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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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almarst2003 - 09:22pm Mar 14, 2003 EST (# 9969 of 9979)

"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." --Adolf Hitler

almarst2003 - 09:34pm Mar 14, 2003 EST (# 9970 of 9979)

Despite daily reports about the "showdown" with Iraq, Americans hear very little from mainstream media about the most basic fact of war: People will be killed and civilian infrastructure will be destroyed, with devastating consequences for public health long after the fighting stops. http://www.fair.org/activism/war-kills.html

The sign on the Buchenvald gate read "The Work brings Freedom"

Is the "America in the 21 Century" project's logo "The Bombs bring Freedom"?

rshow55 - 09:38pm Mar 14, 2003 EST (# 9971 of 9979)
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.

9352 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.1UqAabrD5zO.1972054@.f28e622/10890

A sermon posted on this thread many times deals with a case where a Russian colonel did not do "what was expected" - and saved the world from horror. The NASA engineers were ordinary people - reacting in "ordinary" ways - but they were not heroes. Some of them were a lot less than heroes.

http://www.mrshowalter.net/sermon.html

9314 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.1UqAabrD5zO.1972054@.f28e622/10848

9205 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.1UqAabrD5zO.1972054@.f28e622/10731

9241 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.1UqAabrD5zO.1972054@.f28e622/10767

9242 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.1UqAabrD5zO.1972054@.f28e622/10768

We need logical tools, and human insights, that make closure possible, and agreements resiliant, to a degree that they haven't been before.

9040 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.1UqAabrD5zO.1972054@.f28e622/10566 reads:

But our "logic" - is mostly a choosing between many alteratives going on or being fashioned in our heads - and in the course of that choosing - people believe what "feels right."

But what "feels right," most often, is what, in our minds "cooperates with the interests of authority - with our group." Look at Pritchard's notes on Milgram's experiment - and on Jonestown - to get a sense of how wrong it feels, for most people, to go against authority. http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~epritch1/social98a.html

We need to face the fact that there is more need to check - especially when "the ties that bind" are involved - than people feel comfortable with.

On this thread, again and again, there have been technical arguments - and with absolutely stunning, monotonous regularity - gisterme presents arguments that make no technical sense at all - that are perversely wrong - and feels right about them.

Perhaps people like the top people at NASA - or people more "co-operative" yet - are answering his questions. And perhaps gisterme is such a bully - such a Captain Queeg figure - that nobody who survives around him tells him anything he really doesn't want to hear.

The technical merit of gisterme's answers is gruesomely bad - but who will question such a ranking personage?

In the US, maybe no one - but if anyone with power elsewhere wanted to get some things checked - technical facts really can be established.

I think it may well be that Krugman's George W. Queeg http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/opinion/14KRUG. html is right on the money - and that leaders of other nation states ought to start checking enough facts to make the matter clear. The technical answers gisterme has given here are on the record - and they are stunningly bad - as bad, and bad in the same sort of way - as the "calculations" from NASA that "assured" people that all was well.

rshow55 - 09:40pm Mar 14, 2003 EST (# 9972 of 9979)
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.

think it may well be that Krugman's George W. Queeg http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/opinion/14KRUG.html is right on the money.

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