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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.

almarst2003 - 11:35pm May 22, 2003 EST (# 11876 of 11881)

Authorities in Costa Rica took over an American-run boot camp-style academy yesterday, after claims that the troubled teenagers there were being abused. - http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,961883,00.html

"In Costa Rica, we don't even allow that kind of punishment for our prison inmates. We are conducting a criminal investigation for systematic violations of human rights, specifically the rights of the children."

bbbuck - 01:03am May 23, 2003 EST (# 11877 of 11881)

They were shooting missiles at these people in the boot camp, alarmist200x?

lchic - 05:16am May 23, 2003 EST (# 11878 of 11881)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Congo - streets run with blood

http://www.guardian.co.uk/congo/story/0,12292,961954,00.html

lchic - 07:51am May 23, 2003 EST (# 11879 of 11881)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

RU Repost with correct link

" .. the unravelling of the Communist state and the emergence of crime lords and new capitalist kings. Tales of the Russian mafia are well known, ... Lazaredes' investigation places Russian crime at the heart of political power.

http://www.sbs.com.au/dateline/

rshow55 - 08:10am May 23, 2003 EST (# 11880 of 11881)
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 lead editorial in the Times today ends with a phrase that caught my eye - a body of facts

"suggests that the entire effort is a gigantic, delusional waste of money."

There is also a question from Lawrence Wright: "if truth is stranger than fiction, then what is politics?" That question connected to many things on my mind.

I've been slow to respond, worrying about my own work - on this board and earlier. Spent some hours reviewing things with my wife, with such a questions much on her mind. I've also spent a lot of time checking through records, and reviewing some history, and some things I thought were true about the New York Times - and I think are. Took some time rereading a very good book Deadline by James Reston, 1991. -

Reston put these lines front-and-center on his dustjacket:

"I call this book Deadline - defined in my old battered dictionary as "the latest time by which something must be completed" - because meeting newspaper deadlines was what I did for most of my life. It is also what the United States has been doing for the last fifty years - meeting one damn deadline after another: dealing with the depression, beating the Nazis, facing the Communists, controlling the bomb, always at the last minute."

I've worried about deadlines, too - but I've spent most of my life working on problems I thought were so important that they needed to be solved - however long solutions took - working for solutions that would be worthwhile whenever they were found.

In many ways, my life has been a legacy project, not gigantic, but perhaps an entire effort that has been a delusional waste of money (and effort.)

I've been working on problems that I was told were important - and believed were important - because they were the key problems that desperately concerned Dwight D. Eisenhower and the best people he had contact with - after he'd left office, defeated on some key things because he didn't have solutions to these problems.

I was recruited by people who thought of D.D. Eisenhower as one of the greatest administrators and technocrats who ever lived - and I came to think so. They thought they were assigning me problems worth every effort I could give them. Problems that people wanted solved - and would want solved into the indefinite future.

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