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Boeing Successfully Tests Anti-Missile Laser
dankinit writes "MSNBC is reporting that a 'Boeing Co.-led team has successfully fired for the first time a powerful laser meant to fly aboard a modified 747 as part of a U.S. ballistic missile defense shield.' The test called 'First Light' has a budget of $474.3 million in the fiscal year 2005 and is part of a larger $10 billion dollar missile defense system."
By Michael A. Lev Tribune foreign correspondent
The list of people who let down 25-year-old Huang Jin Bao--who, in fact, left him for dead by the side of the road--includes the police officers who ignored him and the ambulance driver who refused to pick him up because he had no money.
There was also the manager of the luxury townhouse development who took no interest in Huang's nearly lifeless body lying just outside his property, even though the incident began when one of the development's subcontractors fled without paying Huang's 800 salary.
This was why Huang, an itinerant carpenter, was standing outside Merlin Champagne Town with other construction workers demanding their money when a black Volkswagen sedan sped out of the parking lot and badly injured him.
For hours afterward, Huang lay unconscious, with a broken ankle and other injuries, disregarded by the development's security guards and passersby.
The police came and went, taking little interest. The ambulance driver too. When a second police patrol later grudgingly took Huang to a hospital--dumping him and several friends at the gate--doctors turned him away because he could not pay.
Back to the driveway
So Huang's friends, who also were fleeced by the construction boss, took him home. The next morning they carried him back to the driveway of Merlin Champagne Town. There they laid him, still dazed, on a cheap blanket as they wondered how to raise the 370 needed to get him medical care.
In China, it is survival of the fittest. It is a striking fact never addressed by the communist leadership that some of the biggest social problems facing China today--the big gap between rich and poor, the exploitation of peasants--are the same type of woes that led to the revolution of 1949.
The sense of enforced community that came with Chairman Mao's era is long gone, replaced by a burgeoning free-market economic system that rewards hard work but is not developed enough to offer protection to those who are vulnerable.
There are no broad government programs to guarantee medical help for indigents and only a weak culture of reaching out to strangers in need.
Chinese people in trouble will look for help from friends, or people from the same hometown or business partners, but there is little sense of trust among people who don't know each other. Perhaps it is because China is overburdened by its population of 1.3 billion, making it impossible for people to feel responsible for everyone they see in need. Many people also ascribe a loss of public spiritedness to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, in which minding your own business was a matter of survival.
There are few charities in China because the authoritarian government does not easily ease its controls to encourage private groups to organize. Religion, too, with its teachings of compassion or being a good Samaritan, represents only a small voice in a society where the government promotes atheism.
In the end, it may have been that Huang was ignored out of a simple concern that whoever took him to the hospital would get stuck with the medical bill.
A system in chaos
The government acknowledges the need to create a social safety net. But in the whirl of a country in transition from communism to capitalism, the system of overseeing the 100 million migrant workers like Huang who leave their peasant villages to strike it rich in the city is chaotic.
In general, migrant workers are treated as low-status outsiders who get little respect. Many, like Huang, who has only a 7th-grade education, are barely literate. There are hundreds of thousands of these itinerant construction workers in Beijing. They move from city to city, job to job, and get no medical benefits. They are paid annually and are at risk of being cheated.
In the hospital
Can it selectively allow missiles to get through, say to Berkely?