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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 - 01:41pm Aug 9, 2003 EST (# 13274 of 13275)
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.

Menken said some memorable things, that I'm taking from a longer list in Quotes From H. L. Mencken http://watchfuleye.com/mencken.html

Menken on the press:

"Freedom of press is limited to those who own one."

"A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier."

Menken on logic and faith:

"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."

And for some complex problems, there really are solutions that are simple, neat, and fitting in all the ways that matter - in the context as it is. Those solutions are to be distrusted until much tests - but they are precious. Lchic and I have learned some useful things about finding such solutions. By a process of "connecting the dots" and distrustful, careful checking in the ways that matter.

"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."

"Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it."

"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."

"Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice."

"Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone."

"Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all other philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself."

"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."

"The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked... "

Menken on Love and Morals:

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."

"...the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom respectable. No virtuous man--that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense--has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading..."

"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

"Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals."

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