Mr. Shea Cotton who is a research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies noticed something that North Korea watchers have known for a long time, missile testing tends to slow in the winter:

Tuesday, November 14 marked 60 days since North Korea’s most recent missile test. Earlier this year, between March and May, North Korea was launching an average of one missile every two weeks. Now after about two months, the silence seems deafening.

Can we credit the slow down to America’s policies working? Was there a diplomatic breakthrough with the regime? Or has Kim Jong Un seen the error of his ways and is abandoning or backtracking on his missile program? Probably not.

Instead, this is likely part of an annual slowdown in testing we’ve observed now in North Korea for several years.

A look back at missile testing in North Korea under Kim Jong Un demonstrates the trend. The table below depicts a quarterly breakdown of North Korea’s nuclear capable missile tests since 2012.

A few things are clear from this. First, Kim Jong Un stepped on the gas pedal in 2014. In fact, Kim Jong Un has carried out more tests than his father and grandfather combined. Second, and more important to this topic, North Korea slows things down in the fourth quarter of every year. On average, we see about an 80% drop in tests from Q3 to Q4. Every so often North Korea will conduct a test in Q4, but that number is only a small fraction compared to past quarters.

Harvest season

But what then, explains this consistent drop? While difficult to say for sure, the most likely explanation we have is that North Korea’s resources are tied up in the harvest.  [Forbes]

You can read more at the link, but the priority on the annual harvest is part of the reason for the decrease in missile testing, there are a few other reasons as well.

Mr. Cotton in his article says the trend analysis shows that testing will pick up again in February.  February just so happens to be the lead to the annual Key Resolve military exercise.  Every year Key Resolve starts tends to start an annual provocation cycle with North Korea then the UFG exercises tends to be when the provocation cycle slows down.  For example this year the last missile test occurred on September 14th; the annual UFG military exercise concluded in early September.

There are other reasons as well, but the long gap between major US-ROK military exercises, the annual harvest, the winter training cycle for the North Korean military, as well as poor weather all play into the decrease in missile testing.

Here is an update from the trial of a former US Marine who killed a Japanese woman on Okinawa last year:

The parents of a 20-year-old Okinawan woman murdered last year told a packed courtroom Friday they want the former Air Force contractor charged in her death to pay for the brutal crime with his life.

“A murderer, who took my daughter’s life, should not be allowed to live,” the mother said in a statement read by her lawyer during the second day of Kenneth Franklin Gadson’s trial at Naha District Court.

Gadson, 33, a former Marine who was a civilian employee at a Kadena Air Base cable and internet provider at the time of his arrest, is charged with murder, rape resulting in death and the illegal disposal of a body in the death of Rina Shimabukuro. He is being tried under Japan’s lay judge system with three judges and six jurors.

Shimabukuro disappeared after going out for a walk on the evening of April 28, 2016. Gadson became a suspect — and was later charged in the crime — after police spotted his SUV while checking vehicles captured by security cameras in the area.

During the previous day’s proceedings — which mostly focused on whether Shimabukuro’s killing was premeditated — Gadson read a prepared statement pleading guilty to rape resulting in death and illegal disposal of the body but denied the murder charge, stating that he had “no plans to kill her.”

Gadson told the court he planned to knock her unconscious, take her to a hotel in a suitcase to rape her and release her afterward. After failing to knock her out, he panicked and was not able to complete his plan, he said.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link, but I don’t blame the family for wanting this scumbag put down.

It has been 10 years since the Taliban took a group of South Korean missionaries hostage.  They killed two of them and sexually assaulted some of the women before releasing them in return for millions of dollars in ransom money and the withdrawal of ROK troops from Afghanistan.  The hostage taking was of course used by anti-US leftists in South Korea to further push anti-US sentiment.  In recognition of the 10 year anniversary of the hostage taking, Al Jazeera thought it would be a good time to interview Muslims in South Korea and see what their thoughts are about Islam in the ROK:

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Korean hostage crisis in Afghanistan, which was a turning point in the history of Islam in Korea. Today, South Korean Muslims make up a tiny minority, 0.2 percent, of the predominantly Christian and Confucian society.

As South Korea is opening its doors to Muslim tourists, trying to fill the vacuum left by the declining number of Chinese tourists following the debacle launched with the deployment of the US Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, various generations of native Korean Muslims reflect on their double identity as Koreans and Muslims in South Korea.

The number of Muslim tourists coming to the country saw a 33 percent increase last year from 2015 and is expected to reach 1,2 million people by the end of 2017, as revealed by the Korea Tourism Organization (KTO).

Tapping into this economic potential, the country has increased the number of Halal certificates for its restaurants and prayer rooms, and the Seoul Tourism Organization is promoting a series of videos showcasing Muslim-friendly restaurants around the capital.

Islam and the Korean Peninsula share a history of mutual fascination and curiosity. From the era of the Silk Road in the 9th century to today’s modern interconnected world, the bonds that were once forged through maritime travel have now been passed on to a new generation of young Muslim Koreans, who try to find a balance between their Korean culture and newfound religion.

Retracing the history of Islam in Korea and its reintroduction to the country by Turkish troops during the 1950-1953 Korean War, Al Jazeera spoke with several generations of South Korean Muslims, who expressed the difficulties they face in the Confucian Korean society dominated by class, age hierarchy, a strong drinking culture, and a distrust of Islam.  [Al Jazeera]

You can read the interviews at the link, but it is more of the religion of peace talking points which is a bit ironic considering the interviews are in recognition of the 10 year anniversary of the kidnapping, murder, and sexual assaults caused by Islamic extremists on South Korean missionaries.

New satellite imagery shows most prisoner housing in Yodok Camp No. 15 is demolished, deteriorated or uninhabited. Administrative/security infrastructure mostly unchanged so far. More here (but imagery dates are wrong): https://t.co/AqjvuUbxlr pic.twitter.com/joxU6900Sa

— Curtis Melvin 커티스 멜빈 (@CurtisMelvin) November 16, 2017

A medical professional describes the worms found inside the body of the North Korean soldier who underwent surgery at a hospital in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, on Nov. 15, 2017. The soldier suffered serious injuries from being shot by North Korean soldiers while defecting to South Korea through the truce village of Panmunjom the previous day. (Yonhap)

As much as I don’t like Kim Jong-un I don’t think it is fair to blame him for a parasite epidemic when it wasn’t too long ago when South Koreans were doing the same thing and having the same problems:

The hermit nation’s leader issued an instruction to farmers in 2014 telling them to use human faeces with animal waste and organic compost on their fields. With a lack of livestock to provide animal fertilizer, agriculturists poured the human excrement, also known as “night soil”, on their fields.

Kim’s pronouncement further precipitated  the falsehood in North Korea that human waste was the best fertilizer for crops despite the dangerous parasites and worms found within in it, Reuters reported.

The nutrition and widespread health problems that blight North Korea have been highlighted by one North Korean soldier who has recently defected to the south. The army sergeant was found to have dozens of flesh colored parasites in his digestive tract, one of which measured 10.6 inches in length.  [Newsweek]

You can read the rest at the link, but I can remember about 20 years ago I was out near the Imjim River in South Korea during a military training exercise.  From my Bradley Fight Vehicle we could see this old Korean woman in the distance walk into a rice paddy pull her pants down, squat, and take a dump right there in the field.  And no she did not wipe afterwards.  Seeing that made me laugh nearly as hard as when I was flashed by a Korean transvestite while driving in a HMMWV in Dongducheon.

Considering this guy’s violent past you would think he would have been locked up long ago before he did something like this:

A man in his 50s who poured gasoline on his ex-girlfriend and set her alight was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The woman, also in her 50s, suffered serious burns and died of complications two weeks after the incident in March 2016.

The Seoul Southern District Court on Monday found the man guilty of attempted murder.

“It was a premeditated crime,” Judge Shim Gyu-hong said. “The ruling was made after taking into account the nature and circumstances of the crime and his criminal record that indicates there are high chances of him committing another crime.”

He had been convicted more than 20 times for violent acts.

The man lived with the woman for a year in 2005. She dumped him in 2006. He tried unsuccessfully to restore the broken relationship over 11 years.

In March 2016, the man visited the woman at work holding a bag containing a gasoline-filled container and a lighter. When she refused to talk to him, he opened the container, poured the gasoline onto her head and set her on fire.  [Korea Times]

What I don’t understand is how is this a conviction for attempted murder when the woman died in the hospital two weeks later?  It seems like murder to me.

A journal from Duke University’s East Asia studies department has an article published that describes South Korea’s “Tenpro” prostitution culture:

Tenpro (Koran for “ten percent”) are a special kind of sex worker conceptually defined and imagined as women who are intellectually and aesthetically in the top ten percentile of all women, similar in concept to a high-end escort of the United States. Because of the exclusivity and secrecy that surrounds these exceptionally beautiful tenpros, this glamorous business had been veiled from the eyes of the general public. Only recently, with the spread of this business practice and heightened interest in this topic, a few former tenpros like Mihee have released detailed first-hand accounts of their lives.

According to a research conducted by the Korean Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, an average of 49 Korean men out of 100 are predicted to have had used some sort of sexual service, despite the fact that prostitution is illegal in Korea. Additionally,  research conducted by the Korean Women’s Development Institute indicates that prostitution amounts to approximately 1.6 percent of Korea’s GDP, or 13 billion US dollars. When we compare this figure to that of America’s, which is currently estimated to be 14 billion dollars, or less than 0.1 percent of its GDP, we see that an average Korean man spends 16 times more than their American counterparts on sexual services.   [Duke East Asia Nexux]

You can read the rest at the link, but the article concludes by stating that high end prostitution services in Korea is so popular because it is a status symbol for the well off to flaunt their wealth to their peers by affording “Tenpro” girls.

North Korean soldier who defected may have been a driver for a high-ranking officer https://t.co/hqM8bgkT67

— NorthKoreaRealTime (@BuckTurgidson79) November 16, 2017

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un drives a tractor while touring a factory. North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported the story on Nov. 15, 2017, without elaborating on the timing of the visit. (Yonhap)