Replies

"...But how, exactly, will we refuse to tolerate it? One European leader said the situation calls for "very strong words."..."

Idiotic sentiments like this make any man or woman who is grounded in reality lightheaded to read.

'Very Strong Words'...

Would those 'Very Strong Words' be delivered with 'Fiercely Stern Scowls', or do terrorists have to light up a nuclear weapon in a city somewhere before we'll up the ante to that?

Brutal assaults demand savage, sometimes almost inhumanly cruel, REPRISALS... Not 'Strong Words'. If naked challenges to our power and autonomy are not answered in this way the enemy will march on us, it's not complicated.

This gritty reality doesn't doom a civilization. It CAN make maintaining it a dicey proposition at times, but the results have (so far) always justified the efforts required to achieve them.

Bending over and presenting their hindquarters while hoping for mercy is a strategy that the weak employ as they fumble through their subservient, second-rate lives. But it is not an appropriate response for Free Men to stoop to.

Those with a grotesquely naïve school-marm mentality, who believe that 'Strong Words' are a legitimate response to aggression, have no standing, no right whatsoever to participate in any way in the process whereby decent men and women protect what they, and their ancestors before them, have labored to build. Those who cannot respond correctly to an attack should be dismissed and brushed aside by those who can.

Because, before we can defeat our enemies, we must first render the fools among us harmless.

Many lines of scientific research suggest that the evolution of life is a natural and common outgrowth of stellar and planetary evolution, and that interstellar communication and travel should be feasible (though not easy).

Ha ha ha ha ha. If the evidence for evolution on earth shows that getting to the point of producing a sentient creature like man is something so incredibly unlikely as to almost defy belief, then for it to have happened just one other place would require a squaring of the odds. For a third, place, a cubing of the odds, and so on. Someone, I believe it was Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's Bulldog, said something to the effect that evolution (I think he was referring to the present day outcome of the process, not the process itself) was impossible or at least highly improbable because the only alternative, special creation, was "clearly unthinkable". Strictly from the standpoint of naturalism, then, the silence out there is much more likely from our being all alone.

Unnatural plagues may be another matter entirely. A combination of technologies, including biological culturing, weapon-building, and rapid global transportation, can make it possible for a very few individuals (or even one) to do things that really could wipe out whole populations, possibly even on a planetwide scale.

Actually, we have a scientific case to study on the likelihood of this happening. A bioligical agent, Myxomatosis, was used in Australia to attempt the irradication of the feral European rabbit. It failed, due to the rabbits developing resistance to it.

Quote (from the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)): When first introduced in the 1950s, myxomatosis killed 99 per cent of the rabbit population: the kill rate today is often less than 50 per cent. After release of the myxoma virus, insufficient attention was given to the need for conventional rabbit control methods to cull those rabbits which survived myxomatosis. The virus evolved into less virulent forms that allowed both the rabbit and virus to survive. At the same time, rabbits developed greater resistance to the disease. These factors allowed rabbit numbers to increase again to plague proportions in several areas, and the opportunity to keep rabbit numbers low was lost. UNQUOTE

Note that even though 99% of the rabbits were killed, the one percent that survived passed on their resistance to the agent allowing the population to expand again. So perhaps even if one percent of humanity survives, we'll make it. In my opinion, no mammal species more resembles the feral European rabbit in Australia than human beings on the Earth.