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 [F] New York Times on the Web Forums  / Science  /

    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?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.


Earliest Messages Previous Messages Recent Messages Outline (13319 previous messages)

rshow55 - 09:52am Aug 18, 2003 EST (# 13320 of 13326)
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.

Lchic and I started working together closely in July, 2000, after knowing each other a while. I'm proud of our first public work together, which dealt with paradigm conflict - an essential problem where we've made things clearer than they've been before.

Paradigm Shift .... whose getting there? continues. It started on Jul 28, 2000 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7726f/0 with this from lchic:

No one has the right to command attention, everybody has to persuade, sometimes in an organized way, sometimes to whoever'll listen. Often, time works wonders. The amount of "persuasion" that's worthwhile depends on how much the idea matters. (If many lives are at stake, for example, one may be justified in being somewhat assertive.) Most often, ideas diffuse in a pretty sensible way. But there are famous exceptions, and they come to be called "paradigm conflicts." I'd identify them as follows. If the new idea has "hit a nerve" in a negative sense - it the new somehow violates the emotions of the people who "own" the old idea - then one has a conflict that may not readily yeild to time or ordinary persuasion.

Since that time, we've been working on what might be called "the mother of all paradigm conflicts" - - and, it seems to me, making headway.

Largely working on matters of mechanics .

For reasons of mechanics, I'm posting slowly for the next little while - but feeling hopeful. But worried about making mistakes, too.

Psychwarfare, Casablanca -- and terror was originally set out on 26-27 September 2000 , a day after I had an an all-day meeting on this Missile Defense thread with an authoritative figure. http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.QqcSbhWmzfu.3936007@.f28e622/2006 that ended with this http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.QqcSbhWmzfu.3936007@.f28e622/2014

I'd be grateful for a chance to come before you, or one or more of your representatives, and explain, in detail, with documentation and ways to check, how dangerous this situation is. Especially if a good reporter, and a videotape record, were there so what was said was clear.

Some mistakes have been made, and you and I weren't very old when they were made. They can be fixed. A lot of things would improve if this were done. They are American mistakes, and Americans, and American leaders, have to fix them.

Psychwarfare, Casablanca -- and terror continues - and continues to emphasize an "obvious" fact set out in the first posting:

A key point is how psychologically injurious, and devastating, the psychological injury associated with deception can be. http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/0

Script of Casablanca . http://6nescripts.free.fr/Casablanca.pdf

There are parts of the movie that we need to be able to describe better - and if we learned to do so, the movie wouldn't be in any way diminished - it would be, if anything, more beautiful. But we could get some problems solved that elude us now.

Often, people screw up because they don't know how to do any better.

Sometimes, when things are understood and explained, they do better.

People need to be able to put words , pictures , and math - the language of quantity together better than they now know how to do - so that they can understand, predict, and control things they need to better than they do now. In part, that's a matter of mechanics.

And a matter of being clear about what we now do well - and where we are stumped.

Eisenhower worried about things like that. So did Casey. I don't know about other people, but I think if they were alive today, they'd be interested and pleased with what lchic and I have put together. Together.

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 [F] New York Times on the Web Forums  / Science  / Missile Defense