Via Oxblog comes this London Times article entitled "Chairman Kim’s dissolving kingdom".

It strikes me mostly as wishful thinking, basing evidence of an implosion mostly on rumors, which are sketchy at best. I wouldn't hold my breath on the regime collapsing any time soon, and even if they did, the article hints that it would mostly likely fall to a military coup. Oh joy.

Still, the article is worth reading for the first-hand accounts of life in North Korea, replete with malnutrition and brainwashing.

Lined up outside a fisherman’s cottage where the Great Leader stayed in 1953, they listened to a revolutionary harangue by a woman teacher with more attention than most seven to 12-year-olds might muster. They had marched two miles, wrapped up like small bundles against a wind that blew off the Sea of Japan so bitterly that the spray froze on the lines of the fishing boats. It was –15C that day.

These are children whose average weight and height after years of malnutrition are 20% less than those of their equals in South Korea, according to the United Nations. Their rations were recently cut from 300g to 250g of staple food a day.

...

Their classrooms boast lurid posters of American marines murdering Koreans and greedy warmongers ganging up on a proud nation, as though Kennedy and Khruschev still held the world in thrall.

Their teeth chattering with cold, the children staged a classic communist song-and-dance routine for visitors, the boys clad in miniature military uniforms in tribute to Kim’s Songun — army first — policy.

The people who run this insane asylum are the kind of people we're dealing with.