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An Unexamined Life Is Not worth Living
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by Gaurang Bhatt, MD |
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The famous words of Socrates can be equally applied to news and events of life. This does not imply a paralysis of action in a Hamlet's conflict. After all the very purpose of consciousness and reflection is appropriate action. I am not reverting to my background of Karma, but emphasizing the western neuroscience view of the evolution of the brain and its raison d'etre. In assessing what one reads, hears or senses by any means, it is important to be a filter and not a sponge. A living sponge, to give it its due, is merely an indiscriminate absorber, but then proceeds to filter out its needed essential ingredients from its indiscriminate absorptions. Our gastro-intestinal system has little choice but to consume available food, but it then embarks on selective discrimination to absorb vital ingredients and then discard the unnecessary waste. The kidneys do this in reverse by filtering everything below a certain size, and then redeeming from the filtrate those essential molecules that due to their small size have been lost at the first pass. The very origins of life in the oceans begin by the development of semi-permeable lipid membranes and the sodium pump, to selectively overcome the deleterious effects of osmosis contaminating the milieu interior and keeping it in electrolyte, fluid and pH balance. In a real war situation no enemy is going to be stupid enough to bear a bull's eye beeping, 'I am here, kill me'. The enemy could launch enough lethal missiles to saturate the ABM defense or launch decoy and genuine missiles to confuse and overcome the ABM defense. Even a 90% success rate would let ten nuclear missiles through to cause severe devastation. The monitoring defense system would be constrained by lack of 24/7 vigilance, malfunction and in the case of India, time constraints as Pakistan (unlike North Korea, Iran or Russia, which are far away from the US) is right next door. Finally Pakistan, thanks to China, has cruise missiles which can be nuclear equipped, which travel at treetop levels and can evade any radar detection. We earlier bought the Israeli Spyder air defense because our Dhanush anti-aircraft system failed like our anti-tank missiles have failed. Our Arjun battle tank's failure required us to buy more Russian T-90 tanks and our Tejas aircraft failure requires us to buy the much delayed 126 MRCAs. The real truth is the Indian DRDO is a miserable failure run by inept bureaucrats and mostly useless scientists (with few exceptions) just like most of our government and its enterprises. The delays in our military procurement and their sad litany of bribery and corruption by ministers as in the Bofors, HDW submarines, coffin and other scams is the shameful story of India from the Greek, Muslim, European and Chinese invasions spanning over two millennia. You got to admire Pakistan's chutzpah. It is like the Menendez brothers who after killing their parents, got mercy from a US court as they pleaded they were orphans! A spineless India unable to stand erect for its own interests and throws itself at the feet of Russia or America and depends on their mercy. It was doomed to colonization in the past, is doomed to neo-colonization in the present and perpetual disaster in the future. Its only consolation, of no value, is that mighty America has similar corruption in defense procurement with lying and cheating defense contractors, on whose money the election of its corrupt scum bucket congress and presidents depends. That doesn't help, as there is no equivalent word in the Indian languages for 'schadenfreude'. |
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29-Mar-2009 | ||
More by : Gaurang Bhatt, MD | ||
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