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Missile Defense

Nazi engineer and Disney space advisor Wernher Von Braun helped give us rocket science. Today, the legacy of military aeronautics has many manifestations from SDI to advanced ballistic missiles. Now there is a controversial push for a new missile defense system. What will be the role of missile defense in the new geopolitical climate and in the new scientific era?

edevershed - 01:26am Feb 16, 2001 EST (#691 of 692)

Quotations from the universe next door;

The fact that plutonium was missing originally leaked to the press in the mid-1970s. At first there was a minor wave of panic among those given to worryijng about such matters, and there was some churlish grumbling about a government so incompetent it couldn't keep track of its own weapons of megadeath. But then a year passed, and...eventually a decade... but nothing drastic had happened.

Terran primates, being a simpleminded, sleepful race, simply stopped worrying about the subject. The triggering mechanism of the most destructive weapon ever devised on that backward planet was in unknown hands, true; but that was really not much more unsettling to contemplate than the fact that many of the known hands which had enjoyed access to plutonium belonged to persons who were not in all respects, reasonable me. (See TErran archives Ronald Raygun, BS artist, career of.)

edevershed - 01:29am Feb 16, 2001 EST (#692 of 692)

The six-legged majority on Terra were never consulted when the domesticated primates set about building weapons that could destroy all life-forms on that planet. This was not unusual. the fish, the birds, the reptiles, the flowers, the tress, and even the other mammals were not allowed to vote on this issue. Even the wild primates weren't involved in the decision to produce such weapons. In fact, the majority of domesticated primates themselves never had a say in the matter.

A handful of alpha males among the leading predator bands among the domesticated primates had made the decision on their own. Everybody elsde on the planet, including the six-legged majority, who had never been involved in primate politics, just had to face the consequences.

Most of the domesticated primates of Terra did not know they were primates. They thought they were something apart from and superior to the rest of the planet.

Even the educated didn't often think of themselves as primates, and above all never understood that the alpha males of Unistat were typical leaders of primate bands. As a result of this inability to see the obvious, they were constantly alarmed and terrified by the behaviour of themselves, their friends and associates and especially the alpha males of the pack. Since they didn't know it was ordinary primate behaviour it seemed JUST AWFUL to them.

Since a great deal of primate behaviour was considered JUST AWFUL, most of the domesticated primates spent considerable energy trying to conceal what they were doing.

With apologies since your talk policy doesn't allow rude words, ST stands for the stuff that comes out of your backside.

Some of the primates GOT CAUGHT by other primates. All of the primates lived in dread of getting caught. Those who goth caught were called no-good ST's

The term no good ST was a deep expression of primate psychology. For instance, one wild primate taught sign language by two scientist domesticated primates, spontaneously put togehter the signs for "ST" and "scientist" to describe a scientist she didn't like. She did the same for a chimpanzee she didn't like, she was calling him ST-chimpanzee.

This metaphor was deep in primate psychology because primates mark their territories with excretions , and sometimes they threw excretions at each other when disputing over territories.

Among the anal insults exchanged by DP's when fighting for their space was "UP your Ass"

When primates went to war, or got violent in other ways, they always said they were about to "knock the ST" out of the enemy.#

They also spoke of "dumping" on each other.

The primates who had mined Unistat with nuclear bombls intended to dump on the other primates REAL HARD.

Time to face up to our ST, and start dealing with it, then maybe we can leave the age of BS behind.

I have some sympathy with the nutter who tried to crash the aeroplane.

This man, you could say he was evil, but I reckon he was just confused, tried to kill a number of other innocent people.

But there are others, who I would call evil, who seem to be intent on crashing spaceship earth, and they call themselves sane, and they accuse the people who try to stop them of insanity, or of not living in the real world, this "real world" being an insane hell that they created, and imposed on the rest of us.;

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