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Pacifism does NOT equate to doing NOTHING in the face of a violent threat. It only rules out a VIOLENT response.

All manner of creative, non-violent responses are possible. Civil disobedience, monkeywrenching, culture jamming, etc.

While you may want to debate the efficacy of a pacifist response to violence, you at least need to understand that pacifism is not equivalent to surrender. Lots of thought-provoking info at:

http://www.nonviolence.org/

Would be hard for me to find another link, so few talk about it. Will see what I can do. However, I challenge you to find as well a reasoned argument arguing that there will be a draft that addresses those points it brings up. Simply saying that the army is in trouble does not cut it. Here is one more and This other one appears to be from a decidedly left leaning site Here is a third

as for: As for increasing the size of the army, well, the only reason it hasn't happened is because the costs have been pushed down onto individual states by the use of the guard.

Those in the national guard, when pulled into active duty, are on the armys pay roll, not the states. Try again for a reason for not increasing the size of the army. The Congress really does have the controll on the upper limit.

Yeah, my dad too joined up to avoid being drafted and going to Vietnam. In his case he joined the Navy and managed to stay out of their. I agree with you for the rest.

Not really

Instead of reading a corporate media channel like CNN, open your mind.

I don't want to come off as bashing you, because clearly your heart is in the right place - but I believe you are incorrect on that point. Iraq's internal food production is not sufficient to meet the needs of the population (and I suspect sanctions on machine parts may have something to do with this). Hence the oil-for-food agreement - if there were no need for imports there would be no oil-for-food programme - you can bet your life on that.

And poor nutrition is - of course - by far not Iraq's only pressing problem. They have few working ambulances. They have a shortage of basic medical equipment and materials like aneasthetics, as I expect you know.

Why then do the US and Britain repeatedly state that the sanctions do not ban the import of food and medicines? In the strictest sense they are not lying - but they are employing one of the cruellest deceptions imaginable. Medicine is not banned under the sanctions de jure, but de facto - in other words, the United Nations has refused applications to import medicines and medical equipment - sometimes citing "dual use" considerations.

The point is that Saddam Hussein - evil though he undoubtedly is - could not legally meet these needs even if he wanted to. The United Nations committee on Iraq sanctions - dominated by the US - has consistently denied applications for exemptions to the trade sanctions, which must be individually applied for, and which, even if successful, may take weeks to be granted.

I would like to see how an American would feel if the US - an undoubtedly dangerous nuclear state - had basic medical items sanctioned by the United Nations under "dual use" considerations. A foundational moral principle - that if an action is right for the US to do it must be right for any other state to do in equivalent circumstances - seem to be disregarded by many US "hawks". And of course "hawks" is a very relative term, since even most "doves" in the US congress will slavishly toe the Washingtonian line in the big picture (The honorable Barbara Lee excepted.)

Much more information on the sanctions is available, for example, here.

Iraq is actually more secular than most countries in that part of the world. The government still pays lip service to Islam, to appease fundamentalists who might otherwise make trouble, but government officials themselves don't base national policy on religion. Perhaps you're thinking of the kind of government in Iran or Saudi Arabia?

• • ..[was] an inevitable response to the targetting of civilian populations by the USA and her lap dogs
  When has this happened? I'm dying to hear when or where these attacks are.

UNICEF says that 5,000 Iraqi children die each month due to US sanctions. Off camera. Out of sight, out of mind. I'd go on, but I've reached my contempt threshhold for the day. Go watch WWF Bitchslap and chug some beers. All is well. Hush, little man, all is well.

This is one of the good discriptions -- it mentions that the reactor had liquid sodium-potassium cooling. I wonder if they actually had moving parts to move the coolant ? It would make more sense just to have a conducting channel as a heat sink. It's about a tenth of the way into this page.

They planned to boost the hot reactor out to an orbit which would decay into the earth after the reactor was no longer a danger. 954 was a malfunction.

You must not have been paying attention during the Cassini protests. Either they were repeating drivel verbatim or they were deliberately lying. I believe it was some of both. Take a look at: http://www.nonviolence.org/noflyby/intro.htm which deliberately tries to confuse a peaceful science probe powered by RTGs with space nuclear weapons. It switched from being an anti-Cassini site to a "throw the probe away -- don't flyby Earth" site. Please peruse the careful mixture of facts and, to put it kindly, non-facts. Moreover, a couple people who claimed to be members of that organization engaged in flame wars in sci.space.policy, so they can't even claim that the inaccuracies were accidental. They were pointed out during the flame war.

... Plutonium 238, while not fissionable is just as nasty to the biosphere as 239. ...

Actually, Pu-238 is worse in the short term than Pu-239. It's shorter half life (86.4yr vs. 24,390yr) means that a gram of 238 will emit more radiation than a gram of 239. However, its faster decay means it won't be around as long. This is an advantage. A stainless steel shell can contain 238 long enough for it to decay to harmless levels. Of course it is Pu-238 dioxide, an extremely insoluable ceramic, so there was no great danger in the first place, but every little bit helps.

... The watchdogs do serve a purpose, if only to keep NASA honest about such things. A few decades back, a NASA contractor got pretty sloppy about a liquid oxygen tank that was dropped in manufacture. About 2 years later, the damage would blow out the side of the Apollo 13 service module.

Yes, watchdogs help to keep a bureaucracy on its toes, but only rational ones. Far too many of the Cassini protesters had not read the environmental impact report, nor the summary posted on the web. They hadn't bothered to familiarize themselves with the structure of the RTGs nor the precautions taken against contamination. As such, they came off as a bunch of zealots who were railing against the Eviiilll Plutonium(TM) in the probe. It literally looked like a bunch of religious fanatics spamming web news sites and Usenet.

Maybe you think this is an unfair characterization. If so, please check with Deja News and other archives. I suspect you'll be as embarrassed by these people as I was. In any case, none of them could have helped to prevent a subtle failure like Apollo 13. They simply don't operate at that level of detail and aren't interested in trying.

Now, it is entirely possible that your educated granola mystics were not deceived by the spin and were not opposed to Cassini's launch. Or, if they were opposed, then they had actual reasons for their position. If so, then I must ask: Why were they silent? Why let the yammerheads grab and hold the spotlight? How can they expect a movement to be taken seriously when all the public sees is a bunch of loony tunes?

The space enthuisasts and the environmental groups should be allies more often then at odds. Both sides share fault in this, but in my opinion, the arrogance of the techheads has done most of the damage.

I agree that this should be and again I disagree on allocating the blame. 8-) Yes, I want to move nearly all heavy industry into space. Let's start mining the asteroids for metal and close all strip mines; let's try a test-sized solar power satellite, etc. It's the people who don't work out the possible risks and rewards of a proposal but respond at a knee-jerk emotional level that are keeping us stuck in the hole we're in. And, the vast majority of those folks call themselves "environmentalists," generally without taking a single college course in biology, statistics, ecology, etc....
--

You mean something like this?

"In the seventh month of 1999
The Great King of horror comes from the sky,
To resuscitate the great king Angolmua
And before and after Mars will be to rule happily"

Nostradamus goofs again... NEXT!