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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 - 02:01pm Dec 22, 2002 EST (# 6945 of 6946)
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.

gisterme 12/22/02 1:12pm points out that I'm making assumptions - and denies the validity of my assumptions, in a way that I can't check. And of course, assumptions can be wrong.

I haven't hidden the assumption that I've made that this thread has had gisterme as a "Bush administration stand-in" and almarst as a "Putin administration stand-in" - and to check that, you can do better than "connecting the dots" in the sense of making assumptions. You can connect the links - starting with the link in the upper left hand corner of this posting - connected to a caption that says "click rshow55."

I've also assumed, from the quality of gisterme's and almarst's posting - and especially gisterme's postings - that gisterme had good communication and some support from a staff. There have been various reasons that this has seemed reasonable, about 1000 posts since I made the assumption public, repeatedly, on this thread and on the guardian. I've even suspected that gisterme was a team - and even thought that that team included President Bush himself and Condolleezza Rice herself.

Maybe this is just a "web game" - sort of like a video-game.

Living Under the Virtual Volcano of Video Games This Holiday Season By VERLYN KLINKENBORG http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/16/opinion/16MON4.html

In a way, nothing can teach you more about the modern obsession with entertainment than a sojourn in the world of video games. The best of them take hours of practice to get good at, and they contain hundreds of hours of play once you do get good. The real question is always, "What are you getting good at?," and "virtual volleyball" just doesn't seem like answer enough. But there are at least two good answers to that question, neither of them very satisfying to critics. The first is that every human activity, serious or playful, eventually ramifies into a world of its own, a self-contained cosmos of enormous complexity. The other answer is $10 billion.

I think Klinkenborg made a very interesting point here:

" every human activity, serious or playful, eventually ramifies into a world of its own, a self-contained cosmos of enormous complexity."

When one matches that complexity against checkable things - some things that are real may be mapped almost exactly - or even exactly. Even when the match is exact, the map remains virtual . I think that virtual mappings that are correct in every way that matter are precious - and think people are getting clearer on how they happen - by "connecting the dots" and keeping at it.

The point about keeping at it was something I expressed in a eulogy I gave of my old friend and partner, Steve Kline http://www.mrshowalter.net/klineul

rshow55 - 02:02pm Dec 22, 2002 EST (# 6946 of 6946)
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.

With thought - which is virtual simulation of ideas in our heads - we can find patterns - which can be useful or dangerous.

3996-3998 rshow55 8/27/02 12:12pm CP Snow -- induction

Disciplined beauty 5438 rshow55 11/1/02 12:00pm

Gisterme , I haven't responded to every point you've made, and I'm hoping to respond to more of them. But though I can only guess about your staffing, I know mine. I'm working alone, with telepone support. So I can only plod along slowly.

I don't take back anything I've said, on any subject. If you're in doubt about anything you think I should have taken back, please remind me.

- - -

This thread is a backwater - but a lot of really fine exposition happens in the printed (and therefore much higher status) pages of the NYT. Here is wonderfully evocative exposition - connecting our minds to things we know - movie characters - and especially condensed, primal cartoon characters.

The Last Cartoon By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/22/opinion/22FRIE.html

Saddam Hussein has always been a unique political creature — a combination of Don Corleone and Donald Duck. He's always been capable of the most shrewd, but brutal, survival tactics, à la the Godfather, and the most cartoonish miscalculations, à la the Donald.

Here are my favorite URLs, if you click rshow55 :

How a Story is Shaped. http://www.fortunecity.com/lavendar/ducksoup/555/storyshape.html

A Communication Model http://www.worldtrans.org/TP/TP1/TP1-17.HTML

Disney Characters http://www.whom.co.uk/squelch/world_disney.htm

You may not always agree with people at the TIMES - but they write good stories - and take a lot of care to see that they are true. They are experts at finding shared space. And their not too highbrow to connect to Disney characters.

Gisterme , I know you say it is only a game, but sometimes it is fun for me to imagine that you are Bush-Rice . Maybe it is fun for others, too.

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