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I did not invent Mutually Assured Destruction! So please do not make personal attacks on me If describe how it works, and until you got something else...
Do you get my drift?

These are very bigoted statements when you combine singular with plural.

Republicans are the party of morals and values. They are about integrity and apple pie.

Every single one of them? Not a chance. And I figure that Mark Foley is not a real Republican anyway, perhaps he was a democratic spy planeted by the Democrats within Republican ranks.

Oh yeah, they also cover for a gay Republican who has a penchant for pages working in the employ of the US federal government, all for political expediency and to assure majority status in Congress.

Oh yeah, as you know all Republicans are gay or cross dressers, that is why so many gay people join the Republican party, because the Democrats are bigoted homophobes. And you are missing out on the fact that these were ex-pages and consenting adults, no statuatory rape has been proven to have occured. Can't the Democrats win on the issues rather than on just dirty tricks and media smear campaigns? What they don't want the electorate to pay attention to is the fact that they'll raise taxes and lose the War in Iraq, but all the voters are concerned about is what congressmen do to pages, they certainly aren't interested in any issues that affect them directly.

Who has more nuclear weapons? Not Kim. He doesn't even have enough nuclear weapons to destroy us, the means at which he has to deliver them are questionable. Once we give in to a dictator, where do we stop? I don't think we are willing to accept him as our dictator in order that some of us aren't destroyed by his Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons. I'll take my chances with his nukes rather than live under his thumb any day.

What good is deterrence unless the enemy thinks we will do terrible things to him if he does terrible things to us? So long as the enemy thinks this way, then we won't have to do terrible things to his country. If he doesn't or is a fool, then we will have to do terrible things. So far we've managed to avoid nuking the Soviet Union and killing millions of Russians. If Kim is not deterred by our deterrent then we'll just have to use it to destroy his country I'm sorry to say. That's what Mutually Assured Destruction is all about, with the current situation between North Korea and the USA, it means more assured destruction for the North Koreans than it does for us. I can't help it if Kim Il Jumg is suicidal and wants to bring hiw whole nation down with him. Hopefully if he gets the urge to commit suicide with his people, he'll do so when he has fewer nuclear weapons so that fewer Americans get killed.

What is your alternative by the way, I don't believed you've mentioned it? I don't believe Kim is in any position to threaten us, he only has Hiroshima sized nuclear weapons and few of those, he knows that the moment he uses them on us or our allies, we'll commit genocide on his people.

Maybe not this lifetime but
Check this website out:
www.alcor.org
With cryonics, some of us may indeed someday see a terraformed Mars and perhaps walk on its surface. I can't guarantee any of this of course, but what do we have now? Burial, cremation, religion and a belief in the afterlife. I'd say we would have nothing to lose in trying this out, since we would be already dead by the time were frozen anyway. If reversable biostasis can be achieved, then this makes the task of building starships that much easier, and terraforming projects can become more affordable, if you find an "almost Earth" out among the stars that only need a little modification and alot of patience to match Earth's environment. Generation ships have to be huge, but a "sleeper" ship can be small, it doesn't have to support a vast ecosystem on a millenial long journey out among the stars. All life we want can be packed neatly and affordably in cryonics chambers. Yes it all sounds like science fiction, and perhaps it is, but I never said it would all happen tomorrow, did I.

I don't know how close space elevators are, it may be possible to make them using bulk technology. The reason nanotubes are expensive is that we don't have sufficient motivation to find ways to mass produce them in suffcient quanitities. The nanofabrics aren't strong enough yet, and since that is the case, liftport has not reason to mass produce it until it can produce a fabric that is strong enough for its purpose, then and only then would it work on mass producing it in quantity.[/url]

With Clinton, it was worse, Monica Lewinsky was still working for him when they had the sexual affair, at least with Foley it involved ex-pages who were over 18 years of age. The media is making something out of nothing, because it wants to choose the next Congress instead of letting the people do so based on fair and unbiased information. Do you know what Democrats are going to do once they get into power? they are going to raise taxes and deliberately lose the war in Iraq. Thy'll knuckel under to Kin Il Jung and send negotiators to someone who threatened to attack us with nuclear warheads. I don't think North Korea needs to have diplomatic relations with us in order for us to tell them what will happen if they attack us with nuclear weapons, they know themselves. We have way more missiles than they have and they are of higher explosive yield. Let them blow up some left-coast town with their Hiroshima type bombs, and then we'll scour the Korean Penisula of them, burning their bodies to a crisp to get rid of them in revenge! I don't think we'll be feeling so kindly to the North Koreans after they have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, do you? But we can survive whatever they have to throw at us, and they won't survive what we'll do in retaliation! If our missile arsenal isn't enough to disuade them from attacking us with nukes, then I doubt there is anything our diplomats can do other than paying their ransom. At least with a nuclear war between North Korea and the USA, we'll be rid of them, and they won't bother us any more. We can't just let them nuke our cities and not respond, hopefully they don't do this, but we shouldn't cower and give in to their demands to prevent it.

We certainly need one to get into space in a big way. A lot of the world's problems would be solved if we could travel into space cheaply, so in a sense we do need this stuff, and what we got now is not sufficient. The reusable launch vehicle efforts were mismanaged because they were imcompetantly managed government programs, with no real incentives to accomplish anything, as the system was non compedative. NASA can certainly create a launch market if it spent its money wisely, and incentivized private companies to do the development work by lowering the bar of profitability. If we spend the money, we don't want to waste it on dead ends, and inefficient buerocracy. I say we let the private companies develop their own buerocracy, and manage their own programs to accomplish the goals NASA sets forth, rather than NASA running the program itself. Government programs are essentially jobs programs, and survival is not at issue as it would be in a private corporation competing with others. That is why I think the prize system is a more efficient and productive expediture of government funds rather than a buerocracy with rules and regs, and cushy union jobs and bloat.

One can always think up an endless series of disasters that could set back the space program.

Asteroid collision

Nuclear War

Bioengineered Plague

Super volcano

Terrorism

etc etc, the result of all these things is always the same, no progress or expansion into space. I'm already aware of these possibilities.

In a similar vein what Utopians want is a magic bullet that will cure all of Societies ills, and the argument that we shouldn't go to Mars because we have so many problems yet to solve on Earth is a Utopian argument, it assumes achieving a perfect harmonious society is a realistic goal and that all of societies resources should be put toward that end sparing none of it for anything else. My Argument about cancer is a strawman argument, in other words we spend billions and billions of dollars to do reseach on ways to fight cancer, but if you were to take that research money and spend it to buy food for the starving, then you could save alot of people who would otherwise have starved to death. True immediately you benefit more people if you spend it on food for the hungry right now than if you spend it to do research to cure cancer later.

There is the corn you eat and their is the corn you plant for seed. The people who are against space exploration because the world has so many problems, are like people who want to eat the seed corn, they find it such a waste to plant this corn in the ground when it can feed so many people, and so it is with space exploration.

I actually agree with you that cancer research has its benefits, but I was taking a similar attitude towards cancer reseach as the anti-space crowd has against space travel.

They point to how expensive space travel is, and I point to how expensive Cancer research is.

They site the lack of progress in space travel, and I site the lack of progress in Cancer research - my mother died of lung cancer for example, all the billions spent on research did her no good.

They site other things the money for the space program can go for; so I repeat this exercise for the billions spent on cancer research - most people in the Third World do not die from lung cancer but for easily preventable diseases, If we were to spend the money that goes for Cancer research instead on sanitation, and drug programs for the needy instead of developing new cancer drugs, we could no doubt save alot of additional people today, but to turn that around and use it as an arguement that we should not spend money on cancer research, is a bad thing. This is all just to prove that point.

Space Elevators don't require any heat shield. I've given the whole concept of a resuable spaceship that flies into space almost 40 years of my life, and nothing useful has ever come out of this pursuit. A truly reusable space vehicle would be something that stays on the ground and sends things up rather that goes into orbit itself. One idea of a reusable space vehicle is a factory that builds expendible space vehicles cheaply. Have a standardized model of expendible rocket and have the factory mass produce them with a high degree of automation. One of the reasons expendible rockets are so expensive is because they are hand-built, if you can get rid of the hands yet still build the rockets, you have a cheaper launch system.

Ah, the young and naive. I used to be young myself once, I thought problems like Somalia could be solved once, but now I see that it was just a waste of money. Money that can be spent more productively on space exploration and colonization. Not to worry, the 18-24 years olds will get older and disillusioned just like the rest of us. I don't really see why this age group matters all that much, they are not the only ones that vote, nor are they the most prolific voters. We've been there done that before with the cancelation of the Manned Space Program, and we didn't solve any of the Worlds problems with any money saved. The world of the late 1970s had plenty of problems, people didn't stop starving, the only difference was that we didn't have people walking on the Moon to cheer us up. The 18-24 year olds haven't been there or done that, they don't personally remember those times when we did spend our money on things other than the space program, I don't see how doing it one more time would make any difference either.

Why spend money on Cancer research, when we could divert the money to more worthy causes like feeding the poor and hungry? we certainly can save more lives by providing the hungry with enough food to stay alive than we can with cancer research, so far we've spent billions of Cancer, and what have we got to show for it? Like cancer research, the space program is an investment in the future, the goal is to show future results. Current results in both cancer and the space program have been underwhelming, we still haven't found a cure for cancer, and we still haven't built space colonies. That indicates that we should spend the money on Cancer and on our space program differently rather than not spending it on cancer and on the space program. The Shuttle was a tremendous waste of money, for years we did little except operate the machine, when we should have spent the money instead on building better vehicles, its no wonder that some naive young adults think the space program is a waste of money, fortunately for us, their vote is not the most important, and these people will get onlder and no longer be 18-24 years old and will not necessarily hold these same views as they get older either.

By launching larger satellites further out, you can obtain the same resolution as the close in satellites. You probably want the satellites to be in nonequatorial orbits since the elevators will have views around itself at the equator, and better yet, unlike satellites, the elevators can view a place contiuously. Space elevators are also an excellent means of placing a Hab onto the surface of Mars or on the Moon for that matter. Just imagine it, a hab is lowered slowly onto the Martian surface, the astronauts hop around and do some exploring, and then the hab is raised up, the elevator changes its orbit slightly and moves relative to the Martian surface, the Mars Hab will have an excellent view of the terrain below and when it spots a place it wants to set down, it commands the elevator to assume a synchonious orbit once again and it lowers itself down the elevator onto the surface once again for further exploration. Not only that, you can also explore Venus by this method. You lower a Hab into Venus' atmosphere, the elevator won't be synchronius with Venus's surface but with its atmosphere which superrotates over Venus in a period of 48 hours. The elevator lowers a balloon with a liquid hydrogen tank, and boils off the hydrogen to inflate the balloon, the balloon then supports further material which is then sent down the elevator, including an aerial hoab gondala that is attached to the balloon. The balloon remains firmly attached to the space elevator. From the ballon the astronauts lower themselves in refrigerated or cooled bathyspheres and walk around in cooled hard suits that are tethered to the Bathysphere, probably with some mechnical assistance as the suits are likely to be heavy. Rocks can be collected, placed in the Bathysphere and then raised up to the Hab/gondala and from their shipped up the space elevator into orbit where a ship awaits to take them to Earth for further analysis. It might also be possible to use space elevators to lower astronauts into the atmospheres of gas giants.

What else can space elevators be used for?
You can rotate them in space and at their ends provide 1 Earth gravity. You can also loop them into a contiuous strip and spin them for gravity, make enough of this stuff and you can build a staggerinly large space colony. When you no longer confined to the structural material limits of steel and aluminum, you can built giant versions of O'Neill's Space colonies. In his book the High Frontier, O'Neill mentione that his Island Three could be scaled up with common ordinary materials such as steel and aluminum to produce the interial land area equal to switzerland, imagine how much better you could do if you were working with nanotube fabrics instead.

On the surface of Mars, you can create huge domes over enourmous craters using nanotube material.

Mark Foley is sort of a spy, he is not who he pretended to be. You can't blame the Republicans for who Mark Foley was anymore than you can blame George Washington for who Benedict Arnold was. One can argue after all, George Washington should have known that Benedict Arnold was a traitor from the very moment he started consorting with the Loyalist Peggy Shippan. No doubt George Washington was guilty of covering up for Benedict Arnold, and that it was patently obvious that Arnold was a traitor, and so he shouldn't have place him in charge of the fortifications at West Point, because of that George Washington should have resigned and been replaced by Horatio Gates, a general who didn't like Benedict Arnold, so therefor Horation Gates would have made a better commander in chief of the Continental Army than George Washington, or so goes the Devils argument goes.

Mark Foley resigned as soon as he was found out, but the Press being not satisfied has conducted a witch hunt, saying senior republican leaders must have known, how could they not, they after all got spies and bugs everywere. No e-mail or instant message can ever get through without being monitored by the Speaker of the House. Now how difficult would it be for the Democratic Party or George Soros to get get somebody to commit perjury, and have somebody with glasses saying,

Former Page:"Oh thats right I got instant messages from Mark Foley, and he said he wanted to do such and such with me, and I got the instant messages printed out here on these sheets of paper."

The Press:"Oh how do we know those messages were sent by Mark Foley?"

Former Page:"Oh easy, because I said so, and I was a Boy Scout, so its Scouts Honor."

The Press:"Oh that does it, since you were a scout and scouts never lie, we must have some major scandal brewing here in the Republican Party, Oh never mind what North Korea is doing with the Bomb, the most important story is obviously this Instant message scandal! and Oh my gosh! He was a former Page and he was only 21 years old! Terrible terrible, a case of attempted statuatory rape with a minor it is, Oh theirs another one and another one, they all say they had sex with Mark Foley on their scouts honor, they must be telling the truth for sure. No former boy scout would lie about a thing like that would they?"