Letters to the Editor
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You miss the point, norbit
Or you can't read. He's one of the saner ones.
And his role in the government is roughly equal to yours, e.g. none. I don't hear anyone quoting Ward Churchill and calling that policy or law, do you?
-- Electro Robot
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Neocon Pathology
Truth and Reality of the neocons can clearly be defined as doublethink and doublespeak. Neocon false = truth, Neocon delusions = their reality. The neocon right is severely pathological in their "logical" thinking and as such, will never be convinced by logical reasoning. For example from GG above:
"The Wall St. Journal's Op-Ed Page ("If we come to Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran as liberators, we can expect overwhelming popular support")".
When I first read this Op-Ed in the WSJ and then seemingly everywhere shortly thereafter, I knew that the neocons and their followers had finally cut their last connection to reality. I did not know whether to laugh or cry and I have done alot of both since.
The neocons will never stop to question or try to heal their personal and publicly displayed exhibitions of insanity because to do so would threaten their very existence. It is our job to tirelessly reveal their lies and duplicitousness, as GG and others here continue to do. Our problem is that it is often difficult to get ahead of the next fire wall of lies and deceptions, much like it is difficult to anticipate what the insane will do next.
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Breaking news
Olmert being called upon to resign.
Suspected of receiving "funds from foreigners".
Hmmm? This could be interesting.
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@ NotOrbitBoy
You can thank Ronald Reagan for having the foresight (over 20 years ago) to start development of anti-missile technology, which is now coming to fruition.
Wow. Billions of dollars and two decades later, and they're not even really operational, much less effective. With success like that, what would failure look like?
One of the reasons that "ultimate weapons" such as nukes were so popular is that they're far cheaper than the alternatives or the countermeasures. This allowed for the much cheaper "defensive offensive weapons" of the MAD scheme, rather than what would have been needed to defend against the other side's "offensive offensive weapons". There are those of the opinion that the acronym was apt, but it in fact worked for many years. Not to mention, nukes (and the asymmetry between offence and defence in their cost) did have a natural and practical limit as far as "arms races" were concerned; you really could stop as something like 50X overkill, rather than keeping building aircraft carrier after aircraft carrier to match the other side's battlefield weaponry and ships of the line.
Speaking of overkill, we really did go a bit overboard there. I think that I once figured that if you simply took the TNT equivalent of the megatonnage in our arsenal, divided it up and dropped it from a height of 10 feet on the head of each and every person on the earth, you would kill the entire population by crushing them to death; you wouldn't even have to explode the TNT. However, this massive overkill was still quite cheap compared to "conventional weapons" (the wonders of atomic power, eh?).
The equation still hasn't changed, NOB. Offence is generally cheaper than defence (and has other advantages), even in the realm of conventional weapons, and certainly so for nukes.
We do have a current fascination for very expensive offensive weaponry (cruise missiles at a million a pop, for instance), but when the leather hits the road, turns out that good ol' standard ordnance is the major weapon; even in the Iraq war, the "precision-guided" weaponry was a small part of the ordnance dropped in terms of total weight (but not so mch cost).
Weapons and ordnance, of course, are big bidness for 'Merkuh's large corporations, so expect that their use (and purchase) will follow demand ... demand for profits for these last pillars of 'Merkun manufacturing.
For more on Reagan, ABMs, Cheney and Perle (and B-team "intelligence" second-guessing), and such, read Richard Rhodes's "Arsenals of Folly".
Cheers,
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Great Tits Cope Well With Warming
LWM - Olmert? Which missing white woman is she? After all, it can't be breaking news ...
I'll see your breaking news and raise you this ... um, breakinger news (you thought that subj line was just a cheap attention-getter, didn't you?)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7390109.stm
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@Arne
There are those of the opinion that the acronym was apt, but it in fact worked for many years.
Word. I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the Cold War.
Except for a particularly sphincter-clenchy period in the early- to mid-80s, the world seemed so much safer then...
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-- Electro Robot
You made a statement. I just wanted you to know that someone, in this case me and Human Rights Watch, finally agreed with you.
"You mean like the 18,000 unguided rockets fired into Israeli towns? Is that what you meant? Or did you mean bus bombings and carbombs?"
It's news to me that the people of Blida fired 18,000 rockets into Israel.
But I guess what you're saying is that those civilians have to pay the price for someone else's actions. So why are you trying to pretend you give a damn about terrorizing populated urban areas?
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@ L.W.M.
I'll bet that was
a geosynchonous orbit, too, Norbit.
No. Geosynchronous orbits are quite high and stable. This one was decaying and about to re-enter; they were worried that identifiable pieces of the spy satellite might end up in a country that would find such interesting....
Cheers,
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baldosity
You did.
The battle, not the war baldster.
Vote Nader
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Arne, PDA @ acronyms
I remember an academic article called "MAD vs. NUTS", which compared Mutually Assured Destruction to Nuclear Utilitaztion Theory Strategies (i.e., "No, we really CAN use those nukes and not end the world ... and here's how we'll do it!"). Predictably, all I remember is the title ...
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Electro Robot
"You mean like the 18,000 unguided rockets fired into Israeli towns? Is that what you meant? "
There is simply no comparison between the homemade bombs used by Gazan militants and the cluster bombs used by Israel in Lebanon. I think, in the last six years, those "18,000" (citation?) rockets have killed less than a 100 Israelis (that's based on my memory of keeping good track of this situation over the last decade. Feel free to dispute with citations). Israeli cluster bombs killed hundreds in the space of weeks and left unexploded ordinance scattered around the country that killed and maimed for a good deal of time after.
The IDF admits that it fired a million cluster bombs into Lebanon in those 6 weeks of 2006:
"Quoting his battalion commander, the rocket unit head stated that the IDF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/761781.html
"The scope was extensive and unprecedented in any modern use of these types of cluster weapons," compared to Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003, says Chris Clark, the program manager for the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre of South Lebanon, in Tyre.
Additionally:
"UN figures show that 26 percent of southern Lebanon's cultivatable land has been affected, and that 34 million square meters – or 13 square miles – are contaminated....the UN says that nearly all the Israeli cluster bombs were fired in the last three days of the conflict, after a UN ceasefire deal had been reached, but before it came into effect – thereby yielding little military advantage. The timing of the Israeli strikes is "definitely questionable,"..."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0207/p01s01-wome.html