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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.

lchic - 04:27pm Aug 7, 2002 EST (#3552 of 3578)

Richard Dawkins, an Oxford science don, suggested Mr Bush was just as much of a danger to world peace as Saddam Hussein, adding: "It would be a tragedy if Tony Blair were to be brought down through playing poodle to this unelected and deeply stupid little oil-spiv."

^{http://politics.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,9174,770408,00.html}

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Michelle Ciarrocca William Hartung

^{http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Michelle+Ciarrocca++William+Hartung+2002&btnG=Google+Search}

mazza9 - 04:31pm Aug 7, 2002 EST (#3553 of 3578)
"Quae cum ita sunt" Caesar's Gallic Commentaries

Robert:

I don't disagree. The facts that are available to the Administration are far more detailed than we could ever hope to be privy to. This is why we must trust our representatives to act in a responsible fashion. This doesn't always happen and that's what historians are for.

As you watch the machinations of ex president Clinton and his administration personnel regarding the "Anti Al Quida" plan which was developed in April of 2000 and supposedly communicated to the Bush transition team you can see the dynamic of what are facts and how can they be checked. Question. If this plan was developed in April of 2000 why was there no response to the USS Cole attack? Who knows? When did they know? Who died unecessarily? These are all important questions that bring our government into question.

When we talk of missile defense, the same questions should be acted upon. DOW closed up 180!

LouMazza

mazza9 - 04:37pm Aug 7, 2002 EST (#3554 of 3578)
"Quae cum ita sunt" Caesar's Gallic Commentaries

lchic:

"Richard Dawkins, an Oxford science don, suggested Mr Bush was just as much of a danger to world peace as Saddam Hussein,"

Remember, all statements of this type should be prefaced with the phrase, "It is the opinion of...". He is an Oxford science don, (what is that, some sort of MAFIA title?) which means actually very little to me. All to often, the drapery that is laid on one's shoulders may or may not have any relevance to the statement made.

It would be like me stating. "Lou Mazza an MBA in Finance believes that lchic is a clear and present danger to world peace.

rshow55 - 05:15pm Aug 7, 2002 EST (#3555 of 3578)

Just like that, at the level of logical structure, considering nothing more.

But there is a LOT more that has to be considered.

Anyone can SAY anything. ANYTHING, no matter how wrong or pernicious, can be expressed in clear english and can, in a certain sense "sound good."

But how does it FIT ?

Here's something by people who have carefully looked at a lot of facts:

'Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century' by ROBERT S. McNAMARA and JAMES G. BLIGHT http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/29/books/chapters/29-1stmcnam.html

MD1026-1034 rshow55 4/3/02 12:01pm

lchic - 05:48pm Aug 7, 2002 EST (#3556 of 3578)

Showalter - last time I spoke to you on the phone the line was cut - heavy sounding beeping noises .... "My god I thought has the 'Shadow' nothing better to do that sit-in on the private conversations of their citizens" ..... 1984 was an eastern-fiction of Orwell's .... yet 1984 does exist - right now - in the WEST, It is the USA !!

Why the paranoia?

Who hassels?

Why the intimidation?

If this 'intimidation' is done via USA taxpayer's funding ... and were Congress to ask ... who was monitoring that call and under who's orders and why? There would be an answer?

Showalter works hard towards his getting - in writing - a letter that enables him to freely function as a civillian ... why isn't he given such a missive?

How many dollars wasted by 'make jobs' agencies!

lchic - 05:53pm Aug 7, 2002 EST (#3557 of 3578)

In the essay WHY I WRITE, published in 1947, Orwell says:

"...In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (The Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision. The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood.

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.

Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

...I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. ...Of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. ANIMAL FARM was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write. ..."

As we all know, the book Orwell went on to write was "1984".

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