Letters to the Editor
Bill Owen
Published Letters: 507 Editor's Choice: 6
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More on Forgetting the past
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Who said,
"Our misjudgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture and politics of the people in the area.
"We failed to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our own image or as we choose".
The comments were written by Robert McNamara, US Defence Secretary, when he resigned over the continuing disaster of Vietnam.
McNamara was a man, who became a monster. He used his great intellect to convince himself that war is freedom, ignorance is strength and freedom is slavery. At least he had the insight, the insight so lacking in those pathetic, formerly sanguinary pundits, to admit that he was simply wrong, and even better to come to understand why.
Iraq was not wrong as a matter of mistakes in tactics, troop levels, or even in failing to tell the truth; it was wrong as a matter of principle.
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The March of Technolgy
[Read the article: Welcome to the compact fluorescent twilight zone]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]CFL's are obsolete, and an environment hazard. As others have pointed out. Someone talked about the colour of the light, this is no longer a problem and CFL's can produce pretty much any colour range, from "daylight" to a warm, incandescent type yellow.
For now, LED's are the clear choice. I don't buy the oil heating argument, it is true for the moment, but unless we develop alternatives to burning fossil fuels -- at all, it matters little if the lights on the Titanic are incandescent or CFL. I say move to the most efficient tech available and then asap move on the next problem.
Talking about CFL's versus incandescents reminds me of the argument about oil vs biofuel, in the end there is little to chose between them. Biofuel for instance is cleaner unit for unit, but you need to burn more of it, obviating the advantage. Biofuel also is made from food, and burning food to power things like SUVs is an obscenity. The amount of corn made biofuel needed to fill up an SUV, is enough to feed a person for a year.
Several people have mentioned LED technology and the high price. They are still a little expensive but have a look around, you might be surprised at how much prices have dropped.
No one has mentioned OLED (organic light emitting diodes). OLEDs, which are made in panels, can be any colour, and will soon be just a few millimeters thick! An OLED panel could even be used as a window as they are transparent when off and at night could be a light source!
"Konica Minolta developed a lighting OLED panel which features a brightness of 1,000cd/m2, a lifetime of 10,000 hours and a luminous efficiency of 64lm/W."
The production cost for one square meter of OLED panel for lighting applications will reach 10,000 yen (US$87) in 2015, compared to 100.000 yen in 2009, Mitsubishi predicted.
http://www.asia.ru/all/it_news/document19141_.shtml
So OLED's are not here yet, but my money, (for now) is on OLEDs. Sony has a new OLED tv that is insanely expensive at $2400. for an 11 inch screen, but I just saw one as was truly shocked at how good the picture was. I have never seen anything that even approached it.
Good article here in the softpedia: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Giant-Light-Panels-the-Light-Source-of-the-Future-21515.shtml
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Robert Fisk on Lessons Learned
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]For those of you who don't know him Fisk is an absolutely fearless journalist who works for The Independent newspaper. Fisk, or Mr. Robert as they call him in the Mid East, has interviewed Bin Laden 3 times! He speaks fluent Arabic and currently resides in Beirut. Fisk has been there and done that. He was at Shatilla, he took a picture (from the front) of the first American tank into Baghdad, and it was his windows that shook when they hit Harrari. When Fisk speaks on the war, I listen.
Need I add that Mr. Robert was against the war?
Robert Fisk: The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn
Wednesday, 19 March 2008
Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a "hell-disaster".
But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry – but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.
Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people – the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world – not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam's links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn't plan for the aftermath of war?
Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning – of which more later – but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.
more: http://tinyurl.com/2mmlln