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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.

rshow55 - 05:57pm Nov 8, 2002 EST (# 5556 of 5562)
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.

For human safety, and international order, there have to be limits on what nation states can do within their own borders - what they can threaten to do - and limits on their ability to ignore agreements they have made. Those limits, not yet clearly defined, need to become workably clear.

There have to be limits on human behavior, especially terrorism, that make reasonable international order possible.

Such limits are being defined debated, rationalized, focused and clarified by renegotiation now. This is something that is necessary. And an ongoing process, to some extent. A process involving both power and reason.

When National Security Adviser Rice wrote this, I believe she wrote something profound and hopeful.

" Today, the international community has the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war. . . . . . The United States will build on these common interests to promote global security.

" The National Security Strategy of the United States http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/20/politics/20STEXT_FULL.html

There is coming to be a "new deal" in international law. There is a chance that it may be considerably better for the safety and prosperity of the world than the old deal. Clearer. More workable. More fit to real human needs. Negotiations and readjustments are ongoing - and I'm hopeful.

The role of weapons of mass destruction in international affairs is under discussion - nations are taking action about them, talking about them - and with work the risks to human survival and welfare from these weapons may be much reduced. Perhaps almost eliminated. For that to happen, international relations have to work - and that means that workable military force has to be an available tool.

If the Iraq disarmament can be accomplished efficiently and gracefully, effectively and without war - that will have been a great accomplishment for the whole world - and a big step toward a workable redefinition of an international law that fits the things we actually know well enough to use about the "science of human relations."

It seems to me that the negotiations so far have already accomplished a lot toward making the world a safer and more comfortable place - and it seems to me that Ambassador Negroponte's remarks set out standards and principles worth remembering. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/08/international/08UN-NEGROPONTE-TEXT.html

lunarchick - 08:15am Nov 9, 2002 EST (# 5557 of 5562)

BALI lchic

lunarchick - 04:10pm Nov 9, 2002 EST (# 5558 of 5562)

Benchmarking

Universal measurements have no political face.
Benchmarks are numbers, statistics, patterns.
Benchmarks enable one nation to compare and contrast their 'now' with that of others.
Benchmarks are neither left nor right - no 'wing'.

Using signs + -
Using weightings
Using inputs
Using lists

It should be possible to gather facts and take a look at and into nations

To 'burrow under the labels' of figureheads

To see the skew
To note the pattern

As Showalter might say - to look for the ugliness

To see deficiency

From a benchmarked foundation folks can see the direction to travel

Based on the choice and depth of right questioning

lunarchick - 04:24pm Nov 9, 2002 EST (# 5559 of 5562)

Latest statistics show 56.6 million Chinese people nationwide use the Internet via their home computers, a number second only tothe United States.

The center of the IT 'search' Universe will soon gravitate towards Asia - both China and India have huge English-speaking populations.

Based on the 'popularity of articles read' (that's called up) - the search engines place the most-called at the 'top' of their lists.

Currently search engines show a bias towards USA documents - as first off the block.

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