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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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lchic - 07:21am Jun 15, 2003 EST (# 12546 of 12556)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Orison Scott Marden

Every experience in life, everything with which we have come in contact in life, is a chisel which has been cutting away at our life statue, molding, modifying, shaping it. We are part of all we have met. Everything we have seen, heard, felt, or thought has had its hand in molding us, shaping us.

Quotation

almarst2002 - 07:22am Jun 15, 2003 EST (# 12547 of 12556)

On Monday morning, after a harrowing raid into this town by U.S. troops that deployed gunships, armored vehicles and soldiers edgy with anticipation, the family found Aani's body, two gunshots to his stomach, next to a bale of hay and a rusted can of vegetable oil. With soldiers occupying a house nearby, his corpse lay undisturbed for hours under a searing sun.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60042-2003Jun14.html

ROBERT WILL EXPLAIN...

lchic - 07:26am Jun 15, 2003 EST (# 12548 of 12556)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

... THAT ....

• the ugliness in the world has to be ironed out to beauty

rshow55 - 09:51am Jun 15, 2003 EST (# 12549 of 12556)
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.

Almarst http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.uS3gbTytfsF.0@.f28e622/14202 - - we can do a lot better than we're doing - though the animal facts of death, and loss - sometimes witless loss - can't ever be changed.

We can do better - - quite a lot better.

I think Russia, among other countries, offers examples of problems that have to be faced, and how they ought to be weighted. I'm a human being - and at the level of sympathy, I believe that "man is the measure of all things" - and I mean homo sapiens as a species - a sexually dimorphic species - with full value to women. Russia is so messed up that - much too often - people don't have a good enough life that they want to have babies - don't have a stable, comfortable enough human animal situation that they can reasonably raise children. One could hardly find a better test than "what happens to the children."

In much of the rest of the world - people are having children - women and to some degree men, from a cultural perspective are being forced to have children - more children than they can take care of - more children than can find a place. That's ugly, too.

Death and injustice will never be eradicated - we'll always be "a little lower than the angels" - but we can do much better than we're doing.

One thing seems simple enough - at a KISS level. We're "making compromises" and "coming to equilibria" that are not satisfactory in primal human terms, for many, many, many people. And peoples.

We have to do better. To the extent that these problems have technical and logical solutions - lchic and I have something to contribute - and even in a world as populous as this one - I believe something unique.

Here's a fact. Very often, when you've got things clarified - condensed to a situation where it seems evident that there's no solution to the problem as posed - you have to accept an unsatisfactory or perilous situation - give up hope - or you have to find a new solution - with some sort of reframing. I was specially trained for that. ( And training is a fair word - every military training trick anybody knew was used in my education.)

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