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    Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?


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lunarchick - 08:24am Jun 29, 2001 EST (#6277 of 6290)
lunarchick@www.com

I was thinking about this today ... a Third-World leader takes a loan from the world bank .. he 'spends' big on a fleet of luxury cars. Four years later the fleet are heaped in the scrap yard, but the loan still has to be repaid.

If the item purchased changed from 'luxury car' to 'missile' .. the logic would be the same. The 'missile' has no value to a country in that it can't be used to produce product leading to wealth, it deteriorates, it has to be paid for, sometimes via a loan.

If the item reads 'land mine' then all the above apply, and additionally the victims of the mine have to receive state support for up to the next hundred years. [how long will it be before countries that are subject to destruction make claims on the makers of the products of destruction ... retrospectively ?]

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Additional to this, which products can be made entirely within a country, and used within it, thereby creating wealth through monetary velocity (circulation).

If a State wishes to improve the lot of the people, focusing on humanitarian approaches and developing product from within it's boundaries (for the most part), then what can be produced, processed, marketed, purchased and either consumed, or used to make further product for consumption. How much 'wealth' can be created within the Nation State - raising it from abject poverty to reasonable living standards ? Didn't everyone live within their Nation State prior to the expansion of in/visible trading ?

lunarchick - 08:43am Jun 29, 2001 EST (#6278 of 6290)
lunarchick@www.com

    Process, and the licensing of efficient quality process, is important to build wealth.
    The Franchising of process is a means of exporting and exploiting process to give wealth.

rshowalter - 09:15am Jun 29, 2001 EST (#6279 of 6290) Delete Message
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

There's a lot of room for progress, with very little additional capital, in Russia -- though more money will help a lot.

And if the waste in dollars and manpower in the US military budget was devoted to productive purposes -- life would look up - for just about everybody in the world.

Except for a few people -- a tiny group, compared to world population -- people of the lie -- who ought, perhaps, to be asked, or forced, to make some modifications in their behavior -- and some amends.

Perhaps they could do it gracefully.

Back in a couple of hours.

rshowalter - 09:20am Jun 29, 2001 EST (#6280 of 6290) Delete Message
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

If perchance, some of these people are religious, they should think of what their religion might lead them to expect -- in my view -- even the imagination of Dante, or Johnathan Edwards, would be taxed -- imagining what justice for some of these people would be --- unless they change.

Of course, I'm not sure that any of the people who've told these lies, and exploited so much, have any real religious beliefs at all -- it seems to me possible that they're just enjoying the chance to make fools of a lot of people.

lunarchick - 09:32am Jun 29, 2001 EST (#6281 of 6290)
lunarchick@www.com

*

lunarchick - 11:48am Jun 29, 2001 EST (#6282 of 6290)
lunarchick@www.com

http://www.fas.org/irp/world/china/pla/index.html http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2000/china06222000.htm http://www.maoism.org/msw/vol4/mswv4_23.htm http://www.washingtoninquirer.com/archive/03-06-00/ChineseBudget.htm

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