Simple Question of International Import

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

What are the odds that this gets a LOT worse by the traditional spring time offensive season when a young general's fancy turns to invasion?

Brief timeline:

North Korea is accused of torpedoing a South Korean warship.

South Korea fires at North Korean fishing boats crossing the maritime border North Korea refuses to recognize.

North Korea is revealed to have highly modern facilities for nuclear material enrichment.

Not to mention, North Korea is facing the challenge of passing along the regime to a third generation of the Kim family.

North Korea is known for rattling its sabre and demanding to have attention paid to it when it is being ignored, but this is looking like a very different than recent years -- South Korea really has to retaliate...and half of South Korea's population lives in the Seoul metropolitan area within artillery range of the DMZ.

So a question -- is North Korea suicidal or are they betting that this behavior can get them some more winter grain shipments?

Comments

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

The main reason SA props up Zim is fairly pragmatic at this point (forget all the inter-comrade hugging). It's that if Zim collapses abruptly, it'd cause a massive migration crisis which would hit mainly SA, as the nearest prosperous destination. Yet they ignore the simple fact that the more they postpone the collapse, the heavier it'll be. The signs of what's coming could be seen all over the place, like immigration problem, and the upsurge of xenophobia in this country. So yeah. The more we hold our heads in the sand, the worse the shit will smell when it hits the fan.

And that makes the NK/Zim situations very similar.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Which is what I've said: the humanitarian and economic crisis is already there but like SA they're choosing to ignore it as opposed to addressing it when the solution would have been simpler. In that sense it's also like the USA's complete willful ignorance of the disaster NAFTA's proven to be for Mexican farming at the same time as the xenophobes here attribute the mass immigration to everything *but* that.