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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?

lunarchick - 12:15am Sep 24, 2001 EST (#9804 of 9812)
lunarchick@www.com

Questions: Where do 'Secretaries of State' come from - do people elect them?
Where do Presidential Administrative Staff come from - how can 'the people' be sure that there are no conflicts of interest - re policy design and implementation?

lunarchick - 12:24am Sep 24, 2001 EST (#9805 of 9812)
lunarchick@www.com

Conflict of interest: Question: $4million a year - who makes it, doing what?

Would U.S. and foreign companies seek to curry favor by steering business to the father's associates? Would any future overseas flaps involving the former president escalate into diplomatic incidents? http://www.ahrc.com/HOAorg/Media/ma_050700_LAT_CHUBB.html

lunarchick - 12:33am Sep 24, 2001 EST (#9806 of 9812)
lunarchick@www.com

Question: Which two related American Presidents have fostered TV-Lounge wars?

Question: What, if anything, do they stand to gain?

Question: How large a sum has Congress voted into the TechnoMissileSilo this month - without audit checks and balances?

Question: One Guess. Who might have a smile on their face?!

lunarchick - 12:42am Sep 24, 2001 EST (#9807 of 9812)
lunarchick@www.com

Vitai Lampada by Sir Henry Newbolt.

"There's a breathless hush in the close tonight,
ten to make and a match to win.
A bumping pitch and a blinding light.
An hour to play and the last man in".

rshowalter - 06:23am Sep 24, 2001 EST (#9808 of 9812)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

The world is interconnected, and one issue recurs with monotonous, but deadly serious regularity.

It is that sequences where lies are involved are likely to go wrong in ugly, expensive, unjust, unpredictable ways.

It is a point made, clearly, with respect to financial matters, in Thomas Friedman's THE LEXUS AND THE OLIVE TREE , a fine (even beautiful) but incomplete book. Because, for the information flows needed, Friedman doesn't explain enough. I'm doing the best I can to explain what is missing. Is my stuff incomplete, too? No doubt. But if people knew what I could teach them, if I was permitted to do so, lots of things would go better than they're going today.

Unless we check better, and clean up messes where lies are important, many of them embarrassing, it is my professional opinion, repeated often here, that the world is likely to end.

It seems to me that a rather vivid demonstration of our current vulnerabilities -- which we cannot escape, but must deal with, was presented on September 11th, and in the unravellings our sociotechnical and moral system has shown since.

We have too many vulnerabilities, by thousands and millions of times, to defend against them all, unless we do so as part of a working world community.

rshowalter - 06:26am Sep 24, 2001 EST (#9809 of 9812)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

When it matters enough, checking has to become morally forcing.

Otherwise there is "no solution." No solution broadly, and on many subproblems in our lives which we have to care about.

Clean up checking conventions, on the other hand, and there are so many pretty solutions that the world could be kept very productively, very happily busy.

That would be worth money in the stock markets. With decent checking, and some elementary honesty, it is easy to calculate that the US and world markets would go up a great deal. For solid reasons. Now, they are overvalued -- because for values anything like current ones, the future has to be good. As of now, the future does not look good. We should change, and make it so.

I was grateful, after "LouMazza" made his comment just above, that almarst weighed in as he did.

People are now stumped, and many are in agony, and all are in danger, all over the world, because they face problems for which there is no solution - - and they are coming to know it.

With checking , there would be solutions. Much better ones than the status quo offers. And the people involved, themselves, could find and implement these suggestions, fit to the circumstances they actually face, step by step. With steps that they themselves, as they are, could actually do -- and steps that, step by step, would make their objective and emotional condition better, not worse.

If checking is not done, every way I figure it, the world is going to get worse, and will probably end.

The missile defense fraud-psychopathology-fiasco documented on this thread involves many fine exemplars of how badly things can and do go wrong without checking. And also shows how much checking is now resisted, in the world as it is.

rshowalter - 06:40am Sep 24, 2001 EST (#9810 of 9812)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I would like to repeat my guess (only a guess, but I think worth repeating) that gisterme is either Condoleezza Rice, or a team which she heads.

It is easy enough to go back and read what gisterme has written here - - hundreds of careful postings.

Doing so would, I believe, be worthwhile for staffed organizations facing up to their obligation to respond to the decisions now being made by the Bush administration. Decisions that may, in some cases, be balanced and correct. But decisions that should be checked, not deferred to.

I also think there are a number of ways, based on this thread, to document a probability that the "military industrial complex" and its leaders, including those of C.S.I.S. and other leading groups, are engaged with the dialog occurring here.

I believe that staffed organizations, facing obligations, should consider what this means about the wisdom and flexibility of current American arrangements. Some things that consideration would imply would be positive. Others would not be.

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