Some rather interesting thoughts on the deficit and national debt:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/mar/02/unsaid-on-debt-and-deficit

I second that.

Back to the question at hand though, I cannot understand why the question of Scottish and Welsh MPs getting to vote on purely English matters has not been addressed constitutionally, (and for the record, I don’t think the reverse should be true either).

Is there any reason, other than an unwillingness to bring it up?

How about a Hawk Variant manufactured in the US? The USN already have the Goshawk in service, might offer some commonality?

IMHO it would take some kind of total unmitigated disaster, one where the UK find itself powerless to respond, to make the politicos change their minds and start giving defence a prudent budget and capability.

Not that I want this to happen, but I think this is how bad it has gotten.

If all we had was 6 months then the best we (as a species) could hope for would be to build some bunkers to try to preserve what life we could to re-populate the earth, assuming of course they would survive the strike.

I have seen lead times varying from 10-25 years when it comes to deflecting an asteroid, either with sales of a chain of nuclear charges.

Back to thoughts about the Empire:

Has anyone ever noticed that the places colonized and organized by the British are, while not without fault, mostly wealthy and first world, among the nicer places to live? United States, Australia, portions of Canada, South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.

Don’t forget other, perhaps less desirable places to live, such as Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan. It seems that the wealth spread mainly to places where large numbers of Europeans went to live.

As for Haiti, it hasn’t been a colony since the 18th Century, and was crippled by high interest loans from then until 1947.

And what about what was found in the rock samples that were brought back from Mars?.

Lincoln. 7

It’s hard to say what they are, but they bore a resemblance to fossilised bacteria, but they were much smaller than is generally accepted as possible for a living organism. That said they were found with crystals that on Earth are only created by living organisms.

Statistically it would be ludicrous to contend that somewhere out there there isn’t some other form of life, given that all the ingredients are out there and new telescopes are revealing just how many extrasolar planets there are, but I think it’s unlikely they would have visited us in the manner some suggest.