So we should turn to Vladimir Putin for our energy needs? I don't know if you've noticed or not but relations with Russia have gotten a bit frosty lately....
I think our buying power would surely influence the markets if we were to just set up some viable competition, even if it had just a percentage of the output as OPEC
You could have all the competition in the World but it isn't going to change the fact that demand for oil is going to outpace supply again in the very near future. That's going to drive up prices regardless of how many competitors to OPEC we can establish. Unless you think you can talk the Chinese and Indians out of their industrialization. In any case, how does your "plan" address the fact that we are sending $700 billion dollars a year out of our country to pay for all that oil?
Nuclear power doesn't really fund terrorists, last I checked. Neither does hydroelectric
I don't have a problem with either of those power sources. I've often advocated for nuclear power. Hydro is just about a tapped out resource in the United States though. It's great where it's available though.
No "alternative" energy solution has yet proven itself as a viable solution.
Where did I advocate for an "alternative" energy? I was talking about the Pickens plan -- which calls for using wind to displace natural gas used for electrical production to free up that natural gas for the transportation sector. There's nothing "alternative" about wind -- the technology works and we are using it right now. We also have pretty abundant wind resources.
I also don't quite see a reason why it should be more difficult to build very high power electric engines than combustion ones.
The problem isn't being able to build the engine -- the problem is having a power source for that engine. If you assume that the typical truck has anywhere from 300 to 650 horsepower that works out to 224 to 485 kilowatts. Do you know of a battery technology (even on the drawing board) that could deliver that type of power in a reasonable weight? I don't.
Doubtful, since USSR didn't fly squadrons of B52s over Japan to really bring it home to them that they were done for.
B-52s eh?
If I remember my history lessons accurately: Emperor Hirohito, during the signing of Japan's surrender, broke down in tears at the sight of the sun being blocked out by a sky full of B52s.
That's funny, because from what I recall of my history lessons Hirohito wasn't present during the signing of the surrender document.
I would argue the whole Pacific Theater and our use of the most powerful weapon in human history on them, is what made Japan lose more than anything else.
What made them lose was the arrogance of taking on a power that had many times their GDP and industry. What made them surrender is a point still debated by historians. It's likely that was a combination of many factors.
It's indisputable though that the entry of the Soviets into the war was a major shock to the Japanese leadership -- in less than two weeks the Soviets smashed the bulk of the Japanese army in Manchuria, taking over half a million prisoners in the process. The scale of August Storm and the size of the forces involved dwarfs any of the ground engagements that the Allies fought with the Japanese. The Soviets also seized the Kuril Islands and were in a position to launch an invasion of Hokkaido -- which was practically undefended as the bulk of the Japanese forces had been located in the South to oppose the eventual American/British landings.
Now ask yourself if you had to choose between being under Soviet occupation or American occupation -- which would you go with?
Eh, trains are great. I've often wondered just how competitive 18 wheelers would be with them if the 18-wheeler didn't have a subsidized road surface to travel on. Trains are definitely a lot easier to convert to electric -- though I wonder just how much electric you'd actually need to move long heavy fright trains. The energy required is a obviously lot more than moving a smaller and lighter passenger train.
Either way though you'll still need some trucks. And those will have to be powered by something. I'd rather see them powered by American natural gas than Saudi oil.....
Of course, if lots and lots of people did that, the demand for natural gas would go up, so there'd be no chance of it remaining cheap anyway.
Well, the Pickens plan calls for replacing natural gas used for electrical production with wind. The freed up natural gas when then be redirected to the transportation sector -- so in theory you wouldn't be increasing demand as much.
I'd prefer electricity in any case. Electric motors are so much better suited to the task of accelerating a vehicle over and over. Combustion engines of any kind are very bad at that sort of thing.
Electricity is great for personal automobiles. Will it scale up to an 18 wheeler? That's the segment that Mr. Pickens suggests we convert to natural gas.
How is that going to work out when we use one quarter of the oil on this rock? Do we have one quarter of the oil reserves?
If we could just cut out the politics and the environmentalist bullshit, we'd be a lot better off.
Cut out the "environmentalist bullshit" and you are still left with the cold reality that we are sending $700,000,000,000 out of this country every year to pay for our oil addiction. Much of that money goes to countries that don't particularly like us very much. What do you suppose would happen if we invested that money into domestic energy sources like wind and natural gas? Job creation and economic growth perhaps? This is a national security issue in addition to being an environmental one.
T Boone Pickens is a salesman. What do salesmen do? They sell things. Why do they sell things? To make a profit. Remember that. His willingness to invest in wind power is admirable, but the natural gas plans he is pushing through along with wind will largely pad his wallet.
Do you see an alternative in the heavy fright industry to natural gas? Mr. Picken's whole point is that you can't drive an 18 wheeler with electric (battery) technology. If you accept that then what do you purpose as a replacement for oil in this sector? And why assume that he is doing this just to 'pad his wallet'? He's already made his billions -- that and the fact that he's 80 years old (so I'm guessing he won't be running out of money before he dies) makes me think that he isn't purposing this just to make a buck.
being American you couldn't possibly know that Afghanistan shared a border with USSR.
What a waste of a three digit UID if all you do with it is repeat bad stereotypes and troll. Wanna trade user accounts? You can troll with my six digit UID and even have the benefit of good karma while it lasts.....
How is this purpose different from the purpose of a lobbyist?
Because there's a bit of a difference between lobbying for a foreign Government to gain something through our political process and stealing information to give to that Government.
Just think logically about the comparison that you are trying to make. You are comparing the act of advocating for a foreign Government to the act of stealing for that Government.
I'm not a big fan of people who lobby for foreign Governments but I think the comparison between that and espionage is far-fetched.
Yeah, those evil fascists killed thousands of innocent civilians. To show how much superior we are, let's do exactly the same.
No, to show them how much superior we are, let's win the war. It was a total war, remember? Every single source of the nation is poured into fighting and winning the war. Civilians working in arms production, logistics, research, etc, etc are legitimate targets in a total war. It's not pretty but what about war is?
his point that F-22 is designed for air supremacy operations is spot on
Oh, I wouldn't dispute that point. I would dispute the notion that it's a bad idea to build things like the F-22 because we haven't used them recently. There seems to be a competing school of thought in DC about the future of our military -- one side advocates that we build a leaner force focused on asymmetrical warfare -- the other that we retain the ability to fight and win a more conventional war.
I think it's dangerous to build an armed force around the concept of fighting asymmetrical wars -- we may be more likely to engage in them but the consequences of losing an asymmetrical war like Vietnam or Iraq would seem to be a lot less dire than the consequence of losing a conventional war with another nation-state. One leads to a decade or so of reflection and recrimination -- the other leads to the end of this Republic (or the choice of using nuclear weapons for survival -- which might as well be the same thing)
A squadron of smaller, cheaper, unmanned Predators would make a much larger difference in asymmetrical warfare
Asymmetrical warfare may be what we are currently engaged in but nobody is ever going to conquer the free world using asymmetrical warfare. I've never agreed with this notion that we should build our military around fighting asymmetrical warfare -- it would be nice if that was also a focus but we need to retain the ability and technology to fight and win a conventional war.
The competing F-23 was the superior aircraft but it performed more poorly in "knife fights", i.e. head-on dogfights, than the F-22 did. Which is redundant, because the stealth features of both aircraft are designed so that the aircraft can avoid dogfights in the first place!
And it was redundant in Vietnam because the Sparrow missile ensured that dogfighting would never happen. Hell, why even equip the F-4 with a gun? It's clearly obsolete.
Much like GM, the days of "bigger and badder" are over
Yeah, until somebody who is bigger and badder than we are comes along.....
At one time, they made the best fighter jets, the best rockets, and pretty much the best in every engineering and medical field, and after the war they just lost it, as though they were afraid to excel in these fields anymore.
Says who? Other than a few applications (rocketry) the Allies were ahead of the Germans in technology. The German nuclear program never got off the ground. German submarine technology never kept up with Allied advances in anti-submarine warfare. German radar technology was behind that of the Allies -- as was their encryption and communications techniques.
We were even ahead of them doctrinally by the end of the war. The Blitzkerg was pretty impressive against countries lacking in modern armaments and tactics -- but it failed miserably at Kursk and in the Battle of the Bulge.
The Soviets were more fearsome enemies than the Allies. The German scientists obviously concluded that helping the Allies in the post-WWII era would be better for Germany than helping the USSR (or doing nothing).
You would have concluded that too if your choice was between being captured by the power that would treat you fairly well and the one that would ship you off to a forced-labor camp somewhere in Siberia. The Japanese made the same decision -- quite a few historians think that August Storm (the Soviet attack on Japan towards the end of the war) was a bigger factor in forcing them to surrender than the atomic bombs were.
Our military is over-extended already. It's unlikely we even have enough spare troops to invade Guam again at this point.
And? People tend to forget that in 1941 we had a smaller army than Portugal and a nearly non-existent Air Force. The only branch of the armed forces that was remotely ready for war was the US Navy. My concern with our military being over-extended is not that we'd lose a large-scale industrial war -- it's that we'd lose the the opportunity to nip a problem in the bud before it became a large-scale industrial war.
There's no possible scenario I can think of that would see us facing down China in a ground battle.
What possible scenario could you think of in 1920 that would see us facing down Germany and Italy in a ground battle?
Economic warfare seems to be a far smarter arena to be engaged in than direct military conflict. And they have us over the barrel in that regard.
How do they have us over the barrel? Economics is a two-way street. If we stop buying their exports they lose the incoming capital that they need to pull their hundreds of millions of rural poor out of poverty. They'd wind up being hurt at least as much (if not more so) as we would.
Witness how easily we smoked the standing Iraqi army in both Gulf wars versus the trouble we're facing trying to police cities filled with guerrillas.
We're facing that trouble because we didn't go into the country with enough force to fight a proper counter-insurgency operation. And they aren't really guerrillas in the classical sense -- a lot (most?) of the violence is Iraqi on Iraqi as competing interests vie for power. It's closer to a civil war than a guerrilla war.
Granted, the future is always in flux but the prospects for a large-scale industrial war the likes of WWII are extremely remote.
What are you basing that on? WWII didn't happen in a vacuum. The first thing that happened was the economic rug got pulled out from under the globe -- sound familiar?
ANd it will not be population. It will be about water and resources
Well, population comes into play because Russia has a declining population and the largest territory on Earth. How do you hold onto that territory in the long run if your birth rate is below the replacement rate?
Eh, it depends on the underlying motivation they had for committing espionage. The FBI had something called 'MICE' during the Cold War -- Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego -- it was meant to explain the reasonings behind why someone would commit espionage.
Someone who committed espionage because they were blackmailed (coercion) by the foreign power would be less likely to lie about their activities when caught than someone who committed it for idealogical reasons (i.e: they actually believe in the political system of our adversary). In any case, I'm sure that any information from confessed spies is taken with a grain of salt and verified through other sources wherever possible. At the end of the day I'm sure you can see the wisdom in having a living breathing source of information as opposed to a dead corpse.
He's probably as close as you could get to a possible Manchurian Candidate (one parent foreign, raised a large part of "formative" years on foreign soil), and yet I doubt you'll find anyone who would possibly think that way.
but these days our defense is really more of an cash-cow of an industry than it is an actual defense.
Says who? Would you want to go up against American weapons systems and the American military? Our procurement processes may be completely fucked up but the final product is nonetheless pretty impressive. Is there anything on Earth that can take on the F-22 for example?
Thank Nixon. Letting China nurse off our teat has done nothing but show them how to build they're own teat. Are they greatful? No. Now they're stealing the "Mother's Milk" we're loading the teat with. Fuck China!
Eh, it's all part of the balancing game of geopolitics. China was a counterweight to the Soviet Union. Pretty soon we'll be looking for a counterweight to China. Japan and Russia would seem to be worthy candidates. Japan already kicked China's ass once and Russia is pretty paranoid that they won't be able to hold onto Siberia. It's probably not unfounded paranoia either given the respective populations and the fact that Russia isn't even meeting the replacement rate right now.
this isn't a whole lot different from being a lobbyist for a foreign government
A lobbyist for a foreign Government lobbies on behalf of that Government. A spy gives that Government classified information. No difference at all......
what he did would be considered treason in spirit, if not exactly the letter of the law.
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
Maybe even under the letter of the law. 'Aid and Comfort'
One of the most effective ways for us to prevent a war is to make betraying military applicable technologies to their government an offense that most of these guys would never commit because the punishment is so severe.
They'll still do it. People commit espionage for a variety of reasons. And the punishments are already pretty severe -- personally I'd rather be executed than spend the rest of my natural life in 23 hour a day solitary confinement at Florence ADX. The reason that most spies don't get the death penalty is because they agree to a life sentence in exchange for revealing how much information they gave away.
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Russia, for example, has plenty of oil
So we should turn to Vladimir Putin for our energy needs? I don't know if you've noticed or not but relations with Russia have gotten a bit frosty lately....
I think our buying power would surely influence the markets if we were to just set up some viable competition, even if it had just a percentage of the output as OPEC
You could have all the competition in the World but it isn't going to change the fact that demand for oil is going to outpace supply again in the very near future. That's going to drive up prices regardless of how many competitors to OPEC we can establish. Unless you think you can talk the Chinese and Indians out of their industrialization. In any case, how does your "plan" address the fact that we are sending $700 billion dollars a year out of our country to pay for all that oil?
Nuclear power doesn't really fund terrorists, last I checked. Neither does hydroelectric
I don't have a problem with either of those power sources. I've often advocated for nuclear power. Hydro is just about a tapped out resource in the United States though. It's great where it's available though.
No "alternative" energy solution has yet proven itself as a viable solution.
Where did I advocate for an "alternative" energy? I was talking about the Pickens plan -- which calls for using wind to displace natural gas used for electrical production to free up that natural gas for the transportation sector. There's nothing "alternative" about wind -- the technology works and we are using it right now. We also have pretty abundant wind resources.
I also don't quite see a reason why it should be more difficult to build very high power electric engines than combustion ones.
The problem isn't being able to build the engine -- the problem is having a power source for that engine. If you assume that the typical truck has anywhere from 300 to 650 horsepower that works out to 224 to 485 kilowatts. Do you know of a battery technology (even on the drawing board) that could deliver that type of power in a reasonable weight? I don't.
I assume it doesn't have any kind of networking enabled
Umm, you assume wrong....
Your sig must be hilarious for people (blind folks and such) who need their computers to read the text of websites for them. :)
At least they don't have to worry about seeing goatse when the trolls post links ;)
Doubtful, since USSR didn't fly squadrons of B52s over Japan to really bring it home to them that they were done for.
B-52s eh?
If I remember my history lessons accurately: Emperor Hirohito, during the signing of Japan's surrender, broke down in tears at the sight of the sun being blocked out by a sky full of B52s.
That's funny, because from what I recall of my history lessons Hirohito wasn't present during the signing of the surrender document.
I would argue the whole Pacific Theater and our use of the most powerful weapon in human history on them, is what made Japan lose more than anything else.
What made them lose was the arrogance of taking on a power that had many times their GDP and industry. What made them surrender is a point still debated by historians. It's likely that was a combination of many factors.
It's indisputable though that the entry of the Soviets into the war was a major shock to the Japanese leadership -- in less than two weeks the Soviets smashed the bulk of the Japanese army in Manchuria, taking over half a million prisoners in the process. The scale of August Storm and the size of the forces involved dwarfs any of the ground engagements that the Allies fought with the Japanese. The Soviets also seized the Kuril Islands and were in a position to launch an invasion of Hokkaido -- which was practically undefended as the bulk of the Japanese forces had been located in the South to oppose the eventual American/British landings.
Now ask yourself if you had to choose between being under Soviet occupation or American occupation -- which would you go with?
Eh, trains are great. I've often wondered just how competitive 18 wheelers would be with them if the 18-wheeler didn't have a subsidized road surface to travel on. Trains are definitely a lot easier to convert to electric -- though I wonder just how much electric you'd actually need to move long heavy fright trains. The energy required is a obviously lot more than moving a smaller and lighter passenger train.
Either way though you'll still need some trucks. And those will have to be powered by something. I'd rather see them powered by American natural gas than Saudi oil.....
Of course, if lots and lots of people did that, the demand for natural gas would go up, so there'd be no chance of it remaining cheap anyway.
Well, the Pickens plan calls for replacing natural gas used for electrical production with wind. The freed up natural gas when then be redirected to the transportation sector -- so in theory you wouldn't be increasing demand as much.
I'd prefer electricity in any case. Electric motors are so much better suited to the task of accelerating a vehicle over and over. Combustion engines of any kind are very bad at that sort of thing.
Electricity is great for personal automobiles. Will it scale up to an 18 wheeler? That's the segment that Mr. Pickens suggests we convert to natural gas.
There's tons of oil still untapped in the world.
How is that going to work out when we use one quarter of the oil on this rock? Do we have one quarter of the oil reserves?
If we could just cut out the politics and the environmentalist bullshit, we'd be a lot better off.
Cut out the "environmentalist bullshit" and you are still left with the cold reality that we are sending $700,000,000,000 out of this country every year to pay for our oil addiction. Much of that money goes to countries that don't particularly like us very much. What do you suppose would happen if we invested that money into domestic energy sources like wind and natural gas? Job creation and economic growth perhaps? This is a national security issue in addition to being an environmental one.
No, because our main issue is with transportation fuels of which there is no substitute for the lighter grades of crude oil.
Yeah, no substitute exists at all......
he 'windmills kill birds' argument is just another way for the 'we're against everything' crowd to try to stop any kind of change
Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything
T Boone Pickens is a salesman. What do salesmen do? They sell things. Why do they sell things? To make a profit. Remember that. His willingness to invest in wind power is admirable, but the natural gas plans he is pushing through along with wind will largely pad his wallet.
Do you see an alternative in the heavy fright industry to natural gas? Mr. Picken's whole point is that you can't drive an 18 wheeler with electric (battery) technology. If you accept that then what do you purpose as a replacement for oil in this sector? And why assume that he is doing this just to 'pad his wallet'? He's already made his billions -- that and the fact that he's 80 years old (so I'm guessing he won't be running out of money before he dies) makes me think that he isn't purposing this just to make a buck.
being American you couldn't possibly know that Afghanistan shared a border with USSR.
What a waste of a three digit UID if all you do with it is repeat bad stereotypes and troll. Wanna trade user accounts? You can troll with my six digit UID and even have the benefit of good karma while it lasts.....
How is this purpose different from the purpose of a lobbyist?
Because there's a bit of a difference between lobbying for a foreign Government to gain something through our political process and stealing information to give to that Government.
Just think logically about the comparison that you are trying to make. You are comparing the act of advocating for a foreign Government to the act of stealing for that Government.
I'm not a big fan of people who lobby for foreign Governments but I think the comparison between that and espionage is far-fetched.
Yeah, those evil fascists killed thousands of innocent civilians. To show how much superior we are, let's do exactly the same.
No, to show them how much superior we are, let's win the war. It was a total war, remember? Every single source of the nation is poured into fighting and winning the war. Civilians working in arms production, logistics, research, etc, etc are legitimate targets in a total war. It's not pretty but what about war is?
his point that F-22 is designed for air supremacy operations is spot on
Oh, I wouldn't dispute that point. I would dispute the notion that it's a bad idea to build things like the F-22 because we haven't used them recently. There seems to be a competing school of thought in DC about the future of our military -- one side advocates that we build a leaner force focused on asymmetrical warfare -- the other that we retain the ability to fight and win a more conventional war.
I think it's dangerous to build an armed force around the concept of fighting asymmetrical wars -- we may be more likely to engage in them but the consequences of losing an asymmetrical war like Vietnam or Iraq would seem to be a lot less dire than the consequence of losing a conventional war with another nation-state. One leads to a decade or so of reflection and recrimination -- the other leads to the end of this Republic (or the choice of using nuclear weapons for survival -- which might as well be the same thing)
A squadron of smaller, cheaper, unmanned Predators would make a much larger difference in asymmetrical warfare
Asymmetrical warfare may be what we are currently engaged in but nobody is ever going to conquer the free world using asymmetrical warfare. I've never agreed with this notion that we should build our military around fighting asymmetrical warfare -- it would be nice if that was also a focus but we need to retain the ability and technology to fight and win a conventional war.
The competing F-23 was the superior aircraft but it performed more poorly in "knife fights", i.e. head-on dogfights, than the F-22 did. Which is redundant, because the stealth features of both aircraft are designed so that the aircraft can avoid dogfights in the first place!
And it was redundant in Vietnam because the Sparrow missile ensured that dogfighting would never happen. Hell, why even equip the F-4 with a gun? It's clearly obsolete.
Much like GM, the days of "bigger and badder" are over
Yeah, until somebody who is bigger and badder than we are comes along.....
At one time, they made the best fighter jets, the best rockets, and pretty much the best in every engineering and medical field, and after the war they just lost it, as though they were afraid to excel in these fields anymore.
Says who? Other than a few applications (rocketry) the Allies were ahead of the Germans in technology. The German nuclear program never got off the ground. German submarine technology never kept up with Allied advances in anti-submarine warfare. German radar technology was behind that of the Allies -- as was their encryption and communications techniques.
We were even ahead of them doctrinally by the end of the war. The Blitzkerg was pretty impressive against countries lacking in modern armaments and tactics -- but it failed miserably at Kursk and in the Battle of the Bulge.
The Soviets were more fearsome enemies than the Allies. The German scientists obviously concluded that helping the Allies in the post-WWII era would be better for Germany than helping the USSR (or doing nothing).
You would have concluded that too if your choice was between being captured by the power that would treat you fairly well and the one that would ship you off to a forced-labor camp somewhere in Siberia. The Japanese made the same decision -- quite a few historians think that August Storm (the Soviet attack on Japan towards the end of the war) was a bigger factor in forcing them to surrender than the atomic bombs were.
Our military is over-extended already. It's unlikely we even have enough spare troops to invade Guam again at this point.
And? People tend to forget that in 1941 we had a smaller army than Portugal and a nearly non-existent Air Force. The only branch of the armed forces that was remotely ready for war was the US Navy. My concern with our military being over-extended is not that we'd lose a large-scale industrial war -- it's that we'd lose the the opportunity to nip a problem in the bud before it became a large-scale industrial war.
There's no possible scenario I can think of that would see us facing down China in a ground battle.
What possible scenario could you think of in 1920 that would see us facing down Germany and Italy in a ground battle?
Economic warfare seems to be a far smarter arena to be engaged in than direct military conflict. And they have us over the barrel in that regard.
How do they have us over the barrel? Economics is a two-way street. If we stop buying their exports they lose the incoming capital that they need to pull their hundreds of millions of rural poor out of poverty. They'd wind up being hurt at least as much (if not more so) as we would.
Witness how easily we smoked the standing Iraqi army in both Gulf wars versus the trouble we're facing trying to police cities filled with guerrillas.
We're facing that trouble because we didn't go into the country with enough force to fight a proper counter-insurgency operation. And they aren't really guerrillas in the classical sense -- a lot (most?) of the violence is Iraqi on Iraqi as competing interests vie for power. It's closer to a civil war than a guerrilla war.
Granted, the future is always in flux but the prospects for a large-scale industrial war the likes of WWII are extremely remote.
What are you basing that on? WWII didn't happen in a vacuum. The first thing that happened was the economic rug got pulled out from under the globe -- sound familiar?
ANd it will not be population. It will be about water and resources
Well, population comes into play because Russia has a declining population and the largest territory on Earth. How do you hold onto that territory in the long run if your birth rate is below the replacement rate?
And you can trust that information 100%
Eh, it depends on the underlying motivation they had for committing espionage. The FBI had something called 'MICE' during the Cold War -- Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego -- it was meant to explain the reasonings behind why someone would commit espionage.
Someone who committed espionage because they were blackmailed (coercion) by the foreign power would be less likely to lie about their activities when caught than someone who committed it for idealogical reasons (i.e: they actually believe in the political system of our adversary). In any case, I'm sure that any information from confessed spies is taken with a grain of salt and verified through other sources wherever possible. At the end of the day I'm sure you can see the wisdom in having a living breathing source of information as opposed to a dead corpse.
He's probably as close as you could get to a possible Manchurian Candidate (one parent foreign, raised a large part of "formative" years on foreign soil), and yet I doubt you'll find anyone who would possibly think that way.
Unless you watch Fox News ;)
but these days our defense is really more of an cash-cow of an industry than it is an actual defense.
Says who? Would you want to go up against American weapons systems and the American military? Our procurement processes may be completely fucked up but the final product is nonetheless pretty impressive. Is there anything on Earth that can take on the F-22 for example?
Thank Nixon. Letting China nurse off our teat has done nothing but show them how to build they're own teat. Are they greatful? No. Now they're stealing the "Mother's Milk" we're loading the teat with. Fuck China!
Eh, it's all part of the balancing game of geopolitics. China was a counterweight to the Soviet Union. Pretty soon we'll be looking for a counterweight to China. Japan and Russia would seem to be worthy candidates. Japan already kicked China's ass once and Russia is pretty paranoid that they won't be able to hold onto Siberia. It's probably not unfounded paranoia either given the respective populations and the fact that Russia isn't even meeting the replacement rate right now.
this isn't a whole lot different from being a lobbyist for a foreign government
A lobbyist for a foreign Government lobbies on behalf of that Government. A spy gives that Government classified information. No difference at all......
what he did would be considered treason in spirit, if not exactly the letter of the law.
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
Maybe even under the letter of the law. 'Aid and Comfort'
One of the most effective ways for us to prevent a war is to make betraying military applicable technologies to their government an offense that most of these guys would never commit because the punishment is so severe.
They'll still do it. People commit espionage for a variety of reasons. And the punishments are already pretty severe -- personally I'd rather be executed than spend the rest of my natural life in 23 hour a day solitary confinement at Florence ADX. The reason that most spies don't get the death penalty is because they agree to a life sentence in exchange for revealing how much information they gave away.