When California's Mojave Desert becomes the training ground for a homegrown militia group with a deadly scheme to "take back" America, Mack Bolan is sent in to unleash his own form of destruction. But first he'll have to infiltrate the unit and unravel their plot before it's too late. With less than forty-eight hours to go, the stakes have suddenly been raised and millions of Americans are about to be caught in the cross fire of a terrorist attack. As the militia sets its plan in motion, Bolan has only one opportunity to strike back and shut them down forever. Timing will be tight, but if these right-wing extremists want a war, then the Executioner is there to oblige.

The idea of this book is to establish a new scientific discipline, “noology,” under which a set of fundamental principles are proposed for the characterization of both naturally occurring and artificial intelligent systems. The methodology adopted in Principles of Noology for the characterization of intelligent systems, or “noological systems,” is a computational one, much like that of AI. Many AI devices such as predicate logic representations, search mechanisms, heuristics, and computational learning mechanisms are employed but they are recast in a totally new framework for the characterization of noological systems. The computational approach in this book provides a quantitative and high resolution understanding of noological processes, and at the same time the principles and methodologies formulated are directly implementable in AI systems. In contrast to traditional AI that ignores motivational and affective processes, under the paradigm of noology, motivational and affective processes are central to the functioning of noological systems and their roles in noological processes are elucidated in detailed computational terms. In addition, a number of novel representational and learning mechanisms are proposed, and ample examples and computer simulations are provided to show their applications. These include rapid effective causal learning (a novel learning mechanism that allows an AI/noological system to learn causality with a small number of training instances), learning of scripts that enables knowledge chunking and rapid problem solving, and learning of heuristics that further accelerates problem solving. Semantic grounding allows an AI/noological system to “truly understand” the meaning of the knowledge it encodes. This issue is extensively explored. This is a highly informative book providing novel and deep insights into intelligent systems which is particularly relevant to both researchers and students of AI and the cognitive sciences.

Military conflicts, particularly land combat, possess thecharacteristics of complex adaptive systems: combat forces arecomposed of a large number of nonlinearly interacting parts and areorganized in a dynamic command-and-control network; local action, which often appears disordered, self-organizes into long-range order;military conflicts, by their nature, proceed far from equilibrium;military forces adapt to a changing combat environment; and there isno master voice that dictates the actions of every soldier (i

The War on Terror has raised many new, thorny issues of how we can determine acceptable action in defense of our liberties. Western leaders have increasingly used spies to execute missions unsuitable to the military. These operations, which often result in the contravening of international law and previously held norms of acceptable moral behavior, raise critical ethical questions—is spying limited by moral considerations? If so, what are they and how are they determined? Cole argues that spying is an act of force that may be a justifiable means to secure order and justice among political communities. He explores how the just war moral tradition, with its roots in Christian moral theology and Western moral philosophy, history, custom and law might help us come to grips with the moral problems of spying. This book will appeal to anyone interested in applied religious ethics, moral theology and philosophy, political philosophy, international law, international relations, military intellectual history, the War on Terror, and Christian theological politics.

By 1936, after a decade of Civil War and even before the Xi'an Incident, Mao Zedong had begun talking about a "New Stage" of cooperation between the Guomindang and the Communist Party. With the establishment of a framework for cooperation between the two parties, and as Japan began its brutal war against China, Mao began to develop this theme more systematically in both the political and military spheres. This volume documents the evolution of Mao's thinking in this area that found its culmination in his long report to the Sixth Enlarged Plenum of the Central Committee in October, 1938, explicitly entitled "On the New Stage" and presented here in its entirety. It was also during this period that Mao delivered a course of lectures on dialectical materialism after reading and annotating a number of works on Marxist theory by Soviet and Chinese authors. These lectures, from which "On Practice" and "On Contradiction" were later extracted, are also translated here in their entirety.

This is the first volume in a set covering the writings of Mao-Tse-tung and charting his progress from childhood to full political maturity. This work contains essays, letters, notes and articles in the period 1912 to 1920, which saw him move from liberali.