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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 - 07:27am Sep 16, 2003 EST (# 13691 of 13692)
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.

Just now, it seems that a great deal is not understood - and there are large passions involved.

The relationship between me and Cooper, such as it is, doesn't seem very important to me - but it illustrates some of those problems - involving very different weights applied to notions such as "the obligation to take the word of a poster."

I'm posting now after years of work on the NYT message boards - and discourse with people who insisted on their names - and sometimes tied me up for extended times with email correspondence - under circumstances where motivations on both sides were mixed - but where "willful misstatement of fact" was definitely involved - some of it involving great inconvenience to me. In one case - correspondence purporting to "debrief" me from not clearly specified CIA connections - and very strongly implied New York Times connections - by one Roland Cooke - took up months of my time.

In that case, I felt the situation was so awkward that I asked for help with it from a University Dean. I don't know details - but George Johnson came to the University shortly thereafter. He gave a talk that was, in my opinion breathtakingly lousy - it was punishment, I felt, for the audience to listen to it. I think he showed contempt for his audience in giving that talk - and I don't think I was alone in feeling so. Johnson spoke to me - without facial expression - and within the hour I got a remarkably ornate email by a character who I've some doubts about - Patrick Gunkel. Did I suspect that Gunkel was a George Johnson concoction? Yes. Did I suspect that Johnson was Roland Cooke? Yes.

The reasons seemed then, and seem now, entirely reasonable.

A person I like and respect very much has certainly willfully misled me - in ways involving a lot of work from me - about issues of identity. I don't think I've been behaving unreasonably in that relationship - and in ways that count operationally - my wife doesn't either. My wife has checked enough correspondence that the notion of willful misleading - one way or another - is clear to us both. We are both clear that issues of identity remain cloudy - and some "willful misleading" has gone on. I'm not outraged about it - though it has sometimes been inconvenient. On balance, I'm grateful for the relationship.

With this background - I did not take Cooper's assertion of who he was nearly as seriously as he did, before I actually met him face to face.

I don't think, in terms of my experience - much of it documentable - that I was at all unreasonable doubting what he told me - and I am sorry that he has been bothered so much. Also surprised. The pretense that "nobody willfuly misleads" on this threads seems far-fetched in the extreme.

Internal consistencies - on the basis of assumptions - can be assesssed. That takes work - but with enough work ( often not worth doing) - the issue of internal consistency - with respect to specific assumptions, can be clarified. Often, the fit between the "virtual map" set out and checkable reality can be established, too, though scientists and others who actually work to "track down the shy fact" can know how hard that can be. I find the notion Schwartz sets out in his piece that people adjust comforting. We've got a lot of adjusting to do.

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Some adjusting seems worth it.

5362 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@192.HKMIaDBNV1h^375722@.f28e622/6722 includes some comments, and a link

4956 gisterme 10/16/02 10:36pm

" I wouldn't bother with this thread

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