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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 - 05:24pm Dec 24, 2002 EST (# 6999 of 17697)
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.

It is my judgement that I am doing just exactly what I promised Bill Casey I'd do - - and I believe that if Casey were alive, he'd be astonished by some things, but very, very pleased - and, right now, quite hopeful.

I think he would also give The New York Times as an institution very high grades - - and might give pretty good grades to many key people in the US government, as well.

Casey was a "closet intellectual" - and I was his "experimental animal" in ways we both understood - and the motivations for the work seemed sufficient to justify a lot - to both of us. In the 1970's, Casey felt that the world would blow up - and if not blow up, be unrelievedly ugly for as far forward as the eye could see - unless some tough problems were solved. I got fingered.

We may be able to do better than Casey feared, if not as well as he sometimes hoped.

Someday At Christmas by Stevie Wonder http://www.webfitz.com/lyrics/Lyrics/xmas/97xmas.html expresses wonderful ideals - and is a great thing to read.

Maybe someday soon - if we keep our heads, and work at it.

lunarchick - 06:59pm Dec 24, 2002 EST (# 7000 of 17697)

Guiderails of truth would meet with Stevie's approval:

^{http://www.journalism.indiana.edu/Ethics/#military
http://www.journalism.indiana.edu/Ethics/}

rshow55 - 07:33pm Dec 24, 2002 EST (# 7001 of 17697)
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've been trying to Send in clear rshowalter "Science News Poetry" 2/14/01 7:18am for a long time. The poem of rshowalter "Science News Poetry" 2/14/01 7:18am ends with this note:

In clear: Lying is more dangerous than people think, and soaks up more attention than people know. We can do less of it. We can send in clear - the message, almost always, will be peaceful. And complex cooperation, now so often terminated with deceptive sequences, could happen more often.

That may be too much to hope for. But if it is - people, in the US, and other countries, ought to understand more about why. Because "promises" and "opportunities" that America seems to offer are, much too often - not really available.

Adults need secrets, lies, and fictions
To live within their contradictions. <br?

But when things go wrong,
And knock about

Folks get together
And work it out...

To work things out, people need to be able to exchange and check a great deal - freely enough that closure can actually happen.

We're in a mess about a lot of things - including key, life-and-death matters of religion.
http://query.nytimes.com/search/article-printpage.html?res=9905E7DF143AF931A35755C0A9649C8B63

We have some very good reasons to be careful.

We have to objectively, clinically, look at how people actually behave -- including ways where people aren't conscious, or rational -- - so that we can get a more practical, and humane sense of what it is to be human beings.

If we did that, I think we could go a long way towards what Albert Einstein was asking for when he said this:

" We must never relax our efforts to arouse in the people of the world, and especially in their governments, an awareness of the unprecedented disaster which they are absolutely certain to bring on themselves unless there is a fundamental change in their attitudes toward one another as well as in their concept of the future. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking."

I think we're close to knowing enough to actually do as Einstein asks - if we check our work - and set about it.

lunarchick - 07:53pm Dec 24, 2002 EST (# 7002 of 17697)

Especially if so much is social construction!

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