Here at the shebeen, with the invaluable assistance on the ground from Friedman Of The Plains, we've spent a lot of time watching the state of Oklahoma struggle to find an efficient way of killing people without having its death chamber turn into a Roger Corman film every few months. I am just hoping that Governor Mary Fallin doesn't follow international news because I don't want her picking up any ideas from Kim Jong Un.

Gen. Hyon Yong-chol, the minister of the People's Armed Forces, was believed to have been executed with an antiaircraft gun in Pyongyang, the North's capital, around April 30, National Intelligence Service officials told South Korean lawmakers during a closed parliamentary session.

An anti-aircraft gun?

That is when you want someone not merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.

If you believe what the Western press is being fed by South Korean intelligence sources, North Korea appears to be losing what's left of its mind again. And no matter that the regime there remains as strange a one as exists anywhere, the Times is right to caution against what the spooks in the South are relaying about the North.

The spy agency has in the past been accused of leaking shocking news about North Korea to unsettle its government or divert attention from domestic scandals. In recent weeks, the South Korean government has been rocked by the North's test of a submarine-launched missile and a domestic bribery scandal that led to the resignation of the prime minister.

Still, this is a regime that, if you heard that it killed a guy by strapping him to the business end of a submarine-launched missile, you'd half believe it. That there's one entire, well-armed country of which that can be said in 2015 does not make me sleep more easily.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.