Bracing for Catastrophe

The Daily NK has more bleak reports from the North.  The first deals with how the regime’s block committees are feeling the strain of the people’s desperation to survive:

More specifically, “Requests were made to be cautious of any act of anti-socialism such as secretly watching or spreading news of video tapes, anyone who uses a car to sell goods, any act of offering accommodation or receiving money for lease of accommodation and acts of brewing home-wine.

In particular, in the cities near and around the border, meetings of people’s units frequently take place advocating the “act of giving accommodation to people crossing the border illegally prohibited.

The other report deals with one of the coping strategies that saved some people in the last Great Famine:  stripping and selling copper from factories, telephone lines, and anywhere else it could be found.  Most of the copper and other salvageable materials are long gone today, however.