KIM IS SCARY

I've said it before.  He may be a "dear leader" but I think North Korea's Kim Il Jong is one scary dude.  He proved it again yesterday with a July 4th fireworks show of his own.

The current North Korea situation reminds me of when I was growing up in the fifties--the Cold War.  I remember very well the Cuban missile crisis and the unsettling feeling I had at that time.  And of course, the Russians through Khrushchev promised to "bury" us.  All very scary stuff for someone my age at the time.

So here we go nearly fifty years later and we've got an madman across the water who likes to rattle his sabers from time to time.  But it's not the threats or the missile launches that really scare me.  The really scary thing to me is North Korea's isolation.  The country simply doesn't have any perspective on anything because of that.  The only real information the population gets is what Kim decides they should get.  And Kim himself appears to be mad, clearly favoring military production over feeding his own people.  No other word for that but scary.  Now there's word of even more bizarre behavior.  How rational is it to steal the trains that are delivering food and fuel to you?  In a word--it's insane.

Afghanistan, Iraq--they're major trouble spots for the U.S. for sure but I don't worry that much about what they're going to do. Their behavior has been predictable for literally hundreds of years.  North Korea is unpredictable and that gets compounded by their isolation.  Just scary.