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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?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 08:52am Aug 16, 2002 EST (# 3736 of 3741)

It takes a lot of text for focusing. But the product of the focusing - when it works best - is simple ideas, sharply condensed, that are powerful, clear, and beautifully fit to purpose. Things that everybody involved with an issue should know - in a form that everybody can easily learn. Things that, once they are known, make solutions impossible before possible, routine, and even effortless.

Not merely things that can be studied and taught in colleges, and graduate schools, and specialized organizations. The most important things to look for are basic things. Things that enter into logic and function with very high frequency - and very often in decisive or useful ways. Things that can be, and should be, taught in nursery schools, and kindergartens, and in the early elementary grades.

What if everybody were taught, and knew well - the following facts and basic relations -- things that are important - that matter very, very often -- and that no individual human being can be expected to figure out clearly and sharply for herself - at the level of focus that could easily be taught.

rshow55 - 08:52am Aug 16, 2002 EST (# 3737 of 3741)

This could be taught at an early childhood education level, and the world would become better if it were taught well:

" People say and do things.

" What people say and do have consequences, for themselves and for other people.

" People need to deal with and understand these consequences, for all sorts of practical, down to earth reasons.

" So everybody has a stake in right answers on questions of fact that they have to use as assumptions for what they say and do.

rshow55 - 08:54am Aug 16, 2002 EST (# 3738 of 3741)

This could be taught at an early childhood education level:

The process by which human beings "connect the dots" -- form patterns in their minds -- is the same process - - whether the particular pattern "seen" happens to be real or coincidental. You have to check.

This point, which is not now common knowledge, should be common knowledge. The process of teaching it well would enhance reading instruction, and other basic instruction - and the knowledge would convey lifelong benefits. The world would become better if this were taught well. Plenty of people of affairs would do better, by their own standards and the standards of others, if they knew it.

rshow55 - 08:57am Aug 16, 2002 EST (# 3739 of 3741)

There are issues that are both matters of fact, and morality. No one could be asked to "just know" these things, or figure them out for themselves - but these points could be easily taught - they are no harder than a lot of nursery rhymes (which can include some long words, too.) The first two lines below are fact - - and the following lines set out hopes.

Adults need secrets, lies and fictions
To live within their contradictions

. . . . But when things go wrong
. . . . .And knock about

. . . . . . . . . Folks get together
. . . . . . . . . And work it out

(2 following messages)

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