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[Starver]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbirds_(TV_series)

Really, a cultural icon of a series. Despite/because of the age. Because of/despite the questionable quality of the reboot film. (And then there's the CGI reboot. Which I've not seen much, but I liked the CGI reboot of Captain Scarlet, so...)

[Reelya]

Notably, the Southpark guys' film Team America was done a style paying homage to "Thunderbirds". And it's relevant to the thread topic.

[smjjames]

A defecting solder got shot at least 5 times while defecting through the Joint Security Area, he is alive though, barely. What makes this notable is that it's the first time NK soldiers fired into the SK side of the JSA and some SK MPs are wondering if this violated the armistice.

To play devils advocate here, I seriously doubt those NK soldiers were thinking of the armistice, they were likely making a snap decision trying to stop the defector. I doubt anything will come of this, but the reason why I'm posting it is because wars can start (or the seeds get planted, or ball gets rolling, or whatever metaphor you want to use) from small things that might seem inconsequential at the time.

Again, I doubt it will due to the specific circumstances, but if there would ever be a spark for it to unravel, this could be it. Then again, NK has fired into SK and done stuff that very well could be considered as breaking the armistice and nothing happened.

[Wolfhunter107]

If this incident was going to blow up, it would have happened while the Norks were still shooting at the defector. At this point, you might see the usual routine of the North issuing threats of destruction, but that's, well, normal.

[Descan]

North Korea has fired artillery into South Korea before. Pre-meditated like, even.

Granted, that wasn't on the DMZ; but I think they're pretty similar in scope, ones mitigated by location, the other is mitigated by scale and pre-thought.

[Culise]

North Korea sank a South Korean destroyer not too many years ago.  I'm not expecting more than harsh words now that the incident is done, especially since Moon Jae-in is much less aggressive in his North Korean policy than Park Geun-hye was.  He's not a pushover, but he's not likely to go as far as even another Paul Bunyan. 

[Reelya]

http://www.news.com.au/world/asia/north-korea-is-kim-jongun-suffering-bad-health/news-story/671fdbf09547cc870f697f4c80a680a6

There are articles wondering whether Kim Jong Un is doing well in terms of health, because NK has been silent on nuclear tests and rocket launches for the last 2 months. Seems like a bit of a stretch. Kim's only 33 years old, it's a little rich to speculate that he's in failing health and that they would stall weapons development just because of that. In fact I think if Kim was in ill health they'd probably ramp things up to appear strong.

A more plausible speculation would be that the 200 people killed when they had that big accident at their nuclear test site set their program back years. Right now they're probably not conducting weapons tests because the big accident put their entire program into disarray. The point of the nuclear tests is to design devices that are going to go into the rockets, it's not hard to speculate that some important rocket-development people were in fact working closely with the nuclear test people, and perhaps they lost some important key personnel in the collapse and rescue.

[smjjames]

Still curious why NK suddenly stopped its fast pace of testing. One theory that I heard is that they're going to the next level of testing (which might be hard given their losses from the base collapse), though I'm not sure what they meant by next level of testing.

It's also possible that they decided to stop and reevaluate what they were doing (like protocols, whether they were pushing too fast, etc) Seems like something most anybody would do after a major accident like the one they had, and they can't afford to lose more personnel.

Edit: lol the new title.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

33 is old enough to have severe chronic health problems if one lives a bad lifestyle, which for Kim Jong-Un there's a lot of evidence for. We've heard of him having gout and joint problems before, and he's plainly obese. If he's really a chronic drinker on top of that, just like his father? He could easily be experiencing a health crisis, even with the care of what are presumably foreign-educated doctors (but you never know...).

Let's look at some data.

Kim Il-sung, Paternal Grandfather: Died aged 86, of myocardial infarction.

Kim Jong-suk, Paternal Grandmother: Died aged 29, cause uncertain (wartime hardship, childbirth, tuberculosis, or gunshot).
 

Kim Jong-il, Father: Died aged 70, of heart attack (alcoholism contributing?).

Ko Yong-hui, Mother: Died aged 52, of breast cancer.

Kim Man-il, Uncle: Died aged 3 or 4, of drowning.

Kim Kyong-hui, Aunt: Aged 71, alleged alive but in poor health, husband executed for treason.

Kim Pyong-il, Half-Uncle: Aged 63, NK ambassador to Czech Republic.


Kim Jong-chul, Older Brother: Aged 36, uninvolved in politics, plays guitar.

Kim Yo-jong: Younger Sister: Aged 30, trusted confident of Kim Jong-un.

Kim Jong-nam, Older Half-Brother: Died aged 45, assassinated with VX.

Kim Seol-song, Older Half-Sister: Aged 42, lieutenant colonel.


I couldn't find any death dates or causes for his maternal grandparents, as since they were a Japanese-Korean couple that data has been buried hard. Regardless, this is not the picture of an overly health family. His mother got breast cancer fairly young and more importantly died from it, while his father only made it to 70 and seems to have succumbed to alcohol-related damage. Kim Il-Sung did alright, but that was two generations ago and his personal doctrine of optics would have precluded any bad habits getting out of hand. All of Kim Jong-suk's alleged deaths, aside from being shot, indicate a constitution on the weaker side as well. His aunt also taking a turn for the worse around 70 is a decent correlation with Kim Jong-il's death.

His own generation only really says they don't have any young-death genes amongst them, but the half-sister lives a military lifestyle and the older brother seems to avoid the kind of involvement that would fund personal decadence. The younger sister is an interesting one for other reasons, because my research says she's actually the one who's supposed to take over for Un when he's incapacitated, as has happened before.

I think with the deaths of his parents it is totally plausible that Un could debauch himself into a downward spiral at his age.

[smjjames]

For someone who’s family line claims to be pure blooded (lets be honest here, what monarchaic leader hasn’t claimed to be of pure blood or of legitimately royal blood when the past says otherwise?), its funny that there’s some Japanese on the maternal side. Especially given that Japan had invaded Korea less than a 100 years ago and it’s still a sensitive topic for all Koreans.

Given that, it’s not surprising that they’d purge all information regarding the maternal grandparents.

[Reelya]

70 isn't especially young to die, it's not far off the average life expectancy of a westerner.

There weren't really any examples in there that suggest the family as a whole is in poor health.

The maternal grandmother died young in 1949, right on the cusp of the civil war. It's probably due to wartime infections. Remember, pencillin only started being used in 1942 e.g. in the middle of WWII. It's highly doubtful that this new and important wartime stuff would have made it's way to North Korea. People died young of a whole lot of what we consider low-level infections today. Bringing that up is about as relevant as mentioning that your family is unhealthy because of the high infant mortality rate your ancestors suffered in 1910 or something.

Being in "poor health" in your 70's is sort of expect, more often than not that's true.

The rest were all accidental deaths or murder.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm looking for signs of longevity and vulnerability to bad health practices. Some people smoke from 20 to 90 and never get cancer, those people are outliers, and if their children do the same it's more than just luck.

70 is young to die. Kim Jong-il presumably could afford top-tier medical care and didn't even beat par for North Korea, let alone South Korea which is probably a better comparison when controlling for genetics. Died sixteen years before his father, too. Ko Yong-hui's death is a really bad sign, she died of a cancer that most women survive, and at 52. And as I said, Kim Jong-il's sister crashing in health at the same age he did is significant as well.

It's not the worst. I'm not predicting that Kim Jong-un will die from this current bout if it does indeed exist, but the family as a whole is at or below average in terms of genetic resilience and resilience to a bad lifestyle.

For an example of high genetic resilience you might look at Queen Elizabeth and her mother, who lived to be over a hundred.

And dying of disease is at least a soft indicator: Some people get better even from severe infections while others do not, and family trends of either can speak to general immune strength. If three generations all get ebola and three generations all survive, that means something. If three generations all die of influenza, that can also mean something.

[Reelya]

I think you're grasping at straws there. Most women don't "survive" breast cancer - we've developed extremely expensive and specialized treatments that make that possible. Before specialized treatments came along, survival rates were 25%. 1 in 8 women in the USA get breast cancer, so out of your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents you'd expect 1 breast cancer sufferer, on average. Once you have it, it's a crap-shoot.

Also, there's no actual correlation with e.g. cardio health in male relatives and breast cancer in women. So it's really just pie in the sky there. Now, if you cited something that passes down in families and would also affect the men then it would be relevant. It's just not relevant at all that someone died of breast cancer. Because there aren't in fact any correlations between that and any other factors that would matter here.

https://www.bcna.org.au/understanding-breast-cancer/breast-cancer-in-the-family/

For example the correlation between family members and breast cancer is really low. For 90-95% of sufferers there is zero correlation between their disease and anyone else in the family getting it. While there is sometimes a genetic component, it's rare. So, for most women them having breast cancer is completely non-predictive of family health outcomes, even breast cancer, let alone "health in general" whatever that means.

Remember, the article just speculates that his "health is poor" without actually citing even a single person who thinks this is the case. It's purely baseless speculation if there ever was any.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Death by breast cancer could potentially indicate a general lack of anticancer genes. Un doesn't have cancer as far as we know, but I considered it interesting enough to mention. That was an aside though.

My main line of logic is the death of Il far before his father and the relation of that to alcoholism, which Un also reportedly engages in, and the aunt getting ill at the same age Il died. That, and persistent gout, and being obese where Il and Sung were not? Could be nasty.

What I'd really like to see is something that answers the question of how good the ruling family's medical care actually is. We've both mentioned it at this point and I don't think either of us really have an idea. I figure either they're operating on North Korea's best native-educated doctors or foreign-educated doctors, which probably makes a decent difference. Or if Un doesn't go to a doctor because muh personality cult immaculate flesh go go, that would be really bad with what we've heard about his health.

[Culise]

For an example of high genetic resilience you might look at Queen Elizabeth and her mother, who lived to be over a hundred.

To be fair, they also have complete access to the best in First World medicine.  Life expectancy in the Koreas at the time of independence was less than 50, though heavily skewed due to infant mortality.  *South* Korea didn't pass 70 for average life expectancy until the 1980s, much less North Korea which only managed to match it for a brief period from 1990-1994.  These are also long-term issues as well: malnutrition in the formative years has long-term effects on life expectancy and quality of life, and Kim Jong-il was born in a rural village in the USSR during World War 2 to a moderately-effective resistance leader.  This is something Kim Jong-un, who was born the son of the ruler of a nation at peace in the 1980s, did not have to deal with nearly as much.  I have to agree with Reelya that you can draw no real conclusions from this information. 
^{Since it's not directly germane but is rather pretty, I'll place it here as an aside: life expectancies for the curious.}