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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 - 10:24am Aug 14, 2003 EST (# 13301 of 13305)
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.

We are now in a situation where "the powers that be" are very often against checking - where checking is prohibited whenever anybody with real power actually objects.

A great many problems would sort out if that changed. That change, if it occurred, would be a paradigm shift.

We need that change to occur. Sometimes it seems to me that we're moving in that direction.

. . .

The most fundamental logical operator, I was taught by a very wise monster long ago, is not

. X implies Y and its opposite

but

. X is consistent with Y and it's opposite.

Put enough consistencies and inconsistencies together, in a tight structure, and you come as close to proof as human beings can come. This is standard procedure in court.

Under circumstances of much misunderstanding, and particularly in cases were deceptions may occur, questions my old partner Steve Kline often asked are important.

(i) What are the credible data from ALL sources?

(ii) How can we formulate a model or solution that is consistent with all the credible data?

It helps to make different guesses.

Doubt different things at different times - just so see what happens.

And keep at it.

Some things focus. That can be useful, and sometimes even fun.

No matter how many mistakes, muddles, or misstatements happen to have occurred in the course of the focusing.

rshow55 - 05:05pm Aug 14, 2003 EST (# 13302 of 13305)
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.

This thread is many things. One of those things is an attempt, on my part, on lchic's part, and I think on the part of some other posters, too - to improve on the situation Mayer describes below:

Sieve City In our nation's capital, leaking is a way of life. By JANE MAYER http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001203mag-essay.html includes this:

"In modern Washington, the shock is not when secrets leak, it's when they're kept. At least it seems that way to Edmund Morris. As Ronald Reagan's designated biographer, Morris had extensive access to the White House. One day, he sat in on a meeting in which Donald Regan, Reagan's chief of staff, erupted in fury over a leak to the press. Fascinated at the purple-faced tantrum, Morris says, he scribbled verbatim notes while the rest of the staff sat paralyzed in horror. The next day, an almost word-for-word account of Regan's outburst appeared in The New York Times, which, Morris says, made him conclude that the senior White House staff was not just leaking, it was also taping. "Someone had to have had a pocket tape recorder to get it so exactly," he says.

""The White House was so subject to everything being immediately leaked," Morris concludes, "that its essential business was done by three people -- the president, his chief of staff and maybe the national security adviser -- talking for a few minutes while the water was running." Leaks were so endemic that real secrets, like Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, were, as Morris puts it, "literally hot air -- a few quick words exchanged while walking across the lawn." This sort of arrangement exacts an obvious price. It's hard to imagine that the best policy decisions are made hastily and with limited open debate.

. . .

"According to Bob Woodward, a surprising number of Washington secrets -- like Clinton's womanizing -- are in plain sight long before the stories are pinned down and published. "The Daniel Ellsbergs and Deep Throats are rare," he says. Most Washington secrets take years to piece together, and most of them are visible to anyone paying close attention. "People tend to focus on little secrets, such as what was on the 18 1/2-minute gap," he says. "But the real secret of Watergate was all over the tapes. The secret was that Nixon was small and vengeful, so much so that he used a lot of the presidency to settle scores." He pauses. "We elected the wrong man as president. Now that's a shocker -- and that's a real secret."

Is this thread just a simulation, or an "open secret?" Either way - this thread either is, or prototypes, a considerable improvement on the situation Morris describes, where real secrets, are "literally hot air -- a few quick words exchanged while walking across the lawn."

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense