Mail 531 August 11 - 17, 2008 (original) (raw)
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
US public supports missile defense, poll shows
(reposted from Defense Daily)
U.S. PUBLIC SUPPORTS BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE BY A WIDE MARGIN: A lopsided 87 percent of the American public supports creation of the multi-layered U.S. ballistic missile defense shield being developed by the Missile Defense Agency, according to a national poll taken by a professional polling organization that was released by the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance (MDAA). "This is the highest percentage of support ever recorded in the history of missile defense," according to Riki Ellison, MDAA president and founder, terming it an overwhelming show of support. This poll comes as some Democratic lawmakers in Congress have moved to cut funding for some ballistic missile defense programs, as MDA funding legislation is written for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2009. The survey showed that 58 percent of Americans believe that there is a real threat from missiles carrying weapons of mass destruction and that missile defense is the preferred option over pre-emptive military action or diplomatic efforts for dealing with the proliferation of missiles and weapons of mass destruction by nation states. As well, the poll further showed 71 percent of Americans support deployment of the U.S. European Missile Defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, 84 percent believe that the U.S. BMD shield protects U.S. troops overseas, and 65 percent believe the U.S. missile defense system should protect U.S. allies as well. Further, 78 percent of the American public believes it is important for the U.S. presidential candidates to address the issue of missile defense. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, has been seen as possibly being lukewarm in supporting missile defense programs. However, after Iran fired a series of medium- and long-range missiles in a salvo test, Obama said last month that "Iran is a great threat. We have to make sure we are working with our allies to apply tightened pressure on Iran," according to the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom. Further, Obama has voiced support for cooperation with Israeli missile defense programs, including the Arrow. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, over the years has voiced strong support for missile defense programs. He is the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. The poll was conducted by Opinion Research Corp. with a 3 percent plus or minus margin of error. Opinion Research Corp. partners with CNN on public opinion polls. (Defense Daily, 8-13)
Mike
Real missile defense requires space based components, as well as ground lasers with popup mirrors.
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Subject: Prince Georges Police Self-Justification
If one views the video embedded in the story you linked to, about the raid on the mayor's house, you'll eventually get to Mark Spencer, identified as "Prince Georges County Police Dept. Inspector General," making a statement on camera. Here's my transcription from the video:
"It's unfortunate that innocent civilians do get caught up in activities like this, but, the drug dealers know that, and that's why sometimes they use the innocent to try to screen their activities, and this is just an unfortunate occurrence."
In other words, he's claiming the police are allowed to inflict collateral damage on innocent civilians, if they deem it necessary. Sorry, but the bad guys using you as a shield negates all the rights you thought you had. But I don't think martial law has been declared, so I'm pretty sure the police are a bit off base in thinking and acting like an army in a war zone.
'It's just an unfortunate occurrence.' 'innocent civilians do get caught up in activities' One wonders--does Mr. Spencer think anything done by the police ever constitutes an intentional action by a human being?
I too get to a point where I need to stop talking about this.
Mike Juergens
It's in Maryland, not California, I keep telling myself. I do wonder about the Maryland Attorney General. Those police ought to be in big state trouble.
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What were they thinking?
Dear Doctor Pournelle,
"What were they thinking>"
I have noted some recent published letters to Chaos Manor have alluded to some confusion over the Russian attack on Georgia. As with many of the Chattering Class on Television and Radio, , some readers of Chaos Manor have asked "How could the Russian leadership have ever thought they could get away with such a brazen act of 'aggression'?"
For those who ask that question, a primer:
First, take a small country that has one province overwhelmingly populated by an ethnic group that has traditionally been connected politically and culturally with a bordering nation.
Then, that ethnic group decides to revolt, and uses force in an attempt to secede their province from the small nation.
In ude course, acting as nation-states are wont to act, the small country uses force to stop the revolt and attempted secession by the breakaway province. This force is directed largely against the ethnic group that seeks to secede.
Peace keepers are then dispatched to the province in order to stop the "ethnic cleansing". Since there is no peace to keep, this is useless, but there you have it. International opinion is appeased.
When fighting continues, the small country decides to cut the "Gordian Knot" and settle things once and for all with relatively massive military force.
So then the local nuclear superpower intervenes to "stop the genocide" (note the escalation in terms?), using massive air power because it's cheap, fast and pretty much all they have ready to go on such short notice, since they were relatively unprepared, and want to protect the peacekeeping forces they have in the breakaway province under the previous agreement. The nuclear powers leadership labels the leadershoip of the small country "war criminals" and demands their punishment.
So then the OTHER nuclear superpower, an ally of the small country, protests vehemently and seeks for anything they can use to punish the offending nuclear superpower for attacking its' ally. With little leverage, the second nuclear superpower is reduced to vehement protests, pointless gestures and a simmering sense of outrage. Over time the entire fiasco poisons the two nuclear superpowers relationship to everyone's loss.
Eventually, when enough times has passed, the breakaway province gains independence, under the protection of the first nuclear superpower, and the small country undergoes a change of regime in a process once called "Finlandization" when we did not like it.
You might think I have just described recent events in Georgia.
You would be wrong.
I have just described events in 1999, in the Balkans, when the United States and NATO intervened in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
Yes, how could the Russians have -possibly- thought that they could get away with something like that? "I'm shocked, SHOCKED!' that they could have ever made such an assumption.
The chickens have come home to roost.
Petronius
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Putin for US president - more than ever,
Jerry
Putin for US president - more than ever, says Spengler:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/JH13Ag01.html
He has much to say on the Georgian and Kosovo affairs. Juicy quotes:
" If Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin were president of the United States, would Iran try to build a nuclear bomb? Would Pakistan provide covert aid to al-Qaeda? Would Hugo Chavez train terrorists in Venezuela? Would leftover nationalities with delusions of grandeur provoke the great powers? . . . Thanks to Putin, the world has become a much safer place."
" Russia has wiped the floor with a putative US ally, and apart from a bad case of cream pie on the face, America has lost nothing."
" Contrary to the hyperventilation of policy analysts on American news shows, the West has no vital interests in Georgia. It would be convenient from Washington's vantage point for oil to flow from the Caspian Sea via Georgia to the Black Sea, to be sure, but nothing that occurs in Georgia will have a measurable impact on American energy security. It is humiliating for the US to watch the Russians thrash a prospective ally, but not harmful, for Georgia never should have been an ally in the first place."
Of Russia, China and the US: " never before in the history of the world has the world's economic and military power resided in countries whose fundamental interests do not conflict in any important way."
" If it had not been for America's insistence on installing a gang of trigger-happy pimps and drug-pushers in Kosovo, Russia might have responded less ferociously to the flea bites on its southern border."
" America remains so committed to the myth of moderate Islam that it is prepared to invent it. Kosovo, like the Turkey of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, supposedly embodies a moderate, Sufi-derived brand of Islam that will foster an American partnership with the Muslim world. The US intelligence community knows perfectly well that the networks that traffic prostitutes through Albania into Italy and the rest of Europe also move narcotics, weapons and terrorists from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to Grozny in Chechnya to Tirana in Albania and Pristina in Kosovo." (He comments on Sufism and pederasty here: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JH12Ak03.html.)
" The number of flashpoints for violence in the world has grown in inverse proportion to their importance. The world is full of undead tribes with delusions of grandeur, and soon-to-be-extinct peoples who rather would go out with a bang than a whimper. The supra-ethnic states of the world have a common interest in containing the mischief that might be made by the losers. China, which has an annoying terrorist problem in its Westernmost province, has plenty of reason to help suppress Muslim separatists.
"Unfortunately, modern weapons technology makes it possible for a spoiler state to inflict a disproportionate amount of damage. China recognized this when it cooperated with the United States to defuse the North Korean nuclear problem. The most visible prospective spoiler in the pack remains Iran. If America wants to recover from its humiliation in the Caucasus, it might, for example, conduct an air raid against Iran's nuclear facilities, and justify it with the same sort of reasoning that Russia invoked in Georgia. Contrary to surface impressions, Moscow wouldn't mind a bit."
As usual, much to enjoy here.
Ed
There is very little moderate Islam in the middle east. The Kemalist Turks are secularists and atheists, not moderates. The Baath party came closest to being "moderate Muslims".
Spengler is always worth paying attention to. I do not always agree. Regarding Iran, if we can stave off a real confrontation with Iran before there is a disaster in the Middle East, Iran will come apart under the impact of America's cultural weapons of mass destruction -- which actually can create "moderate Muslims" in the same sense that many American teenagers are "moderate Christians." How desirable this kind of paganism might be is possibly worth discussing. I would suppose that Uday Hussein of Iraq was a "moderate Muslim"...
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Georgia on My Mind
Hi Jerry,
I wish that I could disagree with your essay here: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2008/Q3/view531.html#Tuesday I was born in 1960. I have wondered how I would have felt when the Russian tanks crushed the rebellion in Hungary in 1956. Now I know. I am upset watching the Russian tanks drive the roads of Georgia but I know that the cost of USA blood and money would be too immense to do anything.
That blood and money are extremely near and dear to my heart right now as the wife and I are holding our breath praying that our USMC son does not go to Afghanistan in October. He just got back from Iraq in April (tour #2). The four US Marine battalions that went to Afghanistan in April from his base only had two to four weeks notice before leaving. Most people don't know that we have a surge going in Afghanistan also !
I also noticed that the Russian troops are using the latest in digital camo and look fit and eager. I had the impression that Russia was downsizing their army and neglecting them. Looks like I was wrong. 500 tanks and 20,000 troops deployed on a day's notice means a well trained and well supplied army.
It is a hard world out there and we best remember that here in the USA. Especially when certain presidential candidates talk about unilateral disarmament and other such nonsense.
BTW, I saw John McCain saying that Russia is using Georgia as an object lesson to the Ukraine. If the Ukraine does not learn their lesson we could be watching this again in the not so distant future.
Lynn
Russia is a Great Power, and has a legitimate sphere of influence.
We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but we are guardians only of our own. If our liberty is threatened, as it was in World War II (but not the Great War) and in the Cold War, then we have no choice but to seek alliances and take active part in changing that condition -- which usually means hot war: in the Cold War that was proxy war, with Viet Nam a highly successful (to the US) campaign of attrition against the USSR.
Our liberty is not threatened; and the best thing we can do for liberty abroad is to keep the trade routes open, defend the notion of International Law, and remain both strong and free as the City on the Hill.
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Price of farm land
Petronius said: �If you own 500 acres of good corn land, you can sell it for about half a million dollars, move to town, buy a house for a hundred thousand, and retire.�
Good corn land is selling for around 7000/acrenowinmid−stateIllinoiswheremyfamily(dadandbrother)farm.Somakethat7000/acre now in mid-state Illinois where my family (dad and brother) farm. So make that 7000/acrenowinmid−stateIllinoiswheremyfamily(dadandbrother)farm.Somakethat3.5 million. Assuming it�s an old family farm, probably no more than 100 acres of that is �owned by the bank�, and there�s a good chance even that was bought for around 5000to5000 to 5000to6000/acre. Some farms are about half that size, and some are deeper in debt than others. So call it 1to1 to 1to3M, if the farmer sold out now.
I suspect family farms are in for a very hard time in a few years, as algae or some other relatively efficient alternative to burning food comes on line. Crop prices will probably collapse fairly rapidly, while fuel and fertilizer will remain relatively expensive. As farms go under, land prices will fall. I�d guess we�re now at or near the market top for crop and land prices. If the only reason to farm were the money, a smart farmer would sell now.
But most farmers can�t bear the thought of letting the family farm go. The farm defines who he is; to sell it would be to sell his soul AND betray his father, who entrusted him with the farm. No matter how bad things are getting, no matter how many other farms are going under, farmers figure that they�ve always been able to make it through bad times before � �people have to eat�.
Tom Craver
Chandler, AZ
It has been a long time since I thought about the price of land. The yeoman farmer. mainstay of Jefferson's notion of a Republic, has not been an important factor in the US for decades. Which is very much a pity.
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Aren't you glad that they've turned the Capitol into an armed fortress, completely inaccessible to the proles?
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/
man-threatens-to-jump-from-hart-atrium
-2008-07-21.html
-- Roland Dobbins
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Ratborg.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=
080813192458.ud84hj9h&show_article=1
-- Roland Dobbins
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Kipling eBook Collection
Available in HTML or MOBI format.
<http://www.di2.nu/files/kipling/>
-- Dave Markowitz
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Saudi Textbooks, and some short comments on mail.
Thought you might find this interesting.
http://www.slate.com/id/2195684/
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foreigners: Opinions about events beyond our borders.
A Textbook Case of Intolerance Changing the world one schoolbook at a time.
By Anne Applebaum Posted Monday, July 21, 2008, at 8:01 PM ET
Because they are so clearly designed for the convenience of large testing companies, I had always assumed that multiple-choice tests, the bane of any fourth grader's existence, were a quintessentially American phenomenon...
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Other comments:
Petronius:
Not that I'm an expert or even checked the numbers, but Petronius neglected Sugar Beets (somewhere I heard that we get lots of table-sugar from them) and they grow in the Upper Plains/Mountains areas. Perhaps I misremember...
Michael Flynn:
These same people that maintain the "Hitler was a Christian" idea wouldn't possibly have any connection to the people who maintain that "Hitler WASN'T a Vegetarian" websites would they?
Enjoy
Patrick
