AnthonyB posts this gem: 'One thing I do find interesting on the far left however, is the strange acceptance that America meddles constantly in the affairs of other nations but a refusal to believe that other nations engage in similar behaviour.'

Oh boy Tony you had me ROTFLMAO on that one. Sheesh, how do you come up with lines like that?

I, for one, can imagine a certain nation meddling in our affairs. Indeed, I think Mr. Kamiya touched on this nation in his article (heh, heh).

Tell me, can you ever imagine that this nation might somehow think it is in its national interest to send the USA in to destroy a regime hostile to that country & its fervid dreams of greater glory?

I agree with Jason G. & anyone else above who might have posted with the same thoughts.

This letter seems fake. Not 'fake' as in Cary wrote it, but instead written by some jerk who is parodying some of the losers who write in with asinine problems (some people, of course, write in with very serious problems that Cary addresses).

Quote from said dipshit: '(snip 6th grade epithets). And I say that as a progressive-leftist Chomskyite. The man was run out on a rail over next-to-nothing, his implicit freedom of speech violated like almost no one's has been before.'

Uh, Rob do you know anything about 'free speech'? I say that rhetorically, since it's obvious you don't have a clue.

Mr. Imus still has allllll the free speech our great country has to offer. He can stand on a corner & say the same 'comments' that got him in this mess. He can write letters to the editor spewing the same garbage, he can place them on a big sign on his property.

What he can't do for the time being is say those comments into the public airwaves & be paid millions for doing so. That's the 'implicit freedom' (snort) he lost yesterday.

There's a fine quote you've probably heard before, it goes 'you can remain silent & be thought a fool or open your mouth & remove all doubt'. I think in your case doubt flew out the window a long time ago.

with PaulBC above. They may think the emails are deleted, but unless a very extensive & redundant deletion process (both at the time the actual email itself is 'deleted' and then afterwards on all applicable servers) has been undertaken, they are still out there some place.

I thought Sen Leahy had a good line about knowing a 15 year old who could get them back pretty quick. I got a good chuckle out of that.

Jon said up above: 'the result of Morgoth's curse was only to make Turin what he was: i.e. to alter his nature so as to make him not proud, persistent, and bold but headstrong, stubborn, and violent; and to add to this the misfortune of being very unlucky.'

Morgoth's curse upon the childrten of Hurin may have made Turin act in that manner, but the purpose of the curse was always to try & force Hurin into giving up the location of Gondolin.

RosindaleLawlor (that's a name Mr. Tolkein would love, one of the Lawlors from Hardbottle) asked: 'Has anyone heard if there is anything in Tolkien's attic that would give more detail to this story? Sorry if it's already published and I missed it.'

A brief recounting of it is told in the Silmarillion. Unfinished Tales also touches upon events that occurred roughly 1500 years before 'the fall' but have some bearing upon later events in Numenor. Some of the Lost Tales stories are earlier/rougher drafts of that tale.

Nothing that I know of which is fleshed out to something approaching LOTR length, though.

IonaTrailer asked: 'So who exactly is going to decide which ones are the "good" people and which ones are the "bad" people?'

I know when you're in the gun selling business, the 'good' people are the ones who pay cash & the 'bad' ones are those who handle the product & then don't buy anything.

Nomogen above asked: 'Finally, he had the raining to use the gun; I wonder how? He practiced this killing and no one noticed! I wonder how detached we are so that we do not pick up such signs.'

IMO, it's not that hard to use a pistol (once you know how to properly load it & get it off safety). Anyone who as a kid played cops & robbers & eyeballed their playmates with a toy gun or a straight stick was picking up the rudiments.

Many video games also will give you a certain amount of familiarity with a gun. If you are shooting something at close range (10 feet away or closer), it's even easier. I think I read that the young murderer had been target shooting sometime in last 6 months before this horror unfolded.

Think about how easy it is to drive your car into a tree beside the road (if that was what you wanted to do). It's about that easy (physically, not mentally IMO) to point a gun at something very close, shoot it & hit the target.

My boss, who's forgot more about PCs & data processing than I'll ever know, mentioned to me that the government was buying a bunch of supercomputers. He opined that maybe the government is trying to use the computers to calculate every prime number up to the 30th or so power (enormous numbers).

He said that if they knew all these prime number values, they could crack the encryption methods used by most computers today.

I thought I'd throw this out there & see if any of our more computer literate posters would agree with the conjecture.

Duffolonious, thank you for responding to the point I raised a few pages ago.

Appreciate your insight in this matter.