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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: JPR who wrote (1442)6/8/1998 5:11:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette  Respond to of 12475
 
Command over the language.

JPR & all:

I have always liked old George Will,sometimes even if it is only for the language.I guess going to Oxford wasn't a waste of time after all.Then again it could be the man and not the school if one were to go by some of the other Oxonians.<gg>

Anyway here is a rather unkind criticism of fellow Oxonian I saw in The Post.
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[Source: The Wahsington Post-For Private use only]
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Paper Defense
By George F. Will

Sunday, June 7, 1998;

In the meadow of the president's mind, in the untended portion where foreign policy thoughts sprout randomly, this flower recently bloomed concerning the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests: "I cannot believe that we are about to start the 21st century by having the Indian subcontinent repeat the worst mistakes of the 20th century."

What mistakes did he mean? Having nuclear weapons? Were it not for them, scores of thousands of Americans would have died in 1945 ending the fighting in the Pacific. And nuclear weapons were indispensable ingredients of the containment of the Soviet Union and its enormous conventional forces.

Perhaps the president meant that arms competitions were the "mistakes." But that thought does not rise to the level of adult commentary on the real historical contingencies and choices of nations.

This president's utterances on foreign policy often are audible chaff, and not even his glandular activities are as embarrassing as his sub-sophomoric pronouncement to India and Pakistan that "two wrongs don't make a right." That bromide was offered to nations weighing what they consider questions of national life and death.

U.S. policy regarding such tests has been put on automatic pilot by Congress's itch to micromanage and to mandate cathartic gestures, so the United States will now evenhandedly punish with economic sanctions India for its provocation and Pakistan for responding to it. Because India is stronger economically, the sanctions will be disproportionately injurious to Pakistan.

India has an enormous advantage over Pakistan in conventional military forces. (It has the world's fourth largest military establishment, although China's army is three times larger than India's.) That is one reason Pakistan believes it needs nuclear weapons. Economic sanctions will further weaken Pakistan's ability to rely on non-nuclear means of defense.

This should be a moment for Republicans to reassert their interest in national security issues, one of the few areas in which the public still regards them as more reassuring than Democrats. But the Republican who could be particularly exemplary, isn't. Arizona Sen. John McCain says the first thing to do is impose "sanctions which hurt" and the second is "to get agreements that they will not test again."

So, automatic sanctions having failed to deter either nation, Washington's attention turns, robotically, to an even more futile ritual -- the superstition of arms control, specifically the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the United States signed in 1996, but which the Senate has prudently not ratified. The designation "superstition" fits because the faith of believers in arms control is more than impervious to evidence; their faith is strengthened even by evidence that actually refutes it.

Far from demonstrating the urgency of ratification, India's and Pakistan's tests demonstrate the CTBT's irrelevance. India had not tested since 1974. Pakistan evidently had never tested. Yet both had sufficient stockpiles to perform multiple tests. So the tests did not create new sabers, they were the rattling of sabers known to have existed for years. Indeed, in 1990, when fighting in the disputed territory of Kashmir coincided with Indian military exercises, the Bush administration assumed that both Pakistan and India had built weapons with their nuclear technologies and worried about a possible nuclear exchange.

The nonproliferation treaty authorizes international inspections only at sites declared to be nuclear facilities. Nations have been known to fib. The CTBT sets such a low-yield standard of what constitutes a test of a nuclear device, that verification is impossible.

Various of the president's policies, whether shaped by corruption, incompetence or naivete, have enabled China to increase the lethality of its ICBMs. The president and his party are committed to keeping America vulnerable to such weapons: 41 senators, all Democrats, have filibustered legislation sponsored by Sens. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) and Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) declaring it U.S. policy "to deploy effective anti-missile defenses of the territory of the United States as soon as technologically possible."

Instead, the administration would defend the nation with parchment -- gestures like the CTBT, which is a distillation of liberalism's foreign policy of let's pretend. Let's pretend that if we forever forswear tests, other nations' admiration will move them to emulation. Diagnostic tests are indispensable for maintaining the safety and reliability of the aging U.S. deterrent inventory. So the CTBT is a recipe for slow-motion denuclearization. But let's pretend that if we become weaker, other nations will not want to become stronger.

Seeking a safer world by means of a weaker America, and seeking to make America safe behind the parchment walls of arms control agreements, is to start the 21st century by repeating the worst fallacies of the 20th century.



To: JPR who wrote (1442)6/8/1998 6:43:00 PM
From: Jonathan Cleveland  Respond to of 12475
 
thank you and I get your very
good point. I saw the cnbc clip
I guess we all need to
calm down and Breath
So does anybody trade stocks?
best
J.c



To: JPR who wrote (1442)6/9/1998 11:32:00 AM
From: Senor VS  Respond to of 12475
 
Hi JPR et al

Surd Joke... Hope it does not hurt some people's sentiments..

Two Surds Santa Singh and Banta Singh go to France on a
pleasure trip. They meet this Frenchman called Jean Paul
and become good pals. Jean Paul finds these two Surds
some- what amusing and so he goes all out to make them
happy. He treats them at pubs, bars, discotheques ......
This goes on for a while until one fine day Jean Paul
does not turn up. The Surds assume that some important
work would have held him up and do not take a serious
note of it. But, perhaps something was serious as Jean
Paul does not turn up for next five days at a stretch. At
this the Surds get alarmed and go to the police station
to lodge a complaint. The inspector asks them to give
details of the person who's missing. The following
conversation follows:

Santa Singh: Well, his name is Jean Paul.
Inspector: It's a very common name in France.
Something more please.

Banta Singh: Well, he is very tall.
Inspector: Most of the people in France are tall.
Big deal.

Santa singh: Well, he's got blue eyes.
Inspector: Oh! no. Something more substantial.
Banta Singh: I got it. This is slightly uncommon.
I'm sure now you shall be able to
track him. You see, He's got two holes in his ass.

Inspector: (shocked): Well, well, that's curious. Are you
sure?

Banta Singh: Ya! Ya!

Inspector: Are you definitely sure that this very
personal info. you have is CORRECT ?

Banta Singh: Most certainly.

Inspector (still skeptical): But how're you so sure ?
Banta Singh: Simple. Whenever we used to go with him
to the bar, everyone used to greet him as " Here comes
Jean Paul with two a**-holes.