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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

lchic - 11:35am Jan 26, 2003 EST (# 8108 of 8122)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

British Historian - Hugh Trevor ROPER - has died. His claim to shame was his declaring the 'fake' Hitler diaries to be real.

lchic - 11:49am Jan 26, 2003 EST (# 8109 of 8122)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Hello world, this is Me

January 25, 2003

G'DAY. God here. You know, the bloke who's on both sides in every war. The in God we trust, in God's name God. The omniscient and omnipresent God. Eternal and paternal. Alert to the sound of every falling budgie. The God that's supposed to offer each and every one of you eternal life, no matter the depth of your depravity or cruelty, provided you say you're sorry.

It's probably because I'm getting on a bit but, frankly, I'm increasingly irritated with you lot. So it's about time I told you what I really think of you.

First of all, and I can't emphasise this enough, you're not made in my image. I don't look anything like you. I don't have arms or legs or buttocks or knees or elbows. Let alone genitalia. I'm not a he or a she. Despite murals and Sistine ceilings to the contrary, I'm shapeless. Insofar as I exist at all, I'm a very, very big idea. Am I making myself clear? I don't look like you and you certainly don't look like me.

Secondly, I'm not as fond of you mob as you like to think. Nor as focused on your frequently silly and meretricious lives. Look at you all down there! Six billion irritating little creatures. Ants with attitude. Termites with pretensions. Come to think of it, I prefer termites. They're nothing like as uppity as humans. Termites don't go ooooh and aaaah over their own mounds. Yet look at humans. They pile up a few stones and call them cathedrals or skyscrapers. Yet none of them is as big as a decent-sized hill, let alone one of my mountains. ..... Phillip Adams http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,5884146%5E12272,00.html

commondata - 11:55am Jan 26, 2003 EST (# 8110 of 8122)

OK, I've read a little more wrcooper and a little more Johnson, and I'll concede a similarity of style. He likes rshow's map vs. territory metaphor as set out here:

http://www.mrshowalter.net/bhmath/

That's all I'll concede without a LOT more checking. I'm categorically not a talking horse but clearly don't expect that to change anyone's mind.

lchic - 12:00pm Jan 26, 2003 EST (# 8111 of 8122)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Not even God's?

more from Adams ....

"" Then there's hell. I'm expected to furnish the damned with eternal, infernal accommodations where they'll suffer forever. As if I would. As if I'd bother.

But it shows, yet again, what nasty, ghastly little creatures you can be. Fancy wanting to condemn each other to eternal torture? And damn you for putting the blame on me. I'm too busy organising big bangs and parallel universes and worm holes to have time for theological theme parks.

(I've got endless life forms to create, amuse and entertain all over the ever-expanding universe. Squillions of galaxies in this one and just as many in the parallel universes _ and there are squillions of those. And I've been juggling this for squillions of light years. Yet humans still think that they're at the centre of things. That it's all about them. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, including commonsense.)

What were their names? Yes, Galileo and Copernicus. You'd have thought their discoveries would have made humans less arrogant by revealing that they weren't the centre of the universe, which got on perfectly well without human beings for billions of years. You're just another evanescent life form on a piddling planet in one of my squillions of galaxies.

Which, let me tell you, are brimming with more interesting creatures, many far more attractive and at a higher stage of development. Remind me to show you some photos I took on planet Moo, which is run by an advanced civilisation of daffodils. Yet I'm supposed to devote myself to humans? To listen to your greedy, grasping little prayers? Please, please God let me win $10 million in Lotto. Or: Please God, let me be promoted to office manager.

And don't think you can come sucking up to me with your hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of religions. Frankly, they're an insult. They show the applications of tiny minds to the immensity of my imaginings. ...

lchic - 12:06pm Jan 26, 2003 EST (# 8112 of 8122)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Powell | Saddam linked to al-Qaeda: US | Jan 26, 2003

US Secretary of State Colin Powell accused Saddam Hussein of having clear links with the al-Qaeda network, in an address to the World Economic Forum here.

"The more we wait, the more chance there is for this dictator with clear ties to terrorist groups including al-Qaeda to pass a weapon, share technology or use these weapons again," he said.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,5895129%5E1702,00.html

How clear was clear?

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