A day of diffuse sunlight, listening to a Beach Boys song covered by Sonic Youth, and driving on errands in a soft yellow gray afternoon glow, a weird luminescence like there's smog but I don't live in Beijing or Los Angeles.
     News (concern) today about an alleged underground hydrogen bomb test in North Korea and a real earthquake in the vicinity possibly associated with such an explosion.  The North Korean government run by human butterball Kim Jong-un claims they've set off an H bomb.  If they have, they've leaped impressively ahead of previous nuclear tests.  I'll believe it when there's irrefutable evidence.
     Obama's press spokesman, Josh Earnest, gave the impression he and his boss don't believe Kim Jong-un's boast.  Still, the usual righteous stance presents itself: what shall we do if North Korea has  such a powerful weapon?  Could an H bomb launched from North Korea reach the United States?
     They don't ask, "Does even an erratic weirdo like Kim Jong-un want to see his country obliterated by American missiles?"
     The same should be asked of the Iranians when considering their nuclear weapons programs of the past and maybe of the future.  Benjamin Netanyahu and his lovers in the U.S. Congress seem to believe the Iranian government wants to actually launch nukes at Israel, a country itself armed with nukes, supported heartlessly with no consideration of the Middle East big picture by a country, the U.S., with its own supply of thousands of nuclear weapons.
     The North Korean leadership wants nukes for the same reason every country seeking them does: self-protection.  The damage done to human flesh and human structures and institutions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by conventional weaponry should not be ignored.  Fearing nukes possessed even by unsavory people like Kim Jong-un is akin to fearing terror attacks.  It's likely that most Americans will continue for many decades to live their lives safe from terrorism and nuclear war, while simultaneously in danger of injury and death in car crashes, natural disasters, corporate and government misconduct and incompetence, all the while continually violated Fourth Amendment-wise by the NSA.  And there is gun violence, and brutality, persecution, and racism by police departments, and shitty mayors like Rahm Emanuel who don't know when to quit.
     U.S. and other nuclear armed first world powers don't like the idea of North Korea with nuclear weapons.  It's a strange proud desire on America' part to not let others possess what America possesses in abundance, out of fear, in North Korea's and Iran's cases, that those nations will lose their fucking minds and attack other nations far more heavily armed with the same world-destroying weapons.  If U.S. officials worry about the damage North Korea might do with a possible H bomb, they forget the identity of the only nation that's ever used nuclear weapons against another nation and its civilians, incinerated and irradiated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
     It's as if American officials are saying, "Only America is responsible enough to slaughter civilians with this type of weapon."
     It's far more wholesome to be killed by an American than it is by a North Korean.

                                                                               Vic Neptune