GEEZ! Live and learn. That's the first time I've ever heard that buried deep insid the "borg" (hahaha - love it) cube is the "Black Stone of Kaaba" and it's a freakin meteorite. Maybe it fell from the sky and killed Mohammed's fav camel or something. Anybody know?
I think right after 9/11 they should have waited until the Haj -the thing where 11 MILLION muslims run in circles around the Borg Cube - and they should have brought in Bombardier water bombers full of PIG GUTS AND BLOOD and let'em have it. Splooosh. They'd all go freakin MAD! It's WAAAY worse than shooting them!
There is NO reason (other than terminal PC) why, if they can condone the attack on the WTC etc that we shouldn't be open to using time "honored" techniques of knocking muslim insurections back a few hundred years. The British did it to great success. They'd round up a bunch of obvious suspects and execute say, 8 out of 10 and while the 2 survivors watched they would chuck the dead dudes into a pit full of pig guts and poo thus ensuring the dead guys NEVER got to go to Allah-land. Then they let the 2 free. By 6Am the next day the insurection was DEAD!
BTW I've asked 3 Muslims - one a univesity prof, one a very well known lawyer and another guy who is just super rich - what would happen if the Borg Cube was nuked or otherwise destroyed. The reaction was scary. Within two minutes 2 of the 3 were crying like babies and rocking back and forth. The other guy was almost catatonic and started to pray and didn't hear anything else I asked. All of them (before they flipped) said that it would be "the end ... the end of everything .... the end ... man ... end ..." Like that. These were all seperate incidents. They all acted the same way and these guys were all very well educated, world travellers and very rich and very "westernized." Their reaction was startling to say the least.
I guess it's nice to know that that may be the ace in the hole if things go wonky and we do need to do something like that in the future. My take is that 90% of them would simply go insane.
Oh BTW. I wrote a note to Melanie Phillips and thanked her for a great article. She just sent a very nice response. Maybe a few of you could drop her an email too. Writers like that are so few and far between they need all the encouragement us Neandrathals can send them.
Just a thought ...
Star Trek: The Next Generation is the source of the term Borg cube.
The Borg are a people with a collective mind. They run around the galaxy, in spaceships shaped like cubes, destroying other sentient species. The ships are huge, ugly (the Borg have no aesthetic sensitivity), and extremely powerful.
The individuals are expendable; only the collective matters. They get the individuals from the species that they conquer. Their favorite saying is, "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."
Their goal is to assimilate every other species in the galaxy.
The Kaaba (meaning "House of Allah") is an ancient cube shaped stone building inside the main mosque in Mecca. It is 50 feet long, 33 feet wide, and 45 feet high. It predates Islam, though it may have been rebuilt since.
Set in a corner of the building is the Kaaba Stone, which also predates Islam. It was supposed to have been given to Adam after his expulsion from Eden by the angel Gabriel. It is about eight inches in diameter and believed to be an iron/nickle meterorite. It is set in a large silver ring. It is believed by Muslims to have been originally white, but supposedly has turned black from absorbing the sins of pilgrims.
Every muslim must make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca to walk seven times counterclockwise around the Kaaba and touch the Kaaba Stone and kiss it.
See post #71 for my suggestion as to what to do with it.
My apologies to DAVE632. It's obvious from your post that you get the Borg reference.