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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 - 06:57am Aug 25, 2002 EST (# 3982 of 3994)

"" Henry Kissinger has never let me down, as a person to consult before making up my own mind. Stepping lightly over his one-man rolling war-crime wave, extending from Bangladesh through Indochina to Chile and East Timor, I pause to notice that he was the man who persuaded President Ford not to invite Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the White House. He was the chief defender in the West of the right of the Chinese Communists to massacre their own students in the centre of Beijing. He made himself conspicuous on the American Right by being one of the few to argue that Slobodan Milosevic should be left alone.

A week or so ago I wondered when he was going to pronounce on the impending confrontation with Iraq. And I bet right. He is against it. So is his former colleague, and partner in the dread firm of Kissinger Associates, General Brent Scowcroft. The general is known to be a ventriloquist, or rather dummy, for George Bush Senior ...

http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,780386,00.html

http://www.observer.co.uk/0,6903,,00.html

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UK news: "" Ministers in secret plan to bail out nuclear giant

Ailing British Energy is facing financial ruin - a £500m renationalisation is now possible as the Government fears fresh embarrassment after the Railtrack fiasco.

http://www.independent.co.uk/

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GM BUSH http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/story.jsp?story=327307

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lchic - 03:31pm Aug 25, 2002 EST (# 3983 of 3994)

Knowledge Gaps >>

Jake Arnott
Author

I am absolutely useless at anything mathematical. I can scarcely subtract, let alone divide or understand geometry or algebra. I have a general frustration at my inability to calculate gambling odds or understand my tax returns, but it's the big ideas that I feel I really miss out on. Pathetically, there have been times when I've tried to kid myself that I can grasp some of them. I remember picking up Douglas Hofstader's Godel, Escher, Bach and thinking, 'If I can only get through this I'll be somewhere.' I put it down after page seven with a severe headache and glazed-over eyes. And I don't think any amount of popular science can help me: I lack the basic mechanics so I'll never be able to approach the sublime concepts. I watch the bathwater rise without any sense of eureka.

Muriel Gray
TV presenter

The main thing I can't do is mental arithmetic, and there's a good psychological reason for this. I changed schools when I was young, and before I left the first school I had only learned up to my seven times table. My new teacher knew this but she had quite an old-fashioned Scottish method of teaching, in that the whole class would stand up and she would shout, for example 'seven times 12'. The first student to get the answer right could sit down. I was always the one left standing - crying. I could never get them right fast enough. It made me so upset and anxious I got diarrhoea before the competitions in class. So I suppose you could say I have a form of number dyslexia as a result.

Gillian Wearing
Artist

I would like to be able to speak in beautiful, coherent, long sentences. I always have to think beforehand what I am going to say. When I was younger I couldn't do quotes. It must be something in my brain that prevents me. My mother was the same.

... more have 'Georgia' on their mind than MD ...
http://www.observer.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,780255,00.html

lchic - 03:50pm Aug 25, 2002 EST (# 3984 of 3994)

Terrorist - high frequency use of

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter ... BBC ... will use the word 'terrorist' only in events were all victims are civillians (and) when a person has been convicted as a terrorist.
BBC has been driving for consistency in use of the word throughout the service.
BBC tries to use neutral rather than emotive language.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/agenda.shtml

lchic - 04:19pm Aug 25, 2002 EST (# 3985 of 3994)

Not rocket science - yet very 'political'

'Celebacy' was used by the church

for economic reasons ..... then 'property' remained with the church - the deceased having no family claimants

Lots of child abuse re unexploded mines .... six million in Cambodia waiting to kill children small and large!

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