How else would the bodies get shipped? Propped up in first class seats?

This is a cold reminder that dead is final, an irretrievable loss for family and nation.

How is it that any pageantry of loss can make this bearable?

I hope the parents of these men and women will stir themselves to ask this question, again and again.

Ward Beattie

Seattle

I couldn't get the weary smile off my face, reading this. The hypocrisy here beggars the imagination. This said, it's so sad to see Haggard's flock advancing tortured justifications for their fear of gay people. If their pastor cannot find the cure, with every (presumable) advantage of God's grace and his own patent self-interest, what can be the prospects for their own children who happen to be gay?

I have to wonder if it would not be better for the Democrats to lose again this time around. The party has no uncontested leader, and no united platform that anyone could really get behind. The sad story of Kerry's foot-in-mouth disease brings both these basic problems into stark relief. One can only hope that he retires to the sidelines, and mutes his cheering henceforward.

Kerry is a striking symptom of the Democratic Party's malaise: he has the space to fancy himself a leader, when he is no such thing.

If the Democrats win, there will be an unseemly, leaderless feeding frenzy. If the Democrats lose, then perhaps there is a chance that a leader will come forth, to lead us out of the wilderness.

Like much of the commentary about the conflicts (actual and mooted) in Iraq and Iran, Gary Kamiya's article appears to assume a persistent strategic interest by the US in the region. At the same time, he does acknowledge the legitimate grievances against the US by the various regional factions.

So what exactly is this strategic interest? Presumably it has two elements:

1. Oil

2. Israel

I wonder if we can dispense with the first interest by thinking back 50 years to the British humiliation in Suez. From a military perspective, the Suez canal was no longer strategic to the British Empire, only recently much diminished by the independence of India. Nonetheless, Eden's government did not like the Nasserite regime that was prevailing politically in Egypt, and foolishly (i.e. without US support) undertook to regain control of the canal. In the end, of course, Egypt had every commercial incentive to keep the canal open, and has done so ever since, with some brief interruptions when the Israelis invaded the Sinai.

Analogously, the US blunders terribly when garrisons Iraq and threatens Iran and Syria, with the aim of insuring that Western corporations have control of the process of extracting oil resources. And all of this is without UN or general European support. Far better to leave all of this to commercial calculation and national self-interest. Besides, a little interruption of the oil supply might do wonders to motivate less dependence on oil in the West.

As for Israel, it's time for her to come to terms with her neighbors in the region, including negotiating with the quite legitimate armed resistance in occupied Palestine. It's certainly reasonable for the US to guarantee Israel's security, but then the appropriate basing for any US troops in the region would be in Israel -- think of Germany during the cold war -- rather than Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or Kuwait. If the Israelis don't go for this, then all the better: she will be that much closer to living with her neighbors.

All in all, strategic withdrawal by the US looks like the best option, as it was for Britain in 1956.

Bombs don't kill people: state and non-state actors kill people.

I haven't read through all the letters, but it strikes me that an analysis of this problem needs to consider special and general relativity.

Implicit in the statement of the problem (if it is to mean anything at all) is the premise that the engineering goal of the conveyor belt is to keep the plane stationary, even in the presence of forward thrust from the engines. On the assumption that the wheels of the plane are free-spinning, and ignoring the heat generated by friction (in the wheel bearings and where the wheels meet the moving belt), the conveyor belt must accelerate very quickly until its reaches infinite speed. Of course, there is a "practical" (but unreachable) limit here: the speed of light!

So, on the special relativity side, the closer the belt gets to the speed of light, the shorter it will appear from the frame of reference of the plane. Thus I conclude that the runway will shrink almost immediately, and the airplane will end up with no runway left.

Now, I am not an expert in this stuff, and I'm sure I have ignored the general relativity effects of spinning wheels and the fact that the conveyor belt must reverse direction at each end.

Can anyone help with this?