Raising The Stakes By Lowering Them

Conditions: Reflective.


Some Sense At Last.

Finally, the American President has scrapped the demented push to force a missile defense shield into Europe under the cover of protecting it against rogue nations or groups. Not only was it unlikely to be effective, it also hacked off the likes of Russia, who were uneasy about America installing missile batteries along their border. But instead of scrapping the plan entirely, the missiles will instead emigrate onto ships and become some kind of mobile defense system. That's not actually as much of a solution as I had hoped.

Viewed from the perspective of defense priorities, what the Administration has done is shift resources away from building a costly, immovable and as yet unproven shield in central Europe to counter the potential threat of Iran's developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, instead allocating them to deploying ships carrying proven interceptor systems nearer to Iran to counter the current threat of its medium-range-missile arsenal.

Among other advantages, the ships can sail freely in international waters to meet evolving threats without obtaining consent from host countries (the Czech parliament, for example, had yet to approve the deployment of the now canceled system). What's more, they can perform missions other than missile defense, and they are considerably cheaper. "This system gives us a much more significant and robust capability to adapt to the threat as it actually emerges," Marine General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday, Sept. 17.

Part of the furor over Obama's decision results from the fact that ever since President Ronald Reagan launched his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, a.k.a. Star Wars) 26 years ago, the notion of a global missile shield has become an obsession for many of his ideological acolytes. They tend to view any retreat as surrendering to the forces of evil, even though Obama's decision was blessed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates — who had originally recommended the European scheme in 2006 while serving as Defense Secretary to President George W. Bush. In justifying the move, Gates and others cite intelligence reports that Iran — ostensibly the key target of the European shield — is emphasizing shorter-range missiles that couldn't be shot down from Poland.

Sigh. Why is it so many people have to suffer so that a certain type of people can feel as if they're always winning?

The U.S. has spent well north of $100 billion in the effort to create a technological shield to protect its mainland from incoming missiles — much of it on long-forgotten and never used systems such as Nike, Nike Zeus, Nike-X, Sentinel and Safeguard. The grandest of these, the Safeguard system, was built nearly 40 years ago in Nekoma, N.D. Huge earth-moving machines dug up 1.75 million cu. yd. of rich, black loam from the 470-acre site. Contractors built the base with 160,000 cu. yd. of concrete and 12,000 tons of steel. They crowned their work with a partly buried, 123-ft.-tall pyramid containing the system's key radar. Each of its four "eyes" had sprinklers to wash away any potential radioactive debris from collisions between the nearby nuclear-tipped interceptors and incoming Soviet missiles.

The government shut the system down after just four months in service, because of its high cost and doubts about its utility. At least when sea-launched interceptor systems are stood down, they can sail away to new assignments.

- www.time.com/

Well that's great. From a standpoint of sense and peace, the one thing worse than fixed missile batteries is ones that float around. At least the fixed ones have an enforced stability to them that ships bobbing about in the ocean can not have. Is this an effort to try and make things even more dangerous, like blindfolding yourself during a game of chicken?



Film Review: Up.

It says something about Pixar that they can portray a relationship between a husband and wife in a 10 minute montage and pack enough emotion to get the whole audience sniffling. I'm glad Pixar is a force for good, because that kind of power is scary. This relationship is just the beginning of the story of Up, because when the wife, Ellie, passes away she leaves Karl lost and sad. The two of them had always been adventurers at heart, but had never gone on that one great adventure to South America. So now with nothing left to lose, Karl fills his house with helium balloons and takes off. Along the way he'll pick up a young boyscout hitchhiker, encounter eccentric animals and tangle with another adventurer, who'll stop at nothing to put himself back in the spotlight.

Up is an odd affair. Karl, old and driven by his memories of Ellie, gruffly endures the childish antics of boyscout Russell. Gradually he becomes fond of the lad, but there's always a sense of distance between the two, even at the end of the film. I can't really tell if Russell is a sidekick or a proper character in his own right. He does rebel against Karl at one point, but it's only brief. The actual tension comes from Charles Muntz, an old adventurer whose exploits inspired both Karl and Ellie when they were young. Disgraced by the professional community for bringing back the skeliton of a bird they contend is fake, he's banished himself back to the jungle, along with his army of talking dogs, until he captures a live one. When not hunting or crafting electronic leashes for his dogs, he seemingly entertains himself by murdering other adventurers who come south, in the belief they're trying to steal the bird he's after.

Karl and Russell fall right into the middle of this, and despite Karl just wanting to land his house and be left alone, he eventually has to let go of his old life and fight for what's right. It's an odd film, very assured in it's look of course, and as fully-developed as we've come to expect from Pixar. But maybe it's focused a bit more on plot than character in the second half. I kind of feel like front-loading the film with that much emotion is a little like the explosion that goes off at the start of the movie Swordfish: it kind of overshadows all the other explosions that come later on. Still, overall it's another triumph. Three and a Half Balloons out of Five.


- Peace out.