Perhaps you should view Hubble's usefulness in relative terms. NASA's great observatories like Hubble and its planetary exploration efforts out of JPL are among the few programs in NASA's space program doing anything even remotely useful.
Hubble certainly isn't going to solve any of hunamity's problems, it is pure science, but if you choose between spending money on Hubble or wasting it on the ISS Hubble is a hands down winner. It also gets NASA good PR since it does take pretty pictures the press can use occasionally. Hubble did take some spectacular pictures of the comet/asteroid strike on Jupiter a while ago which should be a wake up call to Earth to develop a program to cope with asteroids on a collision course. Preventing an asteroid strike would be the ultimate contribution a space program could give to humanity.
If you have to choose between spending on Hubble and ISS or putting a colony on Mars, the colony on Mars is the hands down winner for a lot of reasons but NASA and the U.S. simply lacks the money, the ability or the will to do it so the U.S. shouldn't even waste the money on a sham program where they fake it as long as possible so they can spend as much money as possible until its obvious they can't do it..
My take on making ISS work is for NASA to finish its pieces and get the hell out of the way. Russia, Europe and Japan might manage to make something out of it especially if they have the 6 man Soyuz successor the Russians are working on so it can be fully manned. The Russians are decidely pragmatic versus the hopeless bureaucratic mess that is NASA and its political overseers. Its an unfortunate and obvious fact of life the U.S. is an empire in decline, incapable of repeating past accomplishments like Apollo. Its one remaining strength is its military, appropriately so, considering the vast sums the U.S. wastes on it.
In my mind, if NASA wants to redeem itself it should start a shoestring, skunkworks program to remove the Shuttle carcass from the Shuttle SRB's and External Tanks and make a heavy lift cargo vehicle on the cheap. Hopefully they could replace the fuel in the SRB's with the wax Standford is working on so they are cleaner and easier to make. With that in hand work on getting LOTS of mass into orbit as cheaply and quickly as possible. When you can start getting lots of mass in to space cheaply then start working to shoot lots of mass to mars to lay down the foundation and supplies for a colony.
Move slowly and push the people out of the way unless they throw themselves under the wheels at which point they are suicidal. The down side being when the convoy slows down it will be more vulnerable to sabotage. I'd think a robotic supply convoy would have to have a manned presence on the ground or in the air to deal with saboteurs.
Well maybe but I doubt there are a lot of air fields that will handle a behemoth the size of a C-5 so I would think this would force you to concentrate all your troops in a few places like around the Baghdad airport.
You sure you didn't mean the C-17 or a mix of C-17's and C-5's. The C-17 can land on a much more primitive air strip so it could deliver supplies to a much more dispersed army than a C-5.
The problem with supply by air is it is expensive especially for heavy things like fuel, though it appears money is no object for these colonial edventures.
Losing a robotic vehicle is less bad from a morale standpoint than losing soldiers. Once an improvised explosive goes off there isn't much a convoy is going to do about it except for the undamaged vehicles to keep moving, as quickly as possible, and avoid the obstruction. I would agree the insurgents might figure out ways to constantly obstruct robotic convoys.
Presumably you could have an armed RPV or a helicopter covering the convoy to deal with insurgents and the unexpected. It would also seem to me to be a better strategy to develop a robotic train, where there is a small and concealed manned presence on the air or ground to guide the train, deal with the unexpected and arrange for defense.
The stuff going on for the grand challenge seems somewhat better for a scout vehicle to serve as an expendable point man than for a robotic supply convoy.
I should add robotic vehicles would also be very useful for scout vehicles that are designed to make first contact with a concealed army, find mine fields and generally do a lot of dangerous scouting work which doesn't require discharging weapons. Scout vehicles would just beam back intelligence, draw fire, and be cheap enough to be expendible.
Based on recent experience I would take the military's word for once, though only once. If you look at Iraq most of the casualties weren't in combat. Soldiers in fast moving, heavily armored, M1 tanks really weren't that vulnerable.
Its probably going to be a real long time before you trust a robotic tank to discriminate friend or foe and to decide when and when not to start lobbing shells. Combat really should have a person in the loop who can react quickly to a complex and changing situation, one that often requires nuance. I wager an RPV tank is the only thing you may see anytime soon.
But if you look at Iraq the place where the Army is VERY vulnerable is convoying supplies from one place to another since they are sitting ducks for improvised explosive devices and ambushes. I could see robotic transports as priceless for this if they can cope with a predefined route, not run anything over and deal with obstructions.
Supply lines have always been the achilles heel of occupying armies. Indications are the U.S. military doesn't really need much help in the conflict phase, but it does need a lot of help to minimize the casualties and manpower needed to occupy its colonial empire.
...but they have one critical flaw...transience. If the Internet develops a maturity where it can preserve valuable information then it might deserve to replace encyclopedias and books in general.
I remember in my childhood fondly looking through an encyclopedia from the 1930's,not because the information was necessarily the most useful because it wasn't current, but because it was a priceless snapshot of the era. It remains to be seen of the Internet will preserve this kind of snapshot of a time or will information always churn, so it is always current which is good for current research, but will it tend to develop some amnesia about the past. By this I don't mean it will lose the great works, because it wont, but will it preserve the smaller but still interesting details of each era.
The way back machine is a very noble effort at trying to preserve this kind of snapshot of the Internet but will it survive and build for 100's or 1000's of years like great books and libraries have?
Enlightened societies have fought hard to preserve books from destruction especially by onslaughts from violent and ignorant warrior cultures. The question is will we be both motivated and adept at preserving digital information. Books last 100's of years. Do we have digital storage media that will do the same or will have to rely on constant duplication of information to preserve it. It seems possible the Internet may preserve information intuitively because it tends to replicate and disperse useful information.
The other obvious problem with the Internet is it is causing an explostion in the volume of information which has to be filtered and preserved. Will the quality information lift its head above the sea of garbage when it comes time to preserve it. Google rankings tend to lift up the quality information but is that enough or do we need an army of editors to raise the valuable so it doesn't drown.
I don't recall exactly the argument Zubrin made at the Mars conference earlier this year but I think it was Ion drives were orders of magnitude short on power to move the large cargo's necessary to go to Mars while chemical is already there albeit slow.
One of the politco speakers at the Mars conference said Ion was ther answer to everything Mars and Zubrin filleted him over it in favor of chemical rockets. I imagine Zubrin's studied the issues more than the politico had. The politico was just saying "ion drive" because it sounded cool.
All great points but you seem to neglecting one key point. Most of generals sitting in the Pentagon and their hawkish politician benefactors DON'T CARE if its pointless and expensive to put weapons on the moon. The U.S. builds all kinds of pointless and expensive weapon systems, the Comanche and the Crusader being the two most recent examples.
All it takes is for China to say they are going to put a base on the moon and there was an instant panic attack inside the Pentagon about losing "the high ground". It can be said that satellites in LEO and GEO are pretty vunerable while the Moon is pretty defensible even if its going to be an exhorbinantly expensive and marginally useful weapons platform.
So the key point about the Moon versus Earth as a weapons platform is all the politiicans and weapons on earth and satellites in LEO and GEO can be wiped in about a half an hour by a sneak attack. The Moon's one big plus is precisely due to the fact that it will take a while for an attack to get there from Earth and such an attack can countered by weapons and shielding on the moon. This leads me to conclude it is ESSENTIAL Dick Cheney be moved to a permenent base on the Moon so he survives the next terrorist sneak attack.....And now I'm going to run away screaming as I recurse in to paranoid delusions stemming from trying to think like a general.....
If you need a refresher on the mind set just watch:
"Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"
First off recycyling water, air and everything else should be a top priority. The Russian's are pretty good at it already and it makes a lot more sense than the ISS approach where you are constantly resupplying water.. I think the goal is to land a few large water tanks as part of the supply build up, then couple that with recycling so you have a large margin of safety for water and air. Certainly finding on planet water would be a top priority. I imagine the search would go faster with people, on planet with a drilling rig and long distance rovers than it will with the current glacial pace off robotic exploration.
I think you are being extremely optimistic about the potential for a scram jet being developed to the point it will be cheap and reliable. NASA's last attempt with Lockheed was a pathetic attempt where they tried risky composites for the Hydrogen tank, they failed, politicians killed it before they'd flown anything. I would also presume by a SCRAM jet you are banking on a reusable vehicle and it remains to be seen if you are going to build a reusable vehicle that will be cheap and reliable. You still have to solve thermal protection, atmospheric loads, reentry stresses and how much time and money its going to refurbish a reusable vehicle.
Ion/nuclear propulsion always sounds great on paper but at the last Mars conference I saw on CSPAN Zubrin was pretty adamant that everyone banking on it to yeild miracles is out of touch with reality, or actually he crucified the one clueless politician who pronounced it as the answer with no understanding of the issues involved.
Expendable chemical rockets, as unsexy as they are, are probably still a better bet for space exploration until someone actually builds something better, versus promising something better, like the Shuttle, that in the end proves to be inferior. Me personally I would love to see NASA take the shuttle SRB and ET stack and make it in to a heavy cargo lifter. In this scenario the ET would be a cargo container with just enough fuel and engine to lift it in to orbit after the SRB's cut out. Hopefully they could also replace the SRB fuel with something cheaper and easier to produce and less toxic, like the paraffin Stanford is working on. The knock against the SRB's is they are dangerous for man launches but they would be GREAT for launching heavy unmanned cargo's if they weren't saddled with the shuttle's carcass. The big plus to this is you have a heavy cargo lifter with very little new R&D expense.
As of a few weeks ago Putin, as part of his campaign to return Russia to what is effectively a one party state, and to its status as a superpower indicated Russia is going to develop manuevering warheads precisely to defeat the U.S. ABM's. ABM's are a lot easier to defeat with countermeasures than they are to make work reliably and it does have to work 100%.
He was also going start an ABM program of his own and Russia does still have the engineering talent to do it. Russia is strapped for cash but it does have huge oil reserves it can use to fund this.
At the same Russia indicated it was going to develop a six man successor to the Soyuz capsule so it can bring the ISS crew up to the point it might actually do something useful just as the U.S. abandons it. It kind of appears like Russia will inherit a very expensive space station on the cheap and I wager with their pragmatic approach to space, versus the U.S. wasteful approach, they might just do something with it.
The one thing about Zubrin is he has the personality of Don Cherry (Have to know hockey especially in Canada to get the parallel). He does know what he's talking about and is very intelligent but he is so abrasive in his advocacy he's never going to get anywhere dealing with politicians. He has no reservations about challenging their intelligence publicly which isn't a way to win friends and influence people.
Easy solution. DON'T follow the Apollo mission profile when you go to mars. A profile where you are expending a massive effort to do a round trip with the dubious returns of a short stay on Mars, bracketed by a massively long, expensive, dangerous, debilitating trip there and back.
Instead start launching large cargo containers with water, food, nuclear reactors, habitats, bulldozers and rovers. Use the same craft to transport this cargo you will use to fly astronauts there. When the cargo ships are arriving reliably and there is a critical mass of resources on the surface launch people as colonists, not astronauts, on a one way mission to Mars. It will be a lot easier to fly people on a one way flight than it will be to do a round trip. The ROI will be immense on a colonizing mission versus miniscule on a short stay round trip. You could send real geologists who would spend a life time exploring the planet and would have a motivator in they are trying to find the resource to free themselves from cargo flights from earth. You also wouldn't need to continue expensive manned flights from earth if and when a self sustaining colony is established. Mars is better for a colony than the moon because gravity is higher, its not a hard vacuam, and it probably has a lot more resources than the moon. It is only marginally worse than what the scientists living at Antarctica experience (the four added problems being radiation, no air, limited water availability, and long expensive supply runs).
The technology spinoffs form a Mars colony would probably be huge because you would, for example, need to establish a society with zero dependence on fossil fuels and you would need significant advances in food production and manufacturing.
The human race desperately needs a frontier colony with a fresh start. A colony where we might try to lose a lot of the economic and social baggage all the nations on Earth currently carry. The 20th century was the first one where mankind stopped having frontiers on Earth and that is not a positive change.
Moderators probably should mark this redundant because I post the same thing everytime a Mars thread comes up.
This post is ridiculous. First off you will need a 3 part facility to do what you're talking about. You aren't going to be doing an serious micro-gravity industrial operations in the same station where you have large numbers of people, factories and docks. You would have to have a free floating or otherwise very well isolated zero G module otherwise your zero G manufacturing would be trashed every time someone uses a jack hammer in the factory.
Its also completely absurd to think you are going to build space craft in space. It would be enourmously expensive because you would have to support a huge number of people on the space station and everytime you need a new part or a tool it would have to be flown from earth at a massive cost, or manufactured in space from materials on the moon or asteroid also at mammoth expense. Maybe if there was a space elevator or a truly reusable SSTO craft so launch costs were ridiculously low this plan might be slightly more viable, but you still have to compare the probable costs of an aerospace worked on earth to one in space and realize its not economicly viable to manufacture big things in space. You might do it if you are building a big structure that had to be built in space, because its big or fragile, but it would still be better to design modular craft on earth, launch them and then dock and connect the modules in space.
Everyone needs to realize space stations are sitting in a vacuam. They have no resources you dont fly there, and it currently costs a fortune, as in a wrench will cost more than its weight in gold, to get in to space.
We are also not anywhere close to colonizing Mars. The resource crash and having a viable colony on Mars both require long term thinking which is something our political and business leaders appear to be remarkably short of. It could be argued that parts of the world are already in a resource crash, but buse most of us live in the first world so we just don't notice or care.
How exactly do you think the Earth, a very finite and precious resource, is going to sustain resource exploitation at the current rate or the accelerated rate necessary to sustain a population of 9-10 billion, especially when resource exploitation explodes in places like China as they join the 1st world in a fossil fuel economy.
Oil wars aren't entirely about whether a country just pumps oil. Its also about who has the oil field contracts, where the oil goes, and if its being sold in U.S. dollars.
If you recall the French and Russians held the oild field contracts in Iraq while now they are going to the U.S. and Britain.
It remains to be seen if the U.S. actually relinquishes control of Iraq in the foreseeable future. Any U.S. official who is being honest will tell you there will be U.S. troops in Iraq, indefinetely, as it replaces Saudi Arabia as the base for projecting power over the oil fields of the Middle East. OUr huge new base in Qatar is their to project control over the middle east oil fields in the future when the war for oil turns ugly.
Chances are we engineered the toppling of Sheverdnaze in Azerbejian to replace him with a leader who is American trained and was living in the U.S. because Sheverdnaze was not cooperating in negotations for a newer bigger oil pipeline into the new and rich oil fields in the Caspian Sea.
The toppling of the government in Afghanistan, in addition to the war on terrorism aspects also coincided with an pipeline war:
The Bush administration nearly overthrew the government in Venezuela a couple years ago and appears to be be trying again because that democraticly elected leader isn't not sympathetic to the demands of foreign oil companies or the needs of the U.S. for its oil. Yesterday the president of Venezuela was threaten an oil boycott against the U.S. because of the return of U.S. backed riots against the government.
I think its naive to think that all the 1st world governments aren't engaged in manuevering for the control of oil now, that is eventually going to become a scarce and precious resource.
Mars is interesting because the Earth is headed for a resource crash in the not so distant future. One reason is we continue to fail at population control. There are a lot of reasons, religions that suppress birth control because they want to maximize their flock and we've interefered with some of the natural, brutal, mechanisms of population control with technology, being two.
We are already at the point that we are waging wars for control of oil (i.e Iraq and Venezuela), control which will determine the economic winners in the near future. Once the earth's population hits 9 or 10 billion and has to be maintained there, for an extended period, its unlikely that you will have enough "water, food and fresh mangos" unless you are affluent and living in a 1st world nation with a military defending its resources and borders. A runaway climate could also rob the first world of the basics needed for survival.
Mars is a desert island to an Earth that resembles a leaking ship. Its precisely because its hard to get to and to live on now that means, to a handful of people, it may be the only refuge from an Earth that will be an increasingly unpleasant to live if the leak isn't fixed and it starts to go down. Mars is unpleasant for natural reasons while Earth is becoming unpleasant due to man made causes.
We could hope for technological and social breakthroughs that would solve earth's looming crisis, and plug the leak. We could, for example, launch an Apollo program to break Earth's dependence on fossil fuels, through nuclear fusion or solar power, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Perhaps its because no one has the capital and the wisdom or perhaps its because breakthroughs would threaten the economic empires of some powerful corporate nations who are acutely short sighted.
Mars is a blank slate. It could go to either of two extremes with a rainbow in between.
We could go there and start fresh, starting with a wealth of knowledge and technology and with no social or economic inertia. We could solve the problems involved with making Mars a habitable place and hopefully build a society that would control population, poverty and pollution and avoid the ravages of capitalism on one extreme and totalitarianism on the other. It may be the only place to create a first world nation that won't have to struggle to shut out the starving masses of the 3rd world.
On the other hand we could go there and repeat all the mistakes we made here and eventually ravage it too, though it would take a while which is some comfort I guess.
If you want to spark your imagination about the possibilities in Mars there are several books though my favorite is Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars trilogy. Its is not Star Wars or Star Trek action packed sci fi, but if you have the patience to read it, it is thought provoking and can light a fire under you for a colonizing mission to Mars.
OK. Bush lied about WMDs, and while I'm at it he lied about Iraq's ties to Al Quaeda before the war!!
If he didn't lie then he is dumb as a post and that should disqualify him to be President too.
In his state of the union when he told America Iraq was pursuing Yellow Cake he didn't technicly lie because he said "British Intelligence says" but he did decieve. The fact is all of the documents that were the basis of this claim were badly and obviously forged and everyone who'd seen them knew this. Rice and the NSA had been told on numerous occasions these claims were bogus but this deception occured anyway.
The state department's intelligence agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and elements within the CIA repeatedly insisted there was no creditable evidence to establish with any certainty that Iraq still had WMD's.
Its a well known fact the Wolfowitz and Rumsfled established a special projects office, a new intelligence agency under Wolfowitz's direct supervision whose goal was to mine all the intelligence that made a case for war and for WMD's in Iraq and to downplay all the intelligence that suggested there was not. Presumably this office was formed because the Defense Intelligence Agency whose role it usurped wasn't giving them the answers they wanted. Much of the best intelligence this office used was single source coming from defectors associated with Chalabi who had a vested interest in getting the U.S. to attack Iraq. In other words the defectors lied about the WMD's and Wolfowitz and company were so eager to believe that they made no attempt to corroborate. Wolfowitz has since publicly admitted WMD"s were just the excuse everyone could agree on when in reality the goal was entirely about a regime change and finding justififaction for it everyone would buy. WMD's were ideal since they evoked the greatest fear and its impossible for a country to prove they don't have them.
If you recall Bush and Cheney repeatedly used rhetoric that suggested that Iraq might have nuclear weapons soon and that we would find out about when there was a mushroom cloud over our cities. Iraq's nuclear program was simply nonexistent since at least 1995. The country that was doing the most to put nukes in the hands of rogue nations and terrorists was our close allie Pakistan. North Korea, Iran and Libya were all farther along than Iraq but we haven't invaded them yet.
You will be hard pressed to find any creditable expert who will agree that the famous aluminum tubes Iraq had were for gas centrifuges. They simply weren't built for it so they probably were rocket tubes. If you want to see some fine centrifuge parts check out the ones the Pakistani's were manufacturing in Malaysia and selling to the highest bidder.
Cheney as recently as a few weeks ago was still contending the mobile vans that were discovered might be used for biological weapons. There is simply no evidence that is the case. They were for manufacturing Hydrogen. There was no traces to indicate they had been used for biological weapons and they weren't particularly suited for it any more than any other big tank you could point to.
The administration repeatedly said "WE KNOW" where the WMD's are. In fact the U.N. inspection team was desperate for the CIA to tell them where the WMD's were. The little intelligence the CIA gave to the U.N. inspection teams was worthless garbage. The Democratic chairmen of the intelligence committee this week is suggesting that Tenet was in fact lying about the intelligence they had on WMD's when the U.N. inspectors were in Iraq and what he gave the U.N. inspectors. The CIA had no creditable evidence on the location of WMD's in Iraq and they also declined every invitation to go in and show the world where they were though they were repeatedly saying "WE KNOW" they have them. The CIA declined because A) they didn't know where they were and B) if they did there has zero interest in actually finding or destroying them until after the invasion. The U.S. wanted to i
Perhaps you would care to cite which parts of his speech were a lie. Its pretty lame to just say he was lieing but not say how. Here is his statement though don't let the fact get in your way as you slander him:
My Lai is a well documented massacre. The atrocities he described are in line with those that were committed by the 101st's Tiger Force.
http://hnn.us/articles/1816.html
The Tiger Force investigation was suppressed under the Ford Administartion in 1975 when none other than Donald Rumsfled was the Secretary of Defense and Cheney was Chief of Staff.
Are you accusing Kerry of being a Benedict Arnold because he told the truth about atrocities by American troop when he should have been a good soldier and covered him. There simply isn't any parallel to Benedict Arnold who was giving plans to fortifications at West Point to the British. As for impuning his combat record, all I can say is he was wounded 3 times and he sure as hell has a better war record than George W. Bush who was partying in Texas and Alabama during the war. I'm not fond of glorifying war records but since you are slamming him:
November 17, 1968: Kerry arrives in Vietnam, where he is given command of Swift boat No. 44, operating in the Mekong Delta.
December 2, 1968: Kerry gets his first taste of intense combat, and is wounded in the arm. He is awarded a Purple Heart.
January, 1969: Kerry takes command of a new Swift boat, completing 18 missions over 48 days, almost all in the Mekong Delta area.
February 20, 1969: Kerry is wounded again, taking shrapnel in the left thigh, after a gunboat battle. He is awarded a second Purple Heart.
February 28, 1969: Kerry and his boat crew, coming under attack while patroling in the Mekong Delta, decide to counterattack. In the middle of the ensuing firefight, Kerry leaves his boat, pursues a Viet Cong fighter into a small hut, kills him, and retreives a rocket launcher. He is awarded a Silver Star.
March 13, 1969: A mine detonates near Kerry's boat, wounding him in the right arm. He is awarded a third Purple Heart. He is also awarded a Bronze Star for pulling a crew member, who had fallen overboard, back on the boat amidst a firefight.
After the third wound the Navy rules encourage people to transfer to a desk job.
It is truly sad that American's seem to think their soldiers never commit atrocities while all their enemies invariably do. Some percentage of all soldiers snap when they are trained to kill, ordered to kill and do kill.
Karl Rove was investigated by the Republican party in 1972 for using a flase ID to break in to a Democratic opponents office to steal their stationary and then used it to send out thousands of forged invitations to one of their events offering:
"free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing."
Sounds like Rove knows how to party too.
Also in 1972, this being the year of Watergate and Nixon's rampant dirty tricks, George W. Bush was working on a now famous campaign in Alabama, which is where his National Gaurd record turned especially mysterious. In the campaign the Republican's sliced together audio recordings of the Democratic opponent to make it appear that he was a strong supporter of busing to force desegration, a position that would have doomed him, this being the South in 1972, if anyone had believed it.
http://www.southerner.net/blog/awolbush.html
I'm not saying the White House had anything to do this but they are experienced.....
If you look at the causualty count for the intafada in the last year you will find Isreal is killing Palastinians at a rate of about of 10-1 versus Jewish casualties. Some of the Palastinians are probably combatants but many of them are innocent chilrdren.
http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Total_ Ca sualties.asp
Remember Isreal's decision to commit a targeted assassination of a guerilla leader by using an F-16 to bomb an apartment building full of innocent women and children.
Ethnic cleansing doesn't necessarily mean whole sale massacre. In milder forms it means targeted killing, destruction of homes and compelling an ethnic group to migrate out of their homeland. Isreal has been doing all of these to the Palastinians since World War II.
Isreal is in an akward position as it tries to maintain a democracy because Arabs constitute a large percentage of their population and the Arab growth rate is much higher than the Jewish growth rate so unless they force emmigration of Palastinians they would eventually lose control of their government which they won't allow. As a result they are obligated to force Palastinians out of Isreal popular and in to refugess camps or shrinking ghettos in the West Bank and Gaza. On top of that Isreal routinely seizes Palastinian land in the west bank to create Isreal settlements decide to extend Isreal's defenses and further marginalize the palastinians. The new security wall Isreal is building is cutting deeply in previously Palastinian land in the west bank. It is essentially a new and massive land grab and will be followed by forcing Palastinians out of Isreal's newly expanded borders.
Its proven impossible to estimate the actual deaths of Kosovo Albanians in Serbia's ethnic cleansing campaign but it is in the range of a few hundred to 10,000 which is conceeded to be an extreme number created by NATO for propaganda purposes. It is certainly in the same range as Palastinian deaths in the Intafada, since 2000.
All religions have zealots that demand everyone convert to their twisted view of the world or die. If you want to cite this as an issue then you can just as easily reference the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades (which Arabs still remember), or supposedly Christian missionaries who compelled indigenous people to convert or die.
If you want to marginalize these extremists then deprive them of the inflammatory issues they use to spread and justify their cause. People listen to Islamic fundementalist who want to wipe out Infidels when they can point to the large body of evidence that suggests Jews and Christians are trying to wipe out or at least humiliate and subjugate Arabs, starting with the crusades and ending with the Palastinians, the current arab group being subjected to a new Diaspora that may ultimately lead to their extinction as a nation.
If religion sects can stop fanning each others extremist flames maybe the moderates will regain control and these sects will remember that religions should be positive influences instead of being obsessed with and dedicated to murder in various forms. It is a source of constant dismay to see how many wars and how much killing has been done in the name of religion. Just as the Catholic church seems to have been destroyed from within by pedophiles, you have to suspect most religions are under the control of people who hold the teachings of their religion in utter contempt.
A few things in his comments that are particularly worrisome:
"It may well be that a number of citizens were not charged with terrorism-related crimes, but they need not be. Where the department has suspected people of terrorism it will prosecute those persons for other violations of law, rather than wait for a terrorist conspiracy to fully develop and risk the potential that that conspiracy will be missed and thereby sacrificing innocent American lives in the process. "
This could be interpreted as all suspected terrorist are guilty of other crimes for which they can be convicted, but I imagine its more likely that it means, if the government can't make a terrorism conviction stick, they fabricate other offenses which are an easier frame to make. An example which immediately comes to mind is Capt. James Yee, the muslim chaplain at Guantanomo who was facing a death penalty espionage charge for collaborating with the enemy. The Army's case completely collapsed but rather than let him go with an apology he is instead up on charges for adultery and using army computers to look at porn which can be used to put him in a Federal pen for a decade:
http://www.counterpunch.org/wright02022004.html
"I do recognize that our Defense Department officials have an awesome responsibility to play in not only prosecuting the war in Afghanistan and Iraq but also continuing to protect the American homeland"
I would really like to know what a DOJ official thinks "Defense Department officials" are doing to protect the Homeland that is apart from fighting foreign wars. The DOD's role in our nation's security is to prosecute foreign wars. It is the DOJ, National Gaurd and Homeland security's role to defend the homeland. The Posse Comitatus act of 1878 was put in place precisely to preclude the DOD from acting as a domestic enforcement agency because we wanted to discourage the military from seizing control of our homeland which is an all to common occurence in nation's where the military takes an active role in the homeland.
http://www.dojgov.net/posse_comitatus_act.htm
I'm cool with the DOD flying aircraft over the U.S. to secure the airspace but I don't ever want to see them practicing their trade on the ground unless we are really invaded.
"We should all applaud each other for getting into the game and risking injury because of it, because at the end of the day we all win if we do engage."
He's conveniently choosing to ignore the fact that his team has the vast resource of the DOJ, DOD, etc. on his side. Any ordinary citizens who jumped in to this game would risk grave, if not mortal, injury. He also doesn't seem to understand how games work. Unless there is a tie and no won wins, there is always a winner and a loser. The point spread is decidely in the favor of his team.
You could hope that somehow we could just all go out and vote and fix this but that is more than a little naive. The majority in this country isn't going to think about or understands the implications of the Patriot Act in their lives. They are going to hear their President, with his bully pulpit, use every speech to summon waves of fear, invoke images of 9/11 and then offer premptive warfare and the patriot act as the solution for all our fears. If we do go out and vote in November we can choose between John Kerry who voted for and cheerled the Patriotic Act when he thought it was popular and George Bush who signed it.
You are also 100% correct. The best way to fight terrorism would be to:
- Seek a lasting and balanced peace between Israel and the Palastinians. This open wound has been there for so long we've almost become oblivious to the fact that it is at the root of the worst of the Arab animosity to the West. The Israeli's are engaged in acts against the Palastinians that would be called ethnic cleansing if they were happening in Yugoslavia. The U.S. has always backed Isreal at every turn, no matter how wrong they are or how brutally they treat the Palastinians. A key reason, the Friends of Isreal is one of the most poweful special interest lobbies in the U.S. A politician can't even suggest a balanced treatment of Isreal and the Palastinians without doing the equivalent of grabbing the third rail. Howard Dean said just that and he was crucified for it. - Stop supporting despotic Arab dictatorships like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The administration spends a lot of time wailing about what a despot Saddam was, crowing about democracy in Iraq and conveniently ignoring the regimes that we call friends that are nearly as brutal as Iraq in suppressing dissent. Iraq under the Baathists offered vastly greater freedom to women then you will find in Saudi Arabi or any other Islamic state. The administration made great propaganda with public executions and dismemberment by the Taliban and Saddam but they are also routine in Saudi Arabia. - Get American (Infidel) troops out of the Middle East. Arab culture simply can't cope with the decedence of American soldiers, liberated American women and an army that is overwhelmingly JudeoChristian in their midst. It just smacks of the Crusades. Its generally forgotten that Al Quaida's core issue was the fact there were American troops roaming all over Saudi Arabia, the Muslim holy land, for more than a decade between the two wars in Iraq. One of the few plusses of the Iraq invasion was it provided a mechanism for withdrawing American troops from Saudi Arabia.
Well apparently the government is spending $2 billion dollars on a new set of helicopters just to fly the President and his friends around and I imagine the current helicopters are in fine shape. This gives new meaning to the phrase "Spending like a drunk sailor".
Much to my dismay, and contrary to another post of mine it appears there is a 50/50 chance this will be partially outsourced since Lockheed is bidding a British/Italian helicopter, Lockheed not having any suitable helicopter so it had to import something to bid against Sikorsky.
Would you be interested in inhaling or ingesting some as proof of your confidence that its safe. It may not kill you. Even if it does it will take a long time which is why there is plausible deniability that it is dangerous.
The one thing I should point out is the the U.S. military is extremely dependent on depleted uranium weapons so they have a vested interest in claiming that its safe.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you should view Hubble's usefulness in relative terms. NASA's great observatories like Hubble and its planetary exploration efforts out of JPL are among the few programs in NASA's space program doing anything even remotely useful.
Hubble certainly isn't going to solve any of hunamity's problems, it is pure science, but if you choose between spending money on Hubble or wasting it on the ISS Hubble is a hands down winner. It also gets NASA good PR since it does take pretty pictures the press can use occasionally. Hubble did take some spectacular pictures of the comet/asteroid strike on Jupiter a while ago which should be a wake up call to Earth to develop a program to cope with asteroids on a collision course. Preventing an asteroid strike would be the ultimate contribution a space program could give to humanity.
If you have to choose between spending on Hubble and ISS or putting a colony on Mars, the colony on Mars is the hands down winner for a lot of reasons but NASA and the U.S. simply lacks the money, the ability or the will to do it so the U.S. shouldn't even waste the money on a sham program where they fake it as long as possible so they can spend as much money as possible until its obvious they can't do it..
My take on making ISS work is for NASA to finish its pieces and get the hell out of the way. Russia, Europe and Japan might manage to make something out of it especially if they have the 6 man Soyuz successor the Russians are working on so it can be fully manned. The Russians are decidely pragmatic versus the hopeless bureaucratic mess that is NASA and its political overseers. Its an unfortunate and obvious fact of life the U.S. is an empire in decline, incapable of repeating past accomplishments like Apollo. Its one remaining strength is its military, appropriately so, considering the vast sums the U.S. wastes on it.
In my mind, if NASA wants to redeem itself it should start a shoestring, skunkworks program to remove the Shuttle carcass from the Shuttle SRB's and External Tanks and make a heavy lift cargo vehicle on the cheap. Hopefully they could replace the fuel in the SRB's with the wax Standford is working on so they are cleaner and easier to make. With that in hand work on getting LOTS of mass into orbit as cheaply and quickly as possible. When you can start getting lots of mass in to space cheaply then start working to shoot lots of mass to mars to lay down the foundation and supplies for a colony.
Move slowly and push the people out of the way unless they throw themselves under the wheels at which point they are suicidal. The down side being when the convoy slows down it will be more vulnerable to sabotage. I'd think a robotic supply convoy would have to have a manned presence on the ground or in the air to deal with saboteurs.
Well maybe but I doubt there are a lot of air fields that will handle a behemoth the size of a C-5 so I would think this would force you to concentrate all your troops in a few places like around the Baghdad airport.
You sure you didn't mean the C-17 or a mix of C-17's and C-5's. The C-17 can land on a much more primitive air strip so it could deliver supplies to a much more dispersed army than a C-5.
The problem with supply by air is it is expensive especially for heavy things like fuel, though it appears money is no object for these colonial edventures.
Losing a robotic vehicle is less bad from a morale standpoint than losing soldiers. Once an improvised explosive goes off there isn't much a convoy is going to do about it except for the undamaged vehicles to keep moving, as quickly as possible, and avoid the obstruction. I would agree the insurgents might figure out ways to constantly obstruct robotic convoys.
Presumably you could have an armed RPV or a helicopter covering the convoy to deal with insurgents and the unexpected. It would also seem to me to be a better strategy to develop a robotic train, where there is a small and concealed manned presence on the air or ground to guide the train, deal with the unexpected and arrange for defense.
The stuff going on for the grand challenge seems somewhat better for a scout vehicle to serve as an expendable point man than for a robotic supply convoy.
I should add robotic vehicles would also be very useful for scout vehicles that are designed to make first contact with a concealed army, find mine fields and generally do a lot of dangerous scouting work which doesn't require discharging weapons. Scout vehicles would just beam back intelligence, draw fire, and be cheap enough to be expendible.
Based on recent experience I would take the military's word for once, though only once. If you look at Iraq most of the casualties weren't in combat. Soldiers in fast moving, heavily armored, M1 tanks really weren't that vulnerable.
Its probably going to be a real long time before you trust a robotic tank to discriminate friend or foe and to decide when and when not to start lobbing shells. Combat really should have a person in the loop who can react quickly to a complex and changing situation, one that often requires nuance. I wager an RPV tank is the only thing you may see anytime soon.
But if you look at Iraq the place where the Army is VERY vulnerable is convoying supplies from one place to another since they are sitting ducks for improvised explosive devices and ambushes. I could see robotic transports as priceless for this if they can cope with a predefined route, not run anything over and deal with obstructions.
Supply lines have always been the achilles heel of occupying armies. Indications are the U.S. military doesn't really need much help in the conflict phase, but it does need a lot of help to minimize the casualties and manpower needed to occupy its colonial empire.
...but they have one critical flaw...transience. If the Internet develops a maturity where it can preserve valuable information then it might deserve to replace encyclopedias and books in general.
I remember in my childhood fondly looking through an encyclopedia from the 1930's,not because the information was necessarily the most useful because it wasn't current, but because it was a priceless snapshot of the era. It remains to be seen of the Internet will preserve this kind of snapshot of a time or will information always churn, so it is always current which is good for current research, but will it tend to develop some amnesia about the past. By this I don't mean it will lose the great works, because it wont, but will it preserve the smaller but still interesting details of each era.
The way back machine is a very noble effort at trying to preserve this kind of snapshot of the Internet but will it survive and build for 100's or 1000's of years like great books and libraries have?
Enlightened societies have fought hard to preserve books from destruction especially by onslaughts from violent and ignorant warrior cultures. The question is will we be both motivated and adept at preserving digital information. Books last 100's of years. Do we have digital storage media that will do the same or will have to rely on constant duplication of information to preserve it. It seems possible the Internet may preserve information intuitively because it tends to replicate and disperse useful information.
The other obvious problem with the Internet is it is causing an explostion in the volume of information which has to be filtered and preserved. Will the quality information lift its head above the sea of garbage when it comes time to preserve it. Google rankings tend to lift up the quality information but is that enough or do we need an army of editors to raise the valuable so it doesn't drown.
I don't recall exactly the argument Zubrin made at the Mars conference earlier this year but I think it was Ion drives were orders of magnitude short on power to move the large cargo's necessary to go to Mars while chemical is already there albeit slow.
One of the politco speakers at the Mars conference said Ion was ther answer to everything Mars and Zubrin filleted him over it in favor of chemical rockets. I imagine Zubrin's studied the issues more than the politico had. The politico was just saying "ion drive" because it sounded cool.
All great points but you seem to neglecting one key point. Most of generals sitting in the Pentagon and their hawkish politician benefactors DON'T CARE if its pointless and expensive to put weapons on the moon. The U.S. builds all kinds of pointless and expensive weapon systems, the Comanche and the Crusader being the two most recent examples.
....And now I'm going to run away screaming as I recurse in to paranoid delusions stemming from trying to think like a general.....
All it takes is for China to say they are going to put a base on the moon and there was an instant panic attack inside the Pentagon about losing "the high ground". It can be said that satellites in LEO and GEO are pretty vunerable while the Moon is pretty defensible even if its going to be an exhorbinantly expensive and marginally useful weapons platform.
So the key point about the Moon versus Earth as a weapons platform is all the politiicans and weapons on earth and satellites in LEO and GEO can be wiped in about a half an hour by a sneak attack. The Moon's one big plus is precisely due to the fact that it will take a while for an attack to get there from Earth and such an attack can countered by weapons and shielding on the moon. This leads me to conclude it is ESSENTIAL Dick Cheney be moved to a permenent base on the Moon so he survives the next terrorist sneak attack.
If you need a refresher on the mind set just watch:
"Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"
First off recycyling water, air and everything else should be a top priority. The Russian's are pretty good at it already and it makes a lot more sense than the ISS approach where you are constantly resupplying water.. I think the goal is to land a few large water tanks as part of the supply build up, then couple that with recycling so you have a large margin of safety for water and air. Certainly finding on planet water would be a top priority. I imagine the search would go faster with people, on planet with a drilling rig and long distance rovers than it will with the current glacial pace off robotic exploration.
I think you are being extremely optimistic about the potential for a scram jet being developed to the point it will be cheap and reliable. NASA's last attempt with Lockheed was a pathetic attempt where they tried risky composites for the Hydrogen tank, they failed, politicians killed it before they'd flown anything. I would also presume by a SCRAM jet you are banking on a reusable vehicle and it remains to be seen if you are going to build a reusable vehicle that will be cheap and reliable. You still have to solve thermal protection, atmospheric loads, reentry stresses and how much time and money its going to refurbish a reusable vehicle.
Ion/nuclear propulsion always sounds great on paper but at the last Mars conference I saw on CSPAN Zubrin was pretty adamant that everyone banking on it to yeild miracles is out of touch with reality, or actually he crucified the one clueless politician who pronounced it as the answer with no understanding of the issues involved.
Expendable chemical rockets, as unsexy as they are, are probably still a better bet for space exploration until someone actually builds something better, versus promising something better, like the Shuttle, that in the end proves to be inferior. Me personally I would love to see NASA take the shuttle SRB and ET stack and make it in to a heavy cargo lifter. In this scenario the ET would be a cargo container with just enough fuel and engine to lift it in to orbit after the SRB's cut out. Hopefully they could also replace the SRB fuel with something cheaper and easier to produce and less toxic, like the paraffin Stanford is working on. The knock against the SRB's is they are dangerous for man launches but they would be GREAT for launching heavy unmanned cargo's if they weren't saddled with the shuttle's carcass. The big plus to this is you have a heavy cargo lifter with very little new R&D expense.
As of a few weeks ago Putin, as part of his campaign to return Russia to what is effectively a one party state, and to its status as a superpower indicated Russia is going to develop manuevering warheads precisely to defeat the U.S. ABM's. ABM's are a lot easier to defeat with countermeasures than they are to make work reliably and it does have to work 100%.
He was also going start an ABM program of his own and Russia does still have the engineering talent to do it. Russia is strapped for cash but it does have huge oil reserves it can use to fund this.
At the same Russia indicated it was going to develop a six man successor to the Soyuz capsule so it can bring the ISS crew up to the point it might actually do something useful just as the U.S. abandons it. It kind of appears like Russia will inherit a very expensive space station on the cheap and I wager with their pragmatic approach to space, versus the U.S. wasteful approach, they might just do something with it.
The one thing about Zubrin is he has the personality of Don Cherry (Have to know hockey especially in Canada to get the parallel). He does know what he's talking about and is very intelligent but he is so abrasive in his advocacy he's never going to get anywhere dealing with politicians. He has no reservations about challenging their intelligence publicly which isn't a way to win friends and influence people.
Easy solution. DON'T follow the Apollo mission profile when you go to mars. A profile where you are expending a massive effort to do a round trip with the dubious returns of a short stay on Mars, bracketed by a massively long, expensive, dangerous, debilitating trip there and back.
Instead start launching large cargo containers with water, food, nuclear reactors, habitats, bulldozers and rovers. Use the same craft to transport this cargo you will use to fly astronauts there. When the cargo ships are arriving reliably and there is a critical mass of resources on the surface launch people as colonists, not astronauts, on a one way mission to Mars. It will be a lot easier to fly people on a one way flight than it will be to do a round trip. The ROI will be immense on a colonizing mission versus miniscule on a short stay round trip. You could send real geologists who would spend a life time exploring the planet and would have a motivator in they are trying to find the resource to free themselves from cargo flights from earth. You also wouldn't need to continue expensive manned flights from earth if and when a self sustaining colony is established. Mars is better for a colony than the moon because gravity is higher, its not a hard vacuam, and it probably has a lot more resources than the moon. It is only marginally worse than what the scientists living at Antarctica experience (the four added problems being radiation, no air, limited water availability, and long expensive supply runs).
The technology spinoffs form a Mars colony would probably be huge because you would, for example, need to establish a society with zero dependence on fossil fuels and you would need significant advances in food production and manufacturing.
The human race desperately needs a frontier colony with a fresh start. A colony where we might try to lose a lot of the economic and social baggage all the nations on Earth currently carry. The 20th century was the first one where mankind stopped having frontiers on Earth and that is not a positive change.
Moderators probably should mark this redundant because I post the same thing everytime a Mars thread comes up.
This post is ridiculous. First off you will need a 3 part facility to do what you're talking about. You aren't going to be doing an serious micro-gravity industrial operations in the same station where you have large numbers of people, factories and docks. You would have to have a free floating or otherwise very well isolated zero G module otherwise your zero G manufacturing would be trashed every time someone uses a jack hammer in the factory.
Its also completely absurd to think you are going to build space craft in space. It would be enourmously expensive because you would have to support a huge number of people on the space station and everytime you need a new part or a tool it would have to be flown from earth at a massive cost, or manufactured in space from materials on the moon or asteroid also at mammoth expense. Maybe if there was a space elevator or a truly reusable SSTO craft so launch costs were ridiculously low this plan might be slightly more viable, but you still have to compare the probable costs of an aerospace worked on earth to one in space and realize its not economicly viable to manufacture big things in space. You might do it if you are building a big structure that had to be built in space, because its big or fragile, but it would still be better to design modular craft on earth, launch them and then dock and connect the modules in space.
Everyone needs to realize space stations are sitting in a vacuam. They have no resources you dont fly there, and it currently costs a fortune, as in a wrench will cost more than its weight in gold, to get in to space.
"We're not anywhere near a resource crash."
6 88 9.stm
We are also not anywhere close to colonizing Mars. The resource crash and having a viable colony on Mars both require long term thinking which is something our political and business leaders appear to be remarkably short of. It could be argued that parts of the world are already in a resource crash, but buse most of us live in the first world so we just don't notice or care.
How exactly do you think the Earth, a very finite and precious resource, is going to sustain resource exploitation at the current rate or the accelerated rate necessary to sustain a population of 9-10 billion, especially when resource exploitation explodes in places like China as they join the 1st world in a fossil fuel economy.
Oil wars aren't entirely about whether a country just pumps oil. Its also about who has the oil field contracts, where the oil goes, and if its being sold in U.S. dollars.
If you recall the French and Russians held the oild field contracts in Iraq while now they are going to the U.S. and Britain.
It remains to be seen if the U.S. actually relinquishes control of Iraq in the foreseeable future. Any U.S. official who is being honest will tell you there will be U.S. troops in Iraq, indefinetely, as it replaces Saudi Arabia as the base for projecting power over the oil fields of the Middle East. OUr huge new base in Qatar is their to project control over the middle east oil fields in the future when the war for oil turns ugly.
Chances are we engineered the toppling of Sheverdnaze in Azerbejian to replace him with a leader who is American trained and was living in the U.S. because Sheverdnaze was not cooperating in negotations for a newer bigger oil pipeline into the new and rich oil fields in the Caspian Sea.
The toppling of the government in Afghanistan, in addition to the war on terrorism aspects also coincided with an pipeline war:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/162
The Bush administration nearly overthrew the government in Venezuela a couple years ago and appears to be be trying again because that democraticly elected leader isn't not sympathetic to the demands of foreign oil companies or the needs of the U.S. for its oil. Yesterday the president of Venezuela was threaten an oil boycott against the U.S. because of the return of U.S. backed riots against the government.
I think its naive to think that all the 1st world governments aren't engaged in manuevering for the control of oil now, that is eventually going to become a scarce and precious resource.
We are already at the point that we are waging wars for control of oil (i.e Iraq and Venezuela), control which will determine the economic winners in the near future. Once the earth's population hits 9 or 10 billion and has to be maintained there, for an extended period, its unlikely that you will have enough "water, food and fresh mangos" unless you are affluent and living in a 1st world nation with a military defending its resources and borders. A runaway climate could also rob the first world of the basics needed for survival.
Mars is a desert island to an Earth that resembles a leaking ship. Its precisely because its hard to get to and to live on now that means, to a handful of people, it may be the only refuge from an Earth that will be an increasingly unpleasant to live if the leak isn't fixed and it starts to go down. Mars is unpleasant for natural reasons while Earth is becoming unpleasant due to man made causes.
We could hope for technological and social breakthroughs that would solve earth's looming crisis, and plug the leak. We could, for example, launch an Apollo program to break Earth's dependence on fossil fuels, through nuclear fusion or solar power, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Perhaps its because no one has the capital and the wisdom or perhaps its because breakthroughs would threaten the economic empires of some powerful corporate nations who are acutely short sighted.
Mars is a blank slate. It could go to either of two extremes with a rainbow in between.
We could go there and start fresh, starting with a wealth of knowledge and technology and with no social or economic inertia. We could solve the problems involved with making Mars a habitable place and hopefully build a society that would control population, poverty and pollution and avoid the ravages of capitalism on one extreme and totalitarianism on the other. It may be the only place to create a first world nation that won't have to struggle to shut out the starving masses of the 3rd world.
On the other hand we could go there and repeat all the mistakes we made here and eventually ravage it too, though it would take a while which is some comfort I guess.
If you want to spark your imagination about the possibilities in Mars there are several books though my favorite is Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars trilogy. Its is not Star Wars or Star Trek action packed sci fi, but if you have the patience to read it, it is thought provoking and can light a fire under you for a colonizing mission to Mars.
OK. Bush lied about WMDs, and while I'm at it he lied about Iraq's ties to Al Quaeda before the war!!
If he didn't lie then he is dumb as a post and that should disqualify him to be President too.
In his state of the union when he told America Iraq was pursuing Yellow Cake he didn't technicly lie because he said "British Intelligence says" but he did decieve. The fact is all of the documents that were the basis of this claim were badly and obviously forged and everyone who'd seen them knew this. Rice and the NSA had been told on numerous occasions these claims were bogus but this deception occured anyway.
The state department's intelligence agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and elements within the CIA repeatedly insisted there was no creditable evidence to establish with any certainty that Iraq still had WMD's.
Its a well known fact the Wolfowitz and Rumsfled established a special projects office, a new intelligence agency under Wolfowitz's direct supervision whose goal was to mine all the intelligence that made a case for war and for WMD's in Iraq and to downplay all the intelligence that suggested there was not. Presumably this office was formed because the Defense Intelligence Agency whose role it usurped wasn't giving them the answers they wanted. Much of the best intelligence this office used was single source coming from defectors associated with Chalabi who had a vested interest in getting the U.S. to attack Iraq. In other words the defectors lied about the WMD's and Wolfowitz and company were so eager to believe that they made no attempt to corroborate. Wolfowitz has since publicly admitted WMD"s were just the excuse everyone could agree on when in reality the goal was entirely about a regime change and finding justififaction for it everyone would buy. WMD's were ideal since they evoked the greatest fear and its impossible for a country to prove they don't have them.
If you recall Bush and Cheney repeatedly used rhetoric that suggested that Iraq might have nuclear weapons soon and that we would find out about when there was a mushroom cloud over our cities. Iraq's nuclear program was simply nonexistent since at least 1995. The country that was doing the most to put nukes in the hands of rogue nations and terrorists was our close allie Pakistan. North Korea, Iran and Libya were all farther along than Iraq but we haven't invaded them yet.
You will be hard pressed to find any creditable expert who will agree that the famous aluminum tubes Iraq had were for gas centrifuges. They simply weren't built for it so they probably were rocket tubes. If you want to see some fine centrifuge parts check out the ones the Pakistani's were manufacturing in Malaysia and selling to the highest bidder.
Cheney as recently as a few weeks ago was still contending the mobile vans that were discovered might be used for biological weapons. There is simply no evidence that is the case. They were for manufacturing Hydrogen. There was no traces to indicate they had been used for biological weapons and they weren't particularly suited for it any more than any other big tank you could point to.
The administration repeatedly said "WE KNOW" where the WMD's are. In fact the U.N. inspection team was desperate for the CIA to tell them where the WMD's were. The little intelligence the CIA gave to the U.N. inspection teams was worthless garbage. The Democratic chairmen of the intelligence committee this week is suggesting that Tenet was in fact lying about the intelligence they had on WMD's when the U.N. inspectors were in Iraq and what he gave the U.N. inspectors. The CIA had no creditable evidence on the location of WMD's in Iraq and they also declined every invitation to go in and show the world where they were though they were repeatedly saying "WE KNOW" they have them. The CIA declined because A) they didn't know where they were and B) if they did there has zero interest in actually finding or destroying them until after the invasion. The U.S. wanted to i
Perhaps you would care to cite which parts of his speech were a lie. Its pretty lame to just say he was lieing but not say how. Here is his statement though don't let the fact get in your way as you slander him:
e rr yTestimony.html
http://www.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/JohnK
My Lai is a well documented massacre.
The atrocities he described are in line with those that were committed by the 101st's Tiger Force.
http://hnn.us/articles/1816.html
The Tiger Force investigation was suppressed under the Ford Administartion in 1975 when none other than Donald Rumsfled was the Secretary of Defense and Cheney was Chief of Staff.
Are you accusing Kerry of being a Benedict Arnold because he told the truth about atrocities by American troop when he should have been a good soldier and covered him. There simply isn't any parallel to Benedict Arnold who was giving plans to fortifications at West Point to the British. As for impuning his combat record, all I can say is he was wounded 3 times and he sure as hell has a better war record than George W. Bush who was partying in Texas and Alabama during the war. I'm not fond of glorifying war records but since you are slamming him:
November 17, 1968:
Kerry arrives in Vietnam, where he is given command of Swift boat No. 44, operating in the Mekong Delta.
December 2, 1968:
Kerry gets his first taste of intense combat, and is wounded in the arm. He is awarded a Purple Heart.
January, 1969:
Kerry takes command of a new Swift boat, completing 18 missions over 48 days, almost all in the Mekong Delta area.
February 20, 1969:
Kerry is wounded again, taking shrapnel in the left thigh, after a gunboat battle. He is awarded a second Purple Heart.
February 28, 1969:
Kerry and his boat crew, coming under attack while patroling in the Mekong Delta, decide to counterattack. In the middle of the ensuing firefight, Kerry leaves his boat, pursues a Viet Cong fighter into a small hut, kills him, and retreives a rocket launcher. He is awarded a Silver Star.
March 13, 1969:
A mine detonates near Kerry's boat, wounding him in the right arm. He is awarded a third Purple Heart. He is also awarded a Bronze Star for pulling a crew member, who had fallen overboard, back on the boat amidst a firefight.
After the third wound the Navy rules encourage people to transfer to a desk job.
It is truly sad that American's seem to think their soldiers never commit atrocities while all their enemies invariably do. Some percentage of all soldiers snap when they are trained to kill, ordered to kill and do kill.
Karl Rove was investigated by the Republican party in 1972 for using a flase ID to break in to a Democratic opponents office to steal their stationary and then used it to send out thousands of forged invitations to one of their events offering :
"free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing."
Sounds like Rove knows how to party too.
Also in 1972, this being the year of Watergate and Nixon's rampant dirty tricks, George W. Bush was working on a now famous campaign in Alabama, which is where his National Gaurd record turned especially mysterious. In the campaign the Republican's sliced together audio recordings of the Democratic opponent to make it appear that he was a strong supporter of busing to force desegration, a position that would have doomed him, this being the South in 1972, if anyone had believed it.
http://www.southerner.net/blog/awolbush.html
I'm not saying the White House had anything to do this but they are experienced.....
If you look at the causualty count for the intafada in the last year you will find Isreal is killing Palastinians at a rate of about of 10-1 versus Jewish casualties. Some of the Palastinians are probably combatants but many of them are innocent chilrdren.
_ Ca sualties.asp
http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Total
Remember Isreal's decision to commit a targeted assassination of a guerilla leader by using an F-16 to bomb an apartment building full of innocent women and children.
Ethnic cleansing doesn't necessarily mean whole sale massacre. In milder forms it means targeted killing, destruction of homes and compelling an ethnic group to migrate out of their homeland. Isreal has been doing all of these to the Palastinians since World War II.
Isreal is in an akward position as it tries to maintain a democracy because Arabs constitute a large percentage of their population and the Arab growth rate is much higher than the Jewish growth rate so unless they force emmigration of Palastinians they would eventually lose control of their government which they won't allow. As a result they are obligated to force Palastinians out of Isreal popular and in to refugess camps or shrinking ghettos in the West Bank and Gaza. On top of that Isreal routinely seizes Palastinian land in the west bank to create Isreal settlements decide to extend Isreal's defenses and further marginalize the palastinians. The new security wall Isreal is building is cutting deeply in previously Palastinian land in the west bank. It is essentially a new and massive land grab and will be followed by forcing Palastinians out of Isreal's newly expanded borders.
Its proven impossible to estimate the actual deaths of Kosovo Albanians in Serbia's ethnic cleansing campaign but it is in the range of a few hundred to 10,000 which is conceeded to be an extreme number created by NATO for propaganda purposes. It is certainly in the same range as Palastinian deaths in the Intafada, since 2000.
All religions have zealots that demand everyone convert to their twisted view of the world or die. If you want to cite this as an issue then you can just as easily reference the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades (which Arabs still remember), or supposedly Christian missionaries who compelled indigenous people to convert or die.
If you want to marginalize these extremists then deprive them of the inflammatory issues they use to spread and justify their cause. People listen to Islamic fundementalist who want to wipe out Infidels when they can point to the large body of evidence that suggests Jews and Christians are trying to wipe out or at least humiliate and subjugate Arabs, starting with the crusades and ending with the Palastinians, the current arab group being subjected to a new Diaspora that may ultimately lead to their extinction as a nation.
If religion sects can stop fanning each others extremist flames maybe the moderates will regain control and these sects will remember that religions should be positive influences instead of being obsessed with and dedicated to murder in various forms. It is a source of constant dismay to see how many wars and how much killing has been done in the name of religion. Just as the Catholic church seems to have been destroyed from within by pedophiles, you have to suspect most religions are under the control of people who hold the teachings of their religion in utter contempt.
A few things in his comments that are particularly worrisome:
"It may well be that a number of citizens were not charged with terrorism-related crimes, but they need not be. Where the department has suspected people of terrorism it will prosecute those persons for other violations of law, rather than wait for a terrorist conspiracy to fully develop and risk the potential that that conspiracy will be missed and thereby sacrificing innocent American lives in the process. "
This could be interpreted as all suspected terrorist are guilty of other crimes for which they can be convicted, but I imagine its more likely that it means, if the government can't make a terrorism conviction stick, they fabricate other offenses which are an easier frame to make. An example which immediately comes to mind is Capt. James Yee, the muslim chaplain at Guantanomo who was facing a death penalty espionage charge for collaborating with the enemy. The Army's case completely collapsed but rather than let him go with an apology he is instead up on charges for adultery and using army computers to look at porn which can be used to put him in a Federal pen for a decade:
http://www.counterpunch.org/wright02022004.html
"I do recognize that our Defense Department officials have an awesome responsibility to play in not only prosecuting the war in Afghanistan and Iraq but also continuing to protect the American homeland"
I would really like to know what a DOJ official thinks "Defense Department officials" are doing to protect the Homeland that is apart from fighting foreign wars. The DOD's role in our nation's security is to prosecute foreign wars. It is the DOJ, National Gaurd and Homeland security's role to defend the homeland. The Posse Comitatus act of 1878 was put in place precisely to preclude the DOD from acting as a domestic enforcement agency because we wanted to discourage the military from seizing control of our homeland which is an all to common occurence in nation's where the military takes an active role in the homeland.
http://www.dojgov.net/posse_comitatus_act.htm
I'm cool with the DOD flying aircraft over the U.S. to secure the airspace but I don't ever want to see them practicing their trade on the ground unless we are really invaded.
"We should all applaud each other for getting into the game and risking injury because of it, because at the end of the day we all win if we do engage."
He's conveniently choosing to ignore the fact that his team has the vast resource of the DOJ, DOD, etc. on his side. Any ordinary citizens who jumped in to this game would risk grave, if not mortal, injury. He also doesn't seem to understand how games work. Unless there is a tie and no won wins, there is always a winner and a loser. The point spread is decidely in the favor of his team.
You could hope that somehow we could just all go out and vote and fix this but that is more than a little naive. The majority in this country isn't going to think about or understands the implications of the Patriot Act in their lives. They are going to hear their President, with his bully pulpit, use every speech to summon waves of fear, invoke images of 9/11 and then offer premptive warfare and the patriot act as the solution for all our fears. If we do go out and vote in November we can choose between John Kerry who voted for and cheerled the Patriotic Act when he thought it was popular and George Bush who signed it.
You are also 100% correct. The best way to fight terrorism would be to:
- Seek a lasting and balanced peace between Israel and the Palastinians. This open wound has been there for so long we've almost become oblivious to the fact that it is at the root of the worst of the Arab animosity to the West. The Israeli's are engaged in acts against the Palastinians that would be called ethnic cleansing if they were happening in Yugoslavia. The U.S. has always backed Isreal at every turn, no matter how wrong they are or how brutally they treat the Palastinians. A key reason, the Friends of Isreal is one of the most poweful special interest lobbies in the U.S. A politician can't even suggest a balanced treatment of Isreal and the Palastinians without doing the equivalent of grabbing the third rail. Howard Dean said just that and he was crucified for it.
- Stop supporting despotic Arab dictatorships like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The administration spends a lot of time wailing about what a despot Saddam was, crowing about democracy in Iraq and conveniently ignoring the regimes that we call friends that are nearly as brutal as Iraq in suppressing dissent. Iraq under the Baathists offered vastly greater freedom to women then you will find in Saudi Arabi or any other Islamic state. The administration made great propaganda with public executions and dismemberment by the Taliban and Saddam but they are also routine in Saudi Arabia.
- Get American (Infidel) troops out of the Middle East. Arab culture simply can't cope with the decedence of American soldiers, liberated American women and an army that is overwhelmingly JudeoChristian in their midst. It just smacks of the Crusades. Its generally forgotten that Al Quaida's core issue was the fact there were American troops roaming all over Saudi Arabia, the Muslim holy land, for more than a decade between the two wars in Iraq. One of the few plusses of the Iraq invasion was it provided a mechanism for withdrawing American troops from Saudi Arabia.
Well apparently the government is spending $2 billion dollars on a new set of helicopters just to fly the President and his friends around and I imagine the current helicopters are in fine shape. This gives new meaning to the phrase "Spending like a drunk sailor".
Much to my dismay, and contrary to another post of mine it appears there is a 50/50 chance this will be partially outsourced since Lockheed is bidding a British/Italian helicopter, Lockheed not having any suitable helicopter so it had to import something to bid against Sikorsky.
OK to be fair:
0 3_ 200303146.html
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2003/n031420
Would you be interested in inhaling or ingesting some as proof of your confidence that its safe. It may not kill you. Even if it does it will take a long time which is why there is plausible deniability that it is dangerous.
The one thing I should point out is the the U.S. military is extremely dependent on depleted uranium weapons so they have a vested interest in claiming that its safe.