With all the knowledge and skill acquired in thousands of flights in the last ten years I would hardly think today of making my first flight on a strange machine in a twenty-seven mile wind even if I knew that the machine had already been flown and was safe.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants crowded together around the Hill blackening the ground that you begin to see the whole beast and now you observe it thinking planning calculating. It is an intelligence a kind of live computer with crawling bits for its wits.

Hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women are deployed across the world in the war on terror. By bringing hope to the oppressed and delivering justice to the violent they are making America more secure.

But inspiration? - That's when you come home from abroad and are asked: Well have you found inspiration? - and fortunately you haven't. But the impressions sink in of course and may emerge later: None of us has invented the house that was done many thousands of years ago.

In Afghanistan there is a plan to build democracy hundreds of thousands of troops are protecting it. There is a plan to rebuild and reconstruct there. But many thousands of Americans die from violence and poverty every year and we don't have a plan for reconstruction at home.

And that's actually the brunt of what we do is people going straight from their workplace straight from home straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands more students.

Now I know there are many Americans who say 'Get out of Afghanistan. Bring 'em all home.' And there are others who say 'Put in hundreds of thousands of more.'

Classes struggle some classes triumph others are eliminated. Such is history such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.

Great Britain had a much different situation than we do and did here in the United States in that they had literally thousands of infected animals with human health risks. Their infectivity in this disease happened before very much was known about it.

Jobs are disappearing from every sector of the economy from engineering to health care workers forcing hundreds of thousands of families into unemployment and low-paying jobs.