When I look around the world, North Korea does not look like a very significant threat to me. The US military does, as they often practice what they preach.

@Peter: When you write 'so much for China working with us', I don't think a serious consideration of who 'China' and 'us' are, and what 'working together' means, would be out of order.
Don't believe the hype - this is about global politics and economics, not realistic fears for the lives of the poor threatened Alaskans, Japanese or even the divided Koreans, either of the south or of the north, despite all the pronouncements from blusterville that are repeated, in all their brain-swamping glory, in the press, which you usually don't seem to trust much anyway.
The agendas to focus on are not those of the North Korean regime, which (I hope I don't need to add) is not an institution for which I have much enthusiasm, any more than I do for nuclear weapons.

Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, was extremely important, not so much in a literary sense, when it appeared in 1906, as for the delineation of the horrors of the Chicago meat-packing industry - there are passages and episodes that will turn your stomach - that Sinclair clearly presented. Although he seems to have been a crusading socialist more than a writer (the novel concludes with an almost religious-conversion type of enthusiasm for socialism by the protagonist, which is way too simple both for the reality and for the novel), the well-researched details of extreme poverty, carnivorous capitalism, the exploitation of immigrants and the greed-driven political corruption of Chicago and elsewhere at the time, including that which affected the police and the courts, had very significant historical influence in the American attempt to tame the growing organized resistance to the beast. The book played an important part in the amelioration of the worst conditions of brutality, exploitation and unsanitary atrocities of the time and the historical improvement of the lives of American workers, which allowed the obscuring of Sinclair's, and others', vision of just what it is that keeps the wheels of 'Progress' and 'Development' turning. Way too much of all of this has been forgotten or ignored by far too many - especially in the US, perhaps - as if it were no longer relevant for an understanding of what it has meant for us all to get wherever we are today. Not long ago at all, many thought this could be called stability, since the badshit no longer occurs...(???)

Scary thought - seems to me life in imitation of the computer game is going on in too many places these days for me to feel comfortable. Think of drone weapons run from laptops.

Yes, Alex, but THE PRICE OF DECENT WEATHER IS ETERNAL VIGILANCE!

You're teaching Western business-economics, right? Practical stuff about how markets work and so forth?