"the last is zzz05 who hopes that Israel (jews?) will be as extinct as pharaonic egypt."

would this be a good time to mention that i have close relatives living in israel, of the hebraic ethnicity and faith? well, i gotta go back to my other online arguments so that people can call me a zionazi some more.

the best evidence that the site was a nuclear facility is that israel destoryed it. it was a complicated expensive high risk mission, which they wouldn't have done just to prop up some kind of propaganda like; they pretty obviously thought it was a major threat which needed to be nipped in the bud, like saddam's reactor 25 years ago. on the other hand, israel's image of superhuman competence has slipped since then leading to the possibility that they were wrong. memories of the clinton administration and the sudanese aspirin factory attack.

calling in the iaea certainly seems like the proper thing to do, but if the israelis were right about the site and the iaea declared it clean, it would be the israelis who ended up dead, not the iaea; so from their point of view, if they were certain, better to just act rather than be seen to be going against the iaea, bush administration in iraq style. time is also of the essence, similar to the aforementioned iraq reactor attack; much better to destroy the place before it's full of nuclear fuel, wouldn't you say?

it's reminiscent of the cold war, in that MAD is what keeps everybody involved relatively well behaved. if one party developed the capacity to destroy the other including destroying any second strike retaliatory capacity, the game would become much more dangerous. israel, for however many nukes they may have, will never be able to do that to its dispersed nations. whereas just a few simultaneous nukes would put israel off the map. this asymmetry is why allowing israel leeway regarding preemptive strikes on these types of targets is in fact a stabilizing factor.

god, it's the bigendians and the littleendians all over again.

poor democrats, to be so cursed with two (or, a few months back, like half a dozen) excellent candidates for the presidency, and facing a contest against a party whose best candidate's best tactic is to try to emulate the pathetic failure his party provided for the past 8 years. so, what else is there to do, but start attacking each other like rabid weasels rather than trying to appeal to the intellect (because after all, aren't the liberal elite supposed to be the intellectuals, etc. etc.?) by explaining in some detail the differences of each candidate's platform? because that's politics, right?

you think the media isn't driving that? you think they'd give the same airtime to the differences between the candidates' healthcare policies as to their digs at each other and the nasty remarks made by their overcaffeinated staffers?

i don't know how many folks saw the recent nostalgia pieces in the papers about the famous photo from the boston busing riots days of the black guy about to be speared by the US flag in front of city hall; but they (the ny times maybe?) tracked down the people involved and what really happened; the guy who was "holding the victim" was in fact trying to yank him away to safety, and the guy with the flag wasn't trying to stab the victim, he was swinging it sideways at him but that doesn't show in a photo, especially with the sideways perspective (yeah, small improvement, but still.....)

yeah, back with a bang

i'm an uberscientific type; i also believe that what we perceive as reality is only a distant shadow of what reality actually is. (study quantum physics and tell me differently). as such, i don't see that religion and science are obviously not intrinsically going to converge towards the same "ultimate truth". that question of 'how many angels can fit on the head of a pin' we laugh at now was the string theory of its day.

the problem is we teach dumb religion now like we teach dumb science. not that the masses haven't always enjoyed both, but nowadays we think everybody's getting a "good education". in fact, great religious thinkers of the past weren't any more believers in the old man with a beard peevishly jotting down demerits in a big book than chris hitchens is. just because folks lived a long time ago doesn't make them stupid.

"I deplore all of those civilian killings as well, but 9/11 was indefensible"

?? are you saying that our civilian killings were/are? maybe you're right that 9/16 was a stupid time to start discussing them, but that's pretty small potatoes.

chris rock is right, when he says all black people over a certain age hate whites, for good reasons. not every white person deserves it, but folks who lived prior to the 60s like Wright have seen what lies beneath the thin ice of the somewhat more progressive recent less than 50 years, which is already starting to crack. and it's his job to call down hellfire and brimstone where he thinks it appropriate.