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 [F] New York Times on the Web Forums  / Science  /

    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.


Earliest Messages Previous Messages Recent Messages Outline (7809 previous messages)

rshow55 - 09:51am Jan 19, 2003 EST (# 7810 of 7811) Delete Message
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.

But I didn't want to displease my mother and father, either - they loved me, and I was sure I loved them, too.

I was stumped. I started taking long, unsupervised walks at night, usually after 2:00 in the morning, in a crowded, middle class row house neighborhood - to think things out. Hiding from everybody, in every way I could figure out to hide, and still take the walks, for reasons that seemed very good at the time, and still do.

I felt I had to take those walks - and found I enjoyed them very much , though I had to hide them from everybody - and they were scary in spots. I felt very alive, but scared and worried. I didn't know it at the time, but I'm pretty sure I needed glasses, too. I've taken a lot of walks at night, over the years.

At the time, and later, too, I was trying to be the very best little boy I could figure out how to be - and was stumped about some things, though it seemed to me that I was a very good boy in a lot of ways. It seemed to me that I was living in a very fascinating but threatening world. Some people thought I was a pretty smart kid, and that seemed possible to me.

I made the best choices I could, lived with them, and handled my exceptions the best way I could, as they came up, with as much foresight as I could muster. I was messed up in some ways, pretty straight in some others. Very concerned about fighting - and not proud of fighting, either, though maybe I was more proud of it than I wanted to admit. And more angry than I wanted to admit, as well.

Anyway, I found, to my amazement, that I was able to keep on living - and sometimes not do so badly - and sometimes have a very good time of it -- through a series of calabrated, precarious, but still usually stable solutions. Every one of them involving contradictions, switched on and off a controlled sequence, and with weights controlled, too. There were some awkward blow-ups every now and again, for one reason or another.

rshow55 - 09:52am Jan 19, 2003 EST (# 7811 of 7811) Delete Message
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 going to collect my courage, eat breakfast - and see if it still makes sense after breakfast to set out the oldest dream I remember (I don't dream much) - a dream that plainly involved repression, and some other things. Maybe I won't have the courage. Some things about that dream are very dark.

Maybe too dark to set out in public. People, all to easily, can dismiss me as a human being - and I hate to risk that.

I'm feeling stressed, but hopeful. It seems to me that the chances of some truly good solutions to the problems of war and peace in the world are taking shape. It is hard for me not to be hopeful, looking at the way some things are laying out. A lot of people are stumped - and ready to "settle for" what they actually need - in ways that can be excellent for almost everybody involved. Though things could easily blow up badly.

If we acknowledge the shared space we actually have, and build some more in areas that ought not to offer any problems for anybody involved, we can find stable solutions of disciplined beauty.

It seems to me that we're well on the way to that.

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