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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 - 04:06pm Nov 4, 2002 EST (# 5451 of 5457)
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.

I'm not ready with much - though I do see some things that look promising. But this much ought to be clear. Peacemaking, after a longstanding mess - is complicated in a good many ways.

It makes sense to ask - could the human groups involved cooperate at the level of complexity required about anything?

I think the answer, right now, is clearly no - and it is worthwhile thinking about how that answer might be changed to "yes" - about something practical, and important to the groups involved.

I'm "war gaming" the notion that, in ways that matter, the Koreas, China, and perhaps some SE Asian countries and Taiwan should get together and "attack" Japan. Not in the starkest military sense - but in ways that would matter.

Just an idea - but it is something that the nations involved might agree on - in ways that matter.

And it would be a complicated enough task that if before it were done, or even well planned - a lot of lines of communication and cooperation would come into being.

Maybe even enough to sort out the military standoff.

Ideally, Japan might be coerced into coming up with the money and resources needed to sort out some of N. Korea's economic problems. Better them than us, after all.

Back within two hours.

rshow55 - 04:12pm Nov 4, 2002 EST (# 5452 of 5457)
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.

Rape Camp

by Dawn Riley

http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?13@@.ee79f4e/1512

rshow55 - 05:52pm Nov 4, 2002 EST (# 5453 of 5457)
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.

Postings originally from this thread, that have been reposted on the Guardian-Talk thread Mankind's Inhumanity to Man and Woman - As natural as human goodness? . . (links work)

I'm wishing, as I often do, that my old friend and partner Stephen Jay Kline were still alive. Steve and I worked together on two things - some math, and the logic of complex, and especially socio-technical systems. The part on sociotechnical systems is in large part written in Steve's

CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS FOR MULTIDISCIPINARY THINKING ..... Stanford University Press , 1995

Steve wrote me a recommendation letter, that includes some things helicopter designers and other technical people ought to know, in http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klinerec and I gave a eulogy of Steve in his memorial service in Stanford Chapel that a lot of people liked. http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klineul

I wish I could talk to Steve now, and ask

" What could we tell Putin, that might help him do his job - a job that he has to do well, in the interest of the world? "

rshowalter - 05:31pm Mar 17, 2001 EST (#1128

When we apply SIMPLE models of structure to circumstances that have a more complicated structure than we are thinking of, we can get into trouble.

We can fail to see how thing work.

And we can be misled by thinking we see "contradictions" where there are no logical contradictions -- though there may be aesthetic or moral tensions.

A complex system can be two "contradictory" things at the same time -- in different places within the larger structure -- without contradiction.

Bertrand Russell got caught up with this one -- but for complicated circumstances, and for dealing with complicated histories, it is an essential thing to know.

It you know it -- solutions that seem "classified out of existence" are seen, and these solutions can be real.

Some moral points can get clarified, too.

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