[wordup] Perspective and responses.

[Adam Shand]

Well there's been a lot of response to my "Prepare..." posting, and
unsurprisingly not all of it was positive.  I was going to post a lot of
the negative responses because I think they are interesting but in order
to be interesting they have to be posted in full and this would end up
being a really long message.  So thanks for those that spanked me, you all
have valid points.

For those that have sent thank you's and updates I appreciated it, and
it's kept me busy over the last day.  Thanks.

From: http://www.interesting-people.org/200109/

Wanna see me get reamed?  Well check out the archives.  I think it's
interesting that it got called "a very unbalanced piece of partisan
paranoia".  Of all the things I would have called myself, partisan is not
oen of them.

From: Royce Williams <royce at alaska.net>

Watch this one closely - there's what appears to be F16 accompaniment
shortly after the impact.

	http://www.cnn.com/video/us/2001/09/11/vo.wtc.2nd.plane.pax.med.html

Via: Daniel Hasenstaub <danielh at spack.org>
From: http://www.seds.org/billa/psc/pbd.html

Written by Carl Sagan in 1996: We succeeded in taking that picture [from
deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's
home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who
ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and
sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic
doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator
and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple
in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and
explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every
superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of
our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the
rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in
glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction
of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one
corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other
corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they
are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our
imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged
position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our
obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come
from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said
that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building
experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the
folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me,
it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately
with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only
home we've ever known.