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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 - 06:20am Mar 28, 2003 EST (# 10617 of 10618)
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.

Delusions of Power By PAUL KRUGMAN http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/28/opinion/28KRUG.html is a wonderful piece - and very important. It includes this:

"They considered themselves tough-minded realists, and regarded doubters as fuzzy-minded whiners. They silenced those who questioned their premises, even though the skeptics included many of the government's own analysts. They were supremely confident — and yet with shocking speed everything they had said was proved awesomely wrong.

No, I'm not talking about the war; I'm talking about the energy task force that Dick Cheney led back in 2001. Yet there are some disturbing parallels. Right now, pundits are wondering how Mr. Cheney — who confidently predicted that our soldiers would be "greeted as liberators" — could have been so mistaken. But a devastating new report on the California energy crisis reminds us that Mr. Cheney has been equally confident, and equally wrong, about other issues.

. . .

"In the last two years Mr. Cheney and other top officials have gotten it wrong again and again — on energy, on the economy, on the budget. But political muscle has insulated them from any adverse consequences. So they, and the country, don't learn from their mistakes — and the mistakes keep getting bigger.

Krugman cites a wonderful phrase

. "incestuous amplification" defined by Jane's Defense Weekly as "a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation."

10579-81 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.Xe8Za2js6Ni.1964049@.f28e622/12129 starts

I've guessed that that gisterme is a personage of considerable rank, and gisterme has posted extensively, and impressively, on this board. One can see much of that impressive posting by searching " gisterme" - and sampling the content. But that doesn't show most of it.

8368 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.Xe8Za2js6Ni.1964049@.f28e622/9894 links to 680 postings by gisterme prior to restarting of this thread on March of this year. All these posts are available by date at http://www.mrshowalter.net/calendar1.htm

Each of these links connects to 20 links on the current MD thread by gisterme:

8370 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.Xe8Za2js6Ni.1964049@.f28e622/9896

8371 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.Xe8Za2js6Ni.1964049@.f28e622/9897

8372 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.Xe8Za2js6Ni.1964049@.f28e622/9900

8373 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.Xe8Za2js6Ni.1964049@.f28e622/9899

8374 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.Xe8Za2js6Ni.1964049@.f28e622/9900

8375 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.Xe8Za2js6Ni.1964049@.f28e622/9901

8376 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.Xe8Za2js6Ni.1964049@.f28e622/9902

8378 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.Xe8Za2js6Ni.1964049@.f28e622/9904

8379 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.Xe8Za2js6Ni.1964049@.f28e622/9905

Judging from the number and quality of these postings - and perhaps biased by a too much respect for the status of the NYT, I've guessed that gisterme might be George W. Bush himself. That may well be wrong, and gisterme has repeatedly denied it. Even so, it does seem likely that gisterme has very close connections with the Bush administration, and high ones.

I think the following posting by gisterme , which I'm recopying in its entirety, is especially interesting - and I want to offer a public apology of my own , about my response to it.

gisterme - 06:43pm Mar 14, 2003 EST (# 9944 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.Xe8Za2js6Ni.1964049@.f28e622/11489

makes very interesting reading - perhaps more meaningful reading either before or after looking at Krugman's fine piece today.

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense