Ah, right. Awful stuff that was.
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Yes, the older brother, at KLIA.
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No, it would be ketamine for the ‘vegetative state’. 
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The context was heart failure, but I like your idea 
hope he doesn’t
I’m not certain it’s quite the same thing.
At least for me, I suspect it’s rather more of realizing that I’m a minor henchman. I’m in the global 1%, so even though I want less wealth-hoarding, I still want enough wealth that my place among the global rich (say ~$50K) is secure.
As long as I give my level of greed and wealth a free moral pass, then I’m part of the conspiracy and will tend to give my approval to those who are even better at it than me.
So, in my opinion, no cult required, just a desire to protect my greed from moral judgement.
(And yes, I think if we can acknowledge that we of the middle class are immoral greed-heads (and have no intention of significantly changing that), it means we no longer have to cheer-lead even more destructive greed in order to morally protect ourselves. It also makes us less quick to make moral pronouncements about others and reduces moral righteousness, which is always a plus on the voting front.)
This little phrase is such an elaborate euphemism
“Open up” to what? Which countries are currently “open”? Does Saudi Arabia count as “open”?
AFAICT “until NK opens up” means until it opens up to foreign ownership
The West has no problem with dictators per se
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?
I didn’t say it is.
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Pretty much the only source of events going down that way is Shin Sang-ok himself (and to a degree his ex-wife Choi Eun-hee). So one needs to take the whole thing with a entire shaker of salt. As absurd as someone defecting to North Korea sounds today, it wasn’t that weird at the time. South Korea wasn’t the prosperous democracy it is today.
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I get it. They turned off the lights.
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Looks like we are stuck with Kim for another 30-40 years.
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From A Kim Jong-Il Production by Paul Fischer (2015):
Shin and Choi were kidnapped in 1978, right in the middle of not just one of the North’s periods of intense kidnapping, but also the only time period (1977-1983) during which Pyongyang has admitted kidnapping people. The kidnapping methods Shin and Choi described—men disguised in long wigs, secluded beaches, being subdued and put into some kind of small bag, the small skiff, then the larger ship—fit exactly with the methods used by North Koreans in other, proven kidnapping cases, methods that were not yet public in 1987 when Shin and Choi wrote and published their first memoir. I submitted their memoir and my own questions both to Robert S. Boynton of New York University, an export on Southeast Asian kidnapping as a political tool, and to the National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North Korea, who found no gaps in it and confirmed that the events as described were logical and within the range of known North Korean methods and activities.
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I know there are always calls for NK to “open up”, but my comment was also a reference to the box in which Schrodinger’s cat exists in a state of quantum superposition.
I concede my post may have lacked intellectual rigor, both in the geopolitical and the quantum-mechanical senses.
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And being murdered doesn’t help either.
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That was the other one.
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Of course, it’s hard to tell a “healthy” Un from one in a coma, but he hadn’t had anyone brutally executed for several hours, prompting his aides to call a physician.
It’s best to coil it tightly around your neck to prevent the virus from getting into your lungs.
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