To: koan who wrote (17134 ) 7/29/2006 1:11:53 PM From: E. Charters Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 78420 Faith in knowing there is an answer, that you can arrive at it by simple methods perhaps, and confidence in your mind are all part of being able to arrive at an answer. You have to try to get an answer. I look at complex problems a bit differently than most. The reason I think they often have a simple answer is that the final mechanism of the answer has often existed before in some mechanism that was fortuitous, so therefore not multi factorial in manifestation. In social problems the driving force to seek solutions should be that all problems of the past finally reached solutions that were not in the end driven by the ones that were sought by the brute force of governments or the dictates of the polity, so much as the natural evolution and consensus of the greater group or groups. With governments at odds with each other, as in the ME, we have to make all parties see what their aims and needs are that are reasonable, in order to make them see what the sole pathways are to achieve these with any hope of success and future viability. In the end all problems are soluble even between enemies of the most bitter kind. They always have been solved in the past. All conflicts and fighting have done is wear the conflicting parties out. All conquest and occupation has done is make the occupier effete and uncompetitive, leading to his eventual stagnation and the crumbling of his empire. In the end in politics the body politic triumphs from the equity of its mass and basic will of the consensual group. History holds all solutions to our present problems. If it did not, then the past was occupied by a different species than exists today. Technology, oft vaunted as a measure of civilization, is merely a complication and amplifier of our vanity and an accelerant of our impulses and pretensions. It is not in the end a solution to the basic psyche or management of man in this political, psychological, social or biological environment. EC<:-}