As usual you have been on the job doing the needed daily research. I have seen the link on Drudge a number of times but was not wise enough and too lazy to get my daily fill of howling moonbattery. I too lack the analytical skills to say anything, but I did just a few hours ago talk with someone who knows people in the North Korean community here in Japan. On the one hand with regards to the removal of pictures and other things there does not seem to be a great sense of concern, even the dropping of honorifics could be an initiative as opposed to the results of a power struggle, but on the other hand with Bush’s reelection, Japan threatening economic sanctions, and China becoming more and more perturbed there is a sense a “perfect storm” is possible and the situation may spin out of control. But who knows. And needless to say my friend and his acquaintances also lack proper analytical skills so take all this with a grain of sand.

Mongai

I’ve read it daily for at least the last five years. I wish I had thought to save a page a week as an archive; the tone of the last week has definitely changed from anything I’ve seen before.

Before, out of the six or a dozen stories, you could count on two things: Dear Leader Kim Jong Il would be mentioned by name in half of them and there would be at least two stories condemning U.S. imperialist ambitions and/or threatening war.

The last three or four days, it’s been ‘Leader Kim Jong Il’ when he is mentioned at all. And the incidence of military and government members being identified by name, rank, billet, and what foreigners they met or appeared with, seem to have increased in frequency.

I lack the analytical skill to make anything concrete of the changes that I’m seeing. There is something different there, and it is a departure from the routine variation in the level of howling moonbattery that normally defines the product.

I finished Rogue State: How a Nuclear North Korea Threatens the World” about a week ago. Depressing stuff.

But did the Mullahs send in their own children to die? I contend that they wish to live the good life, and are not in the least bit interested in dying for Allah. Is their any evidence to indicate that they personally possess an existential need to commit suicide?

During the early stages of the 1980-88 war, the Persians pioneered sending waves of Iranian youth to clear minefields in front of Basra. Actually clutching gold-plated “keys to heaven,” thousands of these bright-eyed boys would gambol over the fields until…BOOM!…another mine was eliminated and another martyr was on his way to heaven.

Suicide is a Sunni-Shia-Arab-Persian-Pakistani-Tamil phenomenon.

I have heard this from several sources now.

It does not seem to me that suicide bombing and other self destructive behavior are the norm.

Well, the current suicide craze may have started amoung the arabs, but that doesn’t mean it will stay there. Look at the spread of headchopping and other modern entertainments.