http://www.floridaoilspilllaw.com/biological-oceanographer-great-concern-over-the-many-recent-unusual-fish-kills-that-have-covered-the-entire-water-column
'Hit to Kill' Interceptors May Be Cheap to Beat
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1218-03.htm
Wednesday, December 18, 2002 by the Chicago Tribune
The limited missile defense system that the Bush administration unveiled Tuesday will rely on homing technology costing billions of dollars--and, critics contend, still could be thwarted by countermeasures costing only pennies.
Also See:
MIT Team Tied to Questionable Missile Studies
Boston Globe 3/4/2002
Missile Defense System Won't Work
David Wright/Theodore Postol
Boston Globe 5/11/2000
Star Wars, AI and quantum computing
http://www.angelfire.com/az3/nfold/starwars.html
( 'Letter' link at top goes to a Red rated site per Web of Trust )
As proposed, the National Missile Defense has, at best, little bang for the buck. Every phase of interception, using direct collision as the kill mechanism, has serious drawbacks.
However, a system combining boost-phase interceptors with high-powered midcourse laser beams is not implausible, though the expense of an effective system may turn out to be unacceptable. Such a system has been found unpromising in a July 2003 report from a 12-member panel of the American Physical Society.
NMD is not designed to be effective against Russia, which can fire enough ICBMs to simply overwhelm the battery of interceptors. Though some have argued that the system might work against Chinese missiles, this seems unlikely, since the Chinese are well able to deploy effective decoys and other 'penetration aids.' The assumption that more primitive states will be unable to deploy such countermeasures is highly unconvincing.
The Real Rogues
Behind the Star Wars missile defense system
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporations/Real_Rogues.htmlLike a bad sequel, the proposed Star Wars missile defense system has come back to dominate the national security debate this election year. This is not Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the failed scheme to build an anti-missile shield to protect the U.S. from a massive nuclear attack by the now-defunct Soviet Union. What's being proposed now under the name National Missile Defense (NMD) is a Son of Star Wars, a more modest version meant to protect against a limited attack by "rogue states" armed with just a few nuclear missiles or an accidental missile launch by Russia.
Much of the debate has centered on money: should we deploy the very expensive or the extremely expensive version? In recent months, as allegations of testing fraud have come to light and another Star Wars missile test failed, the debate has broadened. Many policy-makers and mainstream media pundits are now suggesting the system is not ready, and President Clinton, due to decide this summer or fall on whether to move forward with deployment of NMD, should leave that call for his successor to make.
Yet one crucial area has not been discussed: the real rogues-military corporations-driving the Star Wars deployment decision. To understand their role, one must first look at the arguments against Star Wars.
Star Wars won't work: Independent physicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Union of Concerned Scientists have analyzed the Star Wars radar system and concluded it will not be able to distinguish actual warheads from decoys, chaff, and other countermeasures an attacker would employ to confuse or overwhelm the system. Star Wars testers tacitly acknowledge this-their tests involve a single Mylar balloon decoy instead of the dozens or hundreds they would surely face in an actual attack. Even with the tests rigged to succeed two out of three tests have failed. The third "succeeded" by a fluke when the interceptor missile honed in on the decoy balloon which just happened to be in the path of the mock warhead.
Star wars -- the sequel, not the prequel! Missile defense lives!
http://whyfiles.org/089missile
| U P D A T E (posted 8 MARCH 2000) A former employee of the military contractor TRW has charged the company with faking test results in the $27-billion missile defense program. Nira Schwartz, who worked on Star Wars software in 1995 and 1996, says the company dodged the truth in repeated reports to the Pentagon. Here's how the New York Times explained it: "In test after test, the interceptors failed, she has alleged, but her superiors insisted that the technology performed adequately, refused her appeals to tell industrial partners and federal patrons of its shortcomings, and then fired her." The issue concerned the ability to distinguish real warheads from decoy balloons, a critical capacity for missile defense. In papers filed in federal court, Schwartz charged that while TRW told the government that its system made the correct distinction 95 percent of the time, in reality it worked 5 percent to 15 percent of the time. See "Ex-Employee Says Contractor Faked Results of Missile Tests," William Broad, The New York Times, March 7, 2000, p. A1. |  | |
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When I was a boy, my imagination was sparked by the Cuban Missile Crisis, The Avro Arrow and the Bomarc Missile Crisis ( The public was duped into believing them gone...until they were. And who was in charge ? 'Peace Prize' winner Lester B. Pearson, Lieberal. Hmmm.
Bomarc Missile Crisis
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=a1ARTA0000854
Something so attractive to graft is sure to surface in another guise. Or perhaps I should turn my attention to Butcher Birds in AfPak.
A novel of international intrigue--the sequel to Ing's New York Times bestselling The Ransom of Black Stealth One. A Butcher Bird is loose in the United States. It flies silent. It is too small to be detected by radar. It flies too high to be seen with the naked eye. And it carries a laser generator that can fire a beam precisely enough to boil a specific human brain in seconds. . . .
Ten Candidates File Suit as 'Massive Improprieties, Tampering' Seen in Shelby County, TN, Election
http://www.bradblog.com
Election Watchdog: 'Most brutal voter disenfranchisement, election tampering case we have witnessed yet...like watching a 2 week bank robbery in process'...
Colonel Kicked Out of Afghanistan for Anti-PowerPoint Rant
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/anti-powerpoint-rant-gets-colonel-kicked-out-of-afghanistan/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Netvibes
Army Col. Lawrence Sellin, a 61-year old reservist from New Jersey who served in Afghanistan and Iraq prior to this deployment, got the sack Thursday from his job as a staff officer at the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command in Kabul. The hammer fell barely 48 hours after United Press International ran a passionate op-ed he wrote to lament that “little of substance is really done here.” He tells Danger Room, “I feel quite rather alone here at the moment.”
The colonel’s rant called into question whether ISAF’s revamped command structure, charged with coordinating the day-by-day war effort, was much more than a briefing factory. Or, as Sellin put it, “endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information.”
ACLU blasts Jailhouse Pain RayU.S. Scans Afghan Inmates for Biometric Database
Pentagon's New Global Military Partner: Sweden
http://world.mediamonitors.net/Headlines/Pentagon-s-New-Global-Military-Partner-Sweden
With eleven years of NATO expansion and the Alliance's transformation into the world's first internationally-oriented military bloc, no nation in Europe is permitted to be neutral and none can avoid involvement in military missions, including wars, abroad. Sweden is no exception, having joined scores of other previously non-aligned nations around the world in being pulled into the Pentagon's orbit in the post-Cold War period."
Over 120,000 troops are serving under NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan in addition to 30,000 under American command, and the Western military bloc recently confirmed that Malaysia has become the 47th official Troop Contributing Nation (TCN) for the war effort.
The main function of the Partnership for Peace program - whose name is counterintuitive, Orwellian and blasphemous given the fact it has graduated 12 Eastern European nations into full membership in the world's only military bloc and prepared them for deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq - is to integrate nations in Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia for NATO operations abroad. The major beneficiary of that process is the Pentagon.
Over twenty nations currently in that category are having their armed forces, military doctrines, weapons arsenals and foreign policy orientation transformed for interoperability with the Western alliance and in particular its leading member, the United States.
The PfP is training the armies of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Austria, Bosnia, Finland, Georgia, Ireland, Macedonia, Montenegro and Sweden for the war in Afghanistan and, complementarily, is employing the war there to provide the militaries of those states combat experience and to build a globally deployable force for future NATO operations, including ones nearer the respective nations' borders. [1] Other components of the strategy include conducting ever more frequent and large-scale war games and other combat training in partnership nations with Afghanistan the immediate battlefield destination but with general applicability for other locations, and expanding the arsenals of PfP states with - NATO interoperable - unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), armored combat vehicles, artillery, attack helicopters, advanced warplanes and other engines of war.
Al Burke and his dedicated colleagues with the Stop the Furtive Accession to NATO initiative in Sweden are conducting a tireless campaign to sound the alarm over the surreptitious and accelerating drive to integrate the nation into NATO's - and the Pentagon's - global military sphere. [2]
For over a year Swedish troops in charge of ISAF operations in four northern Afghan provinces have been engaged in regular firefights, the first combat operations the nation has conducted in almost two hundred years. Two Swedish officers were killed in February, the first troops killed in an exchange of fire with Afghan rebels.
( Sure beats the heck out of the setup of interlocking treaties cited in 'The Guns of August' in the runup to World War One : The Great War as a root cause of the conflict. )
World Socialist Web Site
http://www.wsws.org/category/news.shtmlWorld News
US Marine general rejects Obama’s Afghanistan deadline
By Bill Van Auken, August 27, 2010
General James Conway, commandant of the US Marine Corps, publicly challenged the July 2011 deadline set by President Obama for beginning the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, saying it gave “sustenance” to the Taliban.
“Alarm bells” ring for Australian government over deepening China-East Timor ties
By Patrick O’Connor, August 27, 2010
The Australian cited unnamed senior diplomatic analysts who said that “China’s foray into what has been traditionally regarded as ‘Australia’s sphere of interest’ had set alarm bells ringing in Canberra.”
Heavy flooding creates further havoc in China
By Zac Hambides, August 27, 2010
China’s worst flooding in a decade has already left nearly 3,900 people dead or missing. This week, China’s northeast was also hit resulting in the relocation of more than a quarter of a million residents.
US agencies delayed action on tainted eggs for weeks
By Kate Randall, August 27, 2010
US federal agencies delayed action for weeks after becoming aware of a salmonella outbreak linked to Wright County Egg. The revelation comes as the egg recall has expanded to two new brand names and a total of 23 states.
Sri Lankan government evicts street hawkers and shanty dwellers
By Vilani Peiris, August 27, 2010
The cabinet recently approved a plan to evict 66,000 families from shanties in Colombo to clear the way for private developers. Street vendors are also being targeted.
Another utility worker killed in Detroit
By Lawrence Porter, August 27, 2010
Veteran utility worker Michael Parks was electrocuted and killed while repairing a power line August 24.
Philippine hostage tragedy exposes tense international relations
By Joseph Santolan, August 27, 2010
These events simultaneously exposed the rot at the core of the new Philippine government, the empty bluster of the news-as-entertainment media, and the taut and tenuous nature of relations between the Philippines and China.
Conservatives contend for power in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia
By Dietmar Henning, August 27, 2010
The replacement by the CDU, which is currently rent by internal conflicts, of party heads in six states whose previous leaders recently lost power or resigned provides an indication of the future course of the party.
Chicago teachers speak about mass layoffs
By Kristina Betinis and Christopher Davion, August 27, 2010
The WSWS speaks to recently laid off public school teachers at a job fair in Chicago.
Queensland Labor proceeds with privatisations, despite last weekend’s electoral rout
By Mike Head, August 27, 2010
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, backed by the Murdoch media, has vowed to proceed with her government’s privatisation program despite Labor’s electoral rout in last Saturday’s federal election.
US forges closer military ties with Vietnam
By Peter Symonds, August 26, 2010
The Obama administration has taken several steps to boost its military relationship with Vietnam as part of a broader strategy aimed undermining Chinese influence in East Asia.
Australian voters speak out—Part 3
“Why are we still in Afghanistan!”
By our reporters, August 26, 2010
Voters spoke to the WSWS on election day in Australia expressing their alienation from the major parties and their concerns on a range of issues—from the Afghan war to the political coup within the Labor party and the deterioration of living standards.
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