I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.

Erasmus, Letter to an unidentified friend (1489)

It looks to me (admittedly mostly from the outside; I don't live in the US, though I travel there sometimes) much more as if the government has played up the risk of terrorism by organizations like al Qaida than as if it's trying to make it seem less threatening. (It seems like there's less of this under the present government than its predecessor, which cynically would make sense because there's some evidence that people's votes tend to shift "rightward" when they are afraid for their lives.)

The lone gunman thing, where someone flips out and shoots up a Navy base, or bombs a government building because of a conspiracy theory, is distinctively American.

A conspiratorial explanation: perhaps the data has been manipulated to downplay terrorist coordination in America. There would be a couple reasons to do that, depending on the audience. For ordinary citizens, a collection of nutcases might be less scary than a dark underworld of coordinated cells. For terrorists and wannabe terrorists, a collection of uncool loners might less glamorous (as you've suggested too) than a Team of Subversive Evildoers.

But this doesn't explain why the same manipulation hasn't been done for other countries.

This seems likely to be controversial but I want to put forward "sales". Every so often I wonder if I should spend several months in a job like selling cars, where things are presumably really stark, but so far I've generally ended up doing something more kosher and traditionally "geeky" like data science.

However, before I knew a marketable programming language I had a two separate "terrible college jobs" that polished a lot of stuff pretty fast: (1) signature gathering for ballot measures and (2) door to door campaigning for an environmental group.

Signature gathering was way way better than door-to-door, both financially and educationally. Part of that is probably simply because there were hundreds of opportunities per hour at peak periods, but part of that might have been that I was hired by a guy who traveled around doing it full time, and so he had spent longer slower cycles leveling up on training people to train people to gather signatures :-P

I've decided to budget some regular money to improving my life each month.

To what on earth is the rest of your budget devoted?

The implicit claim that Tarski said "'This T-shirt is black' is true if this T-shirt is black" is true iff Tarski said "'This T-shirt is black' is true if this T-shirt is black."

polymathwannabe treats law as being important. The question isn't "What does the law say" but does anybody currently in a position of power in North Korea benefits from bringing him back and would be therefore motivated to bring him back.

I think that without a functioning rule of law, you cannot say that the law about Kim being eternal ruler will have any particular effect and so wouldn't necessarily lead to his being thawed and reinstated. Not being bound in any way by the law refutes the part of polymathwannabe's conclusion about what would happen "if they want to follow the spirit of the law."

North Korean law

North Korea doesn't have a functioning rule of law. Treating it that way produces bad intuitions about how North Korea works.

Not joking at all. Total open borders, by the usual tribal-allegiance measure of political positioning, is a hardcore liberal (in the Democrats-and-blue-tribe sense) position. Most actually-existing libertarians are xenophobes.

Of course, if the Libertarian Party has actually put open borders in its election platforms, then tell me and I'll update.

But no, he's not hardcore libertarian, in the sense of anarcho-capitalist or deontological proprietarian. All utilitarian libertarians are non-hardcore.

Also, I do recall him once self-labeling as "small-l libertarian", which very much implies non-hardcoreism.