Enough is now known about North Korea to draw the conclusion that would have put any 'moral motivation' to get rid of Saddam Hussein for the benefit of his people into the shade - if morality had had anything to do with the true motivation to invade Iraq. Sadly Halliburton hasn't yet worked out how to make a lot of money out of any invasion of North Korea and so don't hold your breath for the liberation of North Korea.

I saw a program on the ABC's Four Corners program in which a defector risked his life to share video footage of generalised famine and concentration camps. This defector was in fear of his life and TV cameras recorded his unsuccessful attempt to gain shelter at the US embassy in Singapore. The US was unwilling or unready to risk a diplomatic blow up by taking him in. He was assassinated by North Korean agents soon after, as he had known he would be.

He is not the first and he won't be the last. But lack of information about North Korea is not the reason for international inaction about the widespread starvation, torture and lack of human rights.

Having just finished the most recent episode of the latest serial drama from Korea ("My Lovely Samsoon") on AZN Channel, and after turning down the volume on my prized homemade VHS of Korean music videos, featuring Cherry Filter, The Jadu, and Big Mama (all still unavailable on iTunes, frustratingly) let me observe that Korean culture -- Korean pop culture, at least -- appears to be in the midst of a flowering period of creativity, the energy of which is not matched by its neighbors. (Though it looks like Thailand will soon be the place to be.) A young man (or woman) looking for a place to spend a few years teaching English while he figures out what to do in life, could do a lot worse than Seoul.

I've often noted the paucity of decent, up-to-date literature on North Korea but I'm surprised the author hasn't made much about the handful of fun-to-read web pages out there which belonging to individuals who've managed to travel in NK as tourists.

Part of the lure is that it's the world's last bastion of pure Stalinism; it's important to have great discipline over one's own tongue. On the way down into the subway, your guide might mention that it was all built using domestically-produced Korean technology-- while you pretend to not notice the Chinese sign on the escalator which says 'made in Shanghai'.

A traveler who doesn't watch his mouth around his minders can often find himself subject to malignantly surreal browbeatings about how Kim Sung Il and his band of partisans defeated Japan in 1945 with one arm tied behind their backs, with the US apparently doing very little.

For anyone who's interested, I recommend doing a google-search for "north korea travelogue" or some variant thereof. Good stuff!

The article neglected to mention an account of North Korea that skewers the madness there in the most sublime way: French cartoonist Guy Delisle's Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea.

Given that the whole point of this series is that writers write about places they personally know, I have a question for James Card: before writing this piece, exactly how much time did you spend in N. Korea?

I posted roughly a month ago re: Card's actual experience in N. Korea. No answer. I realized after the fact it would have been wiser to phrase the question differently, and pose it either to Card or Salon's editorial staff. So I'll do that now: Did he go there? That's the premise of this series, no matter how much we all agree N. Korea has a horrible gov't.