| Tuesday, July
30, 2002
It appears that the Hammer won't fall this time. We have a
little longer to Do Something.
NASA's Near Earth Object Program office has ruled
out any impact possibility
from asteroid 2002 NT7 on February 1, 2019.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/
A series of X projects to bring down the cost to orbit would
still be a very good idea, as well as insurance against being wrong -- or of
there being another we haven't seen yet. The Earth remains a rather small
and fragile basket for the human race to keep it's eggs in.
There is also HOTFACE: a facility for hazardous testing,
located on the Moon, where quarantine can be complete. We came up with that
one in a study back in about 1978, but nothing seems to have come of it.
With lower cost access to orbit we could build and maintain that facility
for biohazardous research.
And there will always be another Hammer -- and one of them
really will have our address.
Roland warns of another major vulnerability:
http://online.securityfocus.com/archive/1/
3D46633B.80403@algroup.co.uk
And is THIS something to worry about?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/saudi/story/0,11599,764617,00.html
Britons left in jail amid fears that Saudi
Arabia could fall to al-Qaeda
Martin Bright, Nick Pelham and Paul Harris
Sunday July 28, 2002 The Observer
Saudi Arabia is teetering on the brink of
collapse, fuelling Foreign Office fears of an extremist takeover of one of
the West's key allies in the war on terror. Anti-government demonstrations
have swept the desert kingdom in the past months in protest at the
pro-American stance of the de facto ruler, Prince Abdullah.
At the same time, Whitehall officials are
concerned that Abdullah could face a palace coup from elements within the
royal family sympathetic to al-Qaeda.
Saudi sources said the Pentagon had recently
sponsored a secret conference to look at options if the royal family fell.
Demonstrations across the kingdom broke out
in March, triggered by a fire in a girls' school in which 14 pupils died
after the religious police stopped them escaping.
Unrest in the east of the country rapidly
escalated into nationwide protests against the royal family that were
brutally suppressed by the police. The Observer has obtained secret video
footage of the protests smuggled out of the country last week that shows
hundreds of Saudis, including women, demonstrating in support of the
Palestinians and opposition to the regime.
The Foreign Office believes that the failure
of Abdullah's recent Middle East peace plan could have terminally
undermined his position.
The Crown Prince's main rival, Prince Sultan,
the Defence Minister, has been vocal in his opposition to Abdullah's
pro-Western policy. His brother Prince Naif, head of the Interior
Ministry, has led a crackdown on the Saudi media in the wake of the
demonstrations to stop any word of them leaking out.
Abdullah has even sent his own representative
to Washington to counter the influence of the ambassador, Prince Bandar, a
son of Prince Sultan.
<snip>
And we can add:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/davidhorowitz/dh20020729.shtml
TownHall.com: Conservative Columnists: David Horowitz
David Horowitz (archive) (printer-friendly
version)
July 29, 2002
The Destructive Romance of the Intellectuals
The British novelist Martin Amis has written
a new book, Koba, The Dread about Soviet Communism and the utopian
delusion. It is about the romance of western intellectuals with a fantasy
whose real world incarnation has already killed at least 20 million
citizens of the Soviet Union and probably 100 million all over the world.
The crime committed by these victims of the progressive dream was their
refusal to go along with the claims of "social justice" and the
requirements of instituting a socialist state.
This is Martin Amis on the adventure of
creating the Soviet Union: "The dictatorship of the proletariat was a
lie; Union was a lie, and Soviet was a lie, and Socialist was a lie, and
Republics was a lie. Comrade was a lie. The revolution was a lie."
Question: How many intellectuals believed and
spread this lie and thereby colluded in the enslavement, death, and
generalized social misery of hundreds of millions of socialist citizens?
This is Martin Amis's answer: "The
overwhelming majority of intellectuals everywhere."
To make the statement perfectly clear: Every
magazine that today calls itself "progressive," including The
Progressive, the Nation, Social Text, Oktober, Zmagazine, and the Village
Voice, tens of thousands of professors in American universities alone, the
intellectual avatars, models and instructors in virtually every Women's
Studies, Black Studies, Chicano Studies and Cultural Studies program in
America, the heads of the American Historical Association, the
Organization of American Historians and the Modern Language Association -
all were either apostles of this lie in its own time, or are apostles of
the same utopian idea that gave it birth, along with the same
anti-capitalist, anti-American social analyses and the same anti-Western,
anti-American historical narratives that produced the lies and their
attendant atrocities in the first place.
Amis's book also asks the following question:
Why are even those leftwing intellectuals who managed to understand all
along that these were lies - or who have come to realize that they are
lies - still comfortable in thinking of those who supported them as
"progressives" and worse, political "comrades." In his
book, Amis addresses this question to his close friend Christopher
Hitchens:
"Comrade Hitchens! There is probably not
much in these pages that you don't already know. You already know, in that
case, that Bolshevism presents a record of baseness and inanity that
exhausts all dictionaries; indeed, heaven stops the nose at it.So it is
still obscure to me why you wouldn't want to put more distance between
yourself and these events than you do, with your reverence for Lenin and
your un-regretted discipleship of Trotsky. These two men did not just
precede Stalin. They created a fully functioning police state for his
later use."
<snip>
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