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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 05:16pm Jun 7, 2003 EST (# 12375 of 12383)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Bush, Blair Face Heat Over Iraq Weapons By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 4:31 p.m. ET http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Iraq-Weapons-Evidence.html

The terrible question is - how many people in the Bush-Blair inner circle believed that they had a valid case?

However the answer comes out, it needs to be dealt with.

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21 March, 1919 Haig's Last Despatch, British Armies in France http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/1918p/haigdesp.html

"A SINGLE GREAT BATTLE"

Haig describes an idea of war as attrition decisively rejected in WWII - and since. To get past war as attrition takes rapid motions that get around defenses, or punch through them in a concentrated way and, practically always, deception.

rshow55 - 05:19pm Jun 7, 2003 EST (# 12376 of 12383)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Some arguments are right in some key ways yet wrong in others.

"John D. saw his competitors as buds to be nipped. "The American Beauty Rose can be produced in all its splendor only by sacrificing the early buds that grow up around it," he said. Rockefeller wasn't very popular with most Americans. Often he behaved as if he were a king. Crusading journalists called him a "robber baron." http://www.pbs.org/wnet/historyofus/web09/segment4_p.html

Is that "right" or "wrong?"

Eisenhower (and Roosevelt, and very many other Americans) thought that, as a matter of administration Rockefeller was often and inescapably right - but as a matter of politics, terribly wrong.

That's a controversy in the US that predates Andrew Jackson's administration - and has not been workably dealt with yet.

We still face problems facing up to "natural monopolies" - and situation were the best techical solutions are monolithic.

Eisenhower wanted to "have it both ways" - he wanted the virtues of a well run dictatorship - "with its heart in the right place" - combined with the virtues of personal freedom, democracy, and a comfortable egalitarianism.

So, in important ways, have leaders all over the world for the last 150 years. Some key technical distinctions need to be clearly faced. So far, they have only been muddled. That stumped Eisenhower when he was president.

Many of the technical economic solutions to human problems are much like "the American beauty rose" - they involve "picking winners" - big time. That's been prohibited, as a practical matter, in the US - and it leaves us with some problems that can't be technically solved because of social usage constraints.

rshow55 - 05:24pm Jun 7, 2003 EST (# 12377 of 12383)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Technical solutions that are really solutions to problems displace people - and there is a necessity to take care of the people involved that Americans don't like to face. It is fundamental. The problem was well expressed in the famous song, "Brother, can you spare a dime?" http://www.leoslyrics.com/listlyrics.php?id=5094

Once I built a railroad, I made it run

Made it race against time

Once I built a railroad, now it's done

Brother, can you spare a dime?

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What happens when jobs get done ?

Unless there are good answers in human terms - jobs can't and don't get done.

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