James Lileks starring as Chicken Little

Every now and then we get a clear snapshot of how basically clueless a certain JL is. Today's newsflash from him is illuminating.

He's pointing out to us that North Korea may be up to something.

Some folks that have been following the news for a while may suspect this is nothing new.

A quick Googling of "North Korea threatens..." shows a steady 480,000 or so hits per year. Every year from 2000 to 2008. They've been threatening to do this or that, pretty steadily all along. You see when you don't have any cards to play, all you can do is bluff. Bluffing is cheap and easy and free of any consequences. So they've been regularly putting out growly press releases. Year after year.

And given that lately they're begging for food and oil, and their one nuclear test was a fizzle, and their tiny fearless leader hasn't been seen in months, they don't seem to have a lot of economic, political, or military oomph recently. But their PR department is still fully staffed and can still rehash and re-release old press releases.

Absolutely nothing new.

But JL somehow knows more than me or you or Google or even the CIA. Hmmmm.....

And about those press releases, a little reading past the headlines reveals that the NK's are not being all that aggresively bellicose. In all three stories the NK's threw a fit, yes, but in each case it was due to something the South did first. In the nuclear inspection tiff, the South has done only about 50% of wwhat it promised, wile the North has by one reckoning done 8 of 11 items. I might send out a pointed press release too if the other guy was 30% behind on his obligations. In the second story the Northern Loonballs were complaining about leaflets being balooned over ther border. One suspects if Canada was ballooning in leaflets about the wonders f being a British Commonwealth, a few Montana ranchers might get a bit huffy. n Same with the third item.

Not that I support the worlds most humorless regime. However it might be nice if Mr. JL thought a bit more about how we could prevent these incidents instead of just wringing his hands about the latest flare-up of a political tug of war that has been going on for fifty-five years.

BTW one interesting side-note I've heard is that all those folks that signed up for the duration of the Korean War are not off the hook yet. No official peace was signed, just a truce.
Officially it's not settled, just in a lull.