Recent content by jclark

The space program could be thought of as a first step to a lot of things: orbital weapons platforms research and development towards long range ballistic missiles more efficient satelite deployment So, lighter and faster just to say "first to put person in space" kind of misses the point...

Let's really make it interesting What if the "plague" we were talking about were to disproportionately impact certain races or ethnicities - say that some have the necessary genetic predisposition or mutations to survive. As a straw man, let's say that more Asians & Jews have the mutations...

what about the BC in NBC I think the one thing we may not be considering is that there are other WMDs that may be researched in such a timeline - bioweapons & chemical weapons. You may still be able to create a near apocolypse with a bioweapon or one that poisons the water or food supply. The...

In retrospect and in hindsight, my old grandmother was correct. We should have learned from the negative lesson of World War I and the positive lesson of World War II - when you go to war, your job is to finish off your enemy. A drive to Baghdad in 1991 would have made clear that the...

No, the sad part is that the dots were all there to connect, we just never did. I will grant you that Turkey has been VERY important in the region for, oh, the last 55 YEARS! It is important, and I think that their reluctance to go along with the invasion speaks volumes for how little...

At first, I was going to question this, but the CIA factbook put the 2003 literacy rate at around 40%. That maybe a lowball estimate, but it probably is still pretty poor. I agree that this was not Germany. My suggested partitioning of the country had more to do with isolating the Sunni's...

As you see in the US, we are all free to choose our path; however, there are consequences to those choices. The Kurds had it bad under Sadam before the US came along. We are just helping out an ally. Well, having the chaos of a civil war leading to a terrorist training amusement park I see...

First, I want to make clear that I would not have gone in in the first place. We were asked how to make this work... Sealing off the area in question is a bit simpler than putting troops on the ground over every inch of the "border" in question. You control the roads & rails and patrol the...

I have to admit that (4) seems like a good option. The only other POD I would ask is to get rid of the "axis of evil" rhetoric - this was inflammatory and only alienated a potential ally in Iran. Here is the way I would have executed the war: Do the invasion per OTL - a bit more planning on...

No...I'm saying that there does not appear to be a relationship between a state's teen pregnancy rate and Bush's margin of victory (or defeat). On the liberal v. conservative issue (I'm less qualified on this one), I considered myself a conservative for years and yet I voted for Kerry...

I believe I'm qualified to speak on that. Let's remember that there are degrees of "redness" - some states went overwhelmingly for Bush while others less so. We have a continuous measure of "redness", the percent differential between John Kerry & W's poll results as well as a continuous...

Well, as somebody who works in the drug industry and has worked on both preclinical and clinical projects, I can tell you it takes about 8-15 years to go from test tube to NDA/BLA approval. If you cut profit protection down, then you take a lot of the money out of the drug game. An extra year...

How about more aggressive FDR at Yalta Perhaps one way to obtain it is for FDR to play hardball with the Soviets. Rather than allow for a clear partitioning of Germany, make it a quid pro quo allowing America to have the Japanese to themselves. FDR can leave it open and, once American forces...

New states would have to be pro-Union Part of the reason for the division of Virginia was that the Northwest part of the state was pro-Union. Dividing up the South, once the states are re-admitted, would lead to more political power for the SOUTH because each state would get two senators while...

This could get interesting. Ol Ronnie had cozied up to the Iranians in the arms for hostages deal and this was the middle of Iran-Contra, so this could go one of two ways: (1) either he and his administration play it soft hoping that the Iranians reign themselves in all whilest providing the...