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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.

mazza9 - 08:52pm Aug 20, 2002 EST (# 3847 of 3866)
"Quae cum ita sunt" Caesar's Gallic Commentaries

Robert:

Sometimes your statements are facile. given the forum's topic you have stressed that percision, mathematical modeling, and connecting the dots are the basis for the decision process. Isn't that what your treatise is about at your web site?

I met my ROTC instructor late in the Viet Nam war at Andersen AFB on Guam. He was returning from a Viet Nam tour flying B-57 Canberras. He had been a waist gunner on a B-17 during WWII. GI Bill after the War and he was teaching English Lit when he was called back in for Korea where he flew F-80s. We visited at the bar and he said that many of the younger pilots had to be retaught the lessons of WWII. In a general sense war fighting is not new but each generation relearns the lessons.

I speculated at another forum that it certainly would be nice if the organization Wings Over the World from the HG Wells movie "Things to Come" 1936 were available. They used a "peace gas" to sedate the waring parties and stop war and return the world to prosperity. It's a good movie, you might want to find it and view it. It's said that when HG Wells died in 1946 he was heartbroken that another World War had occurred although he had railed aginst such folly.

LouMazza

lchic - 09:02pm Aug 20, 2002 EST (# 3848 of 3866)

"" Journalism is in a state of disorientation brought on by rapid technological change, declining market share, and growing pressure to operate with economic efficiency. In a sometimes desperate search to reclaim audience, the press has moved more toward sensationalism, entertainment, and opinion. In only the last year, journalism has suffered a host of embarrassments over press ethics and still further declines in audience size and public confidence, and has engaged in new levels of self-examination

"" While the press may not tell people what to think, it gives them a list of things to think about. In so doing the news culture still shapes the lines of the political playing field and the context in which citizens define meaning for political events. The rules of the political and media culture alter not only how politics is conducted, but increasingly who participates, why, and the nature of what can be accomplished.

http://www.journalism.org/wsone.html

"" in the new Mixed Media Culture the classic function of journalism to sort out a true and reliable account of the day's events is being undermined. It is being displaced by the continuous news cycle, the growing power of sources over reporters, varying standards of journalism, and a fascination with inexpensive, polarizing argument. The press is also increasingly fixated on finding the "big story" that will temporarily reassemble the now-fragmented mass audience. Yet these same characteristics are only serving to deepen the disconnection with citizens, diminish the press's ability to serve as a cohesive cultural force, and weaken the public's tether to a true account of the news. The long-term implications for the role the Founders saw as most important for the press -- that of being a forum for public debate and as such a catalyst for problem solving -- is being eroded.

The way in which the new Mixed Media Culture has diluted the stream of accurate and reliable information with innuendo and pseudofacts had an impact on the Clinton scandal. It partly explains why the impeachment left so many Americans estranged, as if it were a TV show rather than a political crisis. The notion that author Daniel Boorstin introduced in The Image in 1961, in which what was true was becoming less important than what one could make seem true, had thoroughly saturated the political culture by the late 1990s.

Politicians had created an environment in which lying became respectable by calling it spin. They invented "doctors" to administer it. The effect was acute.

Pointing out one of the principal differences between the Watergate scandal and the Clinton scandal, journalist Benjamin C. Bradlee observed, "People lie now in a way that they never lied before -- and the ease with which they lie, the total ease.... People expect no consequences .... This word spinning... is a nice uptown way of saying lying." That was at the heart of the disconnect of the Clinton impeachment: a political establishment that had so perfected and celebrated dissembling lacked the authority with the public to evince outrage and try to convict someone for lying. The irony of it was manifestly plain to most Americans, but it was largely missed inside Washington.

lchic - 09:11pm Aug 20, 2002 EST (# 3849 of 3866)

Each genration has to learn to fight - says 'the poster' above

Each genration has to learn to read

There's reading for sound and reading for meaning.

There's reading for mere acceptance of information.

There's critical appraisal and analysis.

That's where 'history' in the Liberal Arts is important - it develops the critical thinker.

When a new-generation is 'learning to fight' - for the first time, if they have history in their swag-bag they'd want to ask questions

? What is this war about

? Who started it

? Why

? For the right or wrong reasons

? Wouldn't there be another way to settle this war

? What's diplomacy about

? What's negotiation about

? Who's making dollars from the war effort

? Who gains

? Who DOES NOT GAIN

? Why am i expendable

? Why isn't my counry putting a value on me and my life and my potential future contributions to it?

? Why don't people think

? Why don't they look for a BETTER WAY of solving disputes

? Did this dispute need to blow-up to WAR size

? POST WAR who gained what did they gain

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