YOU DON’T SAY: Actual North Koreans don’t think the New York Phil’s visit will mean much. “Most people…are busy trying to make ends meet and put food on the table, and what they truly need is rice and money, so they have little freedom to think about music . . . . Rather than sit around and listen to classical music, people have to spend that time to go out and pluck another bunch of weeds to sell or boil...

SUSTAINING THE CHARADE: She can’t pretend that the six-party scheme is working, so Condi Rice wants a timetable for North Korea to comply with its agreements. Had Secretary Rice insisted on and gotten a well-structured deal back in 2005, there would have been some chance to accomplish something, though we should remember that unless non-performance has harsh consequences, deadlines mean little to the North Koreans. Too late, she realizes that the original deal was too amorphous to accomplish much of...

DO NOT MISS NK Econ Watch’s recent postings (here and here) analyzing whether a recent North Korean anti-corruption drive is just another purge or a signal of a policy change. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY? As the regime’s economic power fades, the regime’s once-treasured Kim Jong Il birthday gifts can no longer compete with the items available in the markets. The source relayed the public sentiment as “Goods more valuable than his gifts are all over the place...

“SIX PARTIES, ZERO PROGRESS:” The Weekly Standard aptly describes the current state Bush Administration’s Korea policy: The real state of play, then, is that North Korea will not fully declare, much less disable or dismantle, its nuclear weapons programs, and it has continued to proliferate. To mask this noncompliance, the State Department will talk optimistically of the next phases of diplomacy, continuing to provide North Korea with heavy fuel oil, removing it from the list of state sponsors of terror,...

MY, WHAT BIG BRASS COCONUTS YOU HAVE: North Korea fires missiles toward and over Japan, Japan builds a missile shield, and then North Korea has the chutzpah to say — Their extreme hostile policy toward the DPRK is heightening the hatred of the army and the people of the DPRK toward Japan. Should the Japanese reactionaries persist in their moves for reinvasion, accelerating the building of missile shields targeted against the DPRK, this will entail catastrophic consequences. The Japanese reactionaries...