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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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piper_pibroch - 11:38pm Mar 3, 2002 EST (#190 of 197)

cont. interview w/Kucinich

LOTTMAN: We addressed some of the political, environmental, and spiritual aspects of this. One thing I'm also interested in is the psychological. When people are stressed, when things are confusing, people look up to the sky—it makes them feel better. So what would the implications be of the skies potentially becoming a battleground?

KUCINICH: Well, you know, there's a Christian prayer called the “our Father,” which has the words, 'thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.' We view the sky as the connection to that principle of eternity, to that idea of something transcendent in our lives. The violence to that belief in a heaven, in a transcendence, in some universal beneficence; to see the skies, the universe itself, threatened with the prospect of nuclear warfare, in the heavens, it is psychologically challenging, and spiritually punishing to invite the prospect of such an exchange of nuclear weapons between nations in outer space.

And the very fact that a nation would prepare for that while its people do not have decent health care, while its children remain not well educated in many places, while its environment has so many challenges to keep the air and the water clean, while people are still struggling to have meaningful employment... There are so many challenges we face here on earth to make our lives more livable, more meaningful. And it seems as though the projection of fear, of the instrumentalities of violence into outer space, is a threat to all of the aspirations which all of us have. Not only in this country, but on the planet.

We need to encourage people to be more than they are. We need to encourage people to unlock their own inner potential to the fullest. We need to engage with each other as brothers and sisters, to find peace and love, and to reciprocate their discoveries. The idea of a new arms race, of taking that image of a restless quest for discovery and to reach up to the sky as an expression of our limitless potential—to take that and to put it in the context of an arms race is to demean humanity. We must think more of ourselves. We must think more of each other. And we must demand of our nation that it do better.

LOTTMAN: The military powers that be, the Space Command, often express the concern that someone else is going to use outer space to harm the United States. What do you think of that concern? Is it justified, and if it is...

KUCINICH: You know, if we have fear, it's up to us to go to our neighbor, to go to our brother and sister, and say, 'look, let us not proceed in our affairs of state, in a way that we feel that we have to threaten each other. Let us participate in your success as a nation, so that you can take care of your people and receive through reciprocation, a sense of safety and security.' Because I think that the way that we can best bring about peace on this earth is through reaching—opening up our hearts, reaching out to people.

We can never have peace through armaments. That's a false peace. We can never pretend that we can reach security in this country through a matter of piling arms upon arms. There's no security in that. The only real security is through love and compassion and seeking peace. And the military, while they might have important work to do in the sense of basic defense, should not be charged with the responsibility of providing peace. That's an individual matter. It's a national matter.

And we need to, actually, we're at a moment when we need to change the way we look at matters of war and peace. That's one of the reasons that I've proposed a department of peace, which would use nonviolence as an organizing principle, in international and domestic policy. So that we can look at peace as being inevitable, not war being inevitable. We can look at our domestic policy for race relations, for domestic violence, for spousal abuse, for gangs, and all those areas where we

lchic - 01:19am Mar 4, 2002 EST (#191 of 197)

If looking at the sky, that's a militarised sky, is to cause psychological trauma ..... then it's the duty of 'every' citizen so traumatised to take out a 'group action' against offending an party.

Cash $$$ payouts are an 'understood' medium of restraint-exchange.

So in cash terms per individual - how much cash would it take to compensate for loss of that sense of release and freedom via sky-gazing?

lchic - 01:23am Mar 4, 2002 EST (#192 of 197)

ENRON

_{Former Enron employees like Laura Chapa, who worked as a software tester in Houston and is now struggling to find another job, say they believe they were tarnished by their association with the company http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/03/business/yourmoney/03ALLI.html}

But for all these cases, there are available defenses that would never work in simpler crimes. Corporate defendants can argue not only that they are not the criminals, but also that a crime never took place. Try that in a liquor store robbery.

And prosecutors have to prove that defendants intended to defraud, not just that people lost their life savings by believing what they said. Money missing from the cash register is a crime; money missing from an investment might not be.

So corporate criminal cases often revolve around a concept called "professional reliance" — meaning that everything the executives did was first approved by accountants and lawyers, so there could not be the intent to commit a crime. Enron executives have repeatedly pointed to the approvals they received from Andersen in constructing the Byzantine partnerships that helped bring the company down.

EVEN white-collar prosecutions that seemed successful have been sabotaged by these problems. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/03/weekinreview/03EICH.html

lchic - 01:30am Mar 4, 2002 EST (#193 of 197)

_{'small guy with overgrown EGO'- the problem}

4. And finaly, the "human factor". The US President's power at home is very limited. While left almost unchecked and unrestrained abroad, except by US alias. Which became less and less strategically important. So you get a small guy with overgrown EGO came to the top of the World's power just to find out
how limited what he can do at home
and
how "creative" can he be abroad
to live a desired "legacy". almarst-2001 3/3/02 4:11pm

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