The crazy little fat bastard is at it again.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared his front-line troops were in a “quasi-state of war” Friday and ordered them to prepare for battle, a day after the most serious confrontation with South Korea in years.
A North Korean military official says a meeting of senior party and defense officials led by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met Thursday night and “reviewed and approved the final attack operation.”
He gave no details on what kind of military retaliation North Korea would see as appropriate punishment for South Korea’s shelling of its territory Thursday.
It is easy to think it is more of the same, but the problem is the North Korean’s get a lot of subsidized support from China, and as it is, conditions are harsh. As China’s economy goes south, that support will dry up, and what was crazy will become nothing compared to what the North Korean leadership will be capable of.
Their biggest fear will be revolution, which begins with loss of respect and rebellion against their authority – something which has already begun in some places.
The resulting film, an hour-long Frontline documentary titled Secret State of North Korea, is a sweeping, disturbing peek into a misunderstood and rapidly changing society…
There are also other signals of change. In one scene, a woman pushes back against authorities who accost her for violating the country’s dress code. In another, a woman running an illegal bus service hits a soldier who tries to cite her. Ordinary citizens listen to black market radios and watch illegal DVDs; even state officials, we are told, consume foreign media voraciously.
One overarching trend among the footage and interviews is that everyone, it seems, is skeptical of Kim’s ability to lead. Jones told FP that North Koreans’ lack of confidence in the young leader became particularly clear during an interview that wasn’t included in the final cut of the film. Jones interviewed a woman who had reluctantly defected to South Korea because her husband hoped to improve their economic situation. “She was still kind of a true believer and spoke very reverently of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il,” Jones said. “But even she didn’t like Kim Jong Un. She called him a pumpkinhead.”
Ultimately, the film portrays North Korea as a country approaching the brink of something monumental – a military dictatorship trying brutally, but not altogether effectively, to contend with the threats posed by new technology, the inevitable flow of information, and an increasingly discontent populace.
The key will be uniformity of K being spread over the populace, to the point that the choice is starvation or fighting. Everyone has to be pissed off for an extended period, with their back to the wall, and the rabbits at the top cannot have an artificial means of support to use to exert control. Under those circumstances the brains of the people change, from an organ promoting tolerance and passive observation, to an organ promoting intolerance and active action. Once that developmental transition occurs, it heralds the beginning of a renaissance.
Given China’s economic outlook, it appears that may be exactly what is coming.
The numbers are historic. China’s total debt has sprouted from 153 percent of gross domestic product in 2008 to 282 percent today. That, according to Goldman Sachs, makes China’s borrowing binge bigger than 96 percent of all others on record. The problem is that, despite all this debt, growth is slowing and profits are falling, which makes it harder for companies to pay back what they owe. So does the fact that inflation is down to just 0.8 percent. It’s no surprise, then, that China’s central bank just eased policy for the third time in as many months, cutting its benchmark rates by a quarter of a percentage point, to try to avoid the kind of low growth, low inflation trap that the rest of the world has fallen into.
But it might be too late for that…
No, it’s the debt. Investors have become so exuberant, perhaps irrationally so, that they aren’t just throwing their own money into the stock market, but borrowed money, too. Margin accounts, which let people do this, more than doubled in 2014. And to give you an idea how important this has become to the market, stocks tanked 7.7 percent in a single day after the government announced it wouldn’t let the three biggest brokerages open any new margin accounts for the next three months.
That was written in March of this year.
On the bright side, if China goes down, there is a good chance the North Korean people will eventually taste freedom.
Apocalypse cometh™
