Maybe He Could Work Out a Job Share?

" ..North Korea is scheduled to test-launch a long-range ballistic missile next week. .. "

And our missile destroyers are, eh, steaming pell-mell toward the area.

Now, if anyone shot down our missile-under-test, or even looked at our civilian/military launches from Cape Canaveral with an evil eye -----

We know what big-boy USA is getting into and what the imperial statement would be, right? (And so does China and Japan and France and.. and Israel and - oh ho - Russia and - cough cough - UK. )

@gunny-Hope North Korea gets lucky, hits the twitter server and knocks all the twits off line.

Here's a bomb that is about to go off and will cause a hell of a lot more damage than some weak missle from North Korea. Only things missing right now is the ability place blame on Obama or a union contract.
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Just months before the start of last year's stock market collapse, the federal agency that insures the retirement funds of 44 million Americans departed from its conservative investment strategy and decided to put much of its $64 billion insurance fund into stocks.
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Switching from a heavy reliance on bonds, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation decided to pour billions of dollars into speculative investments such as stocks in emerging foreign markets, real estate, and private equity funds.
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The agency refused to say how much of the new investment strategy has been implemented or how the fund has fared during the downturn. The agency would only say that its fund was down 6.5 percent - and all of its stock-related investments were down 23 percent - as of last Sept. 30, the end of its fiscal year. But that was before most of the recent stock market decline and just before the investment switch was scheduled to begin in earnest.
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No statistics on the fund's subsequent performance were released.
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Nonetheless, analysts expressed concern that large portions of the trust fund might have been lost at a time when many private pension plans are suffering major losses. The guarantee fund would be the only way to cover the plans if their companies go into bankruptcy.
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http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/03/30/pension_insurer_shifted_to_stocks/?page=full

The human rights situtation in NoKo is appalling. It's unfortunate that the UN, which endlessly prattles on about the supposed Israeli crimes says next to nothing about North Korea or the disgusting manner in which they are treated by the Chinese.
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I guess since we need the Chinese, we'll just ignore that. So much for Hope.

North Korea is one of the worst places to live in the world. It's really a nightmare there. Thousands starve to death every year. In a bad year, it's millions. The technology level, infrastructure, general quality of life of the average person is like the 1800's. The moral situation is even worse; people have very little hope for change or advancement, severely restricted creative freedoms, and massive punishments for even minor offenses. If any possible war of the 21st century was justified, it would be a war to depose North Korea's tin pot leadership and reunite them with the South. Why that hasn't happened and probably won't is complicated. For one thing, China wouldn't be likely to play ball, though they have shown signs recently of getting tired of North Korea's bullsh!t. For another thing, the reintegration of the North with the South would be a painful process. Most people in the North are kept totally ignorant of the outside world; they completely lack the skills to survive in the modern world. A large part of the population would be virtually unemployable; once machinery and modern farming methods remove the necessity of a laborer to work every acre of arable land, there would be millions of indigents with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
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Still, almost anything would be better than the current situation. At least the next generation would have some hope.

nhautamaki :

" .. North Korea is one of the worst places to live in the world. .. "

I bet that at no time in your life did you ever utter the words "Home Sweet Home".
Would you believe it if someone doesn't think much of YOUR home?

" ..It's unfortunate that the UN, which endlessly prattles on about the supposed Israeli crimes says next to nothing about North Korea .."

And when the UN said something against our invasion of Iraq - you didn't like it. Remember?

To be fair: Are you prattling about "the supposed crimes" in North Korea?

cfukara--I loved it when the UN said something about your invasion of Iraq. I wish they said a hell of a lot more. I'm Canadian by the way. And I spend a lot of my time telling some Chinese people to appreciate how good they have it here (in China), instead of being in such a hurry to emigrate to Canada, America, England, or Australia so they can take their Chinese university degree and use it to get a job waiting tables, washing dishes, driving a taxi, or if they're lucky, open a corner store.
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And I have visited North Korea. I went on one of their four day, heavily supervised, guided tours. Costed about 8,000 rmb at the time, which was about 1,000 US dollars. Have YOU been to North Korea? At least I have some frame of reference to be speaking from. You are accusing me of being a hypocrit and you don't even know what country I'm from....