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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 - 01:13pm Jan 12, 2003 EST (# 7608 of 7612)
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.

The Bush administration is wrong, I think, about a lot involving sexual relations. Too draconian. But they are emphatically right that sex relations in the US are in a mess -and we need to do better - for ourselves - so we can live with the rest of the world, and so the rest of the world can live with us - step by step - comfortably, stably.

There are dangerous problems with the "canonicity" of language - which is superb in some ways - but treacherous when issues of quantity or balance have to be negotiated between people who are too different. Some of these problems are now terribly dangerous - and it seems to me that we can do a lot better - and that language that can start being taught in Sunday schools and kindergartens could make communication and thought about quantity and mathematics more comfortable and safer than it now is. It seems to me that a lot of progress can be made - but that solutions have to work, for the real people involved, every which way.

Extermination solutions are "clean and neat" in some ways - but wrenching, and not acceptable. There are times when, I believe, abortion ought be not only permissable - but even obligatory. Some basic decisions have to be subject to exception handling - so that they can be "honored in the breach" in ways compatable at higher levels. Such things happen at Harvard and Stanford all the time - but they are done differently. There are many people who cannot, and ought not, to go to either Stanford or Harvard - may of them with excellences that could not exist at either Harvard or Stanford. In America - we have to tolerate diversity.

Both Stanford and Harvard are merciless on their graduate students in main line departments - and have to be. They are merciless differently. They temper their severity differently. There are formal correspondances between University reproduction and animal reproduction.

rshow55 - 01:15pm Jan 12, 2003 EST (# 7609 of 7612)
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.

7232 rshow55 1/2/03 6:52pm includes this:

" Some issues of reproductive convention, that go very deep, are sources of some of the strongest and intractable problems and ill feelings.

" Should men proved to be not the biological parent have to support a child regardless? From Guardian Talk .. Nov 3-6, 2000 http://www.mrshowalter.net/a_md01000s/SupBast.htm deals with an issue that the Islamic culture cares a great deal about. Men all over the world care about this - in America, perhaps more than they admit, or will talk about.

" Islamic nations have a lot of trouble accomodating patterns of modernity - and a lot of those problems connect to some deeply embedded committments to assure paternity. I happen to think that abortion, regrettable as it may be, is often the lesser evil in America, and has to be permitted. But it seems to me more clear that, when assuring paternity is an absolutely uncompromisable value, as it certainly seems to be in Islamic nations, genetic testing and abortion may offer much better solutions than some that Islamic people are committed to now.

Both the Bush administration, and leaders in the Islamic world, have interests that might be well served by more genetic testing for tracing of inheritance than is now customary. These leaders, if they think about it - would agree in some areas - but use signficantly different tactics in others.

I am personally sure that if I had a wife who was pregnant with another man's wife - I'd want her to abort - so that I could stay married to her. Whether I'd want to know about the abortion or not is an important question that would depend a lot on details. But I'm sure of this. In America - some things have to be permitted - and the kinds of "solution" set out in My Last Dutchess by Robert Browning rshowalter "Science News Poetry" 2/14/01 1:24pm ought to be ruled out. That means that abortion will sometimes have to be tolerated.

7161 rshow55 12/31/02 2:05pm

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