Road...paved with Google intentions

Political pilgrimage fashionable again?  Deja vu all over again;

Google's intentions in North Korea are not clear. Two people familiar with the plans told The Associated Press that the trip was a "private, humanitarian mission." They asked not to be named, saying the delegation has not made the trip public. [Google executive Eric] Schmidt will be traveling with former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a seasoned envoy, and Kun "Tony" Namkung, a Korea expert with long ties to North Korea.

"Perhaps the most intriguing part of this trip is simply the idea of it," Victor Cha, an Asia expert who traveled to North Korea with Richardson in 2007, wrote in a blog post for the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington.

Kim Jong Un "clearly has a penchant for the modern accoutrements of life. If Google is the first small step in piercing the information bubble in Pyongyang, it could be a very interesting development."

Opportunities for this kind of inanity are becoming rare, as even the Castros are bowing to economic reality in Cuba, but some journalists never run out of gullibility;

In the early 1970s, communist North Korea had the stronger economy of the two Koreas. But North Korea's economy stagnated in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union as the regime resisted the shift toward capitalism in the world around it. 

That must be the explanation for the massive migration of Koreans from South to North in the 1960s.