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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (11252)	6/6/1999 10:17:00 PM
From: George Papadopoulos	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

This tragic episode apparently is not over...This is getting worse by the hour.......where will it end? Downright spooky:( Sunday June 6 9:11 PM ET Kosovo Talks Fail, NATO To Intensify Bombing KUMANOVO, Macedonia (Reuters) - Talks between NATO and Yugoslav military commanders broke down in the early hours of Monday and NATO's Lieutenant-General Mike Jackson said the alliance would intensify its bombing until Belgrade gave in. The Yugoslav delegation had failed to stick to the agreement reached last week between Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Russian and EU envoys, he added. ''NATO has no alternative but to continue and intensify the air campaign until such time as the Yugoslav side are prepared to implement the agreement fully and without ambiguity,'' Jackson said. ''We are prepared to meet with the Yugoslav delegation as necessary to achieve it,'' he added. A Yugoslav spokesman also left open the prospect of further meetings. ''We are ready to talk further,'' he told journalists. NATO's stated aim in the two days of talks in Macedonia had been to get Yugoslav commanders to agree to its proposed details of routes and methods of a full Yugoslav retreat from Kosovo, not to negotiate over peace terms. ''The Yugoslav delegation presented a proposal that would not guarantee the safe return of the refugees or the full withdrawal of Yugoslav forces and indeed was inconsistent with the text produced by the President of Finland (Martti) Ahtisaari and (Viktor) Chernomyrdin, the Russian special Balkans envoy,'' Jackson read from a prepared statement.

To: Neocon who wrote (11252)	6/11/1999 2:00:00 AM
From: D. Long	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17770

Neo, On the subject of an ultimate grounding for the cosmos, I think that would be counterproductive, and delusional. Any attempt to project meaning on a universe that simply Exists is to fall back into anthropomorphic hubris. The universe is not a machine, as machine connotes purpose, nor is it evolutionary in the biological sense (ala Spencer) as life connotes purposefullness (replication of life). In the end, philosophy must come to grips with the fact that any teleological justification of the yawning purposelessness of the universe is self-deception. In our desire to project meaning upon our own existence, we feel the need to project meaning upon the universe, because the universe ultimately reflects our own selves. Let me give some explanation, as a lot of my own conviction is in that paragraph. The human dilemma is that we are creatures born with the capacity to reason, and hence grasp our own existence in the universe. The universe itself is a cold, meaningless, reality... life itself is a mysterious growth out of the futility of this reality. The meaning of life can be summed up in one word: replication. The entire purpose of life is to recreate itself, immortality of the DNA. Human beings are the freaks of the universe, in that we are unleashed from mere reaction, and have the capacity for, indeed our very nature is, reflection and reasoning. So we are in an odd spot, having grown beyond the bounds of our biological imperatives, and able to project our own imperatives, our own reality, upon the world, and ourselves. So we have the situation where our existence is fundamentally, from the point of view of the creative animal, absurd. The question for the human animal is not, what is the meaning of the universe, but what meaning should we create for ourselves? We are in the unique position of being the self-defining organism, and this, I believe, is the challenge of philosophy. Derek