North Korea

More news on the North Korea front, they seem to be prepping a few missles for a test. And, the NK army is doing their annual spring planting. The link is from Fox News, so take that into account, but it still seems like they're aiming for the provocation-step back-collect cash-provocation cycle they've been living off of for the past twenty years or so.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/0...ns-from-fighting-to-farming-as-soldiers-help/

 

Please cut the "this is from fox so watch out" B.S. This is from the Associated Press, not FoxNews.com. Watch out for this link I'm about to post, it's from the Huffington Post!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/24/north-korea-farming-soldiers-plant-rice_n_3145897.html

Seriously though, click on both links, same story word-for-word. Fox can be misleading at times with its own articles but many many news outlets aggregate AP. There's a great disparity between TV news bias and print/online media bias (for good, technological and sensory reasons)

 

That's what reputations do for you Vandy. Gives people impressions whether well deserved or not.

Now back to FatBoi. He's probably pissed that Boston bumped his garbage dump of a country off the front page so its no surprise he'll pull some kinda stunt to get back. More of the usual bluster and bullshit military moves designed to scare the western press more than anything else. Sad thing is, I have a bad feeling the West will cave in again and feed them. Kinda like feeding stray animals. If you do that, they'll keep on coming back.

 

The North Koreans asked Mongolia for food aid the other day.

http://blogs.wsj.com/korearealtime/2013/04/22/north-korea-asks-mongolia-for-food-aid/

When you're panhandling to Mongolia maybe it is a sign that things have reached the bedrock bottom?

It's not unthinkable that the North Korean regime could choose to go out with a bang when things reach the point that they can't really hold on any more. They don't have really repressive policy changes to fall back on to quell dissent because every day life in North Korea is already there.

I think I would relocate for the next year if I was an ex-pat in South Korea or Japan.

 

Hungry man is an angry man. Twist that any way you want, but it was the first thing that popped into my head.

 

Bradway, your comment about "use it or lose it" was the gist of an intelligence summary I received when I was in the Army. That was '97. So, you could look at that a couple of ways, either they're comfortable living on the brink of starvation or the situation was bad then and is worse now.

This thread is too depressing. I'll toss another link in and I'll qualify the source again. This is from the Duffel Blog and is 100% SATIRE. But I thought it was funny. Enjoy.

http://www.duffelblog.com/2013/03/north-korea-launches-podcast-aimed-at-this-american-life/

 

I thought like you did until I watched that special on National Geographic (mentioned it a page or two back). The people in NK truly don't know that better exists, at least for the moment. They truly believe in the regime and that all of their problems come from evil America, evil Japan, and the misguided actions of South Korea. They live in fear, where one wrong word can get not just you, but your entire family (including kids) shipped off to a prison camp, for the rest of their short lives. Really sad stuff.

 

My ex wife and son are traveling through Seoul next week. I'm a little on edge as they have a 7 hour layover in Seoul and thrown in the North Koreans have shot down a passenger jet in the past so maybe they'll do it again. I considered moving to S Korea to teach English... good paying job and they pay for your apartment in most cases.

 

I completely agree; however excessive TV news media bias has overstated print media bias.

 

Yep. Not to mention, you're not really "teaching English", you're just telling them what things like "crunk" and "dope" and "bad-ass" mean when they see them on the internet and American movies and don't know what the fuck they mean.

I have a number of veteran ex-pat friends that are still in SK doing such things, all the while pruning the young lovelies of their innocence.

Not a bad gig, if you don't mind the country sharing a border with a communist regime led by delusional idiots with a depleted uranium stockpile and a country full of people that don't know the difference between a white man and a chupacabra.

 

Now that they have a Korean-American hostage, the North Koreans start backing down, removing missiles from a launch site.

http://ap.stripes.com/dynamic/stori...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-05-07-11-01-39

 

And now come the pleas for food and financial aid, as well as the promises to dismantle the nuclear program and missile program. I am glad the President doesn't seem to be falling for it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/w...ses-talks-with-washington.html?ref=world&_r=0

 

A lot of people in the USA are overly worried about this, whilst others seem to carry on with life. We've been getting threats from N. Korea for a decade or longer (in my conscious memory), so it might just be one of those things people aren't taking seriously. I am more worried about friends in S. Korea.

 

Looks like the fat man wants to be in the news cycle...it's been a while for him:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/05/asia/north-korea-seismic-event/index.html

 

NK says its a "Successful hydrogen bomb test", fourth test

 

Japan, South Korea and China are all having emergency meetings. Japan has already released a statement saying that this violates their security.

If this is true and we're going to have to take a few days to know for sure but this is a game changer. That being said, detonating the bomb and getting it on a missile and actually using it are two different things.

 

Well that's step two.

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