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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?

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rshow55 - 12:28pm May 30, 2003 EST (# 12209 of 12212)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

There would be interesting things to check about what I said here: http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.WrKlbTrjcWo.2829960@.f28e622/4270

Both the Senate staffer to whom I adressed this - his boss - and Sulzberger might be interested in the background involved.

http://www.mrshowalter.net/LtToSenateStffrWSulzbergerNoteXd.html

If nation states care about the subject matter in http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/30/opinion/30KRIS.html , they should be interested in these matters, too.

A very good person to look into these things - if it could be done in a way fully satisfactory to the people involved from a standpoint of status and money, would be Rick Bragg http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.WrKlbTrjcWo.2829960@.f28e622/13793 . I'd damn sure be proud to submit to his questions. If Bragg looked into things on this board - he might solve some problems for the TIMES, as well. And he's not the sort of guy who can be physically intimidated.

Another person who could do a great job - if he was paid in a fully satisfactory manner - would be Scott Turow.

Also, I'd guess, a hard man to lie to. Well connected, to.

My guess is that either Bragg or Turow could make effective contact with anybody in the world that it made sense to contact - cleanly and neatly.

Just dreaming? Maybe. But the stakes are high enough that these sorts of approaches might well make sense from many points of view.

rshow55 - 12:41pm May 30, 2003 EST (# 12210 of 12212)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

The Music Man http://216.39.194.181/songs/songs_text.php is a great show - great literature - and includes a fine song:

The Sadder But Wiser Girl

" No wide-eyed, eager, wholesome, innocent Sunday-school teacher for me . . .

rshow55 - 02:46pm May 30, 2003 EST (# 12211 of 12212)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Here's part of an undelivered speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt, written shortly before his death:

" Today, we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships --- the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together in the same world, at peace."

This quote was on the last page of the American Heritage Picture History of World War II , by C.L. Sulzberger and the editors of American Heritage , published in 1966. I've cited the quote on this thread a number of times before (Search Sulzberger and Roosevelt ).

In 1969, C.L. Sulzberger wrote A Long Row of Candles Memoirs and Diaries [ 1934-1954 ]

The Sulzberger family is journalistic royalty, and some notes in CLS's preface touch on connections that provide both strength and constraint to The New York Times .

" . . Yet, when General Eisenhower (in the locker room of the St. Germain gold club, during the summer of 1951) offered to sell me some property next door to his Gettysburg farm and to have a retired general who looked after his own estate also keep an eye on mine, I made no record of this generous suggestion (which I, perhaps foolishly, declined.)"

(Perhaps foolishly. But perhaps with a sense of the ambiguities and limits that went with being CLS. D.D. Eisenhower was no stranger to the uses of the press, and MIlton Eisenhower - guiding his campaign for president at the time - had been a "wheel" in OWI during WWII.)

Later in the preface, CLS writes:

" And, in contemplating my own diary, I remember how inaccurate diaries can be. Once I played cards with Eisenhower, Harriman, Greunther, and Dan Kimball, Unites States Secretary of the Navy, while all discussed the memoirs of James Forrestal, first Secretary of Defense. They had attended a meeting referred to in the book, and each agreed that Forrestal's account was wrong. But when I asked what, then, was the true version, all promptly disagreed among themselves."

There may have been difficulties of memory and perspective, but also differences in interest behind the disagreement - nor could CLS escape knowing that, for all the conviviality, each would be sensitive in speaking to the man who headed the NYT's foreign correspondents.

In the preface CL Sulzberger refers to himself as " an observer, a worm with a notebook" - and the point is both true and false. The NYT not only records - its decisions on slant and cover play a role in shaping public opinion and history - and the world knows it. And the Sulzberger family knows it.

The New York Times is, first and foremost, a loyal opposition.

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