It's amazing just on the puny power of the sun by having a super lightweight plane, you're able to get it up there.

Yes, the Kremlin was able to smack down the uppity Mikheil Saakashvili s hope of reuniting his country by force. But the world saw in Russia s onslaught against so puny an antagonist a thuggish state determined to recapture its lost empire.

Today's great powers have relied on similar methods, also heavy with rhetoric, against puny opponents, but with far less convincing results. The United States put 500,000 troops into Vietnam in the 1960 s, but withdrew before North Vietnam overran the South in 1975.

Finally, D Souza fell back, as many Christians do when pressed, on the claim that we should not expect to understand God s reasons for creating the world as it is. It is as if an ant should try to understand our decisions, so puny is our intelligence in comparison with the infinite wisdom of God.

Even government deficit spending long the bane of Africa seems positively puny compared to the massive debts that the US and some European countries face. The new Obama administration is proposing spending plans that would create a record US deficit of more than one trillion dollars and this coming on top of the outgoing Bush administration s record deficit.

Moreover, the assertion that our intelligence is puny in comparison with God s presupposes just the point that is under debate that there is a god who is all knowing, all powerful, and all good. The evidence of our own eyes makes it more plausible to believe that the world was not created by any god at all.

That goes a long way toward explaining (add a bit of ideology to the mix) why the current Greek government has gone to the brink of default before agreeing to restrain public sector pensions, as its European Union partners demand. It also helps explain why both Greece and Argentina have sizeable governments (public spending accounts for 46 and 39 of GDP, respectively) but puny public investment and outdated infrastructure.