The Family Business

The last Stalinist regime on earth is preparing for a transition of power with Kim Jong Il naming his twenty-six or seven year old son four star general. Not much is known about the younger Kim beyond the fact that he is taller than his father (as are most adult males around the globe) and that Kim Jong Un loves American professional basketball, the National Basketball Association, which certainly would qualify him to be a fourteen year old boy if not a military genius. North Korea is a state built on the blood and bodies of its own citizens who are mostly starving slaves, a dynastic enterprise held together by terror and murder and financed by proliferating weapons of mass destruction and counterfeiting currency (including the US dollar). In a nation that brought Christendom into that part of Asia and produced committed missionaries, now Christian practice can be a capital crime and the Kim family are venerated as living gods. That sad nation is so opaque one may only guess at how North Korea will progress under new leadership, but most North Korea scholars doubt much will change in the totalitarian dystopia.