What a surprise. North Korea is asking for emergency food aid again. Their people are starving (more than usual) because of bad flooding (which wouldn't be an issue if Pyongyang would stop sabotaging its own economy).

Once again, this atrocious regime that hates foreigners and blackmails its neighbors is banking on charity from the outside world. Instead of falling into old habits, can we not try to get a little something -- maybe a whole lot of something -- for our help?

I'm not talking about shutting down their nuclear program... again. Or stopping them from exporting rocket technology to rogue regimes... again. That's stopping North Korea from doing what it wants. It's not giving us what we want.

We've got leverage. Let's give them a whole lot of food aid. Don't be stingy -- send 'em mountains of triple-decker cheeseburgers with bacon, trainloads of fried chicken with potatoes and gravy, boats packed to the gills with gourmet fish tacos. In return, we ought to give them hard conditions:

1. Closing the Gulag and releasing all prisoners.
2. Mass surrender of all North Korean forces bordering the DMZ.
3. Total demilitarization of North Korea except for a small division of border guards along the northwest frontier to keep the Chinese happy.
4. The immediate execution of Kim Jong Un and any potential dynastic replacements.
5. Overnight transition to Jeffersonian democracy. Barring that, handing over control over all state institutions to South Korea, on the basis that both countries share a common language and those folks in the south have proven they can actually run a country that isn't bonkers (Referrendum dependent on the willingness of South Korea to take over sovereignty of this mess).

That would be a start.

Jonathon Narvey is the Editor of The Propagandist