Okay, lets break this down :
Quote:
"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me,
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Okay, so Rumsfeld finds reports that something hasn't happened (ala, we have not found WMDs in Iraq) interesting.
Quote:
because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
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Alright...in a space of 15 words, he uses the word "known" 5 times. Sorry, but in any paper or speech I did in high school, this would have earned an immediate "F." But lets see what he actually means by this: There are things we know.
Quote:
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
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Okay, he restates himself using "do not know" instead of "unknowns" in the first phrasing. I think this can be summed up quite easily: There are things we don't know.
Quote:
But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know."
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In a very succint closing sentence, he seems to state: There could be life on other planets. Basically, this is an inherently repetitive statement, there are 2 types of things in the universe, known and unknown. You might know a peice of something, but the rest is unknown, so basically you can toss the final sentence.
So, when it all comes down to it, he would have been better saying, "There are things we know, and things that we don't know." However, how that relates to "reports that say that something hasn't happened" is still a mystery to me.
MB