MOSCOW – Russia's top military officer has threatened to carry out a pre-emptive strike on U.S.-led NATO missile defense facilities in Eastern Europe if Washington goes ahead with its controversial plan to build a missile shield.
President Dmitry Medvedev said last year that Russia will retaliate militarily if it does not reach an agreement with the United States and NATO on the missile defense system.
Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov went even further Thursday. "A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens," he said at an international conference attended by senior U.S. and NATO officials.
So let me see if I get this right.
The US (and others) would like to install a set of anti-missile missiles, which contain small warheads that are inadequate to do any sort of material damage to anything -- other than another missile, which they are sufficient in size and mass to destroy if they hit it (or explode close to it.)
The Russians, in response to this, threaten to blow up said defensive devices if they're deployed, because they're interested in maintaining the ability to blow entire nations to somewhere around the orbit of Saturn any time they'd like.
Do I have this pretty-much right?
You know what I'm looking forward to?
The day we discover how to make a Star Trek style transporter.
You know why?
Because on that day, all of this stupidity ends. You see, if I possess one of those I can use it to transport an active and operating nuclear reactor core inside the Kremlin -- or the White House.
Such a device makes all this sort of silliness entirely obsolete, since (1) there's no way to stop me from using it, irrespective of where I am or where you are (on the planet anyway) and (2) It doesn't matter how much money I have, how big (or small) of a nation that I happen to be, or anything else. Such a device makes all the nations equal under the sun when it comes to the ability to do something hideous and also makes all the "defensive measures" you care to employ worth a warm bucket of spit.
The ability to take something that is in one place and make it appear somewhere else "instantaneously", if we ever achieve it, either results in the end of the human race as the people here on this planet immediately use it to start killing, and once it starts the retaliation cycle will continue until the last "Scotty" dies as a bomb appears on his transporter pad, or it results in the end of the more than 5,000 year cycle of stupidity where taking steps to defend yourself results in people threatening to preemptively shoot you.
I'm not sure I care which way that debate resolves any more, to be honest. If we lack the intellectual and ethical fiber necessary to do the right thing perhaps we deserve to go the way of the dinosaurs.
We have the same stupidity here in America on a smaller scale. We must have "gun control" when the fact of the matter is that the jackasses of the world don't give a damn about the law (that's why they're called criminals, incidentally.) The only thing someone with that frame of mind understands is the fact that their threatened actions, if they actually try to take them, is quite likely lead to their immediate demise. This means that the only two options one has to prevent these crimes are to (1) lock all of them up and throw away the key so they can't prey on other people or (2) honor the Second Amendment in full, such that any potential victim may have a concealed or openly carried weapon upon them sufficient to stop any impending attack and there is no way for the jackass to know in advance whether that's true.
We do neither because we're not actually interested in putting a stop to the criminal element victimizing the weaker among us -- we're interested in sound bites, nasty pictures to run on the 6:00 News and political talking points to use in election campaigns and we the people allow all of the above to buy those items with the blood of the victims.
The same principle applies to nations. Twice in the 20th Century and many other times through history we didn't believe people who demonstrated that they were jackbooted *******s who would shoot on a grand scale -- right up until they started crossing borders with tanks and murdering people. It was far more profitable that way, you see, for certain elements in our society.
There is only one correct response to someone who threatens to shoot if you buy and wear a ballistic vest. You push back the chair, politely say "**** you", and don the vest while making clear your counterpart sees the very-visible .44 Magnum you have on your hip.
This sort of crap has to stop in this world, but it won't as long as we consider conflict in various forms, whether it's a "flash mob" on the streets of Chicago stealing iPhones, a bunch of thugs doing home invasions in Sanford, or "heads of state" threatening to blow up things a profit center.
