Terri is Gone

Terri Schiavo died this morning. Our thoughts and prayers are with her and her family today.

North Korean Public Execution Video - Update

The video of the public executions that took place on the 1^st and 2^nd of March 2005 that I previously posted here is, as I posted yesterday, no longer on line. Life Funds for North Korean Refugees (LFNKR, an NGO) has arranged an agreement with Jin-Net (Japan Independent News Net) to make a DVD for sale to support its work. Jin-Net is the Japanese news outlet that produced the original news story and owns the copyright to the video.

Yesterday I reposted the link to the streaming video of the execution of the 1^st of March.

LFNKR'S DVD page has made a 12 minute DVD available for $30 to raise funds for the NGO. They have also posted a link to a 3 minute clip of the video of the execution of the 2^nd of March.

Read Jin-Net's detailed discussion of the video and the events recorded.

See the clip of the execution of the 2^nd of March here (12.1mb). It is in English with an excellent explanation of events. It is a .wmv file, so you can right click on it and save it to your computer.

Little Freak Kim Jong Il cannot hide his crimes. History will condemn his as the present already has.

North Korea Human Rights Review

The UN Commission on Human Rights will hear a report on human rights in North Korea, including a screening of the execution video that I have posted here. The video is no longer on line, but there is an abbreviated report in English here.

North Korean Rights Abuses, Public Execution, Under Spotlight from CNS News.

Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - The situation in North Korea takes center stage this week at the U.N. Commission for Human Rights meeting in Geneva, where campaigners plan to screen secretly filmed footage of a recent public execution in the Stalinist state.

Former inmates of North Korea's notorious prison camps also will tell their stories and describe the plight of tens of thousands of others still there.

On Tuesday, a U.N. special rapporteur delivered a report to member states, urging immediate action to stop numerous rights abuses in North Korea.

The rapporteur, Thai law professor Vitit Muntarbhorn, was appointed under a resolution passed at last year's commission session. Since his appointment, Pyongyang has refused him access to the country.

Of course the DPRK denies that they abuse their inmates citizens.

Responding to Muntarbhorn's report, North Korean representative Choe Myong-nam said his country did not accept the rapporteur's mandate.

Choe dismissed the report as "tricky political propaganda" and said it was part of a "plot" by hostile forces who "would not hesitate in fabricating anything with a view to overthrowing the state system of the country."

And, the Dear Murdering Freak knows about the video.

Violations in North Korea will be highlighted further on Thursday, when non-governmental organizations in Geneva show a movie clip of a public execution reported to have taken place on March 2.

Life Funds for North Korean Refugees (LFNKR), a Japan-based NGO, said the footage was secretly taped in Yuson district near the Chinese border and smuggled out at great risk.

The clip shows a cursory public "trial" in an empty lot of two people, accused of illegal border crossing and human trafficking. One is sentenced to death, and the other to 10 years' imprisonment.

The blurry footage shows the execution, watched by a crowd, carried out minutes later. The condemned person is tied to a post and three soldiers ordered, in Korean, to "aim at the enemy ... fire."

As the soldiers force the body into a sack with apparent difficulty, an official is heard to intone: "You have witnessed how miserable fools end up. Traitors who betray the nation and its people end up like this."

According to LFNKR, North Korean defectors have corroborated key aspects of the footage, saying the execution depicted was similar to ones they had themselves witnessed in past years.

Refugee flight

The NGO noted that the region were the execution took place was on a major escape route into China, and said it was likely the regime intended the public killing as a warning to others not to try cross the border.

Last Friday, Seoul's Chosun Ilbo newspaper said in a report citing ethnic Korean sources in China that North Korean authorities had begun a large-scale investigation aimed at finding out who had filmed the execution.

That will, of course, require large amounts of killing.

Judicial Oligarchy Watch

We regularly see examples of abusive exercise of judicial power. Here is some more. Steve Dunleavy at the New York Post has a few things to say about has a few things to say about Judge Phyllis Gangel-Jacob.

BENCH THIS COURT KOOK BEFORE SHE RULES AGAIN

On her nitwit orders, Shavon Stewart Skinner, 25, a tragic quadriplegic, was removed from her guardian's custody, with the threat of police action if she didn't comply.

Her guardian, her aunt, Cynthia Stewart, 52, said, "She called me dangerous. What kind of judge is this? She is asking for three days evaluation of my baby in New Jersey.

"My sister, Oro, had her for 19 years before she had a heart attack and died."

"If Oro wanted her institutionalized, she would have done it," said distraught Cynthia before her charge was sent away by court order.

"I know what they will try to do. They will try to institutionalize her forever. Sweep her under the carpet. Get rid of her like Terri Schiavo. People do not like people like Shavon around."

Yesterday, Shavon was taken forcibly into a van and she started to cry.

I completely agree with Mr. Dunleavy's conclusion;

Please, Gov. Pataki, you know how to remove this arrogant fool.

This piece of judicial trash needs to be removed, and laws passed that will better enable people to get these decisions overturned.

Cuba - Another Worker's Paradise

Doc, over at Bloodletting has a story to tell about Hollywood's favorite country.

On the worker's paradise;

We deployed in the vicinity of the fenceline. We met the refugees as they approached, and with weapns in hand, denied them entry to the base. They had managed to traverse a kilometer deep minefield covered by towers with machine guns to get to this point. They had left everything they had ever known in order to get out of there. And we stopped them. We had orders. We had our orders, so we followed them. After enough shouting and threatening, the refugees eventualy gave up and headed back. Back into Cuba. While I was sweating my balls off under the hot sun, these refugees made a mistake. They had gotten through the minefield the first time, but they had not followed in their own footsteps going back. While I was thinking to myself how I wish these people would hurry up and go back so that I could head back to someplace with air-conditioning, one of them stepped on a landmine.

That explosion touched my world.

Then, I witnessed the worst thing I ever saw in my life.

I will not tell you what he saw, go read it. Read all of it. It brings tears to my eyes. Danny Glover and his Hollywood buddies can go to Hell.

Blogger is Being Difficult - Time for Motime?

Perhaps not yet, but Tom the Pooklekufr (who is a Constitutionalist, BTW) is just about ready and so am I. I already have an account there that I use just to log in and post at Jheka's blog. If I find the time, I think I'll start a blog there and see what it looks like.

North Korea Kidnaping Series

To help those who have been interested in this series, here is a list of links to all of the posts that I have written on the kidnapers of North Korea.

North Korea Kidnaps Japanese - Background

North Korea Lies To Japanese Families

What Happened to Megumi Yokota - Part 1

What Happened to Megumi Yokota - Part 2

What Happened to Megumi Yokota - Part 3

There are continuing developments, so there will be more to report. And, I have not yet written about the kidnapings from Europe, or the kidnapings of thousands of South Koreans (including a famous movie star and her husband).

Tricks of the Main Stream Media

In the March 29^th issue of The American Spectator George Neumayr writes, Lying Jesuits and Journalists in which he discusses liberal hypocrisy and mendacious word selection.

The media's instinctual use of "authorities" who are frauds -- the Drinans who clog their rolodexes (priests appear on television in proportion to their willingness to upend Catholic teachings) -- was just the tip of the iceberg during a weekend of torrential bias. Whenever a cultural controversy pops up, the bias that mainstream reporters furiously deny comes rushing back. Reporters and commentators were thrilled with the chance to try and nail Republicans for "overreach." To embarrass the Republicans and ensure that everyone would feel good about killing Schiavo, the media dug down into their bag of malicious tricks, using tendentious polling, a smear job against Tom DeLay, reports of faux-concern about conservative division (worrying about a cohesive Republican Party is of course foremost in their minds), and flat-out Orwellian propaganda to confuse the matter as much as possible.

The reliance on euphemism was almost nonstop. Much of the coverage was cast in the passive terms of not "prolonging" a life rather than starving a woman to death. The journalists rooting for her death didn't quite have the courage of their convictions. They didn't want to call murder by its proper name, so they searched out softer names for it.
Lest anyone figure out that the humanism of liberalism is essentially Hitlerite -- think about how often killing people deemed undesirables is the final solution in liberal schemes of human improvement -- specificity had to be avoided at all costs.

Just as reporters are more comfortable calling soon-to-be-killed human fetuses "blastocysts," so they prefer calling a disabled human like Schiavo a "vegetable." Reporters helped launch the abortion movement with euphemisms denying the humanity of children, now they help the euthanasia movement pick up speed with euphemisms denying the humanity of the disabled and the elderly. [emphasis mine - ed.]

There is much more, read it all.

Liberals Refuse to Understand Ronald Reagan

The San Francisco Chronicle printed a review by Josh Green of two new biographies of Ronald Reagan, The Great Communicator revisited - Historians land early blows in the slugfest over Reagan's legacy. It is not my aim to review a book review, but I did note the following in the review of Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons by Paul Lettow, Random House; 328 Pages; $25.95;

But the book fails to address SDI's legacy: an estimated $70 billion spent over 10 years for a system that still does not work, even in its latest incarnation under the Bush administration as a ground-based, midrange defense missile system. One could argue that SDI effectively scared the hell out of the Soviets and may have changed the dynamics of Cold War bargaining. But the ultimate failure of missile defense technology -- which, judging from last year's dismal test of the most recent interceptor missiles, still needs some work -- is a glaring omission.

SDI was not a failure, as is implied here. Its unstated purpose was to cause the Soviet Union (remember them?) to get into an arms race to develop a similar system, which Mr. Reagan knew they could not do, and in doing so, collapse. That is a purpose that could not be made public, else the Soviets would not have fallen for it.

SDI worked perfectly and did not have to actually be built, today's technical difficulties notwithstanding. (The ground-based system being developed is an entirely different system although it does use technologies developed for SDI.) This does not suit liberals, though, so they willfully refuse to accept it.

Mr. Green's disdain for President Reagan is evident from the very first paragraph of his book review. He simply cannot accept the notion that Mr. Reagan was a brilliant man who knew how to pull our country out of the morass that Mr. Carter put us in;

They all get their own libraries, no matter how little they may have read while in office.

They prefer to portray Mr. Reagan as some sort of bumbling idiot who happened to stumble into the Presidency and then stumble out of it after eight years.

Ronald Reagan knew something that Jimmy Carter and his leftists and various other brands of liberals and "intellectuals" did not. You cannot defeat an implacable enemy by "engaging and understanding" them. Liberals make the same arguments today in their campaign against the War on Terror. They are as wrong now as they were then.

And that is why they are not qualified to lead the country.

Oppression of Christians in the DPRK

While the LA Times endeavors to put a friendly face on the most murderous regime in the world, the Dear Murderer has not changed. The Christian Post reported on March 25^th, Christianity Rigorously Repressed in North Korea, Says Federal Agency.

North Korea represses religion and has an official ideology that is a form of secular humanism, a bipartisan federal agency said on Thursday.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which was created by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 to monitor religious freedom in other countries, said interviews with North Korean refugees showed a pattern of arrest, imprisonment, torture and execution for public expressions of religion.

"Any reappearance of Christianity, possibly permeating from northern China to where many thousands of North Koreans fled from famine in the 1990s, is rigorously repressed," USCIRF North Korean researcher David Hawk said at a news conference, as reported by Reuters.

And Kim is not satisfied with killing only the Christians in his own country;

In recent years Pyongyang has reportedly grown worried about “spiritual pollution” of North Koreans and has attempted to persecute such “corrupt” citizens living abroad. In China, for example, where there are 100,000-300,000 North Korean refugees, Pyongyang has obtained support from Beijing to hunt the “fugitives” down.

A Japanese human rights activist reported that the North Korean government built a fake church in China (in Yanji, Jilin province), just 20 km from the border. There, Chinese police arrested many North Korean refugees and had them sent back to North Korea, the activist claimed. During long interrogations, North Korean government authorities reportedly ask the repatriated refugees what kind of contact they've had with South Korean missionaries working in China, if they read the Bible or attend church services. Those who admit to having contact with missionaries or any other religious affiliations and activities are reportedly imprisoned and condemned to death.

So there is blood on China's hands too. This does not come as a big surprise to Orthodox Christians.

William Kristol Nails It

In a piece published by The Weekly Standard for April 4^th, 2005 William Kristol has a few things to say about our black-robed oligarchy in "Evolving Standards of Decency".

First a word of thanks;

THANK GOD FOR OUR JUDGES. (Oops! Sorry. No offense, your honors. I didn't mean to write "God." Or at least I didn't mean anything specific or exclusionary or sectarian or unconstitutional by writing "God." It's just an expression I occasionally use. It does go way back in U.S. history. I hope it's okay.)

Anyway. Thank God for our robed masters. If it weren't for them, Christopher Simmons might soon be executed. In September 1993, seven months shy of his 18th birthday, Simmons decided it would be interesting to kill someone. He told his buddies they could get away with it because they were still minors. He broke into the house of Shirley Crook in Jefferson County, Missouri, bound her hands and feet, drove her to a bridge, covered her face with tape, and threw her into the Meramec River, where she drowned. He confessed to the crime, and was sentenced to death according to the laws of Missouri.

Later he suggests that we should not judge the judges too harshly;

So our judges deserve some criticism. But we should not be too harsh. For example, it would be wrong to suggest, as some conservatives have, that our judicial elite is systematically biased against "life." After all, they have saved the life of Christopher Simmons. It would be wrong to argue, as some critics have, that our judges systematically give too much weight to the husband's wishes in situations like Terri Schiavo's. After all, our judges have for three decades given husbands (or fathers) no standing at all to participate in the decision whether to kill their unborn children. It would be wrong to claim that our judges don't take seriously legislation passed by the elected representatives of the people. After all, our judges are committed to upholding the "rule of law"--though not, perhaps, the rule of actual laws passed by actual lawmakers. And it would be wrong to accuse our judges of being heartless. After all, Judges Carnes and Hull of the 11th U.S. Circuit told us, "We all have our own family, our own loved ones, and our own children."

As Charles would say, read it all for it is good.

Liberals will Never Get It

I was looking at Ancient Faith Radio when I discovered Terry Mattingly's blog, GetReligion. One of the writers of that blog, Douglas LeBlanc wrote, Ashley Smith's vilification begins. Ashley Smith is the heroic woman who helped Atlanta police capture Brian Nichols. Brian Nichols is the guy who killed a judge, a court reporter, a Fulton County sheriff, and a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on Friday, March 11^th.

The story of Ashley Smith's heroism was bound to annoy some journalists as being too pat, too unbelievable, too much of a redemptive ending in a story of carnage and mayhem. Lee Siegel, television critic of The New Republic, raises some fair questions about whether Smith's story should be accepted uncritically, although reporters will have a difficult time gaining access to her captor, Brian Nichols, for some time to come.

Siegel's tone turns petty, however, when he characterizes CNN's coverage of Smith as an attempt to gain an audience among the 20 million readers of Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven Life.

Go read the whole piece for details and a wonderful conclusion where Mr. LeBlanc quotes Rabbi Philip Pohl, who compares Smith to the heroine from the book of Esther.

Apparently being a Christian is too great a crime to be forgiven.

What Happened to Megumi Yokota - Part 3

North Korea originally said that she died in March of 1993. When presented with credible reports of her alive in 1994 they changed their story to say that she committed suicide in 1994. These reports came from defectors from North Korea to South Korea, not the least of whom was An Myong Jin and Kaoru Hasuike, another abductee. Since then they have done whatever they could to obfuscate her life.

According to the "Dear Wacko-Man" Megumi was buried after her suicide, and her body dug up years later to be cremated by her "husband". This ashes were the supposed provided to Megumi's family in a so-called act of compassion. Some compassion, the ashes were fake. This was proved by DNA testing in Japan after the ashes arrive there. Read about it in these articles;
From the Japan Times, Remains not those of Yokota.
From the BBC, Japan fury over abductee remains.

Megumi Outside of Intelligence Agency - Possible Composite Photograph

Ah Myong Jin reports that the location of the photograph is well known to him as it is just outside of a training institute (college) for the Intelligence Agency of the DPRK. He says that there could not possibly have been a car there since she was standing in a place that is a historical commemoration of a visit by Kim Il Sung. There is a bench there and a memorial tree planted in memory of the visit. I do not have information of Megumi's height, but Ah also reports that the proportions of Megumi with respect to the car are incorrect (if this photo is true she would have to be very short). These two facts indicate that the image of the car was artificially pasted into the photo. Sadly, I do not have the links to these reports, they exist in Japanese news sources and are provided to me in translation by my wife.

Not only did the DPRK provide fake remains and falsified photographs of Megumi to her parents, in a bizarre and cruel twist, they want them back!
N Korea demands return of remains;

"Now that the ultra-right elements of Japan insist that the remains are not those of Megumi... the DPRK cannot but urge the Japanese side to return them just as they were along with the DNA test data as demanded by the husband of Megumi," the agency said.

Is she still alive? That possibility has been advanced by several sources. The Mainichi Daily News on November 24, 2004 reported, North Korean deserter says Yokota probably still alive;

Abduction victim Megumi Yokota, who North Korea insists died in the 1990s, is probably still alive, a former Pyongyang agent who deserted to South Korea said in an interview with the Mainichi in Tokyo.

and;

The former agent believed the ashes given to the Japanese delegates were those of another person. He suspects that North Korean officials burned the person's body and claimed the ashes as Yokota's in a bid to make it impossible for Japanese officials to identify them.

During talks with the Japanese delegation, the man who claimed to be Yokota's husband refused to be photographed on the grounds that he worked for an intelligence office.

"I think he refused to be photographed because he is not her husband," An said.

An added that a Japanese abductee, not a North Korean, might be Yokota's husband.

As for North Korean officials' claims that most abduction records have been burned or discarded, An said, "Intelligence offices still use those records 20 or 30 years later. They never burn them."

How is it possible that she could yet live? There are rumors that she was a teacher of very senior officials and children of very senior officials of the DPRK including Kim Jong Il himself. An article that covers the photographs includes this rumor, Photos Intesify N. Korean Kidnap Outrage;

Media accounts have focused on inconsistencies in North Korean accounts of Yokota's death: changing dates, alleged contradictions in hospital records and suspicions that, as an attractive young woman, she was associated too closely with North Korea's elite to be allowed to leave.

"I imagine she had been very close to Kim Jong Il. I hear people say she had been his teacher and so on," said Kaneko Tomiyama, a 51-year-old Tokyo woman. "I think she was not allowed to return to Japan because she knew too much about the North."

The man identified as her husband also reportedly refused to provide hair and blood samples that would prove he fathered the girl identified as their daughter.

It is hard to imagine a more bizarre story of more cold-hearted cruelty than that shown by Kim Jong Il.

Ahmed Al-Jarallah Gets It

Ahmed Al-Jarallah is the Editor-in-Chief of the Arab Times. This was published on March 20^th. The Arab Summit in Algeria did indeed convene on the 22^nd.

I have no idea what they are publishing in the Arab language edition but this, at least, is pretty good. No 'summit,' no nonsense;

PEACE initiatives of the United States are the only things we see on the political horizon of the region. Arabs, well-known for their penchant for hysterical reactions, are digging into their dictionaries looking for new words to denounce these initiatives and coining new slogans to chant while they run around burning effigies and flags. This what the Arab Summit will see in Algeria Tuesday - a repetition of a similar scene which led to the failure of the Tunis Summit when Arab leaders preferred to go home.

The current crisis in the Arab world reflects the position of its leaders and not the people. We know citizens of the Arab world are far more advanced than their leaders. It is a proven fact Arab leaders neither communicate with their people nor have an idea of their true ambitions. Some Arab leaders even tried to create a people of their own, wanting them to be silly, low in self-esteem and easily led. These leaders, who trained their people with the help of intelligence agencies to participate in demonstrations praising them, don't even care for the suffering of their people.

The Syrian regime, which lacks wisdom and refuses to understand the ground realities, was surprised by the uprising of the people of Lebanon, which it has been occupying for 30 years. The stunned regime didn't bother to study the reasons for this revolution and hasn't cared to analyse this phenomenon, which has been going on for over two months. The Syrian regime is not the only Arab regime which is incapable of staying in touch with its own people. The Palestinian regime was doing the same until the death of Yasser Arafat. Now the Palestinian Authority is able to sense the needs of its people and has succeeded in pacifying armed groups. It has made various Palestinian groups agree to an armistice as a prelude to reconciliation.

I hope that he's right about the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinians, but I have little faith in them.

It would be nice if a few more people over there would stop the idiocy and work toward the end of tyranny, the Syrians need to wake up and smell the coffee.

Death Continues on his Way

Allan at the Barking Moonbat Early Warning System writes On A Pale Horse.

Death is laughing.

Judicial Oligarchy

No, we're not there yet, but if we continue to allow political issues to be settled by judicial fiat, we will be (and no, I am not talking about Terri Schiavo).

Ann Coulter has been a lightning rod for many because she has written some outlandish things, although she wrote them tongue-in-cheek. I suspect that she truly did not want the New York Time building destroyed instead of the World Trade Center. I enjoy reading her columns.

Via BlogMeister USA (thanks Pam), this piece by Ann Coulter, STARVED FOR JUSTICE. She uses the Terri Schiavo case as a starting point for a discussion, in her own inimitable way, of judicial power and its abuse.

I note that whenever liberals talk about "federalism" or "states' rights," they are never talking about a state referendum or a law passed by the duly elected members of a state legislature — or anything voted on by the actual citizens of a state. What liberals mean by "federalism" is: a state court ruling. Just as "choice" refers to only one choice, "the rule of law" refers only to "the law as determined by a court."

As a practical matter, courts will generally have the last word in interpreting the law because courts decide cases. But that's a pragmatic point. There is nothing in the law, the Constitution or the concept of "federalism" that mandates giving courts the last word. Other public officials, including governors and presidents, are sworn to uphold the law, too.

It would be chaotic if public officials made a habit of disregarding court rulings simply because they disagreed with them. But a practice borne of practicality has led the courts to greater and greater flights of arrogance. Sublimely confident that no one will ever call their bluff, courts are now regularly discovering secret legal provisions requiring abortion and gay marriage and prohibiting public prayer and Ten Commandments displays.

Just once, we need an elected official to stand up to a clearly incorrect ruling by a court. Any incorrect ruling will do, but my vote is for a state court that has ordered a disabled woman to be starved to death at the request of her adulterous husband.

And this pointed bit;

What was supposed to be the "least dangerous" branch has become the most dangerous — literally to the point of ordering an innocent American woman to die, and willfully disregarding congressional subpoenas. They can't be stopped — solely because the entire country has agreed to treat the pronouncements of former ambulance-chasers as the word of God. The only power courts have is that everyone jumps when they say "jump." (Also, people seem a little intimidated by the black robes. From now on we should make all judges wear lime-green leisure suits.)

President Andrew Jackson is supposed to have said of a Supreme Court ruling he opposed: "Well, John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." The court's ruling was ignored. And yet, somehow, the republic survived.

Read her column, even if only to get her entirely gratuitous and delightful stabs at the Democrats.

AND, she does know something about the Law.

I have previously written on judicial power here, Overturn Marbury v. Madison?

Public Execution in North Korea - English Video

Here is streaming video from the Associated Press. This is only a video clip 56 seconds long. It is much easier to download, but leaves a lot out.

Their version of what is happening is different from the Japanese one. They believe that the crowd watching the trial and execution are simply curious onlookers. This is because news stories written at the AP are written by idiots.

Another difference is, they say the men are being tried for trying to cross into China. That differs from the Japanese version which says that the men were working with a Chinese broker to help North Koreans escape the country.

In fact the AP only got two things right, the manner of execution and the fact that the public execution is for the purpose of terrorizing North Koreans into remaining in the country.

I will always trust Japanese news sources over the AP.

My earlier post on this subject.

The Japanese Indepentent News Net video.

UPDATE 8/20/06: All of the links that I have posted for these videos are dead. I had a video saved on my hard drive that shows the execution of March 2nd in Yuson. I got it from www.CharlesBurke.com.

Public Execution in North Korea

Democrats Learn from Nixon

You may have heard about that so-called "talking points" memo that was supposedly circulated to all Republican members of the U.S. Senate. Hindrocket at Power Line has a few things to say about that, A Fishy Story Gets Fishier;

We have expressed skepticism about the authenticity of the "talking points" memo; the most recent developments have only served to heighten our skepticism.

First, an alert reader pointed out that the copy of the memo that was leaked to a left-wing web site does not quite match the "exact, full copy of the document" as quoted by ABC News. ABC News identified four errors in the document, each noted with a (sic). The first such error is in the very first word, a misspelling of Terri Schiavo's name. (Interestingly, ABC did not note as an error the fact that the memo got the number of the Senate bill wrong.) But in the scanned version of the memo itself, as now leaked to the web, three of the four typographical errors have been corrected. So, what is going on? Is the memo now being presented as authentic one that was fabricated or, more likely, cleaned up after the fact?

Second, our Washington sources tell us that a number of Republican Senators say they did not receive, and have never seen, the memo. This contradicts the implication that the memo is some kind of official Republican document that was circulated to all Republican Senators.

Third, the only clear evidence as to the origin of the memo is that it was circulated by Democratic staffers. Tom Maguire, author of Just One Minute, wrote to point out this story from yesterday's New York Times:

As tensions festered among Republicans, Democratic aides passed out an unsigned one-page memorandum that they said had been distributed to Senate Republicans. "This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue," the memorandum said.

So the memo has been traced to a group of Democratic staffers. What evidence is there that its origins go back any farther? None, that we're aware of.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (Moonbat-NJ) wants an investigation. I think he would regret it. Let's have that investigation. A nice big fat public transparent investigation. If this memo came from a Republican staffer, that that person must be instantly fired and his political career ended. I don' think that that is the case.

This is a Democrat dirty trick. And if the Democratic Party staffer that started it is found, he should be instantly fired and his political career ended. They won't do that though, they will protect him.

[Note to liberals, I use he/him in the correct English manner where, in context, it refers to both genders. If you don't understand that, buy a good grammar.]

What Happened to Megumi Yokota - Part 2

Locations of Abductions In Japan as Known Prior to Kim Jong Il's Confession

Megumi Yokota was the schoolgirl abducted from Niigata in the map shown. Part 1 discussed the actual event of her kidnapping.

As mentioned in the previous post, after growing up she trained spies for the North Korean government. On December 11^th, 2004 the Kyodo News Service reported; Abductee Yokota may have taught Japanese to N. Korean agent;

TOKYO, Dec. 11, Kyodo - A repatriated Japanese abductee says that Megumi Yokota, who was abducted to North Korea in 1977 at age 13, taught the Japanese language to a North Korean woman called ''Suk Ki,'' sources close to the abduction issue said Saturday.

Fukie Chimura has given the information to families of other abductees, the sources said, adding that Suk Ki might be Kim Suk Ki, who is believed to have underwent (sic) spy training along with former North Korean agent Kim Hyon Hui.

Nothing more is really known about her. The Dear Thug has provided three photographs of Megumi to her parents. You have already seen one. Here is another.

Composite Photograph of Megumi

This photograph purports to show Megumi as a young woman. There are several problems with this picture. On November 18^th the Mainichi Daily News reported, N. Korea accused of doctoring photo of missing abductee;

After returning to Japan, delegates gave copies of the three photos to the parents of Yokota, who was reportedly kidnapped at age 13.

Looking at one of them, which depicts an adult woman Pyongyang claimed to be Yokota, group members working for the missing people's relatives said Wednesday that it might have been doctored.

"The woman's shadow and the shadow of the trees in the background are cast in different directions," a group member said.

They suspect that the photo is a composite to hide a scene or a person in the original photo.

And, in an article published on November 19^th, 2004 the Japan Times reported;

One of three photographs of Megumi Yokota provided by Pyongyang is probably a composite, a group working on behalf of North Korean abductees' relatives quoted a professional photographer as saying.

North Korea gave three pictures of what it claimed is the abductee to Japanese officials at the abduction talks that ended Monday.

"It is probably a composite photograph, because there are shadows in both directions," the photographer was quoted as saying.

Examination of Composite Photograph of Megumi

Why would Kim go through such effort to fake evidence of Megumi's life? We will look at that in a later post.

What Happened to Megumi Yokota - Part 1

This is a question that I have intended to post on for some time. The case of Megumi Yokota has special poignancy for Japanese people. Her case is mentioned in two previous posts;
North Korea Kidnaps Japanese - Background and
North Korea Lies To Japanese Families (this post includes the hint that Megumi may still be alive).

After she was kidnapped and grew up (she was still a child of 13 when she was taken) she became a teacher of North Korean spies one of whom was involved with the "spy" who bombed a South Korean airliner in 1987.

Megumi in a photo supplied by the DPRK

Kim Jong Il admitted to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that agents of his personality cult government had kidnapped 13 Japanese nationals (an act of war, BTW). Megumi was kidnapped on November 15^th, 1977.

In a story published the day after Kim's confession to Mr. Koizumi The Guardian published the story with this about Megumi;

Megumi Yokota, the first of those on the list provided by the North Korean authorities, was 13 when she failed to return from a badminton class in 1977. She was last seen walking on her usual route home along a coastal road in Niigata, northern Japan. For 20 years, her parents thought she was just one of the thousands of people who go missing each year, but then reports started to emerge that a Japanese woman of her age and appearance had been seen in Pyongyang.

One captured agent had told them that Megumi had been carried off by boat and that she had struggled so hard in the hold of the vessel that she arrived in North Korea covered in blood from trying to scratch at the hull.

Ahead of yesterday's meeting between the two leaders, her parents had been hopeful for news that she was still alive. Instead, they were told that she had married, left a daughter and died.

More to follow.

Liberals - The Tolerant Ones?

On March 7^th The Drudge Report flagged this story via Yahoo! Financial, PLAYGIRL Editor-in-Chief Outs Herself as Republican! (Matt Drudge's version here).

So how did this work out? Drudge reports today, 'PLAYGIRL' EDITOR FIRED AFTER OUTING SELF AS REPUBLICAN. In an email Michele Zipp sent to Drudge;

"After underlings expressed their disinterest of working for an outed Republican editor, I have a strong suspicion that my position was no longer valued by Playgirl executives. I also received a phone call from a leading official from Playgirl magazine, in which he stated with a laugh, "I wouldn't have hired you if I knew you were a Republican.

"I just wanted to let you know of the fear the liberal left has about a woman with power possessing Republican views."

So liberals stand for freedom of what, exactly?

Oh yeah, they stand for the freedom to kill the severely ill, mentally retarded, and the unborn while leaving murderers alive. I almost forgot.

Public Execution in North Korea - Video

Kim Jong Il has loudly denied that public executions are carried out in the DPRK. Three days ago my wife was reading a Japanese news site when she found a video of recent public executions that occurred on two consecutive days. It is a 20.1mb .wmv file and I have been trying to figure out a way to get it on the internet so that I could provide you with the link.

The Mutant Frog Travelogue has solved the problem.

North Korea Public Execution

The video. Right click to save it to your computer. It is 20.1mb, so be patient.

The video shows two consecutive days. During the first day you see a group of people brought to watch the trial and execution. It occurs out at the execution ground with the posts prepared on the other side of a van. The trial takes about twenty minutes. The crowd is then led around the van and two of the prisoners are executed, the other nine sentenced to prison terms. The crime? Crossing into North Korea from China numerous times to help North Koreans escape and being paid by a broker in China to do it. Immediately after they are shot you can here a guard ask loudly "Are they dead?".

On the second day the "trial" is even quicker, with the execution posts being put up during the trial. One man is executed for the same crime. Following the execution a guard loudly announces to the crowd, "this is what you get if you do not respect and work for Kim Jong Il Shogun".

After that you hear a raspy voice telling of the events. That is the guy who took the video disguising his voice.

Now we know what one of Kim's non-existent public executions looks like.


UPDATE 8/20/06: It appears that all of the above links are long dead. Here is another video that I had saved on my computer hard drive. It is now at www.CharlesBurke.com. It shows only the executions of the second day.

Public Execution in North Korea

Overturn Marbury v. Madison?

Abuse of judicial power is common. Judges routinely impose their personal political views on the law, particularly on the liberal side, resulting oftentimes in rule by judicial fiat. Now the Supreme Court finds that the United States Constitution is not sufficient and foreign law (and foreign dinner conversations) now must substitute.

Ben Shapiro at Towmhall.com has an interesting idea, It's time to end judicial review;

Perhaps judicial review wasn't such a great idea after all. In Marbury v. Madison (1803), Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall assumed the power of judicial review over acts of the legislature. According to Marshall, the Constitution vested in the Supreme Court the ability to overturn legitimately enacted laws if those laws conflicted with the Constitution itself.

It is anything but clear that the Constitution meant to create the power of judicial review. Marshall's opinion is full of holes, both textual and logical. As Judge Learned Hand stated, Marshall's opinion "will not bear scrutiny." Professor Alexander Bickel of Yale University agreed in his work "The Least Dangerous Branch": "The opinion is very vulnerable."

He is aware that some may consider his thesis radical and acknowleges it;

No doubt this view will be called radical. But, as "Brutus" wrote, "when this power is lodged in the hands of men independent of the people, and of their representatives, and who are not, constitutionally, accountable for their opinions, no way is left to control them but with a high hand and an outstretched arm ."

Congress Has to Intervene because Judges Cannot Think

evariste over at Discarded Lies posts, Cait's Oz: Terri's cerebral cortex has NOT been replaced with spinal fluid. This story demonstrates very poor logical thinking by the Judges who sit on the Second District Court of the State of Florida.

Why Don't They Just Shoot Her?

Andrew C. McCarthy at the National Review Online asks some excellent questions.

Is Prosecution the Solution?
Terri Schiavo is being tortured, torture is a crime, therefore...

The U.S. Congress and the Florida state legislature are struggling to overcome impasses in their efforts to enact laws that might save Terri Schiavo's life, or at least have her case reviewed by federal courts. But is there a more straightforward solution? Excruciatingly slow starvation and dehydration is clearly a form of torture. Torture is a crime. So why don't the state law-enforcement authorities in Florida prosecute Michael Schiavo and any person who is aiding and abetting him in carrying it out?

After the feeding tube that sustains Terri Schiavo was removed on Friday afternoon, National Review's John Miller asked a question (on NRO's weblog, The Corner) which was penetrating in its trenchant simplicity: "If somebody put a pistol to [Terri] Schiavo's head and pulled the trigger — you know, to give the "dying process" a little nudge — would the shooter be guilty of murder under Florida law?" Well, given that we've had no small amount of propaganda from right-to-die activists about the purported humaneness of letting Terri wither and die, why doesn't someone just shoot her — or at least administer the procedure employed to execute in capital cases. It would, after all, be quicker and thus more humane, right?

Mr. McCarthy writes an excellent legal discussion.

Murder by any other name is still murder.

UPDATE:
I don't know how I missed this, but if Terri dies Michael will be guilty of murder.
Read this from Discarded Lies;
Terri told what is about to happen to her, cries

Who is Ahn Chol?

The material in my earlier post about Ahn Chol dates from some time in the year 2000 as far as I can tell. I was curious to find out if he has survived. Running a Google search I was able to find some information on him, but none more recent than late 2003.

In January of 2003 MSNBC let Ahn Myong Chol tell us about himself in his own words.

Former guard: Ahn Myong Chol
North Korean prison guard remembers atrocities

Despite all efforts by that monstrous regime, even though he worked as a camp driver and later a guard, Ahn Chol did not lose his humanity.

He was at four different camps including Camp 22, which gas chambers I have already written about.

The article is not terribly long, but each sentence and every word that Ahn Chol says is important. I cannot even begin to do an adequate job of summarizing it. I don't read very many things that bring tears to my eyes, but this did. Some of it is strange as well as tragic;

At first I felt it was a movie film studio for the propaganda of North Korea, speaking ill of South Korean government. But actually the officer who brought me to the prison instructed me not to speak and not to smile. I was instructed if there is a prisoner who tries to escape or fight me, then I was allowed to kill him.

They call prisoners “re-settlers.” They called the prison the managing office for the “re-settlers,” and they call the prisoners non-guilty persons.

Some of it is only tragic;

The guard system is so strict there are few escapees, and sometimes we need to find out a way to be, get away from our guard’s life in the prison. And we try to find a pretext in order to go to college. One of my colleagues tried to make a prisoner escape by climbing the barbed wire fence, and then he shot him, and he went to college.

And then there is the story of Han Jin Duk;

At that time the tunnel was passing near the pig pen of the camp, and about 500 political prisoners were participating and there was one female named Han Jin Duk, 26 years old. I was in charge of giving food to the pigs. And my supervisor, when he saw the woman, she was beautiful. And he raped her, and he was found by the watchman officer. And he was investigated. My superior, his rank was reduced and the woman was sent to the detention center And then I didn’t see her for one year.

One day I was going to the place to load the coal, I met her. And I noticed she was exactly that woman, and I asked her, how you could survive. And she told me, that yes, I survived. But she showed me her body, and it was all burned by fire.

After six months I met her at the corn storage in Kusan district and found her putting on a used tire on her knees because her legs were cut off. Because of a coal mine wagon ran over her knees. And all she could do now was separate the corn grains from the cob.

The reason why she was forced to go to the prison is her father’s elder brother was purged at the Anbyon, Kanwhan Do province. She went when she was 5 years old. All of the family members were imprisoned. Her mother starved to death, and her brother also starved to death in the prison. I met her at age 26. So it means she was in the prison for 21 years. I think she no longer is in the world.

This is not even close to being everything in only a moderately long article. Go and read about what happened to two girls who were trying to take a piece of noodle out of a polluted pond.

But Ahn found his humanity;

I thought it is natural to punish or beat a guilty person. Because I was a driver, and I was a guard. But in the course of time, I had the opportunity to talk to the prisoners and found they are not guilty. And when I see the senior citizen kneel down in front of young guard, and he was treated badly, then my heart was breaking. And I thought this is not a humane thing.

Once I beat one person while training in tae kwan do. I kicked him with my foot, but fortunately he didn’t die.

And then;

My way of thinking was changed. While I was starting as a driver, before I took it as natural, and after a while I thought this is not the right way. So I was already changed before coming to the south. I didn’t change my way of thinking here in South Korea, in order to buy people’s hearts.

Because of Kim Jong Il and his subordinates and a small portion of citizens, the total nation of 20 million people are suffering such hardships. And the people are now changing to think that this regime is not right one. But they cannot speak out, because of Kim Jong Il’s atrocities.

This man has become a true hero.

Washington State Beer Drinkers

My friend Ted of Head's Up Brewing in Silverdale, WA has a blog - Head's Up Brewing. Unless you are prepared for a very steep increase in in your taxes, you need to read this, URGENT - BEER TAX HIKE WARNING.

Oh, and welcome to the blogosphere, Ted!

Ahn Chol - One of the Very Brave

Ahn Chol is a guy who regularly commits horrible crimes demanding immediate execution. He secretly videotapes the ordinary lives of the people who have the misfortune to live in North Korea, and gets that video into the hands of Japanese and Western journalists. To do this he crosses the border between the DPRK and China.

A Child in North Korea

He lives under constant threat of death from the Dear Murderer-Freak Himself, yet continues to inform the world of the horror that is North Korea.

Ahn Chol's most recent video coverage of North Korea!

　This August, I saw Ahn Chol several times at a city located by the China-North Korea border. This was in preparation for Ahn Chol's operation to secretly enter and film the reality of North Korea. We decided on filming the same black market that Ahn Chol filmed 2 years ago.

　There were two reasons why we decided on filming the same location. One was to measure the amount of "change" that has occurred to North Korea ever since it began receiving a great amount of foreign aid, and after Kim Jong Il began to show enthusiasm in foreign policy. We wanted to reveal the reality of what went on inside North Korea.

　The other reason was purely strategic. After the revealing of the shocking footage Ahn Chol filmed two years ago, the furious Kim Jong Il ordered the secret police the arrest of Ahn Chol. Kim Jong Il showed the footage to the head staff of all different sections of the secret police, and upon doing so, ordered the arrest and execution of Ahn Chol. "The man most wanted by Kim Jong Il". Ever since, Ahn Chol has been the target of a heated investigation by North Korean agents. Returning to North Korea under these circumstances would be incredibly dangerous. So, in order to fool the enemy, we decided to film the exact same location as last time.

We get to see the effect of all of the food aid that is entering the country (the United States,Kim's most hated enemy, provides large amounts of food to North Korea) and how it helps the "worker's paradise".

　This has been filmed in a large city that is a major distribution station of foreign aid. Still, one can see starving orphans weakly wondering the streets of the black market in search for crumbs of food. The food that was calculated to be enough for all the North Koreans has somehow found it's way into the black markets, and are now sold at expensive prices. The film shows a sign that prices wheat for 80-60 won. The average income of a North Korean per month is said to be about 80 won, so an average citizen wouldn't even be able to buy a bag of wheat.

Wheat that only the upper class can afford.

Read about the re-establishment of the distribution system. A system that distributes grain mean't for cattle with 10% rice mixed in to avoid foreign criticism. Why only 10%? Most aid goes into the hands of the upper class in this, the classless society and dream state of the Left™.

But, at least there is some benefit to the people of North Korea, right?

This is who can afford to buy food in North Korea.

　The other change is the complete revival of the secret police. When the food shortage became critical during 97-98, the threat from the secret police towards citizens weakened, and they almost lost faith in their strength. But the food aid completely revived them. Some of them even boast that the reason why North Korea doesn't change isn't because of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il or the Juche (self-reliance) philosophy, but because of them, the secret police.

Read it all.

The Oppressed Will See The Lies

The free flow of information has always been a problem for those who tyrannize their populations. It had a lot to do with the fall of the Soviet Union and the spread of freedom through eastern Europe. It is the free flow of information that is loosening the grip of the Communist government in China. Only leaders who can completely isolate their populations from outside information can hope to maintain their tyranny.

It how seems that the murderer-freak Kim Jong Il has run into a problem. In its March 15^th edition the New York Times reports, How Electronics Are Penetrating North Korea's Isolation;

SEOUL, South Korea - Halfway through a video from North Korea, the camera pans on a propaganda portrait of Kim Jong Il, North Korea's leader, magnificent in his general's dress uniform with gold epaulets. Scribbled in black ink across his smooth face is a demand for "freedom and democracy."

If genuine, the graffiti speaks of political opponents willing to risk execution to get their message out. If staged, the video means that a North Korean hustler was willing to deface a picture of the "Dear Leader" to earn a quick profit by selling it to a South Korean human rights group.

Either way, the 35-minute video is the latest evidence that new ways of thinking are stealing into North Korea, perhaps corroding the steely controls on ideology and information that have kept the Kim family in power for almost 60 years.

So, how does this happen?

The construction of cellular relay stations last fall along the Chinese side of the border has allowed some North Koreans in border towns to use prepaid Chinese cellphones to call relatives and reporters in South Korea, defectors from North Korea say. And after DVD players swept northern China two years ago, entrepreneurs collected castoff videocassette recorders and peddled them in North Korea. Now tapes of South Korean soap operas are so popular that state television in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, is campaigning against South Korean hairstyles, clothing and slang, visitors and defectors have said.

"In the 1960's in the Soviet Union, it was cool to wear blue jeans and listen to rock and roll," said Andrei Lankov, a Russian exchange student in the North at Kim Il Sung University in 1985, who now teaches about North Korea at Kookmin University here in the South. "Today, it is cool for North Koreans to look and behave South Korean, as they do in the television serials. That does not bode well for the long-term survival of the regime."

Things that we take for granted. Things that are ubiquitous in free (and not so free) societies and are viewed as essentially unimportant may have the power to shake loose the worst, most totalitarian regime in the world.

At a human rights conference here on Feb. 15, defectors estimated in interviews that about one-third of the defectors in South Korea regularly talk to family members back in North Korea, calling owners of prepaid Chinese cellphones at a prearranged time.

To counter this, North Korea has reportedly started border patrols using Japanese equipment that can track cellphone calls. Reporters tell stories of their contacts who only make calls from their private garden plots in the hills, burying the cellphone in the ground after each call.

While Chinese cellphones only work a few miles inside North Korea, the videocassette phenomenon has reportedly spread throughout the nation, reaching into every area where there is electricity.

Read the article to learn about the videotapes and how the government is trying to move against them. This is not trivial. Prisons in the DPRK exist to kill slowly, as we have seen in earlier posts. As soon as I figure out how to host it, I will post video of the trials and executions of people convicted of helping other people cross the Chinese border (the trials last about twenty minutes with the executions immediately after - the posts to which the prisoners are tied are put up during the trials, which are held on site).

Lastly;

Draconian controls on internal travel and on travel to China have been breaking down, he said, and hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have traveled to and from Korean-speaking areas of China, exposing them to a thriving market economy and more South Korean television broadcasts.

"They are gradually learning about South Korean prosperity," Dr. Lankov said. "This is a death sentence to the regime. North Korea's claim to legitimacy is based on its ability to deliver the worker's paradise now. What if everyone sees that it is not delivering?"

This bears watching.

And a big thanks to Tom the Pooklekufr for the link.

EU Offers Appeasement to North Korea

In an opinion piece for the Japan Times in its March 17^th edition, Pyongyang under EU's wing Glyn Ford and Soyoung Kwon write about a "new independent stance on foreign policy issues" that looks a lot like an old stance. The DPRK is to be punished for developing nuclear weapons in violation of every agreement and treaty that it haws signed with free oil. That's right;

Reflecting this new stance, the European Parliament this week passed a comprehensive resolution on the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and nuclear arms in North Korea and Iran:

It urges the resumption of the supply of heavy fuel oil (HFO) to North Korea in exchange for a verified freeze of the Yongbyong heavy-water reactor, which is capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium, to avoid a further deterioration in the situation. At the same time it is calling for the European Council and Commission to offer to pay for these HFO supplies [emphasis mine - ed.].

It urges the Council of Ministers to reconsider paying 4 million Euros of the suspension costs for KEDO (the Korea Energy Development Organization) to South Korea to ensure the continued existence of an organization that could play a key role in delivering energy supplies during a settlement process [emphasis mine - ed.].

Although Kim Jong Il has openly admitted to possession of nuclear weapons, this is not enough for the EU;

The EP cannot substantiate U.S. allegations that North Korea has an HEU (highly enriched uranium) program or that North Korea provided HEU to Libya. It has called for its Foreign Affairs Committee to hold a public hearing to evaluate the evidence. "Once bitten, twice shy" is the consequence of U.S. claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. [claims which, it now appears, were true - ed.]

And of course, the required European sneer at current American leadership. Japan and the United States are the bad guys, and note the sneering reference to neocons;

In Japan, opinion is split by hardliners in the Liberal Democratic Party who view problems with North Korea as a convenient excuse to justify the abandonment of the Peace Constitution. They don't want a quick solution until crisis has catalyzed the transformation of Japan into what advocates call a "normal" country. [and why shouldn't Japan have a Constitution that she has written herself? - ed.]

The U.S. expects an EU financial commitment, but not EU participation. The neocons believe that EU participation would change the balance of forces within the talks inexorably toward critical engagement rather than confrontation.

The question is whether the EU's offer will point the U.S. into a corner or trigger a breakthrough. [Notice, the U.S. into a corner or a breakthrough by the EU. It assumes no chance of success by the U.S. and Japan in making the DPRK live up to its agreements - ed.] Will U.S. fundamentalists outmaneuver the realists who favor a diplomatic rather than military solution? Only time will tell.

What time will tell is - the Left™ will never understand that appeasement does not work. These are the same people who cannot see that the President's actions in Central Asian are causing people to stand up and demand freedom from their oppressors. These people loved Saddam Hussein, they love Bashir Assad, they loved the terrorists Arafat, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, "Dr." Rantisi, they love Hezbollah. To the Left™ these monsters are heros and their defeat is to be lamented.

So, who are these writers?

Glyn Ford, a Labour Party member of the European Parliament (representing South West England), belongs to the EP's Korean Peninsula Delegation. Soyoung Kwon is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Yep, leftists™.

A Chinese - Russian Rehearsal?

Found via The Drudge Report, REPORT: CHINA, RUSSIA TO 'REHEARSE INVASION OF TAIWAN'

The original stories are at the Russian Information Agency (RIA) Novosti
CHINA TRYING TO USE RUSSIAN ARMY FOR ITS OWN PURPOSES

MOSCOW, March 17. (RIA Novosti)-Yesterday, Chief of the Russian General Staff Yury Baluyevsky left for China to settle a scandal over the first Russian-Chinese military exercise, Commonwealth-2005, which is due to be held this fall off the Yellow Sea coast, writes Kommersant.

The initial plans were to practice operational teamwork in combating terrorism during the exercise. However, Beijing, skillfully changing the format of the exercise, has tried to re-orient the two countries' armies to practicing an invasion of Taiwan.

The choice of where the exercise will take place became a stumbling block. The Russian military selected the Xinjiang-Uigur autonomous region, basing their choice on the area's problematic nature due to Uigur separatists and its proximity to Central Asia, which has become an arena in the fight against international terrorism. However, Beijing flatly rejected the proposal. Instead, it suggested the Zhejiang province near Taiwan.

A joint exercise in this area would look too provocative and trigger a strong reaction not only from Taiwan but also America and Japan, which recently included the island in the zone of their common strategic interests.

The reason for that should be clear;

The Proximity of Japan, the Koreas, Russia, and China

On the Russian military's insistence, the exercise was shifted north to the Shangdong peninsula. However, the Chinese are trying to change the format of the exercise with proposals to enlarge the contingents with Marines and Pacific Fleet warships. Marine landings to seize the area will be practiced during the "antiterrorist" exercise.

In a follow-up article, RIA Novosti reports RUSSIAN-CHINESE MILITARY EXERCISE IS QUITE LEGITIMATE AND TRANSPARENT

BEIJING, March 17 (RIA Novosti) - The forthcoming Russo-Chinese military exercise is not directed against any third parties, Russian General Staff Chief, General of the Army Yury Baluyevsky, now visiting Beijing, said Thursday.

"This exercise is by no means directed against any third party," he said.

Commenting on the claims appearing Thursday in some Russian media to the extent that a Chinese invasion in Taiwan would be rehearsed during the exercise, General Baluyevsky dismissed them as "pure fiction".

China is pushing.

Beginning Tomorrow Afternoon...

Michael Schiavo will begin torturing his wife to death. The moral bankruptcy of Mr. Schiavo and the immoral and incompetent Judge Greer has been written on thousands of times by writers better than I. While my friends on the right side of the moral spectrum see the evil of this clearly one must wonder, why the blindness of those on the left. Perhaps it has something to do with the malignant and illiberal form of modern liberalism which results from the philosophy of monsters like Peter Singer. I still stand by my evaluation of American liberal political belief;

It seems that, according to this modern, malignant form of liberalism, the only people that shouldn't be killed are murderers.

So, about using that word, "torture". If it should happen that someone should suggest torture in even the most urgent and potentially catastrophic of cases (the ticking bomb scenario), as Alan Dershowitz did, liberals worldwide would rise up in outrage. Is the use of the word "torture" correct or justifiable?

Andrew C. McCarthy thinks so. In an article published today in National Review Online he makes the case very clearly.

Torturing Terri Schiavo
She’d be better off if she were a terrorist.

A few months back, I wrote an article for Commentary arguing that we ought to reconsider our anti-torture laws. The argument wasn’t novel. It echoed contentions that had been made with great persuasive force by Harvard’s Professor Alan Dershowitz: that under circumstances of imminent harm to thousands of moral innocents (the so-called “ticking bomb” scenario), it would be appropriate to inflict, under court-supervision, intense but non-lethal pain in an effort to wring information from a morally culpable person — a terrorist known to be complicit in the plot.

As one might predict with such a third rail, my mail was copious and indignant. Opening the door by even a sliver for torture, I was admonished, was the most reprehensible of slippery slopes. No matter how well-intentioned was the idea, no matter the lives that might be saved, no matter how certain we might be about the guilt of the detainee, the very thought that such a thing might be legal would render us no better than the savages we were fighting.

Well, lo and behold, a court-ordered torture is set to begin in Florida on Friday at 1 P.M.

Torture?!? Really?

Yes!

It will not produce a scintilla of socially useful information. It will not save a single innocent life. It is not narrowly targeted on a morally culpable person — the torture-victim is herself as innocent as she is defenseless. It is not, moreover, meant to be brief and non-lethal: The torture will take about two excruciating weeks, and its sole and only purpose is to kill the victim [emphasis mine - ed.].

Why?

On Friday afternoon, unless humanity intervenes, the state of Florida is scheduled to begin its court-ordered torture-murder of Terri Schiavo, whose only crime is that she is an inconvenience. A nuisance to a faithless husband grown tired of the toll on his new love interest and depleting bank account — an account that was inflated only because a jury, in 1992, awarded him over a million dollars, mostly as a trust to pay for Terri’s continued care, in a medical malpractice verdict.
[emphasis mine - ed.]

And the response of the "compassionate Left™"?

In this instance, though, deafening is the only word for the silence of my former interlocutors — -civil-liberties activists characteristically set on hysteria auto-pilot the moment an al Qaeda terrorist is rumored to have been sent to bed without supper by Don Rumsfeld or Al Gonzales (something that would, of course, be rank rumor since, if you kill or try to kill enough Americans, you can be certain our government will get you three halal squares a day).

Not so Terri Schiavo. She will be starved and dehydrated. Until she is dead. By court order.

Go read the whole thing and see how this treatment compares to the treatment that actual terrorists who have been convicted of capital crimes and sentenced to death get, and pray for Terri.

The Conspiracy is Found Out!

The moonbats clear thinking political watchers over at Democratic Underground have discovered the truth about 9/11. Is it true that 9/11 was the day 2000 election results were to headline?. "Genius" posted;

Absolutely. A press conference had been scheduled for steps of capital by Bob Fertik, Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi and Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. The results were going to show that Gore won Florida and the press conference was going to revolve around the removal of the loser from office. This press conference was widely publicized. It never took place though. Guess why.

Good thing that we were able to fool the Press. In Newsmax on Oct. 22^nd, 2003 Phil Brennan wrote The Making of a Myth – The Creation of a Lie;

A couple of weeks after the 2000 presidential election I was talking to a nurse in my doctor's office. The nurse, a very bright young black lady, told me that her vote had not been counted. I ask her how she knew that. "Oh, I know," she said, without revealing how she knew.

Not wanting to cruise on that sea of invincible ignorance, I let the subject drop. Her vote among the tens of thousands counted in Palm Beach County simply hadn't been counted. She knew that. That was it.

It was also the first hint I had that a monstrous lie was being propagated – a myth that would become a mainstay of Democrat propaganda just as the Herbert Hoover myth was dredged up in presidential campaigns for many years afterward. Democrats ran against Hoover, just as they are now running against the GOP and the U.S. Supreme Court for allegedly stealing the 2000 election from the sainted Al Gore.

Boy, do we have them fooled or what. We almost got away with it. There is going to be a lot of discussion about this at the next meeting of the VRWC.

UPDATE:
While knocking around the blogosphere I discovered that Jheka over at The Daily Blitz has posted on this also.

China's Religious Development

The People's Daily, the main propaganda rag of the People's Republic of China (PRC) has published an interview with Ting Kuang-hsun, chairman of the "China Religion & Peace Committee", and honorary president of the China Christianity Association [bet you didn't know that they had one of those], I'm full of confidence in China's religious development;

On March 13, the China Religion and Peace Committee held in Beijing [link is original to the article - ed.] the Second Plenary Session of the Second Committee. During the meeting in an exclusive interview by People's Daily,Ting Kuang-hsun, vice-chairman of the CPPCC National Committee, chairman of the "China Religion and Peace Committee", and honorary president of the China Christianity Association, said that he is full of confidence in China's religious development.

Normally I'd pass on this as communist propaganda to be read only for entertainment (or to make myself angry). Orthodox Christians know full well how the Chinese government has forbidden any Orthodox bishops to serve in China. While looking for the link to that, I found this, "Beijing is sending positive signals to Orthodox church", AFP October 21, 2004 at WorldWide Religious News (WWRN);

Chinese authorities, seen as repressive toward Roman Catholics, are giving increasingly encouraging signals to the country's small Russian Orthodox community.

Orthodox followers in China hope they will soon be able to practice their faith normally after being forced into hibernation for many years, partly because of a lack of active priests.

and

The Chinese Orthodox church reached its peak in the mid-1950s when it became autonomous and had two bishops who oversaw an estimated 20,000 faithful. However, the church was to suffer much at the hands of the Red Guard, which drove it underground in 1966.

The two bishops died in the 1960s and have never had any successors.

China's Orthodox community has since diminished, with many expecting it to disappear altogether after the death of the last active priest in December.

But, benefiting from the current healthy political climate between Moscow and Beijing, the Russian patriarchate has taken steps to revive the faith in the country.

Let us pray for success in China.

The Right Not to be Killed

Touchstone Magazine is a wonderful Christian magazine with largely orthodox viewpoints. I could kick myself for not having checked sooner, but on March 11^th in their Mere Comments section (which looks a lot like a blog) is this post by Kenneth Tanner about the coming killing of Terri Schaivo. In that post he links to an article by William Luse, Live or Make Die;

Not long after a Florida judge granted Michael Schiavo permission to have the feeding tube sustaining his wife, Terri, removed, I went round the room of a night class that I teach trying to find out who among the students had found a topic for their research paper. One young lady had chosen euthanasia. Was she for it or against it? Against it. The passive form, the active, or both? Umm, she hadn’t read about that yet.

It’s remarkable how little they know about subjects on which their opinions are vehement. I gave her a couple of examples to illustrate the difference between active and passive, then asked, out of sheer curiosity, if she or any of the others had heard of the Terri Schiavo case. None had. This struck me as odd, I said, since it was happening right down the road in St. Pete. Oh yes! A couple of them had heard of it, but were not familiar with the details. So I laid those details out.

Later in the piece William Luse discusses the crucial difference between Terri Schaivo's case and that of Christopher Reeve. In the third and fourth paragraphs of that section he writes;

And so far, I would say, so good, with one crucial difference: Take away Reeve’s tube and he will at once stop breathing; take away Terri’s, and her digestive system will not at once shut down. It will continue working until all the food is gone. In fact, it will begin to digest her own tissues until starvation is complete. [if I did this to either of my dogs I would go to jail - ed.] Reeve’s lungs would have no such residual activity.

Many will think this distinction too finely wrought, leaving their doubts undisturbed. And yet I wonder if they would have any doubt were Terri Schiavo fully conscious.

This is a thoughtful discussion of issues surrounding the rights of patients, using the case of Christopher Reeve, who was still alive when Mr. Luse was questioning his students, as a source for comparison and argument. There is a lot to read and a lot to think about here, so get a cup of coffee, sit back, read, and think.

Also, William Luse has a blog, Apologia.

PETA Won't Like This

Orthodox Christians are fasting, so we will have to postpone this.

Meryl Yourish has posted The Third Annual International Eat an Animal for PETA Day to protest PETA's vile ad campaign that compared eating meat to the Holocaust (they have since removed it from their site). In fact the title was Holocaust on Your Plate.

Tom, the Pooklekufr has an excellent post on this (language alert). Got Meat?

Liberal Leaves Party - Pelosi Out of Touch

Michael J. Totten received a comment that he promoted to an article. It seems that one of his readers, although very liberal (abortion, gay marriage, etc are all good with him) is being forced into the arms of the Republicans (gasp!) by the Democratic Party's love of terrorists, thugs like Saddam, and pro-Stalinist groups like A.N.S.W.E.R. as well as its ever more open anti-Semitism. Not anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, which in my mind they are the same thing anyway. This reader wrote a letter saying so to Nancy Pelosi (Moonbat, CA) and Michael J. Totten put it up.

A Letter to Nancy Pelosi

If I had to pick one guy who was most responsible for driving me out of the Democratic Party and into the arms of the Republicans, it would be Howard Dean. Welcome him to the DNC? I'd just as soon welcome Noam Chomsky, the late Edward Said, or Ward Churchill, or Juan "Israel is always wrong" Cole, or Leroi What's His Name, former "Poet Laureate of New Jersey" ("The Jews didn't show up for work on 9/11, 'cause they were in on the secret – the CIA/Mossad did it!), or the Middle Eastern Studies Department of Columbia University, or the Chairwoman of the Duke University Middle Eastern Studies Department ("Let's boycott the International Gay Pride Celebration in Tel Aviv – we don't want to give any encouragement to the International Zionist Conspiracy!), or Representative Cynthia McKinney, or her Jew bashing (not just Israeli bashing, but in-your-face Jew bashing) daddy.

Read the whole thing, and Ms. Pelosi's empty response.

A big hat tip to Van Helsing at Moonbattery. If you choose to visit him, read this too. I'm just going to leave that one alone. Van Helsing did a wonderful job.

DPRK Speaking from the Moral Low Ground

In the News from the Enemy category, Xinhua reports, DPRK: Japan has no qualification for permanent member of UNSC;

PYONGYANG, March 13 (Xinhuanet) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) stressed on Sunday that Japan has no qualification to be a permanent member of the UN Security Council in all respects, describing Japan's behavior to make desperate efforts for Security Council membership as "impudent and imprudent."

"This issue can not be solved by money or backing of big countries but by the recognition of the international community," said Rodong Sinmun, the leading daily newspaper of the DPRK, in a singed article.

"It has no pluck to take action responsible for world security and international order. If Japan, a servant following the United States, becomes a permanent member of the UNSC, it will only result in adding one vote to the US in harassing world security and international order," it added.

Of course the DPRK has great respect for the UN, international law including treaties, human rights.

"As Japan is a dangerous warlike state which is seeking overseas aggression going against the trend of peace, its attainment of the UNSC permanent membership will give the Japanese militarists the wing of revanche for aggression," the article said.

They really need to get a good dictionary or thesaurus and stop projecting.

Japan, along with Germany, Brazil and India, is stepping up its bid for permanent membership of an enlarged Security Council.

I openly admit my biases. It should go to Japan.

Chinese Belligerence

The Guardian reports, China Law Authorizes Force Against Taiwan;

BEIJING (AP) - China's parliament enacted a law Monday authorizing force to stop rival Taiwan from pursuing formal independence, sparking outrage on the self-governing island and warnings that the measure would fuel regional tensions.

The law does not specify what might trigger an attack and does not add new threats or conditions. Instead, it codifies the measures for authorizing Chinese military action.

The ceremonial National People's Congress passed the law despite U.S. appeals for restraint. It came a day after President Hu Jintao called on China's military to be ready for war and followed a 12.6 percent increase in the country's defense budget for 2005.

This situation is becoming ever more dangerous. Should there be war it will likely involve not only China and Taiwan, but the United States and Japan. The Japanese Ryukyu Islands form a line all of the way to Taiwan, separating the East China Sea from the rest of the Pacific Ocean.

The Proximity of Japan, the Koreas, Russia, and China

Reuters also reports, Chinese Parliament Passes Law to Warn Taiwan;

Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council quickly called the law a "serious provocation" unhelpful to the development of relations.

"It also brought emotional pain to the Taiwanese people," said chairman Joseph Wu. "At this point, the most important matter is that the Chinese government should sincerely apologize to the Taiwanese people for their grave mistake."

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao offered soothing words. "This is a law to strengthen and promote cross-Strait relations, for peaceful reunification, not targeted at the people of Taiwan, nor is it a law of war," he told a news conference.

The United States is bound to assist in the defense of Taiwan. The Chinese justify the anti-secession law by comparing it to the U. S. anti-secession legislation written prior to the American Civil War;

Saber-rattling in the Taiwan Strait by China's fast-growing military forces has in recent years drawn in forces of the United States, legally bound to help Taiwan defend itself.

Chinese President Hu Jintao Sunday urged the People's Liberation Army to "step up preparations for possible military struggle" and "prevent wars and win the wars if any."

China hopes the legislation will deter Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian from pushing for independence. Analysts say the PLA has no immediate plans to attack Taiwan, over which Beijing has claimed sovereignty since Nationalist troops fled there in 1949 as the Communists conquered the mainland.

Wen defended the legislation by comparing it to U.S. anti-secession legislation at the start of the 1861-65 American civil war, fought to prevent southern states from seceding.

"In the United States, the civil war broke out, but we here do not wish to see such a situation," he added.

This bears close watching. It is not a good situation and Chinese belligerence is making it worse.