Archive for April 12th, 2012
North Korea does two things badly
Thing 1
In Pyongyang, food appears plentiful, with sidewalk vendors doing brisk business selling roasted sweet potatoes and chestnuts, ice cream bars and griddle-fried pancakes. Those with cash can splurge on hamburgers and pizza.
But aid workers say the food shortage is very real in the poor provinces far from the comparatively prosperous capital city.
“It’s now very common to see people with little wicker baskets or plastic bags collecting whatever is edible” — even roots, grasses and herbs, said Katharina Zellweger, the longtime Pyongyang-based North Korea country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.
Thing 2
Reports say the impoverished country spent around $850 million on the project, with another $5 million set aside to imprison any citizens who didn’t weep uncontrollably if the launch went bad, which appears to be the case.
Sources tell me US intelligence officials suspected a possible rocket launch after satellites picked up signs of artificial light in North Korea after sunset.
Oddly, the North Korean government just made a deal with the US to knock off the missile tests in exchange for 240,000 tons of food in February, guess that’s shot now?
Since they seem to be bad at doing both feeding its people and firing stuff into the sky, maybe they could keep their feet on the ground, and their heads out of their a**es and concentrate on feeding the people? See, Thing 1 above required little effort, just don’t do anything overly stupid, and food would come. Whether the government would actually deliver the food to ordinary people or not is yet another Thing altogether – likely the Proletariat Elite in big (visible to the outside world) cities would be the only ones benefitting from US and international food deliveries.
If these missiles of theirs ever actually work, we could have a problem.
Related articles
- North Korea’s Missile Launch Begins (gizmodo.com.au)
- Shoot It Down! (papundits.wordpress.com)
