Hope everyone is enjoying the day and having a good time eating BBQ and such!

I’ll be watching fireworks downtown later tonight, assuming the rain heading this way doesn’t decide to ruin the night for the second year in a row :/

The big news of the day is of course the North Korean missile launches. I’m amazed at the amount of speculation on the television news stations about number of launches, whether or not it’s a certain type of missile, what the response is going to be, etc. What happened to news being informative instead of speculative?

One interesting note to point out is that while this Administration has employed what amounts to a failed tactic with North Korea (and has been since the policy shift away from one of engagement put in place by the Clinton Administration), they and the rest of the UN Security Council have been all too eager to address Iran and offer them many incentives, including a light water nuclear reactor.. something that was pulled off the table for North Korea.

Now I’m not saying that giving either Iran or North Korea nuclear technology is an especially good idea, but when the US decides to take a hardline stance against a pair of nations like North Korea and Iran, label them an “Axis of Evil”, and then one of those two nations (Iran) begins to see results in the form of these incentive packages after issuing harsh rhetoric and engaging in blatentely disregarding the will of not only the United States, but the International community, what did we expect was going to happen with North Korea?

Did we expect them not to take notice of the focus that’s been placed on Iran? Ignore the package of incentives that have been offered? Not take steps to bring itself to the forefront of international discussion in the hopes of getting what it wants the same way Iran has?

It seems an obvious and predictable outcome.