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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?

rshowalter - 01:48pm Sep 14, 2001 EST (#9052 of 9061)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

A community that ought not to tolerate acts of terrorism, from any source, and that should have the competence, will, decency, and strength to prevent them.

There are signs that such a community is coming into being - - and it faces challenges which may cause more convergence to a workable community now.

lunarchick - 02:00pm Sep 14, 2001 EST (#9053 of 9061)
lunarchick@www.com

Australian public opinion [ http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/austback/index/default.htm ]

Quote: 'the military mind sees the solution of all problems as the military solution' usa's G Douglas

rshowalter - 02:07pm Sep 14, 2001 EST (#9054 of 9061)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

There was a prayer service, today, and I'd like to cite some reasons for concern that are both religious and secular.
MD776 rshowalter 2/24/01 9:17am ... MD777 rshowalter 2/24/01 9:25am
http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/sermon.html

MD803 rshowalter 2/28/01 9:39pm
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/democracy/nuclear/stories/nukes/index.html

We neen to know how others feel, and why MD1274-1279 almarst-2001 3/21/01 7:41pm

MD9044 almarst-2001 9/14/01 1:08pm

lunarchick - 02:10pm Sep 14, 2001 EST (#9055 of 9061)
lunarchick@www.com

Re 'hot heads' rushing headlong into things that haven't been fully considered.

The point here is that Bwsh from the Bush family of opportunism is grasping this as an opportunity to invoke a President's ability to go to war - followed blindly by boot-licking nations such as Australia.

So, the world can quite suddenly 'be at war' .. without reference whatsoever to the WILL OF THE PEOPLE of those countries.

America should look carefully at the Powers of the President when at war ... that's why the 'war' word was used so quickly.

Sunday will see rallies here as people come out on the streets to campaigne against Howard Prime Minister embracing Bwsh too closely.

lunarchick - 02:22pm Sep 14, 2001 EST (#9056 of 9061)
lunarchick@www.com

Can Americans explain why the planes that were hi-jacked weren't shot down ?

How come America say they can hit a missile (with a homing beacon on it) over the pacific ... travelling at fast speed ... when they are incapable of stopping a hi-jacked plane, a hi-jacked plane, a hi-jacked plane when it is pointing into a city of high density population and known to be way off course.

Recall Bwsh was beating drums looking for rogues .. leading to:

China bringing the regular routed spy plane down, as a lesson to bring the hot-headed president to earth - + insisting on plane being dismantled prior to dispatch

The rest of the world made alliances to counteract the failure of government by the hi-jack president - ballot fiasco

General discusssions on international boards have noted that the greatest threats aren't MD rather the bomb in the suitcase (asymmetry)

rshowalter - 02:26pm Sep 14, 2001 EST (#9057 of 9061)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

HOW TO SEARCH THE "MISSILE DEFENSE" FORUM

gisterme and I disagree on some things, but he's recently joined me in asking that the search function be reinstated.

That would be useful, because the thread has been set up as a format for communication and consideration of a complex, vital issue by staffed organizations. I think that the chances for peace, and good decision, would be facilititated if staffed organizations looked at it.

The thread, which now fills 25 1 1/2' notebooks of text, and accesses by links perhaps 3-4 times more text, is set up as an "associative memory" --with enough detail for closure. It has, I believe, gotten results.

To search the thread:

1. Pull down the entries to the thread, an html at a time, and store on disk so that it can be searched by one of several common search utilities. (For speed of searching, dividing into seperate files for each 1000 postings helps.)

2. Search by key words, or by citation numbers, and store the searches in a way that can be acessable. Many can be used as guides to further searching, and as these searches accumulate they serve to organize the ideas of the thread into a seperate corpus that can itself be searched.

3. The html's linked in a given posting can themselves be stored inside the "folder" that each html is filed with.

With disk storage and CD ROM storage as convenient as it is, this is a searchable corpus.

I believe that the similarities between the searching of this corpus, and the searching of human associative memory, are basic, and built into the logic of classification itself.

If that's true, that may be one reason, among a number, why this corpus, and corpuses like it, may facilitate "meetings of the mind."

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