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Thinking Black Thoughts


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Pat wrote:

We live in a world where more people believe in angels than in God, without ever stopping to realize that the existence of angels requires the existence of God.

Pat, a very interesting statement.  Do you actually have the statistics re the percentage of people who believe in angels but not God? You are correct, of course, that this is irrational. .

There was a survey a few years back that was widely quoted for a brief while--I seem to remember seeing Jay Leno do some jokes on it. This survey came out when shows like "Touched By An Angel" were on the tube and films like "Michael" starring John Travolta were at the theatre. Anyhow, as I remember it, something like 75% of those surveyed said they beleved in angels, but only 70% said they believed in the God of the Bible. This struck me at the time as indicative of a lot of people's basic stupidity, and I asked around and found several acquaintances who believed in angels but not the God of the Bible. Their thinking was something along the lines that it was easier for them to believe in invisible spirits that appear on occasion to help people, than it was for them to believe in an all-powerful God who allows babies to die and people like Hitler to gain power. It just never occurred to them that the existence of angels was connected to the existence of a Biblical God.

Thanks to shows like "Highway to Heaven" they'd grown up thinking it was completely rational to believe in angels, the same way those who grew up with Back To The Future thought time travel was just a matter of time, so to speak.

Edited by Pat Speer
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This was an interesting colloquy but isn't it also interesting how these threads start on one topic and end on another seemingly unrelated?

Pat, do you know if the 5% who believe in angels but not God --are the same small percentage who still believe the Warren Commission Report?

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This was an interesting colloquy but isn't it also interesting how these threads start on one topic and end on another seemingly unrelated?

Pat, do you know if the 5% who believe in angels but not God --are the same small percentage who still believe the Warren Commission Report?

If Gerald Posner would write a book PROVING the existence of angels separate from God I'm sure 5% of America would believe him. Afterwards Peter Jennings could do an in-depth investigation which reveals nothing and Dale Myers could create a computer simulation demonstrating Posner's proof, using anatomically incorrect models of angels of course.

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  • 5 months later...

Al let on a few weeks back that he was making progress in identifying some shooters he suspected were flown in from Nam. Don Roberdeau is another one who hasn't posted much lately but is reportedly working on something big. Hopefully we'll hear from them soon with the results of their hard work.

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John, so you agree that in October of 1962 Curtis LeMay and the other military advisers who urged Kennedy to immediately invade Cuba were correct that the Soviets would not respond militarily?  And in resisting the demands of his military advisers Kennedy was responding to a "daft" idea that the Soviet Union might initiate a nuclear attack if we invaded Cuba?  You may very well be correct that LeMay and others were right and Kennedy chose negotiation over invasion because of his belief in a "daft idea".  I may very well agree with you.  But this turns the consensus of history on its head, that being that the Cuban missile crisis was Kennedy's "finest hour" and he may very well have saved the world by courageously resisting the demands of his military advisers and choosing negotiation over military confrontation.

You are confusing two different issues here. The Cuban Missile Crisis was very different from the invasion of Hungary or Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union had placed men and weapons in a country in America’s sphere of influence. Once this became known, JFK had no choice but to resolve the issue. It then became a question of how you did this.

The Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ECNSC) came up with six possible solutions.

(1) Do nothing. The United States should ignore the missiles in Cuba. The United States had military bases in 127 different countries including Cuba. The United States also had nuclear missiles in several countries close to the Soviet Union. It was therefore only right that the Soviet Union should be allowed to place missiles in Cuba.

(2) Negotiate. The United States should offer the Soviet Union a deal. In return for the Soviet Union dismantling her missiles in Cuba, the United States would withdraw her nuclear missiles from Turkey and Italy.

(3) Invasion. Send United States troops to Cuba to overthrow Castro's government. The missiles could then be put out of action and the Soviet Union could no longer use Cuba as a military base.

(4) Blockade of Cuba. Use the United States Navy to stop military equipment reaching Cuba from the Soviet Union.

(5) Bomb Missile Bases. Carry out conventional air-strikes against missiles and other military targets in Cuba.

(6) Nuclear Weapons. Use nuclear weapons against Cuba and/or the Soviet Union.

The above exchange leaves out a critical element that was only discovered in the late 1980's at one of James Blight's oral history conferences, which were attended at times by both Castro and McNamara. It is the disclosure that the Soviets had pre-authorized its generals on the ground in Cuba to use tactical Luna nuclear missiles against any invasion force. This sort of tactical use of such weapons and the ramifications thereof didn't gain widespread recognition until the U.S. deployment of nuclear cruise missiles in Europe to stop any potential invasion by conventionally superior Warsaw Pact forces in the late Seventies and early Eighties. The idea was that the use of nuclear weapons on one's own soil didn't constitute nuclear agression, and therefore wouldn't warrant a nuclear retaliation.

This was the circumstance in Cuba during the Missile Crisis. Soviet generals had already been authorized to launch against an invasion force. McNamara has since stated that this unknown element was the most dangerous factor in the Crisis, and that there would have been no stopping the action/reaction sequence to all-out nuclear war. Of the above-named options, ExComm recognized that bombing the missile sites was insufficient in that it would not take them all out. A bombing of the sites by necessity required a follow-up invasion, which would have automatically triggered the use of the tactical Luna nukes, which would then have automatically triggered a massive U.S. response. There is no way Kennedy could have restrained the U.S. military after 100,000 U.S. troops were killed with a nuclear device on a Cuban beachhead, even if that didn't constitute agression against another nation's sovereignty.

I am clearly one of those who consider the Missile Crisis to be one of Kennedy's finest hours, even if he didn't have the full picture at the time.

Tim

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Tim  Welcome back!  Glad to see you are still alive, well, thinking and writting.  Jim Root 

Thanks very much Jim. I look forward to more discussion with you about the relationship between Max Taylor and Edwin Walker.

Tim

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