...for them to just give up like that. Scuttling programs with no real replacement.

Haven't heard of the Collapse? Haven't even noticed that food prices have doubled in the past year with many nutritional items going off the shelf or being replaced with high-fructose, high-subsidy corn syrup or high-subsidy, high-pesticide soy?

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENCA260&q=peak+oil+collapse

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/

(I bet a lot of you assumed that the Internet would be there forever, as well...)

Nicely done, Idiomatick. As for North Koreans, their behaviour is right on schedule, no surprises. The Americans prop up these regimes by isolating them.... no thinking is going on in Washington either even though the Messiah won the election. Expect more of the same from countries that have been kept isolated, now that the US are growing weaker and collapsing internally.

We live in the US and have always been on the DNC list and we get hammered nevertheless. Especially around dinnertime. The DNC is ineffectual and I have concluded that being on it makes you a special target.
This is like the recent subway stabbing in Toronto, which made front-page-news, because it is so rare. In US cities it's commonplace, and hushed up (no reporting) so as not to drag down speculative real estate values and foreign investment.

I live in the northern US and wouldn't complain. A collapsing superpower with falling-apart infrastructure, a debt-addict government and a personality cult surrounding the chief executive --- is not a good place to raise children.

...no rights, only priveleges. That's the teacher's job, to prepare you to fit into society later on. Become a compliant, obedient, brainless consumer-citizen.