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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 - 12:36pm Aug 18, 2002 EST (# 3799 of 3810)

Stories are a big part of what's needed to explain the problems we have, and how to fix them.

http://www.whom.co.uk/squelch/world_disney.htm is a wonderful reference, and shows an enormous cultural achievement by Walt Disney and his associates. Disney's achievement has been powerful - and people care about it, and pay for Disney products, for some good reasons. The thing Disney did that seems to me most creative -- and by his own account, the hardest thing he did, was to develop Mickey Mouse. Here is Walt Disney:

" Mickey was the first cartoon character to stress personality. I thought of him from the first as a distinct individual, not just a cartoon type or symbol going through a comedy routine. Mickey was simply a little personality assigned to the purposes of laughter." . . . . from Walt Disney - His Life in Pictures

The purposes of laughter are serious, complicated purposes - close to the purposes of tragedy - closely connected to fear and pain, as well as hope. Mickey Mouse changed the way human beings think, all over the world.

On missile defense, and on other defense issues which are matters and life and death, and matters of $1200 per year per american, it is worth the work to get much clearer than we are. For all sorts of practical, moral, and aesthetic reasons. Survival being one of them.

I wonder how Mickey Mouse would go about it?

rshow55 - 12:43pm Aug 18, 2002 EST (# 3800 of 3810)

How can it be that, even for The New York Times - - the most careful efforts at reasoned persuasion are somehow, too weak?

Maybe the answers are simple.

Maybe some of those answers are getting clearer.

In MD3772 rshow55 8/17/02 10:59am I set out reasons I think lchic is wonderful, and other reasons to think the thread may be important, even to politicians. Maybe even to the President of the United States.

In 3733 rshow55 8/16/02 8:39am I cite some background and in 3734 rshow55 8/16/02 8:42am .. I list some things that I think this the thread has accomplished.

lchic - 05:15pm Aug 18, 2002 EST (# 3801 of 3810)

Saw an interesting documentary on China (with subtitles) yesterday. It had three aspects: a radio station presenter interviewing an imprisoned corrupt Shanghai official whose greed had prevented thousands having homes of quality - fast; a five year old who required heart surgery - that donations enabled; and lastly a woman appealing in the court regarding her wrong accusal for corruption.

In the last instance the woman and her husband had merely had an associate who went on to make a deal at a factory for silk and not paying. The police and factory locked up the woman and her husband (who were nothing to do with the deal) set them up with false confessions and took money from them. The appeal didn't look to logic, rather the corrupt status quo.

It showed a need for a central authority to furthur accept appeals and go in an audit the legal process.

China put in a rule of law in 1980.
Russia has laid the foundations of law.

To get the law to function requires that those working for it and within it have an ethical and moral code that enables function.

lchic - 05:26pm Aug 18, 2002 EST (# 3802 of 3810)

Shanghai Vice [G]

Unprecedented seven part study of life in Shanghai. Examining how the new legal system that was introduced in China in 1980 continues to evolve, giving more rights to the victims of injustice.

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