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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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lchic - 05:22pm Jul 14, 2003 EST (# 13012 of 13015)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Vroom Vroom ... a new Broom

“Let’s start calling racial profiling what it is — discrimination based upon race,” Dean

http://www.deanforamerica.com/site/PageServer

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jorian319 - 05:25pm Jul 14, 2003 EST (# 13013 of 13015)

Profiling sucks. Probably 99% men of all middle-eastern appearance, wearing towels on their heads and toting semi-automatic weapons are no threat at all, but they all pay the price for that renegade one percent.

It got understood and overexposed.

rshow55 - 05:35pm Jul 14, 2003 EST (# 13014 of 13015)
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.

Overexposed?

. Bush Aides Now Say Claim on Uranium Was Accurate By JAMES RISEN http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/international/worldspecial/14INTE.html

The idea that the claim is "accurate" may possibly be true, in the same far-fetched and legalistic sense that Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman" is "arguably accurate" - but misleading. I'm not sure it is true even in the senses that Clinton was speaking truly. In the ways that ought to matter - the statement is a diversion and a deception.

Text of a news conference with U.S. President Bush, Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, Prime Minister of Portugal, Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Britain and Jose Maria Aznar, Prime Minister of Spain , as recorded by eMediaMillWorks, bears revisiting. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/international/16IRAQ-TEXT.html

Razzle dazzle works too often. They took me in - I'm sorry to say. I believed that, on balance - they had a solid case. Rich was wiser.

They Both Reached for the Gun By FRANK RICH http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/arts/23RICH.html

"To see why "Chicago" became the movie of the year in a year when America sleepwalked into war, you do not have to believe it is the best picture of 2002 . . . All you have to do is watch a single scene.

"That scene is a press conference in 1920's Chicago. A star defense attorney, Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), wants to browbeat a mob of reporters into believing that his client, Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger), did not murder her lover when in fact she did. "Now remember," Billy coaches Roxie, "we can only sell them one idea at a time." The idea: Roxie acted in self-defense. "We both reached for the gun," Roxie sings to the reporters, who obediently turn her lie into a rousing chorus, repeating it over and over in a production number that portrays them as marionettes, bowing and scraping to the tug of Billy's strings and spin.

"For history's sake, this spectacle should be paired on the DVD with George W. Bush's fateful White House press conference of March 6, 2003. This was the president's first prime-time faceoff with reporters since a month after 9/11 and certain to be his last in what remained of peacetime. The former Andover cheerleader had failed to convince America's friends to come aboard. The economy was tanking. But the journalists at hand were so limply deferential to the president's boilerplate script that the subsequent, good-natured "Saturday Night Live" parody couldn't match the gallows humor of the actual event.

"One reporter, April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks, asked, "Mr. President, as the nation is at odds over war, how is your faith guiding you?" — a God-given cue for Mr. Bush to once more cloak his moral arrogance in the verbal vestments of humble religiosity. "My faith sustains me because I pray daily," came the president's reply. "I pray for peace, April, I pray for peace." Far be it from Ms. Ryan to ask a follow-up question about why virtually every religious denomination in the country, including Mr. Bush's own, opposes the war. She might as well have been Mary Sunshine (Christine Baranski), the sob sister reporter in "Chicago," who tosses Roxie an image-burnishing softball at her press conference by asking, "Do you have any advice for young girls seeking to avoid a life of jazz and drink?"

"At Mr. Bush's sedated show there were no raised voices, not a single query about homeland security or Osama bin Laden. As Billy Flynn says, one idea at a time is enough for the journalistic pack — in this case the administration's idée fixe of Iraq. And like their "Chicago" counterparts, the Washington press corps were more than willing to buy fictions if instructed to do so by the puppeteer. "Eight times [Mr. Bush] interchanged the war on Iraq with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001," wrote The New Yo

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