TCS Daily : May 2001 Archives
Endangered Grizzlies Could Return as the Good News Bears
Part Two of Two Click here to read Part One While George Bush was battling Al Gore in Florida last November, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service was quietly making conservation history. It put the U.S. Interior Department's seal...
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Rumsfeld Biding Time for Big Changes at Pentagon
The honoring of fallen military this past Memorial Day weekend prompts consideration of whether today's military men and women will get the best tools and training to minimize their future sacrifices. The sound and fury of the vaunted "defense review"...
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'WARNO': A New Spelling for Security in the Missile Defense Age
It was always going to be hard to deploy National Missile Defense (NMD), but the defection of Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords from the Republican Party has made it harder. Pro-NMDers have rightly regarded themselves as being on the cutting...
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Broadband All Alone as the New Economy's Weakest Link
Heading into the Memorial Day weekend, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates offered a bullish view of technology's future at his fifth CEO Summit in Redmond, Wash. But he offered a major caveat that lawmakers in Washington, D.C., had better consider as...
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Interest Rates Have Almost Hit Bottom, and So Has the Economy
The economic data have continued to be pretty lousy over the past couple of weeks. As anticipated in an earlier column ("The Good News on GDP May Be No News At All," May 3rd), inventory investment dropped further in March....
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Authentication Tools Opening Up Opportunities in Online Security
Worried about using your credit card online? You shouldn't. The risks to you are tiny, but that doesn't mean that you should ignore this issue. In fact, there's an interesting investment opportunity here. The odds are that you'll never be...
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Bush's New Military Strategy Poses Challenges to Service Branches, Congress
Defense Central spoke with former senior Pentagon official Bill Owens immediately after President Bush's address to the Naval Academy. Defense Central: The president said that weapons and methods of the military must change. How must they change? Bill Owens:...
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Class of 2001 Naval Academy Commencement
Class of 2001 Naval Academy Commencement President George W. Bush, President of the United States Friday, May 25, 2001 U.S. Naval Academy Stadium, Annapolis, MD THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Thank you, all. Secretary England, thank you very much....
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End the Scare, Report the Uncertainty of Global Warming
"New research findings have identified declines in the extent of Arctic sea ice and its thickness over the past several decades. The average thickness from the ice surface to the bottom of the ice pack has declined by about...
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Save Wildlife: Stop the Semantics Over 'Species'
Part One of Two Click here to read Part Two What do an Alaskan goose, a white-tailed deer from Washington state and a flat-bellied water snake from Michigan all have in common? They all are (or recently were) listed as...
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Who Do You Trust to Cut Spam from Your E-Mail Diet?
One morning I arrived at work to find an e-mail on my computer that asked: "Lucas, Do You Look Good in a Swimsuit?" Opening it, I found an ad for a new weight-loss product. Some people may be interested in...
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Restore the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to its National Security Purpose
Americans couldn't have asked for a sharper reminder of the necessity of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) than the one they got from the Mideast last week. It's a shame that the flippant politicians who insist on viewing the reserve...
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Help Wanted: A Scribe to Illuminate the Space Experience
Why is it hard to go to space? Well, there's the cost, the difficulty, and the danger. But the dream of an energetic space program faces an even greater hurdle: it lacks an inspiring first-person lore, of the sort that...
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'Price Gouging' Doesn't Cut It As Reason for Rising Energy Prices
To many critics of President Bush's energy plan, the cause of today's energy problems, particularly rising gasoline prices, is something called "price gouging." And what is that? "We know that big oil has played a role in the price spikes...
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Sen. Bob Smith Sees Incentives and Innovations as Best Regulators for CO2, Mercury, Etc.
New Hampshire Sen. Bob Smith's tenure at the helm of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has taken both liberal and conservative camps by surprise. While he voted for the Clean Air Act back in 1990 and opposes exploring...
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Banking on High-Tech Education
I believe that education will be one of the great growth industries of the 21st century. In the short term, President Bush's education plan, as amended by Congress, will do nothing to disrupt this trend. Big money will pour...
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Wrestling with the Tensions Between Tech Investment and National Security
On May 3rd, a Cabinet-level panel known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. agreed to an acquisition by Dutch firm ASM Lithography of Silicon Valley Group. The go-ahead capped months of behind-the-scenes jockeying by parties trying to...
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Autos and Air Pollution Should File for Divorce
Fed a daily dose of media horror stories, most people have been led to think that air quality is getting worse, when in fact it's been improving for more than 20 years. A number of national and regional surveys...
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Wildlife Enrichment and Oil Exploration a 2-for-1 Deal at the Welder Wildlife Refuge
For landowners and conservation groups intimately involved with the environment, every day is Earth Day. For many others, however, this year's version added a bonus chance to lament the new Administration's 'anti-environment' agenda. One of the most egregious parts
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Leaders Needed to Proclaim an 11th Commandment for a Future in Space
A year ago, the world barely had one space program. NASA was seemingly moribund, derided in the media for its probes that tended to crash and smashwhen they didn't disappear altogether. The Russian space program seemed to be fading away,...
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The Cruel Wind of Energy Crisis
If only Tippi Hedren could have held off those birds in Bodega Bay until California`s energy crisis. Her problems may have been solved by windmills, those bird Cuisinarts eagerly touted as an earth-friendly form of electricity generation. Strategic placement...
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What's Behind Utility Execs Flacking for Caps on CO2?
Flacks for the utility industry scored an apparent coup Thursday, May 10 in the Wall Street Journal. A front -page story sneered at the Administration for rejecting controls on CO2, asserted that these are inevitable in the future, and lauded...
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OPEN UP! It's the Spam Police!
Eroding liberty for the sake of convenience. One morning I arrived at work to find an e-mail on my computer that asked: "Lucas, Do You Look Good in a Swimsuit?" Opening it, I found an ad for a new...
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Cooperation On Building Global Defenses
Last week, President George W. Bush dispatched a high-level delegation to visit capitals around the world to explain his commitment to build effective missile defenses at the earliest possible date. Such defenses are intended to protect not only Americans, but...
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It's No Time to Go Wobbly on Kyoto
Is George W. Bush going soft on Kyoto? Two months ago, in a decision marked by clarity, good sense and not a little courage, the president said he was dropping the climate-change protocol, which was signed by Al Gore in...
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American Lung Association Fails with Its Air Quality Report Card
What do the rat-catchers do when there are less and less rats to catch? Why, they make the remaining rats look bigger and nastier, of course! At least, that seems to be the philosophy of the American Lung Association. Despite...
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Rethinking and Repairing America's National Forests
President Bush made a sound conservation choice by letting stand President Clinton's ban on new road building on 58.5 million acres of national forest lands, while reserving the option to make needed amendments later. The decision is right politically....
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No Defense -- and No Excuse
Why did Israel's anti-missile program succeed so much faster than America's? Key technology for building non-nuclear missile defenses was demonstrated 15 years ago. Yet despite spending nearly $60 billion on a variety of missile-defense programs since Ronald Reaga
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The World Doesn't Get the Science Right
Friends and allies, especially in Europe, were aghast when President Bush ordered the U.S. to withdraw from the Kyoto global warming treaty, repeating a furor from the early Reagan administration. Twenty years ago, Jeane Kirkpatrick, as President Reagan's newly...
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Clamoring for Kyoto: The Networks One-Sided Coverage of Global Warming
Major media outlets have devoted extensive space to President Bush`s decision abandoning the 1997 global warming accord reached in Kyoto, Japan. This Media Research Center report separates out this year`s best and worst in TV network coverage of the global...
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Why Not Space-Based Missile Defense?
Last week, President George W. Bush explained his plans for one of his key initiatives: building an effective ballistic missile defense at the earliest possible date. It was a fine speech, though missing an important element. He was right...
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Bush's Push for Missile Defense Must Defuse Incoming Rhetorical Bombs
It's a cliché George W. Bush is closer, stylistically, to Ronald Reagan than he is to his own father. Both W. and the Gipper share a big-picture, laid-back southwestern style that supporters embrace and critics decry. Reagan, of course, ultimately...
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'Tis the Season for Small Caps?
"Holy Cow!" That's the polite version of my exclamation when I heard that the US economy grew by 2% in the first quarter of this year. This rate of growth is really nothing special, usually not cause for excitement, and...
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Cannon Loads in a Telecom Bill for the Judiciary Committee
All circuits are busy on Capitol Hill as lawmakers wrestle with revisiting the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996. Soon after Easter, House Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin (R-La) was among the first to dial in with an answer. His...
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The Good News on GDP May Be No News At All
We found out last week that GDP rose 2 percent in the first quarter, well above expectations. Markets soared in response to the good news. With less fear of an impending recession, investors decided that profits and equity prices have...
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Post-Cold War Era Demands Missile Defense
Defense Central E-Ring Contributor William Schneider says in an interview that it's time to get the U.S. and its allies past Cold War thinking. "Nations are no longer able to develop military forces that are optimized against a specific threat,"...
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No Title
President Bush's speech on ballistic missile defense (BMD) is a reaction to "the Kyoto complex," where he made a big (and the right) decision (getting out of the protocol) without consultation. Now on BMD, he's all consultation and no big...
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Put Broadcast Spectrum Under New Management
Last October, then-President Bill Clinton tried to prod federal regulators to carve out space in the nation's airwaves for the next generation of wireless technology - technology that promises high-speed Internet access with simple hand-held devices. For Clinton, t
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