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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 06:49am Sep 23, 2001 EST (#9731 of 9749)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Given how capable people are of producing order and beauty, a lot of the world is stunningly, astonishingly ugly.

It isn't an accident, or an unavoidable fact of nature, much of the time.

It is the consequence of bad decisions, based on bad assumptions, based on bad models, or lies, or some combination of both.

Checking the assumptions and models involved is often thought to be "in bad taste" -- and "antisocial". But, for most of the problems that I see around me, that look ugly to me, that checking is the only hope for real improvement.

rshowalter - 07:03am Sep 23, 2001 EST (#9732 of 9749)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Let me make a statistical statement. Only based on the sum of my own observations and experience. Interpreted, for me, in terms of a principle the great Marx explained very clearly with an example.

Here's what Groucho said:

" Most young girls do not welcome promiscuous advances.

( Either that, or my luck's been terrible. ) "

Well, on the same statistical basis, I'd say this:

These days, with a few narrowly defined and awkward exceptions, anybody with any real social power can block checking on any subject likely to matter to her, and that blocking is respected and defended as a matter of social convention.

( Either that, or my luck's been terrible . )

I understand why that convention exists, and understand that it has some real uses. But there needs to be some modification, that permits better checking, if we're to survive, and make the world better.

At least, that's how it looks to me.

lunarchick - 09:32am Sep 23, 2001 EST (#9733 of 9749)
lunarchick@www.com

Afghani: Children in ragged clothes made the most of the daylight hours, playing football with screwed-up balls of cloth and grass just beyond the bus station in Kabul. Beggars sat in pot-holed roads, their arms outstretched for scraps of food. Women, covered from head to toe in sky-blue burqas, hurried between the tottering ruins of the bombed-out capital of Afghanistan, stopping to haggle for bread and tea with hawkers on the road.

At night, the residents retired to the few cellars that had not been destroyed by a decade of war. Dozens crowded into rooms with no heating, electricity or sanitation. Outside, nothing much stirred: there was no rubbish to blow down the streets. In a city with nothing, even the waste is treasured. http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,556573,00.html A world away, President George Bush was at Camp David in the rolling hills of Maryland, the place where American leaders have traditionally met and where some of the most monumental peace accords of recent times have been forged. Yet peace was not uppermost in the minds of Bush and Dick Cheney, his deputy, when they landed on the helipad last Sunday morning. Hours earlier, Bush had gone on television to tell the world: 'We are at war.

lunarchick - 09:35am Sep 23, 2001 EST (#9734 of 9749)
lunarchick@www.com

+ Wolfowitz said the US should attack the Beqaa Valley, from where the Hizbollah 'Party of God' militants attacked northern Israel. He also singled out Iraq for punishment, saying that no campaign against terrorism could call itself serious while Saddam Hussein was in power.

The tensions worsened. Powell listened in silence; he disliked war without objectives. Bush asked a few questions. Rumsfeld said nothing. Wolfowitz pressed his case; Powell became angry; he raised his voice beyond its usual calm and said: 'If you go this way, you will wreck the alliance.' Bush rounded on him: 'The US has the right to defend itself.'

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