This Korea "thing" is escalating and you're not noticing it.

Things are getting a bit dicey in Korea and much to my amazement most Americans are not getting it.

Check this out from The Drive.

“Self-restraint, which is a choice, is all that separates armistice and war,” U.S. Army General Vincent Brooks, in charge of all American forces on the Korean Peninsula and head of the U.N. Command that has been in place since the Korean War, said in a written statement in both English and Hangul. “As this Alliance missile live fire shows, we are able to change our choice when so ordered by our Alliance national leaders. It would be a grave mistake for anyone to believe anything to the contrary.”

Story here. 

Meanwhile at the UN we heard this from the US Ambassador. via Reuters.

The United States cautioned on Wednesday it was ready to use force if need be to stop North Korea's nuclear missile program but said it preferred global diplomatic action against Pyongyang for defying world powers by test launching a ballistic missile that could hit Alaska.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told a meeting of the U.N. Security Council that North Korea's actions were "quickly closing off the possibility of a diplomatic solution" and the United States was prepared to defend itself and its allies.

"One of our capabilities lies with our considerable military forces. We will use them if we must, but we prefer not to have to go in that direction," Haley said. She urged China, North Korea's only major ally, to do more to rein in Pyongyang.

Story here. 

Now it's time for a survival lesson.  You ever wonder why people in all those horror movies get ate up by the monster when common sense would tell you to leave?  You ever read a survivor story and wonder why they didn't listen to their gut when it told them that something was horribly wrong?

It's because they suffered from "normalcy bias".  via Wikipedia.

The normalcy bias, or normality bias, is a mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster and its possible effects, because it causes people to have a bias to believe that things will always function the way things normally function. This may result in situations where people fail to adequately prepare and, on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations.

The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since one has never personally experienced a disaster, one never will. It can result in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. They also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation. Normalcy bias is essentially a "desire for the status quo."[1]

"With a normalcy bias," writes one observer, "we project current conditions into the future. Normalcy bias is a form of denial where we underestimate the possibility and extent of a looming disaster even when we have incontrovertible evidence that it will happen. We assume that since a disaster never has occurred, then it never will occur. Consequently, we fail to prepare for a disaster and, when it does occur, we may be unable to deal with it."[1]

I've been disturbed by the number of people that visit SNAFU and appear to be victims of this phenomenon.

Things are not normal in Korea.