Antoine de Saint Exupéry, meet Niccolò Machiavelli.

Word has been leaking out of South Korea for awhile now that KJI’s presumed successor is his third son, Kim Jong Un, aged 26. The Swiss magazine L’Hebdo carries an account (en français) of the “apprentice dictator’s” schooling in Berne. The Washington Post hits some of the high points:

Kim attended the school under the false name of Pak Chol, the weekly said, and school officials and his classmates “thought they were dealing with the son of the driver of the embassy.” Friends and staff at the school remembered a shy boy who enjoyed skiing, loved the National Basketball Association and spoke highly of action-movie actor Jean-Claude Van Damme. He reportedly left the school at age 15 to return to North Korea, and little about his life there is known to the outside world.

Bill Powell of Time has a profile with details from his Pyongyang days:

In his memoir recounting the days he spent as Kim Jong Il’s personal chef in Pyongyang, Kenji Fujimoto calls Kim Jong Un, the third son of the North Korea dictator, the “Prince.” “When Jong Un shook hands with me,” Fujimoto writes, “he stared at me with a vicious look. I cannot forget the look in the Prince’s eyes: it’s as if he was thinking, ‘This guy is a despicable Japanese.’” Jong Un, Fujimoto also writes, is “a chip off the old block, a spitting image of his father in terms of face, body shape and personality.”

[snip]

Jong Un, Fujimoto writes, is different. He and his brother Jong Chul enjoyed playing basketball — but after the games, Jong Chul would just say goodbye to their friends and leave. Jong Un would then gather up his teammates and, like a coach, analyze the game they just played: “You should have passed the ball to this guy, you should have shot it then.” According to various, usually unsourced South Korean press reports since Fujimoto’s book came out, Jong Un is said to be “ambitious” and a “take-no-prisoners” type — again, in contrast to his older brothers.

Notice what connects these accounts: basketball. Soon, perhaps, KCNA will start accusing the brigandish puppet flunkeys of conducting a madcap full-court press.

Meanwhile, it appears that North Korea is preparing a long-range missile at its new launch facility at Dongchang-ni.