Renegen on 5/7/2006 at 04:26

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I saw the Discovery launch, that was pretty cool, how many people tuned in, 40k?

Dia on 5/7/2006 at 13:05

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Personally I'm glad it's the 5th. My dogs have damn near lost their voices from barking at the all the fireworks displays in the surrounding towns all night and are still jumpy as hell. My cats need kitty downers or it's gonna be days before they stop looking like they just put a claw in a light socket and jump 4 feet straight up every time there's a moderately loud noise. I just found the youngest cat this morning; she was so scared from all the noise she ripped a hole in the underside of my bottom mattress and was hiding up inside (it was her first 4th). It's a good thing I had the garden hose ready last night when an inebriated neighbor landed one of his flaming rockets on my roof (wow! I think I invented some new swear words!). Oh yeah - my mailbox seems to have been disintegrated from the M-80 some funseeker decided to set off inside it.

Yep, I'm definitely glad it's the 5th.

demagogue on 5/7/2006 at 14:22

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I see the North Koreans wanted to help us celebrate by firing a long-range and a few mid-range rockets towards us and Japan (missle tests). My guess is they think nothing stokes the cowboy-mentality more than being provokative on Fireworks Day. I want to meet the guy who writes their material because it's hilarious.

Renegen on 5/7/2006 at 23:41

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To be fair Demagogue NK's missiles are allowed to do whatever the hell they want, it's not up to the US to police the world. Keep in mind that there's such a thing as diplomacy or merely common sense seperating missile tests and wars, or keep in mind there was a time not long ago when a country in East Europe had thousands of Nukes pointed at the US and life still went on. If NK wants a missile program, it's not up to the US to say what they're allowed or not allowed to do. Amplify this last paragraph 10-fold for the Iran discussion.

demagogue on 6/7/2006 at 02:10

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Well, if we are talking about the construction of the missles, that's one thing (the US had this problem with Soviet missle build-up in Cuba), but once NK fires them into the Japanese EEZ the situation changes... some of the missles flew within Japanese airspace and fell into its EEZ (exclusive economic zone), and by treaty Japan's security is handled by US Armed forces. So actually the US does have some right to proportionally respond in Japan's self defense. There are also a few international obligations NK is in breach of, e.g., law of the sea, to which any party has a right to respond. And there is also a diplomatic process in which NK has already agreed to participate, and some less formal (but real) obligations surrounding that, to which the US is also party.

Realpolitik, of course, what matters is that it is patently unacceptable for NK and Iran to have intercontinental ballistic technology and the ability to fit a nuke on a warhead, and as the saying goes: int'l law can't be a suicide pact. But ostensibly, the Security Council would step-in before it got to that point. The situation as it stands now won't play out like Iraq, but I can't predict the future.

The reason we might treat Iraq, Iran and NK differently from the USSR and its satellites is that the latter are considered rogue States to which the idea of international obligation doesn't have much if any meaning, unlike the Soviets who realized that it was important to keep repicrocal promises just out of pragmatic self-interest. Int'l law has always applied a little differently to rogue States. The US sometimes seems to suggest int'l law should apply a little differently to them as a superpower, too, but of coure there's not much support for that idea outside the US.

I should dig up the Iran thread to talk about it, though. It doesn't belong here.