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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (67694)	1/22/2003 1:01:33 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

<I wonder if this value exchange had any effect on the development of North Korea's missile technology?> Hi Michael. No doubt it did. I'd go further and say that China was instrumental in North Korea having nukes. If I was China, I would want a well-armed North Korea to hold at bay the forces of the Matrix of Malevolence. I know the holy trinity of ANZUS is all about peace, light, harmony, happiness, love and contentment, but when on the receiving end of some napalm, it might not look quite like that. The USA considers China a strategic competitor, which means let's point some nukes at it and put it in a box like Shrodinger's cat and if necessary we'll give it a dose of fissile material and cyanide, not at a random time but a time of our choosing. One could understand the cat, whether black or white, feeling somewhat put upon. If I was Russia, I'd be inclined to keep the western border with the USA's imperial forces secure by pre-emptive forward placement of defence technology. The USA has got their forces hard up against the fence and frequently they rattle their sabres. I'd be inclined to rattle back. This is no way to run a neighbourhood. Back to the soldering technology which was alleged to be breaking the technology export ban and helping a 'strategic competitor' prepare to send ICBMs in return. It must be very tough to decide what is weapons grade technology. Everything has military application, from baked beans canning technology to cdma2000 cyberphone technology. Since quite a few countries can launch rockets as well as the USA, the technology is obviously not all that secret. Therefore, it's likely that the USA companies will miss out on business if they aren't prepared to ensure the satellites are launched safely. Anyone who deals with government bureaucracy will know that it's almost impossible to not break rules. Judges and lawyers sit for years trying to figure out with 20:20 hindsight just what the rules were, finally having to toss it to the Supreme Court who toss a coin to decide [though they do that in chambers and write learned dissertations as a fig leaf]. Those in the heat of commercial battle are supposed to be able to know what the rules are instantaneously for a complex set of circumstances. Most of the spittle from the raving right is because Bernie Schwartz and others donated money to Bill Clinton, thereby proving they were the real enemy. Ollie North and others back to antiquity have moved money around the place to buy favours and do what they thought was a good idea at the time. Nixon's gang busted into the Watergate to disrupt democracy and the legal system. The USA has got the best politicians money can buy. Though the failure to get the cash from NextWave when the FCC organized a great deal showed that even those excellent politicians are not very good. Senator Hollings put the kibosh on it and the USA citizens' government is now worse off to the tune of $10 billion. Hollings couldn't hurry. Still the NextWave spectrum is sitting unused, 7 years after the event. If the USA handles things well, North Korea and China could be great buddies of the USA. Lumping them in with superstitious Moslem terrorist fanatics is absurd. Mqurice PS: <...the spittle from the raving right ... > I admit to being provocative here and maybe FL will nuke me for it. I really have no idea what right and left mean. The terms seem to be merely replacement words for Democratic and Republican. They don't seem to have any particular policy or political meaning that I can decipher. I saw a list the other day here intending to describe the meaning by way of example of groups which are right and left. But being an engineer, I like things to have definite meanings rather than the Alice In Wonderland 'It means whatever I want it to mean'. Is there an official left and right definition? I'd have called Libertarians extreme left wing, meaning least government dictation and extreme right wing as meaning most government dictation, which would put the communist party and the militaristic conscription crowd [my way or the highway - or more likely the cage or bullet] happily together on the far right. But Libertarians are apparently called right wing.