicken bone. It’s got that crunchy taste and that’s what the people in Japan and China, they like that crunch.”

Marine biologist Page has tried them, too. He’s not a fan. “One time and that was gracious plenty for me. They were more salty than anything. It was not my favorite, but fortunately there’s others out there that found it to be a favorite.”

Did he say they taste like chicken? He did, or close enough.

Anyhow, I think I see a way to narrow the trade gap between the US and China, one jellyball at a time.

For all you opera fans out there.

But just as dungeons and prisons feature prominently in opera (Tosca and Fidelio come to mind), so do they in modern politics:

Madam High Commissioner,

United Nations Watch welcomes your annual report and the important work of your office. We greatly appreciate today’s valuable opportunity to engage in this interactive dialogue with you on your report.

…

Your report mentions your recent legal brief in the European Court of Human Rights, and there was another in the US Supreme Court. Certainly a legal intervention by the UN’s highest human rights official is a powerful tool, especially if used in jurisdictions that are less developed in their judicial independence, democratic institutions and rule of law tradition.

Accordingly, would you contemplate submitting legal briefs to the Egyptian court where NGO human rights defenders are currently being prosecuted; in the Chinese court that can free jailed Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo; and in the Pakistani court that has the power to stop the execution of Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of five who was convicted, without any foundation, on the crime of blasphemy?

Thank you, Madam President.

I don’t know what’s Mandarin for shuddupa-yo-face, but that’s China’s response:

My delegation also categorically rejects the comments made by a few NGOs, especially by UN Watch, concerning the case of Liu Xiaobo.

Liu Xiaobo has committed crimes against the state and was therefore sentenced by the Court. As a country with the rule of law, my country has always emphasized that all people are equal before the law.

Anyone who carries out criminal activities and threatens state security and the public interest will be dealt with by the public authorities in China in accordance with our law.

That’s my problem with China. Laws are instituted by governments, and governments are (and I quote):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

It’s probably just me, but I don’t feel China’s “government” (the Communist Party, I guess) has derived anything like a “just power”. And I think a very strong case can be made for a new government, based on the poor performance in the safety and happiness categories.

PS: Case in point:

The death toll from an explosion at a chemical plant in north China last week has risen to 25, state media said Sunday of the latest industrial accident to strike the country.

Another 46 people were injured in the blast last Tuesday near Shijiazhuang city, capital of Hebei province, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing the State Administration of Work Safety.

PPS: Now, to make this post worth your while: Placido Doming singing Non piangere, Liú.

Two consecutive posts from Jungle Trader:

Cameroon

Government officials ordered a military offensive against elephant poachers in Cameroon’s Bouba N’Djida National Park.

WWF:

The action was taken in response to the killing of hundreds of elephants in the Northern Cameroon park over the past eight weeks. Given the area’s remote location and the level of insecurity, details on the severity of the slaughter have been difficult to ascertain.

Government authorities say heavily armed poachers have entered Cameroon’s sovereign territory illegally across the park’s border with Chad in order to obtain ivory. The poachers, who are reportedly Arabic speakers traveling on horseback, are believed to be from Sudan and it is widely speculated that the vast volumes of ivory are destined for Asian markets.
Posted by DEC at 10:47 AM

China

National Public Radio: “As China grows richer, the demand is growing for elephant ivory smuggled from Africa.”
Posted by DEC at 10:13 AM

Just add it to the list.

It smells… like evil:

An important piece of North Korea’s system of control over its own people is finally being exposed: China’s complicity. On Monday, Seoul raised the issue of Beijing’s policy of repatriating North Korean refugees in the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Every year the Chinese authorities arrest an unknown number of North Koreans who have fled to China. Some of the refugees are trying to escape North Korean tyranny permanently by making their way through China to third countries, from which they can travel to the South. Beijing forcibly repatriates these unfortunates without giving them a chance to apply for asylum.

Do they at least give them a meal before shipping them back? It may be the last one they see for a while. (Which is why they tried to get out in the first place.) Of course, you know what they say about Chinese meals: after you get out of the gulag, you’re hungry all over again.

Until now, the South Korean government has not spoken out publicly about this ongoing atrocity, in part because it doesn’t want to incur the wrath of its largest trading partner and in part because it realizes that Beijing could make life much harder for those North Korean refugees whose presence it chooses to overlook. Seoul’s silence was China’s price for allowing some North Koreans to escape.

Last year, 2,727 North Koreans reached safety in South Korea, according to the Unification Ministry in Seoul. Most fled through China, traveling on an underground railroad that Beijing could shut down in an instant.

Nevertheless, China’s repatriation policy is a blatant violation of the International Convention on Refugees, to which it is a signatory. The Convention bars “refoulement,” the diplomatic term for returning refugees to places where their lives would be endangered.

Heinous enough for you? We’re only just getting started:

The number of North Koreans hiding in China at any given time varies, depending on conditions at home and the extent of the crackdown in China. There are at least tens of thousands of North Koreans there today. And at the height of the severe food shortages in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were as many as half a million. More than half of the North Koreans who flee—perhaps as many as 70% or 80%—are women, many of whom have been sold to Chinese men as “brides.”

Now Pyongyang is stepping up its campaign to scare its citizens so that they won’t attempt the journey.

Reports from South Korean and American activists who work in China near the border with North Korea are chilling. After Kim Jong Eun took power last December, one of his first acts was to issue a shoot-to-kill order to North Korean guards patrolling their side of the border. There are further reports that he ordered land mines to be buried on riverbanks to stop people from fleeing. North Korean security agents are said to be flooding into China, where they spy on the refugees and the people who help them, and report them to the Chinese authorities.

According to the Venerable Pomnyun Sunim, a Buddhist monk and activist in South Korea, Kim Jong Eun has exiled the relatives of fugitives to remote regions of the country. Knowing that their families will be punished serves as a powerful disincentive to anyone who is thinking of fleeing. The Venerable Pomnyun also says that Kim Jong Eun has intensified the crackdown on possession of illegal Chinese cellphones, which allow North Koreans to communicate with the outside world and arrange passage on the underground railroad.

Hold still, kid. Stop fidgeting!

Chinese men get their women, Korean women get calories—it’s a win-win!

While the rest of the world focuses on the Korean offer of a nuclear moratorium (where have I heard that before?), we would do well to remember that the skunk does not change his stripe.

I can see Passaic!

The prospects for life are difficult in the best of circumstances. We have to eat and drink every day, stay protected from the elements, defend ourselves from wild beasts and marauding pirates. That’s why we clump together into communities and form governments. The betrayal of that trust by abusive and tyrannical governments is beyond reproach. We’d rather be torn to pieces by the beasts and sold into slavery by the pirates. At least I would.