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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshowalter - 06:10pm Jun 22, 2001 EST (#5848 of 11896)
Robert Showalter mrshowalter@thedawn.com

I could be wrong about all sorts of things -- but enough fits, and stakes are high enough, that these matters should be checked.

Nation states, with enough staff that they can get things to reasonable closure, should do so, I feel, and journalistic organizations should, too.

Unless I miss my guess, and judging from his magnificent speech, I believe that President Putin has staff people, at some level, who pay attention to this board. And it is in the Russian national interest, and the interest of the whole world, to see to it that the United States does not have its military decisions run by a conspiracy often indistinguishable from a NAZI conspiracy.

lunarchick - 06:12pm Jun 22, 2001 EST (#5849 of 11896)
lunarchick@www.com

People learning a second language, lets say English, can best do it, when they are interacting continually in an English Speaking environment, or, have a dedicated tutor.

In relation to right of Genghis Khan think tanks ... one would hope that these folks manage to interact with people from the fullest specturm of view points.

rshowalter - 06:15pm Jun 22, 2001 EST (#5850 of 11896)
Robert Showalter mrshowalter@thedawn.com

And in the British, French, German, Italian, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Mexican, Canadian interest.

And in the interest of decent human beings everywhere -- especially in the United States, and perhaps most especially, in the Republican party. (And I would have voted for either McCain or Powell over Gore -- but did not vote for Bush.)

lunarchick - 06:19pm Jun 22, 2001 EST (#5851 of 11896)
lunarchick@www.com

History ... repeats itself ..

The Mongol empire at its height was the largest the world has known, stretching from the Korean peninsula to west of Moscow, taking in much of the Middle East and all of China to the south.

In modern Mongolia - struggling to fend for itself since the collapse of a once dominant Soviet Union - the history, legend and image of the great Khan have become a strong motif in the fledgling democracy's attempts to drag itself from abject poverty.

Not possible to keep harvesting and bleeding others ... Empires have to have a perennial commercial foundation.

That the people of Mongolia today are dirt poor .. figures ... they didn't develop a commercial base.

rshowalter - 06:21pm Jun 22, 2001 EST (#5852 of 11896)
Robert Showalter mrshowalter@thedawn.com

MD5264 rshowalter 6/16/01 10:18am

MD5145 rshowalter 6/14/01 7:51pm .... cites several articles citing reasons for concern, and one I believe merits special attention, because it relates to the manufacture of "consent" and the projection of "artificial sincerity" according to patterns perfected, in detail, by the Nazis.

In Virginia, Young Conservatives Learn How to Develop and Use Their Political Voices by BLAINE HARDEN http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/11/politics/11CONS.html linked to md4771

I feel that Harden's article ought to be read, carefully indeed, by people who have questions about the responsibility, and dominance, of right wing patterns in the Republican party, and in America as a whole.

rshowalter - 06:25pm Jun 22, 2001 EST (#5853 of 11896)
Robert Showalter mrshowalter@thedawn.com

If reasonable commercial auditing procedures -- which involve not only dollars, but getting a sense of what was done with the dollars -- and a sense of results achieved -- were done on Star Wars - - I think the stench would sink the program beyond all hope and caring. For what has been spent, the results are astonishingly and shamefully small.

The errors are so great, that any program proposed by Rumsfeld so far can be disposed of on the basis of unclassified calculations that competent engineers could check in public.

lunarchick - 06:31pm Jun 22, 2001 EST (#5854 of 11896)
lunarchick@www.com

The thing that struck me re the schooling of Republicans was an association in my mind with Brand and Product and Marketing ... rather than intelligence, integrity, and innovative thinking.

The system has produced a lot of party-hacks, but, no brains!

Then again most Americans are seen as not being able to apply themselves to science because of their creationism-masking ... and science leads to invention, patents ... commercialisation and wealth .... were all the imported patents and foreign companies isolated from the USA commercial mainstream ... would the US then be catergorised as 'super power' ... i doubt it .. they do ride the backs of Nation States requiring capital to further their products.

gisterme - 06:32pm Jun 22, 2001 EST (#5855 of 11896)

lunarchick wrote (WRT Kissinger-Pinochet meeting): So this is what it’s come to: a president carries on a clandestine affair with an intern, and it’s headline news every day for a year.

That's because it was a known current event, exacerbated by the fact that the President of the United States lied to a grand jury about it.

But a secretary of state whispers sweet nothings to a violent dictator, and the mainstream media is bored to death.

That's because of two things:

1. times were different then, the Cold War was in full swing.

2. the press didn't find out about it until MUCH later (decades?).

"Okay, so the story took place long ago and far away, on June 8, 1976, in Santiago, Chile. But it has its celebrities: Henry Kissinger, who was then U.S. secretary of state, and Chilean general Augusto Pinochet, whose government had a reputation for torturing and murdering its political opponents..."

I'm not trying to defend anybody's wrongdoing, lunarchick, but it seems that your view is not the only one. Here's one from a Chilean:

http://www.pensionreform.org/eys/carta11_ingles.html

But why do you keep harping about this? It has NOTHING to do with BMD.

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