WT: In other words, if you can find value in what shooter242 is up to here, more power to you. I can't.

L@L specifically exempted shooter with the following:

A little thought should suffice to persuade even the most ideologically hidebound or thoroughgoingly prejudiced among us that no sentient human being is capable of being 100% wrong about anything.

Clearly, shooter is not included in this category. On the other hand, shooter isn't really a troll. He doesn't disrupt anything. He knows that no one here is going to take anything he says seriously. He provides us with comic relief with his outrageous comments — the outrageouser the better (with apologies to the Sprachpolitzei). Shooter fills the same ecological niche as the kygmy in Al Capp's Li'l Abner. He exists to be kicked. Since he is mostly harmless, we have more or less agreed to keep him as a pet, even though he has proved that he can't be housebroken. We just have to remember to cover the furniture when he starts flinging rhetorical feces and to put him out at night before we go to sleep.

"There is no such thing as a totally false perception"

is a false perception.

Well anyway, that's how I see it.
— sysprog

Being a student of logic, this is one of my favorite categories of paradoxes: statements that can only if they are false.

This one is very similar to: "All sweeping generalizations are invariably false."

In this case, since the statement is a sweeping generalization it must, by its own logic be false. But if it is false, then it is true because it is a sweeping generalization that is false.

Then there is "Every rule has an exception."

If this is true, then since this is a rule, it mush have an exception. The only allowable exception is that there must be somewhere a rule that has no exception. But if this is the very rule that has no exception, then it is true because it is false.

This statement isn't paradoxical. It's just false. Some rules have no exceptions. Some have one or more.
— Paul Rosenberg

Always willing to see something new. Show me the rules with no exceptions. But if it's false then it's true because it predicts that there will be at least one rule with no exception.

And more than one exception is included in "an exception."

Paul R: I'm sorry I wasn't clear enough about this. The problem is with an exception, as I tried to point out by saying "Some have one or more."

Rules with 2 or more exceptions make the statement false.

And I tried to point out equally futilely that "more than one exception" subsumes "an exception." If a rule has twenty exceptions then it surely has "an exception" (plus nineteen others). Notwithstanding that 'an' was originally an unstressed form of 'one', the usages have diverged. Nowadays if you want to specify 'one' with the indefinite article (except in some specific contexts such as before numbers or measures) you need to say "a single" or "a certain". Otherwise, the expression "a few" is meaningless. If someone asks me "do you have a book about astronomy?" and it so happens that I have a hundred books about astronomy, I don't say no. Similarly, if I say "I have a man working for me who has red hair" the fact that I may have ten men working for me who have red hair does not make the statement false. If you say "I have an idea" am I justified in believing that you have one and only one idea at that particular time? If Martin Luther King, Jr. says "I have a dream" does the fact that he may have more than one dream make him a liar?

BTW, if you're not already familiar with it, I highly recommend the work of Raymond Smullyan, particularly What Is the Name of This Book? and This Book Needs No Title.

Sadly, I haven't read it, although I am a fan of Smullyan. I've somehow never had the book and the time together at the same time.

bucky1: I asked a few times if anyone here ever just talked about a particular solution to a particular problem (an issue) rather than in broad generalizations. So far, no love.

Just so you don't lose any more sleep waiting for this to happen, here is something for you to consider:

There are no solutions, only problems. Anything that looks like a solution is merely a reformulation of the problem. Since there are no solutions, everything is part of the problem.

casual_observer makes some excellent points. It is the job of the National Security Advisor to coordinate the State and Defense Departments. Much of the current mess in foreign and military policy can be traced to the fact that there has not been an effective NSA for the past six years. At least foreign policy is no longer being decided and implemented by the Defense Department as it was in 2003-4. That function seems to have been taken over (like so many others) by the Office of the Vice-President.

Not that there haven't been military officers serving as policy advisors to the president previously. Perhaps the most notable (or notorious) of these was Admiral John Poindexter, serving as NSA (and chief arms smuggler) to Reagan.

That Gen Lute's function is to provide military policy advice is indeed a duplication of effort inasmuch as this is now the function of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Since 2002 the JCS have not been part of the US military's operational command structure. Their function is purely administrative and advisory. Having another general officer providing military policy advice seems to be an invitation to conflicts of a precipitous sort.