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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (24527)	10/25/2002 12:04:30 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 74559

Hey Jay!! Haven't been ignoring you, but have been a trifle involved over on the FADG threat.. hehe I'm flattered that you would think enough of my opinions to revisit them... I still stand by my belief in an anti-missile/meteor defense. And I think our government is finally starting to realize that meteors are a major threat that far exceeds anything mankind might wreak upon one another. And I still believe we need to have the missile defense, if only to indicate to the other side that we can retaliate with relative impunity. But 9/11 has certainly brought into sharp focus the threat from terrorism and it's ability to operate in a relative "supranational" status. Very similar to the old James Bond novels/movies where evil criminal organizations posed either as fronts to the Soviets, or as completely independent groups/individuals attempting to extort the international community for profit and power. International power is, once again, becoming decentralized, and I still perceive progress towards multi-polar politico/economic blocs as China continues to assert its power and Europe continues to consolidate the EU. We're "friendly" now, but there will be considerable pressure at some point in the future where economic interests create pressure to engage in military operations. This will be exacerbated by protectionist policies, if permitted to assert themselves in our international relations. However, that said, I believe that political openess and a move to democracy is the greatest "weapon" that we can implement to prevent economic competition from leading to military confrontation. Democracies, as we're seeing with Iraq, are generally loath to go to war with one another, especially if economic ties are well developed. I think we saw a measure of this with the recent Pakistani-Indian confrontation. India was showing signs of being fully prepared to go to way with Pakistan, but it's rumoured that western business interests convinced the Indians that they would pull their businesses out of their country if they didn't "cool it".. And I believe the same implicit threat was made to Pakistan... And you know something.. that's the way it should be... As for cyberwarfare, this is timely topic given the recent DDoS attack on the DNS servers.. Apparently they were sucessful in bringing down 9 of the 13 servers for about an hour. But the remaining 4 were able to pick up the slack with very little impact on the overall system.. And if we control the DNS servers, we control everything that passes through the internet. Which means, should the US feel compelled to do so, we could literally shut out any block of gateways to a particular nation or region that we so desired. Regarding Echelon... that's an irrelevant argument anyway since the Brits over at GCHQ have been spying on US communications for decades and sharing that information with the US. And we do the same for them... That's how we get around the "no domestic surveillance" issue. I can't say much more about it, but that much is already public domain information and readily acknowledged. We do live in some interesting times though.. I think we're going to see the US asserting itself in order to reshape the landscape in the Middle East. All we're looking for is sufficient provocation to "spring the trap".. We're seeing the middle east face some terrific demographic issues, where upwards of 40% of the muslim world is currently under the age of 18. It's their version of the baby boom and these young minds are in that point of their lives where their future views of the world are shaped by the events around them. And currently the Islamic Militants have captured their attention and vision as they find their lives growing more miserable under their current corrupt leaders/rulers. What the middle east requires is a Marshall plan.. But to have a Marshall plan, you have to have relatively open and stable governments. And to have those, we will be required to do a bit of political and social "terra-forming"... And that could possibly get very bloody.. for all sides. But IMO, I think it's better to do it now before we forced to deal with it later when those forces have grown even stronger. And we don't have to do it strictly by way of military action. What we're doing in Iraq is a prime example.. We're giving Saddam a choice.. while at the same time empowering dissident opposition groups who were previously too cowed to act... I can see this trend being repeated in Iran, Syria, and eventually, Saudi Arabia(where the head of the snake lies). Hawk