I have no idea who wrote this, but I agree.

IMMIGRANTS, NOT AMERICANS, MUST ADAPT.

If Stars and Stripes offend you, or you don't like Uncle Sam, then you should seriously consider a move to another part of this planet. We are happy with our culture and have no desire to change, and we really don't care how you did things where you came from. This is OUR COUNTRY, our land, and our lifestyle. Our First Amendment gives every citizen the right to express his opinion and we will allow you every opportunity to do so! But once you are done complaining, whining, and griping about our flag, our pledge, our national motto, or our way of life, I highly encourage you take advantage of one other great American freedom, THE RIGHT TO LEAVE.

You probably missed it in the rush of news last week, but there was actually a report that someone in Pakistan had published in a newspaper there an offer of a reward to anyone who killed an American, any American.

So I just thought I would write to let them know what an American is, so they would know when they found one.

An American is English or French, or Italian, Irish, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian or Greek. An American may also be African, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Australian, Iranian, Asian, or Arab, or Pakistani, or Afghan.

An American is Christian, or he could be Jewish, or Buddhist, or Muslim. In fact, there are more Muslims in America than in Afghanistan. The only difference is that in America they are free to worship as each of them choose.

An American is also free to believe in no religion. For that he will answer only to God, not to the government, or to armed thugs claiming to speak for the government and for God.

An American is from the most prosperous land in the history of the world. The root of that prosperity can be found in the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes the God-given right of each man and woman to the pursuit of happiness.

An American is generous. Americans have helped out just about every other nation in the world in their time of need. When Afghanistan was overrun by the Soviet army 20 years ago, Americans came with arms and supplies to enable the people to win back their country. As of the morning of September 11, Americans had given more than any other nation to the poor in Afghanistan.

An American does not have to obey the mad ravings of ignorant, ungodly cruel, old men. American men will not be fooled into giving up their lives to kill innocent people, so that these foolish old men may hold on to power. American women are free to show their beautiful faces to the world, as each of them choose.

An American is free to criticize his government's officials when they are wrong, in his or her own opinion. Then he is free to replace them, by majority vote.

Americans welcome people from all lands, all cultures, all religions, because they are not afraid. They are not afraid that their history, their religion, their beliefs, will be overrun, or forgotten. That is because they know they are free to hold to their religion, their beliefs, their history, as each of them choose.

And just as Americans welcome all, they enjoy the best that everyone has to
bring, from all over the world. The best science, the best technology, the best products, the best books, the best music, the best food, the best athletes.

Americans welcome the best, but they also welcome the least. The nation symbol of America welcomes your tired and your poor, the wretched refuse of
your teeming shores, the homeless, tempest tossed.

These in fact are the people who built America. Many of them were working in the twin towers on the morning of September 11, earning a better life for their families.

So you can try to kill an American if you must. Hitler did. So did General Tojo and Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, and every bloodthirsty tyrant in thehistory of the world.

But in doing so you would just be killing yourself. Because Americans are not a particular people from a particular place. They are the embodiment of the human spirit of freedom. Everyone who holds to that spirit, everywhere, is an American.

So look around you. You may find more Americans in your land than you thought were there. One day they will rise up and overthrow the old, ignorant, tired tyrants that trouble too many lands. Then those lands too will join the community of free and prosperous nations.

And America will welcome them.

Defense Minister Yevhen Marchuk, in an interview published in the newspaper Den, appeared to suggest the missiles may have been dismantled without proper accounting, rather than stolen or sold.

RIGHT!!!

"We are looking for several hundred missiles," Marchuk was quoted as saying in Thursday's edition. "They have already been decommissioned, but we cannot find them".

Do you think Marchuk is corrupt?

Marchuk didn't specify the types of missile. Defense Ministry spokesman Kostyantyn Khivrenko told The Associated Press that he was referring to S-75 air defense missiles — also known in the West by the code-name SA-2.

SA-2's are bad JuJu.

Marchuk said the Defense Ministry hadn't observed the accounting requirements established by law until last summer, an apparent jab at his predecessors.

Cover his ass? I think so.

Hundreds of such missiles from Soviet arsenals in Warsaw Pact member countries had been brought to Ukraine for dismantling but were lost due to "accounting problems," Khivrenko said.

Do you really expext me to believe that? POS.

He said the absence of records documenting what happened to the missiles was "strange," and added that an investigation was under way.

By your own people, I'm sure.

The missiles entered service with the Soviet air defense troops in 1957. Able to shoot down targets at altitudes up to 12 1/2 miles, they have been sold to a large number of nations around the world.

It was the same type of missile that brought down a U.S. U-2 spy plane over the Ural Mountains in 1960. Its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, bailed out safely, but was captured, convicted as a spy, and held for almost two years until being traded for a KGB agent.

Like I said...these are some bad JuJu.

The S-75s played a prominent role in the Vietnam war, Mideast conflicts, and, most recently, were used in wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq.

Marchuk blamed his predecessors for not observing proper accounting standards while dealing with the missiles and other weapons.

Accounting Standards ? Give me a break!!!

"They say they were destroyed. OK, destroyed," Marchuk said. "Every such missile has gold, silver, platinum metals. Where are the results of their destruction?"

WTF does this have to do with anything?

Marchuk said that when he became minister, "no one knew what the armed forces had," and after nine months in the job he still doesn't have precise information.

Reminds me of Bill Clinton.

He said that inventories of military equipment had revealed a gaping hole equivalent to some $189 billion. In comparison, Ukraine's entire budget last year was less than $10 billion.

Like I said, reminds me of Bill Clinton.

Ukraine inherited a vast arsenal with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, including dozens of intercontinental ballistic missiles, strategic bombers and a wide array of other weapons. It shipped all its nuclear weapons to Russia in the early 1990s.

I doubt they shipped them all!!

Marchuk's statement drew renewed attention to numerous reports of military equipment leaking out of Ukraine amid the post-Soviet turmoil.

For a short time only!!

In 2002, the United States claimed Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma had sanctioned the sale of a sophisticated military radar to Iraq. The allegation, which Kuchma denies, badly strained relations between Washington and Kiev.

Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma is a POS.

General Hawley, is a recently retired USAF 4-star general. He commanded the USAF Air Combat Command. The Command headquarters is at Langley AFB, VA. General Hawley is now retired and no longer required to bepolitically correct. His short speech is very much to the point.

The following are excerpts:

"Since the attack [9-11], I have seen, heard, and read thoughts of such surpassing stupidity that they must be addressed. You've heard them too.
Here they are:

1) "We're not good, they're not evil, everything is relative." Listen carefully: We're good, they're evil, nothing is relative. Say it with menow and free yourselves. You see, folks, saying "We're good" doesn't mean, "We're perfect." Okay? The only perfect being is the bearded guy on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The plain fact is that our country has, with all our mistakes and blunders, always been and always will be the greatest beacon of freedom, charity, opportunity, and affection inhistory. If you need proof, open all the borders on Earth and see what happens.

2) "Violence only leads to more violence." This one is so stupid you usually have to be the president of an Ivy League university to say it. Here's the truth, which you know in your heads and hearts already: Ineffective, unfocused violence leads to more violence. Limp, panicky, half-measures lead to more violence. However, complete, fully thought-through, professional, well-executed violence never leads to more violence because, you see, afterwards, the other guys are all dead. That's right, dead. Not "on trial," not "reeducated," not "nurtured back into the bosom of love." Dead. D-E-A-D -- Well, you get the idea.

3) "The CIA and the rest of our intelligence community have failed us." For 25 years we have chained our spies like dogs to a stake in the ground, and now that the house has been robbed, we yell at them for not protecting us. Starting in the late seventies, under Carter appointee Stansfield Turner, the giant brains who get these giant ideas decided that the best way to gather international intelligence was to use spy satellites. "After all, (they reasoned,) you can see a license plate from 200 miles away." This is very helpful if you've been attacked by a license plate. Unfortunately, we were attacked by humans. Finding humans is not possible with satellites. You have to use other humans. When we bought all our satellites, we fired all our humans, and here's the really
stupid part. It takes years, decades to infiltrate new humans into the worst places of the world. You can't just have a guy who looks like Gary Busey in a Spring Break '93 sweatshirt plop himself down in a coffee shop in Kabul and say "Hiya, boys. Gee, I sure would like to meet that bin Laden fella. "Well, you can, but all you'd be doing is giving the bad guys a story they'll be telling for years.

4) "These people are poor and helpless, and that's why they're angry at us." Uh-huh, and Jeffrey Dahmer's frozen head collection was just a desperate cry for help. The terrorists and their backers are richer than Elton John and, ironically, a good deal less annoying. The poor helpless people, you see, are the villagers they tortured and murdered to stay in power. Mohammed Atta, one of the evil scumbags who steered those planes into the killing grounds is the son of a Cairo surgeon. But you knew this, too. In the sixties and seventies, all the pinheads marching against the war were upper-middle-class college kids who grabbed any cause they could think of to get out of their final papers and spend more time drinking. It's the same today.

5) "Any profiling is racial profiling." Who's killing us here, the Norwegians? Just days after the attack, the New York Times had an article saying dozens of extended members of the gazillionaire bin Laden family living in America were afraid of reprisals and left in a huff, never to return to studying at Harvard and using too much Drakkar. I'm crushed. Please come back. Let's all stop singing "We Are the World" for a minute and think practically. I don't want to be sitting on the floor in the back of a plane four seconds away from hitting Mt. Rushmore and turn, grinning, to the guy next to me to say, "Well, at least we didn't offend them." SO HERE'S what I resolve for the New Year: Never to forget our murdered brothers and sisters. Never to let the relativists get away with their immoral thinking. After all, no matter what your daughter's
political science professor says, we didn't start this. Have you seen that bumper sticker that says, "No More Hiroshimas"? I wish I had one that says, "No More Pearl Harbors."

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001.

Steinbeck, John


1902–68, American writer, b. Salinas, Calif., studied at Stanford. He is probably best remembered for his strong sociological novel The Grapes of Wrath, considered one of the great American novels of the 20th cent. Steinbeck’s early novels—Cup of Gold (1929), The Pastures of Heaven (1932), and To a God Unknown (1933)—attracted little critical attention, but Tortilla Flat (1935), an affectionate yet realistic novel about the lovable, exotic, Spanish-speaking poor of Monterey, was enthusiastically received. A compassionate understanding of the world’s disinherited was to be Steinbeck’s hallmark. The novel In Dubious Battle (1936) defends striking migrant agricultural workers in the California fields. In the novella Of Mice and Men (1937; later made into a play), Steinbeck again presents migrant workers, but this time in terms of human worth and integrity—a theme he also used in The Moon Is Down (1942; later made into a play), about Norwegian resistance to the Nazis. The Grapes of Wrath (1939; Pulitzer Prize), while treating the plight of dispossessed Dust Bowl farmers during the 1930s, presents a universal picture of victims of disaster. Steinbeck’s depiction of the westward migration of the Joad family, and their subsequent struggles in the exploitative agricultural industry of California, is realistic and moving, and he endows his humble characters with nobility. Steinbeck’s other works are diverse, ranging from the literal account of a voyage, The Sea of Cortez (1941; written with the marine biologist E. F. Ricketts); to a parable, The Pearl (1948); to a playful French folk piece, The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957). Love of his native land shines through the exquisitely nostalgic story “The Red Pony” in The Long Valley (1938). The somewhat sentimental attitude of Tortilla Flat appears again in Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1947), and Sweet Thursday (1954). More ambitious are the novels East of Eden (1952), a family chronicle with the Cain and Abel theme, and Winter of Our Discontent (1961), about a suburbanite’s moral conflict. Steinbeck also wrote notable nonfiction, particularly The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) and A Russian Journal (1948), and the screenplays for the motion pictures The Forgotten Village (1941) and Viva Zapata! (1952). Travels with Charley in Search of America appeared in 1962 and America and Americans in 1966. Steinbeck was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature. 1
See his letters, ed. by E. Steinbeck and R. Wallsten (1975); biographies by J. Benson (1984) and J. Parini (1995); study by J. H. Timmerman (1986).,

NEWS STORY
Canada's first space probe may miss its target -- Mars

Tom Spears
Canwest News Service

Monday, November 24, 2003
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OTTAWA -- Canada's first space mission to another planet -- a science instrument riding on a Japanese probe heading to Mars -- is likely doomed as the Nozomi spacecraft is escaping control and may miss Mars completely.

Nozomi has been flying for five years and has already missed Mars once. It carries a Canadian-built instrument that would measure the gases in Mars' thin atmosphere. Nozomi is designed to orbit Mars.

But Japan acknowledges it can barely control Nozomi, and the spacecraft may crash on Mars within a few weeks, or miss the planet and drift aimlessly around the sun forever.

Nozomi means "Hope," and the little spacecraft could use some.

It has experienced a series of failures that kept it from reaching Mars on its first trip. Unfazed, its operators swung it around for a second pass at the Red Planet, but now say the probe is in its "final challenge" and may never arrive.

Translation: Nozomi, and the Canadian-built Thermal Plasma Analyzer, may continue a tradition of man-made probes that don't survive the trip to the bad-luck planet.

Canada's instrument is the country's first participation in a mission to another planet. In theory, once Mars orbit is established, the Thermal Plasma Analyzer will be extended out from the satellite on a boom, and its measurements of the Martian atmosphere will begin.

It is designed to measure low-energy particles and gases considered vital to the understanding of the origin and composition of the Martian atmosphere. Other instruments will study the magnetic field of Mars and take pictures of the planet's surface.

The Canadian Space Agency is funding this research. It involves scientists from the University of Calgary (the co-Principal Investigators of the TPA are Dr. Andrew Yau and Dr. Greg Garbe, professors of physics and astronomy at the University of Calgary), as well as scientists from the Universities of Alberta, Western Ontario, and Victoria. Others on the research team include scientists from Hokkaido, Nagoya and Tokyo.

Nozomi's troubles began in December 1998 during an Earth fly-by that was to "slingshot" the craft toward Mars, and arrive there in October 1999.

But the plan went wrong. A stuck valve forced controllers to do extra manoeuvres, leaving Nozomi too low on fuel to steer safely into orbit around Mars at the scheduled arrival time.

The Nozomi team was forced to steer a more indirect path, and the probe is now closing in on Mars, and is due to arrive next month. As well, the probe's main transmitter stopped working, so scientists now depend on a backup.

Also, a large solar flare a year-and-a-half ago damaged its power system.

Nozomi isn't dead yet. On Friday the Japanese Space Agency had this to say:

"Nozomi right now is under 'the last challenge' to repair its malfunction on which must be concentrated all [the] task force of scientists and engineers of Nozomi mission team until its outcome is clearly known. Upon recovering from the damage, we will then work on putting the probe to orbit around Mars and resume its exploration."

But if they can't repair the damage they will steer away from Mars. "Nozomi will, after once approaching Mars, escape from Martian gravitational sphere to become an artificial planet going around the orbit of the sun forever."

The Ottawa Citizen

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: MAY I INTRODUCE TO YOU THE THEME PARK OF THE NEXT GENERATION (ASSUMING THAT THE SOCIALISTS IN DEMOTURD CLOTHING HAVE THEIR WAY):

S P R O U T W O R L D
A VISION, by Key Monroe.
Come one. Come all to the magical land of tofu and bean sprouts, where animals roam free rather than lay gutted and deep-fried on a platter before you. We have many lands of promise that have been built with love for your enjoyment.

ENVIRO-LAND
Come see what the world would be like without the oppression of mankind constantly bearing itself down upon it. Explore the forests that haven't been touched in decades. Experience thick underbrush, swamps brimming with mosquito larvae, areas so rich with oil that it bubbles at the surface, wildlife so thick that it costs taxpayers a million a day to keep the boogers alive. For some reason, if we don't feed them, then we find dead, mangled, carcasses laying about everywhere drawing flies and buzzards, and the stench....Oh, the stench! But, no worries, all that is taken care of. So come and join us, bring your boots, and guys, leave the bug spray at home. It's bad for Enviroland.

THE LAND OF INDOCTRINATION
A favorite. This is where our precious youth learns everything that they need to know to carry this beautiful legacy on to the next generation. We must thank our programmers for giving up their own beliefs long ago and dedicating themselves to this noble cause.

PEACE-KEEPING LAND
We are most proud of our success in this arena. Countries and people alike are coming together to discuss their problems rationally. Ambassadors are a thing of the past. They have been replaced by certified counselors that are teaching the world how to communicate. Weapons have become an antique. In fact, if you'd like to view one, we have several museums that showcase primitive weaponry.

SMARMYLAND
Meet our great country's leaders. Enter the smarmy gates and come face to face with the individuals who are responsible for creating the paradise that you see before you. (Please note: if you hear moaning, please wait until the intern leaves the room before entering. Thank you.)

LAND OF STANDARDIZED HEALTHCARE
Finally, a land where everyone has the same medical benefits. Now everyone suffers equally under a new plan that gets us all a little nostalgic when we think of the good 'ol HMO. Discover the program that sent the Canadian doctors RUNNING back to the border with many American doctors on their heels. Meet the ONLY two dozen doctors left in the country, and please, do not feel obligated to give to their children's college fund. Yes, they ask everyone.

ABORTIONLAND
Well, the name says it all. Come here and watch our county's women exercise their right to choose. But please, make reservations early. We have precious few doctors and limited space in the viewing area.

LAND OF INFLATION
The most fun of the park! Take a ride on the yo-yoing economy, or belt yourself in to the coaster of doom!*

Enjoy all of this with your FREE admission to Sproutworld. Don't worry about a thing! All of the fun that you can stomach--for that matter all of the sprouts that you can stomach are ON US! That's because we've had you bent over a barrel for years now until we finally managed to finance our billions a day project. (We apologize if this has affected your standard of living.)

*Sorry, we've had to temporarily close the coaster. It seems that a rebel brat from Georgia escaped from the School of Indoctrination, stole a bazooka from the Museum of Antiquities, fired it into Enviroland, turned it into an inferno, and sent the overpopulated animal kingdom scurrying into the Land of Inflation where they met their demise on the tracks of the coaster of doom! We apologize for the delay. We are sending our clean-up crew--who make as much as the doctors do, because that's only fair--to the scene, and the guts and ash should be out of your way in no time. I hope everyone realizes that this is the fault of that damn rebel. We had everything set up perfectly.