depending on how far away the star is/was, there's a fair chance that it left our galaxy millions of years ago
7700 years, anyway, according to the article.
But it's never a good idea to take these announcements at face value. It's far from clear the thing has anything to do with a supernova, or that it's a neutron star at all -- presuming any of them exist at all. What we do know is that its light (radio, x-rays, etc.) pulses at a rate too fast for them to understand unless it's a tiny thing spinning.
The reason they insist it has to be something spinning is that they have studied almost no plasma fluid dynamics, so they can't understand something blasting out radio, light, and x-rays that doesn't have a star in the middle of it. They don't understand fluid instabilities and current oscillations, so they're at a complete loss to understand the (quite common) sudden, often temporary changes in oscillation rate in pulsars.
What little they have studied, typically, is a trivial approximation to plasma fluid dynamics known as "magneto- hydro-dynamics" (MHD) which assumes space is superconducting and magnetic fields can't change distribution or strength. (They talk in all earnestness of magnetic fields "frozen" in place -- even in the sun!) Therefore, they can't understand how large flows of charged particles -- currents, which they insist on calling "jets" -- produce their own magnetic fields and flow along them, or how these flows' fields can interact in marvelously complex ways.
Everything you read about "dark matter", "supermassive black holes", and "neutron stars" amounts to a desperate attempt to find some way to make the extremely weak and purely attractional gravity account for the complicated things they see. The mathematics behind plasma fluid dynamics is too hard for them, and they just can't stand that. It makes their press releases funny to read, but it's sad, too. (Think of the lives wasted on planetary epicycles.)
got any links/paper names that have cosmologists abusing ZPE
No links handy, but the keyword is "inflation". BB needs inflation to get information from each bit of the universe to all the others faster than light, so that future generations can be provided that all-important (nearly!) uniform cosmic background radiation, and also to provide us with galactic superclusters in only 13 GY and not 100 GY, as would be required using only Astronomers'-Union -approved gravitation. What powers inflation, which requires more energy than the universe had to spare? Why, zero-point energy! No mechanism specified.
In the U.S., it's thoroughly established case law that promoting a perpetual motion scheme does not constitute fraud -- even when the promoters know beforehand that their machine doesn't work!
This is not to imply that the two paragraphs above have any connection to one another.
"You misunderstand the nature of zero point energy... [it] is only a source of energy to kooks trying to make perpetual motion machines or free energy"
... or kooks trying to inflate big bangs.
I understand it perfectly. It's a consequence of Heisenberg indeterminacy: a particle with precisely zero energy would have to be everywhere in the universe, which is hard to reconcile with having trapped it on one's lab bench.
ZPE's not available for you to use, it's not available for me to use, but to a cosmologist, oh my! The sky's no limit.
Yes, censorship is the answer to all inconveniences. Facts and discussion of facts might make some people momentarily uncomfortable.
Those made most uncomfortable will be those who have invested years studying things that don't exist, and those who don't feel confident about picking up the mathematical skills needed to study the stuff that we do know exists.
It is interesting that we should be talking about wild speculation here because actually dark matter is thought to make up ~23% of the universe and dark energy ~76% (1% being "normal" baryonic, luminous matter).
Oh, is it 99% now? How that number keeps growing. It has nowhere to go, now, but asymptotic. Let's project where it will be in five years: 99.999% of the mass of the universe (100,000 times as much mass as the bits we see, a thousand times as much stuff as we needed this year) will be composed of conjectured unobservable particles. They still will have no particular properties, other than whatever it takes to rescue somebody's pet theory. For the next guy's theory, they can have other properties instead, and why not? Falsifiable facts might get falsified, and you'd need to find an honest job.
The Big Bang, contrary to your claim, keeps getting more and more experimental backing.
I.e. backing by an unbounded mass of formless Conjecturons. Do call when you have something, anything compatible with observable evidence. In the meantime, please give the poor Cosmic Background a rest. It's been consistent with every cosmological theory proposed in the last half-century. The universe has to have a blackbody temperature.
As for the rest: there's nothing wrong with gravitational lensing until it's used to avoid seeing what's there. There's nothing wrong with zero-point energy until magic machines are discovered tapped into it just to keep bankrupt theories, er, "inflated".
1) The volcanoes at Io's surface have nothing to do with plasma physics or MHD.
Easy to say. "Much to the astonishment of mission scientists, it was discovered that the 'volcanic' plumes emit ultraviolet light, something inconceivable under normal conditions of volcanic venting."
2) No volcanoes have "drifted around" the surface of Io.
No, just the place where stuff comes out. "Since the Voyager observations in the late 1970s, Prometheus and the exposed regions have traveled more than 80 kilometers".
3) There have been migrations of Ionian eruption plumes (the gas/dust "geysers" above the surface).
"Migration" is a nice word. "Gas/dust" is a nice way to say "ejecta", if you have trouble forming the word "plasma".
4) We can quite readily explain this with simple thermophysics. Plasma or MHD has nothing to do with it.
Squint hard. "Cornell University astrophysicist Thomas Gold... in Science (Nov 1979)... suggested that the plumes were the effect of an electrical exchange between Io and Jupiter.... Gene Shoemaker (of comet Shoemaker-Levy fame),... argued that an electric discharge would be extremely hot--much hotter than lava". "Years later, as the Galileo probe began returning data from the Jovian system, NASA scientists were surprised to discover that the plumes on Io were too hot to measure temperatures accurately."
5) Some people have claimed that MHD has influenced the shape of plumes, but we can't reconcile that with the observations of WHERE the fields interact with Io.
Because you don't, personally, know where and how fields interact with Io, they can't cause anything? The earth's magnetic field still surprises.
(Somebody said, "Theory is fine, but if your pet theory can't handle the observations, go back to the theory--the observations are rarely 'wrong'." I wonder who. Me, I'd start with the observations and see where they lead. A theory might suggest itself, later.)
6) Some have claimed that electric currents can cause the elevated temperatures of some of Io's volcanoes, but they haven't done the simple math to know that even at 100% efficiency, there simply isn't enough energy available, and AGAIN, the field lines don't intersect the high temperature volcanoes.
"Plasma in Jupiter's magnetosphere injected from Io (the Io plasma torus) flows pas[t] Io with a speed of about 57 km/s. The magnetic field from Jupiter at Io is 1900 nT. The v x B voltage induced across Io (3620 km) is, therefore, 400 kV, and approximately 10^6 A was observed to be flowing out of the satellite.... If we assume the available power (~0.4 TW) is equally divided between the four largest volcanic plumes, we have ~10^11 W of continuous power available for each volcanic plasma arc. This is roughly equal to the kinetic energy flux of material..."
So, not only is there "enough" energy available, the energy available actually matches observation of the energy consumed. Furthermore:
"the effluent ejection velocity as calculated from an expression for the sheath velocity in a plasma gun (0.893 km/s) is close to that observed for Prometheus, 0.49 km/s."
(Have you ever heard of a volcano ejecting material continuously, year upon year, at 1100 mi/hr? On earth (neglecting atmospheric drag) that would blast 15 mi high! Mt. St. Helens managed that, for a few seconds.) Furthermore, it always comes out around the edges of the blackened region, as predicted.
Your thermophysics have a long way to go. Your "field lines" seem not to be such an impediment, perhaps be
If you have a an explanation - write it up. Become a famous planetary scientist.
A famously unemployed planetary scientist, it looks like. You have get papers accepted in peer-refereed journals, and draw peer-refereed NSF grants, to stay employed as a scientist. (Of course these "peers" haven't studied plasma physics.) One might as well apply for a grant to study the cause of DNA damage in brain tissue exposed to low-magnitude modulated microwaves.
Actually, I happen to know there are some very competent electrodynamicists on the Cassini science team (these folks, for example), and no doubt they'll be involved in vetting hypotheses.
Or they'll be told to sit down and shut up, as they evidently have been so far. They know better than to stick their necks out. It would be easy to tie them to cranks and biblical literalists.
Your first image is not from Mars. It's of a catena on Ganymede, and the chain is about 150--200 km long.
Fine. This makes an enormous difference, doesn't it?
... Shoemaker-Levy 9. We watched SL9 break up and impact Jupiter, producing similar "features".
For a sufficiently dissimilar grade of "similar". Jupiter doesn't have any craters that I know about. (Maybe you have private information.) SL9 pieces hit thousands of miles apart. What broke up something, but kept all the bits right next to one another and right in a perfect line, and furthermore arranged they would all hit at precisely the same instant? And what happened to the stuff that was in the holes?
... our second image is perfectly consistent with aborted graben formation...
They don't look anything like the grabens we know about, although they do look like other things called grabens on, e.g., the moon, which begs the question. (Expand your definition enough and any hole is a graben.) Anyway, Mars (like the moon) is supposed to be geologically inactive. How long are these things supposed to have been there?
our third image is...consistent with the breakup of a comet or asteroid before impact
An exceptionally well-trained, tidy, and cooperative comet, evidently. Notice the perfectly-formed ridges between craters ("graben"?), and the lack of ejecta.
As technical as it may seem, your reply amounts to, "I can't handle big numbers where electrical phenomena are involved." There's no denying that the amount of energy you quote carved out those cavities. It certainly can be terrifying to contemplate lightning bolts that large, but no more so (if you think clearly) than the corresponding rocks zooming about.
Deep Impact: The predicted impact size was about not more than... [yadda yadda]
The amount of energy released was several times the largest value predicted and, in particular, much larger than could be accounted for by the kinetics. (Kinetics is a pretty mature topic.) I note that you don't address the flash that occurred prior to (what I would interpret as) impact, or the x-radiation. The one-mile-deep burrow wasn't my idea; it came from a JPL press release, as an explanation for the delay between the initial flash (interpreted as impact) and the ejecta. As you note, it's obviously silly, which demonstrates my own original point nicely, thank you.
The only way the amount of volatiles could square with expectations is by out-and-out revisionism. Before impact Tempel was described as a "dirty snowball" (or "snowy dirtball" by more lately fashionable models), and the ejecta was predicted to be mostly, or largely, volatiles. (The disagreement was just over whether it was mostly snow, or maybe as little as a third snow.) Instead, there were only traces, and it is now acknowledged to be a rock and not a snowball at all. Now the "cometary jets" that were supposed to be suddenly-vaporizing pockets of volatiles are entirely unexplained (again). Now everybody pretends they knew that all along.
It cannot be a "waste of taxpayer money" to publish papers: researchers pay "page fees" to publish. Considering what does get published, any suspicion about the ultimate correctness of the ideas contained obviously has little or nothing to do with the decision to accept or reject. To reject a paper because you quail at the amperage implied is inconsistent with the bold spirit of inquiry. If this was science, you'd publish the stuff you disagree with, and other papers that show what's wrong with it, and any that show what's wrong with them. Censorship is for churchmen and cowards.
Headlines like "Nothing New Seen" or "Unexpected Finding Immediately Explained" just don't attract much attention.
That would be fine, except the explanations make no sense at all, and also fail to account for the features observed. What's worse is when they doctor the pictures to make them seem more like the explanation, as in the Io volcano pictures where they painted in flaming geysers in place of white-outs in the actual images. The white-outs were from something way hotter than any volcanic eruption could be.
... Never mind trotting out... billion-solar-mass black holes... Um, these almost certainly exist.
Based only on the assumption that nothing but gravitation can produce x-rays and high-velocity jets, or affect motion of large (electrically-conductive) masses. Even your "super-massive black holes" aren't enough to account for galactic rotation; you need to make up "dark matter" too.
galactic lensing,... This definitely exists.
Sure, here and there. But it gets trotted out every time somebody points out that quasars are all clustered around nearby galaxies.
the Big Bang has quite a bit of evidence for it.
Meaning, really, that the mountains of evidence against it are neatly hidden behind an even bigger pile of ghostly "dark matter".
zero-point energy This exists too.
Sure, and any astronomical or cosmological event that demands an unlimited energy supply can tap into it at need.
That, and cropping from Hubble pictures anything embarrassing, such as quasars actually in front of opaque nearby galaxies. Cite?
It's interesting to see these two statements so close to one another:
Theory is fine, but if your pet theory can't handle the observations, go back to the theory--the observations are rarely "wrong".
Electrical currrents don't do a damned thing to effect morphology.
Observation is that there are whole lines of flat-bottomed, overlapping craters on Mars, consistent in human experience only with Electric Discharge Machining. Theory says that nothing much electromagnetic can ever have happened on Mars because the planet's intrinsic magnetic field is weak. Which wins?
Observation is that the explosion when comet Tempel was hit by a projectile was much, much larger than any of the principal experimenters predicted. Observation is that there was a flash (producing X-rays) long enough before any ejecta emerged for the projectile to have traveled a mile. Observation is that the ejecta contained essentially zero volatiles (also counter to every principal experimenter's predictions). Theory offers that the projectile burrowed a mile (or just a half?) through the (stony) comet before properly exploding, with no explanation for x-rays. Which wins?
Of course this doesn't prove these events were electromagnetic. All that has been proved is that the people making the announcements have disregarded better explanations for their observations, not from aversion to speculation, but because it would be personally inconvenient to learn enough to follow them up. All this would be benign if they didn't also sit on review committees reflexively rejecting papers and grant proposals that even mention the topic.
... they're not about to start saying that X is caused by Y until they're SURE about it.
That would be fine, except that every single one of these press releases is filled with wild speculation -- subsurface water, volcanism, recent meteor strikes, martians, what have you -- anything and everything except the only thing that has ever been observed to cause (e.g.) polar heating.
Never mind trotting out black holes, billion-solar-mass black holes, "dark matter" (imagined to constitute 90% of the mass of the universe), "dark energy" (part of it? supposed to repel matter), the "Great Attractor", galactic lensing, "magnetic reconnection", WIMPs, MACHOs, the Big Bang, Inflation, zero-point energy, and worse, without even a trace of embarrassment. That, and cropping from Hubble pictures anything embarrassing, such as quasars actually in front of opaque nearby galaxies.
After the last cosmic background experiment concluded, Georg Smoot at a podium announced, in the the most smug of terms, that it proved the Big Bang theory "correct, once and for all." Of course no single experiment, or even a dozen, can do any such thing, and Big Bang is looking iffier every month.
"Scientists are baffled! We can't account for polar heating / overlapping flat-bottomed craters on Mars / volcanoes drifting around the surface of Io / particles blasting out of the sun at a quarter of lightspeed / gullies that cross over one another / the enormous explosion out of that comet!"
Of course they're baffled. They won't let anybody competent explain it to them. These guys never studied plasma fluid dynamics in school, and they figure that now they're too old to learn it. Anyway the math was too hard even back then. If they had even one experienced plasma physicist on-staff (or took his gag off) they'd have easy explanations -- at least the beginnings of them -- for most of these things.
As it is, every time they run across something that's unavoidably electromagnetic in character, they're absolutely astonished. Then they instantly forget all about it. Each time, they're astonished anew. Yet it never occurs to them that any new impossibility could also involve similar stuff.
Here's a hint: is there a magnetic field somewhere nearby? That means there's electric current, too, either generating it, or at least being induced by the (conductive) moon moving through it. Where's it flowing? What sort of ions are carrying it, and are transported by it? What happens when they hit a planetary surface? What happens when a charge builds up for a long time, and then gets released? Polar heating... hey, guess where auroras happen? Look at Saturn's poles, in x-rays and infrared.
Jeez. What do we pay these mooncalves for, if they're afraid of fluid dynamics maths? Hire somebody mentally better-equipped.
Changing the subject prevents you from addressing the topic at hand. A reasonable observer may conclude, when you persist, that that is your intent.
It is objective fact that PTSD is most traumatic in soldiers who have killed, moreso in those who have killed civilians (under orders, or otherwise).
It is objective fact that the supposed "weapons of mass destruction" claimed to justify the invasion have not turned up, nor even any hint of their existence. It is objective fact that assertions of cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda, also used to justify the invasion, remain unsupported. It is objective fact that many of those most involved in summarizing intelligence have reported heavy pressure to remove relevant facts from their reports. It is objective fact that the writers of Bush's speech promoting invasion knew, even when they wrote it, that the claim Iraq had sought uranium was baseless.
Lying about those facts and their implications doesn't help your case, whatever you imagine it to be. Readers may easily verify them.
Any "good things... in this 'conflict'" are as far off-topic as the first time you tried to distract readers with them.
If those troops who slaughtered civilians and draftees suffer as a result of knowing the facts above, that is directly the responsibility of those who sent them. Blaming, instead, people who point out facts is worse than a rhetorical gambit; it's frankly despicable. Lying here won't protect troops from psychological harm; the facts are readily available. (We may pray they are someday drawn upon to support a verdict of treason.)
"Anyone who can make you believe falsehoods can make you commit atrocities." -- Voltaire
Repeating a false assertion with lots of periods in it ("we. do. not. deliberately. slaughter. civilians") doesn't make it true, or even any less false. The only truth your statement reflects is that mass slaughter of civilians was the main point of relatively few missions between 1973 and 2001. Maybe that means progress, but such progress seems easily turned back.
Nothing you have posted bolsters any of your claims. It remains that soldiers have been and are ordered to kill civilians, and that the military brass do not openly discuss PTSD that arise most directly from those orders. You have offered nothing more than brute pragmatism to distinguish conscripts from civilians. You have no grounds to claim that discussing the truth here actually causes or worsens anyone's PTSD, never mind that it "endangers innocents". You have revealed no connection between PTSD and distribution of food to subject people not (yet?) shot.
Claiming that facts are "left-wing talking points" does not refute them. Truths, as talking points, are much less expensive to propagate than lies. (The corollary is that lies may suffice, if you spend enough.) People who are not war profiteers must needs pursue the less costly approach.
Finally, my heart goes out to those poor souls you have "counseled". Judging by the evidence, you must have just repeated louder the lies they'd already heard. Here's a hint: shouting lies makes them the more suspect.
I find certain killing to be perfectly acceptable, and would dispute the characterization of killing in wartime as "murder."
Please try to pay attention. The topic under discussion concerns psychological consequences of people's actions.
Whatever rationalizations you have for distinguishing this police-action from that mass-murder are irrelevant to the topic. I used a variety of descriptions of the same act to emphasize that the distinctions are arbitrary. It's telling that you don't object to the others, considering that they all describe the same act.
So tell me now, since you brought up the food, healthcare, etc: who is helping the people of Iraq?
Please try to pay attention. The examples of routine slaughter in Iraq were in response to the trivially false assertion that U.S. troops aren't under orders to kill civilians, and that talking about it somehow "endangers innocents". Let's ask the innocents which they would prefer: me talking about how their son didn't deserve to die, or you blasting their guts all over the wall?
Can you even remember the topic? Many thousands of U.S. troops have their own guts in knots over having followed orders to slaughter people (civilian or otherwise) whose only offense was to be in front of them. It would rip up anyone who's not a psychopath.
It's obviously worse for those soldiers when they learn that they were there as a result of deliberate, and possibly treasonous, deception. (Treason is of particular concern to soldiers; treasonous orders must be disobeyed.)
I doubt anyone's guts are in knots about having fed people, so I don't understand why you bring it up.
... profiteering contractors like the four Blackwater operators who were burned to death
(This is off-topic, but... the operators weren't profiteers. They were just unlucky working stiffs. The profiteers are sitting safe at home, perhaps even chuckling at how dumb those guys were to have been there.)
It's telling to me that you will not acknowledge the ethical upsides of this conflict along with the negatives.
Please try to pay attention. The topic is not about ethical upsides or downsides of "conflicts". The topic is the psychological effects on the poor dumb stiffs sent (by your profiteers' pals) to slaughter people in uncounted thousands, conscript and civilian alike. Illegitimacy doesn't create the problems, it just makes them worse.
But then again, your cries of "jingoism," "personal vendetta," and the like tell me all I need to know about your ideological bias.
I suppose accusations of "ideological bias" make it much easier for you to ignore the facts.
There's no such thing as "rabid anti-war" anything. Rabid jingoism, sure. Rabid treasonous jingoism, even, given the pattern of systematic deception we've found. Rabid toadyism, too, and rabid war profiteering, yes. Anti-war attitudes might be reflexive, but not rabid.
They are not, NOT "civilians."
Please try to pay attention. Nobody said the Iraqi conscripts were civilians. I said they were draftees, and thus not appreciably different from civilians, as far as blowing their guts out or burning their faces off goes. You can swear like Cartman that they're no different from stampeding wildebeest or black-widow spiders, but deep down you know better. They're people like yourself, with wives and kids, and doing their best to do what they think is right. Most of those ripped to bloody shreds in Iraq never, like the civilians, pointed a gun at anybody, nor even had a chance to.
Maybe somebody made up rules that say it's not murder, but that doesn't really make so much difference. Anybody can make up fancy rules, and even give them fancy capitalized names. In the end, killing is killing.
your attempt... endangers the innocents"
Hey, guess what: bombing, shooting at, and starving the innocents endangers them. So does destroying their water treatment and sewage systems, and blockading medical and food supplies and the equipment to produce and distribute it. So does leaving hundreds of tons of high explosives unguarded for the non-innocents to truck away and make into hundreds of thousands more bombs. So does blowing up half of Afghanistan and then abandoning it (again!) to the warlords and Talibaners, in favor of pursuing a personal vendetta in Iraq.
Encouraging tobacco executives to trick teenagers into lifelong addictions, and million upon million agonizing deaths by cancer, endangers innocents (not just the erstwhile teenagers, but their children besides). Forcing other countries to dismantle antismoking campaigns under threat of crippling import duties endangers innocents.
I could go on. Saying that people are people is what some of us call truth. Even "rabid" (as you say) Christians have been heard, at times, to approve of truth. If you've resolved to murder somebody (or thousands of somebodies), the least respect their memory deserves is that you be honest about it.
You are invited to look up "open secret" in the dictionary.
Then, look up "elephant in the room".
the above link goes on to contradict the assertion that PTSD affects only killers, nor is it limited to soldiers.
No one I know of has ever asserted that PTSD affects only killers, or is limited to soldiers.
I love public television
Who has time to watch television? Perhaps you would better spend the time learning to pay attention to what you are reading, and the rest of the time actually reading. A half-hour of TV corresponds to three to five minutes' reading, for most topics. (Exception: anything by David Attenborough.)
The "military brass" has been very up front about PTSD in recent conflicts. There are far more measures taken now than when I was in the military 10 years ago. (Mandatory counseling before exfil back to states for instance.)
Please try to pay attention. Military brass take PTSD seriously, but use euphemisms like "combat stress". PTSD resulting solely from having killed people is never mentioned to trainees.
Your statement that military leadership "orders" the slaughter of unarmed civilians is a fucking joke.
I guess you weren't fixing pipes in any of those water treatment plants they blew up at the beginning of the first Iraq invasion. I guess you weren't among of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands who died of dehydration after having had to drink water that hadn't been treated in one of those plants. Who do you think they're after when they bomb a city, the stray dogs and cockroaches? Who do you think dies when a soldier at a guard station (under orders!) machine-guns a car that didn't stop at the right place because the driver got confused?
We haven't had draftees for quite some time now, how is that statement relevant?
Guess what: Iraq did. The overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers blown to hell were draftees who would have done practially anything not to be there. They're really no different from civilians. ("Conscientious objectors", you say? How about "mass graves"?) Practically every draftee shot or blown up was -- as you'll gladly admit if you have even a shred of honesty -- no different from a civilian.
What the fuck do you know about losing arms/legs in combat and how easy it is "by comparison". I'd bet my left nut that most vets with PTSD would disagree.
Interesting that you (unlike they) won't actually be obliged to follow through. The therapists say those injured but who never shot anybody have an overwhelmingly lower incidence of PTSD. A good thing, they have lots else to worry about.
"one must have empathy for people who have killed other people in battle"
Something none of the military brass like to talk about... PTSD, overwhelmingly, debilitates soldiers who have personally killed people. "Combat stress" -- from being shot at -- is incidental by comparison. The ones ordered to slaughter unarmed civilians, particularly women and children, get it worst. (Bomber pilots and artillery specialists do the most of that, but find it easiest to pretend; they don't usually see their victims fall.) Those who think honestly know draftees are really no different from civilians. Soldiers who "only" had their legs blown off get off easy, again by comparison.
My father used to call Viet Nam vets with PTSD crybabies. I asked him if he (as a Naval officer, earlier) had ever been obliged to kill anybody. He must have thought it over carefully, because I never heard him criticize a vet after that.
Reading that reply, did anyone else think "Wow. Now this is a 'textbook anti-corporation' reply!" All that was missing was an irrelevent, offtopic, anti-bush rant.
I'm not sure I understand this remark. By my count I used the word "corporation" exactly zero times. Is the point that, because corporations were involved, any amount of fraud, deception, and deliberate mismanagement are OK? That Bush's involvement makes any amount of mere financial corruption trivial by comparison? That all is right with the world since the right kind of people got the money, and the undeserving suckers didn't?
Or did you read the word "corruption" as "corporation"?
If the management of your IRA and/or 401K has been "handed over to professional managers" then it can only be because you have been found incompentant to manage your own affairs.
I wrote of hundreds of billions of dollars changing hands via freshly-legalized malfeasance, fraud, money laundering, and logrolling, and you're talking about a dip in somebody's IRA returns? Do try to pay attention, at least to what you're saying yourself.
Changing the subject doesn't fool me, and it won't fool anybody else. (But why try to change the subject? Are you a fraudster yourself?) Nothing you've posted has addressed any substantial point. (No, saying "moonbat" does not make a substantial point.)
What do you imagine kept pension fund managers immune to pressures to "perform" as well as "the market", year after year? What do you suppose happened to the pensions of former employees of all the companies that were bought up by dot-coms (and by MCI, and Enron) with bubble money, and then ridden into the ground? What do you imagine happened to the Orange County employees' pensions when the county defaulted? Or those of the State of Oregon, even thought it didn't? Or those managed by the banks that listed doomed companies as "strong buy" long after they had been thoroughly gutted?
You'll need to find other ways to squelch your conscience than imagining that only millionaires and dopes were hurt in the crash. Maybe you should hand your own share of the take over to somebody more honest.
Do you the faintest idea what you're talking about?
IRAs and 401Ks do not have pension managers! IRAs and 401Ks are managed by individual owners.
Management of most IRAs and 401Ks is handed over to professional fund managers.
There is no such fund as "Fidelity Vantage"
Not any more.
A 16% loss hurts, but it's hardly being wiped out.
Clue: if the professional funds got hit badly (and they're not supposed to lose money at all, ever -- the risk is supposed to be that they won't make much, sometimes) what do you imagine happened to even less well-managed accounts?
I'm sorry you were too stupid to get out before the bubble burst, but its not like there wasn't plenty of warning that it was going to happen. Stop blaming Bush for your own personal failings.
It's obvious you are absolutely tickled at the thought of people losing money in the crash... which is irrelevant, because I didn't. (VC money paid my salary until it dried up. I didn't give any of it back.) Furthermore, I didn't blame Bush for the crash; his lot are just some of the higher-profile beneficiaries. It was Newt and his crew who set it in motion.
You weren't there, were you? Lots of millionaires were plumbed, but they won't be tightening their belts. What was then the Fidelity Vantage Fund lost 16% in one year: mostly IRAs and 401Ks, retirement money. Were all the pension managers on the take? Any who sold off too early got creamed when their peers kept raking in paper profits; likewise, any analyst who predicted the crash a little too early.
Who needs grand conspiracy theories when garden-variety white-collar crime, venality, and regulatory restructuring suffice?
Banking regulation and oversight were gutted in the Reagan years, directly bringing about the "savings and loan scandal", thence the bailout which you and I are still paying off. It's a matter of public record that the Bushes were deeply and lucratively involved. Neil Bush's indictment (successfully buried during the war) is an embarrassing footnote.
During the Clinton years -- the Newt Gingrich years -- securities regulation and enforcement were similarly gutted. The subsequent "scandals" -- the dot-com bubble, MCI, Global Crossing, Enron, Tyco -- were trivially predictable, albeit not in detail. Anyone not committing securities or accounting fraud was leaving money on the table, a much greater crime. Bush's connections with Enron make another footnote.
Here's a page tracking one of those toady CEOs installed at startups, this the one who gutted LinuxCare. The CEO installed at Cygnus Solutions, just a year before it was sold out to Red Hat, waltzed away with $100M, more than all the founders combined.
The conspiracy theorist would say that enabling what they did (and what most got away with) was the whole point, but extremist ideology must be as large a factor as ordinary greed. However, it's not always so easy to tell the difference: an idiot ideologist and a clever crook may promote the same policies. Most ideologists aren't habitual idiots, but don't care to examine too carefully what benefits them and their friends at the expense of people they don't know. It's an easy habit, and it works better than actually conspiring.
Scams like BELO, like Pets.com, weren't idiocy at all. They served their purpose to perfection. The only mistake the VCs made was overreaching. Had they kept things toned down, the gravy train could have run on and on.
These companies weren't expected to succeed. The VCs even said so: profits didn't matter, sales prospects didn't matter, even embarrassingly stupid products didn't matter. What mattered was that large amounts of money could change hands with very little oversight. It was money launderers' heaven.
If you want to pay somebody off, buy their company at a massively inflated price. (No company to sell? Start one!) Want to hide paper profits? Stage a stock collapse. Want to reward a toady? Make him CEO or CFO of a startup. (The CEOs were all directors of one anothers' companies.) Want to pocket the investors' money? Have your CEO spend it all at your marketing or advertising service.
None of the money was wasted. It wasn't burnt. Every dollar went into somebody's pocket. Every dollar came from somebody else's. One group got most of it, another lost most of it. The ones who lost were pensioners, whose pension funds were "mismanaged" into oblivion. Did the pension fund managers suffer? Or did they make out like, er, bandits? Which do you think is more likely?
This is not to say that everybody involved was a crook. Lots of people worked really hard to try to make something new, and most of them suffered as much as the pensioners.
How do you imagine W funded his campaign? His father used banking fraud, and had to bait Saddam into invading Kuwait to keep son Neil (Silverado) out of prison. The W crew relied on more modern, less legally-risky securities fraud (Enron). They're not very imaginitive, though: count on the VCs to ramp things back up before the next election season.
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7700 years, anyway, according to the article.
But it's never a good idea to take these announcements at face value. It's far from clear the thing has anything to do with a supernova, or that it's a neutron star at all -- presuming any of them exist at all. What we do know is that its light (radio, x-rays, etc.) pulses at a rate too fast for them to understand unless it's a tiny thing spinning.
The reason they insist it has to be something spinning is that they have studied almost no plasma fluid dynamics, so they can't understand something blasting out radio, light, and x-rays that doesn't have a star in the middle of it. They don't understand fluid instabilities and current oscillations, so they're at a complete loss to understand the (quite common) sudden, often temporary changes in oscillation rate in pulsars.
What little they have studied, typically, is a trivial approximation to plasma fluid dynamics known as "magneto- hydro-dynamics" (MHD) which assumes space is superconducting and magnetic fields can't change distribution or strength. (They talk in all earnestness of magnetic fields "frozen" in place -- even in the sun!) Therefore, they can't understand how large flows of charged particles -- currents, which they insist on calling "jets" -- produce their own magnetic fields and flow along them, or how these flows' fields can interact in marvelously complex ways.
Everything you read about "dark matter", "supermassive black holes", and "neutron stars" amounts to a desperate attempt to find some way to make the extremely weak and purely attractional gravity account for the complicated things they see. The mathematics behind plasma fluid dynamics is too hard for them, and they just can't stand that. It makes their press releases funny to read, but it's sad, too. (Think of the lives wasted on planetary epicycles.)
No links handy, but the keyword is "inflation". BB needs inflation to get information from each bit of the universe to all the others faster than light, so that future generations can be provided that all-important (nearly!) uniform cosmic background radiation, and also to provide us with galactic superclusters in only 13 GY and not 100 GY, as would be required using only Astronomers'-Union -approved gravitation. What powers inflation, which requires more energy than the universe had to spare? Why, zero-point energy! No mechanism specified.
In the U.S., it's thoroughly established case law that promoting a perpetual motion scheme does not constitute fraud -- even when the promoters know beforehand that their machine doesn't work!
This is not to imply that the two paragraphs above have any connection to one another.
I understand it perfectly. It's a consequence of Heisenberg indeterminacy: a particle with precisely zero energy would have to be everywhere in the universe, which is hard to reconcile with having trapped it on one's lab bench.
ZPE's not available for you to use, it's not available for me to use, but to a cosmologist, oh my! The sky's no limit.
Yes, censorship is the answer to all inconveniences. Facts and discussion of facts might make some people momentarily uncomfortable.
Those made most uncomfortable will be those who have invested years studying things that don't exist, and those who don't feel confident about picking up the mathematical skills needed to study the stuff that we do know exists.
Oh, is it 99% now? How that number keeps growing. It has nowhere to go, now, but asymptotic. Let's project where it will be in five years: 99.999% of the mass of the universe (100,000 times as much mass as the bits we see, a thousand times as much stuff as we needed this year) will be composed of conjectured unobservable particles. They still will have no particular properties, other than whatever it takes to rescue somebody's pet theory. For the next guy's theory, they can have other properties instead, and why not? Falsifiable facts might get falsified, and you'd need to find an honest job.
The Big Bang, contrary to your claim, keeps getting more and more experimental backing.
I.e. backing by an unbounded mass of formless Conjecturons. Do call when you have something, anything compatible with observable evidence. In the meantime, please give the poor Cosmic Background a rest. It's been consistent with every cosmological theory proposed in the last half-century. The universe has to have a blackbody temperature.
As for the rest: there's nothing wrong with gravitational lensing until it's used to avoid seeing what's there. There's nothing wrong with zero-point energy until magic machines are discovered tapped into it just to keep bankrupt theories, er, "inflated".
Easy to say. "Much to the astonishment of mission scientists, it was discovered that the 'volcanic' plumes emit ultraviolet light, something inconceivable under normal conditions of volcanic venting."
2) No volcanoes have "drifted around" the surface of Io.
No, just the place where stuff comes out. "Since the Voyager observations in the late 1970s, Prometheus and the exposed regions have traveled more than 80 kilometers".
3) There have been migrations of Ionian eruption plumes (the gas/dust "geysers" above the surface).
"Migration" is a nice word. "Gas/dust" is a nice way to say "ejecta", if you have trouble forming the word "plasma".
4) We can quite readily explain this with simple thermophysics. Plasma or MHD has nothing to do with it.
Squint hard. "Cornell University astrophysicist Thomas Gold ... in Science (Nov 1979)... suggested that the plumes were the effect of an electrical exchange between Io and Jupiter. ... Gene Shoemaker (of comet Shoemaker-Levy fame), ... argued that an electric discharge would be extremely hot--much hotter than lava". "Years later, as the Galileo probe began returning data from the Jovian system, NASA scientists were surprised to discover that the plumes on Io were too hot to measure temperatures accurately."
5) Some people have claimed that MHD has influenced the shape of plumes, but we can't reconcile that with the observations of WHERE the fields interact with Io.
Because you don't, personally, know where and how fields interact with Io, they can't cause anything? The earth's magnetic field still surprises.
(Somebody said, "Theory is fine, but if your pet theory can't handle the observations, go back to the theory--the observations are rarely 'wrong'." I wonder who. Me, I'd start with the observations and see where they lead. A theory might suggest itself, later.)
6) Some have claimed that electric currents can cause the elevated temperatures of some of Io's volcanoes, but they haven't done the simple math to know that even at 100% efficiency, there simply isn't enough energy available, and AGAIN, the field lines don't intersect the high temperature volcanoes.
On the contrary. From Perratt & Dessler's pre-Galileo paper,"Filamentation of Volcanic Plumes on the Jovian Satellite Io":
So, not only is there "enough" energy available, the energy available actually matches observation of the energy consumed. Furthermore:
(Have you ever heard of a volcano ejecting material continuously, year upon year, at 1100 mi/hr? On earth (neglecting atmospheric drag) that would blast 15 mi high! Mt. St. Helens managed that, for a few seconds.) Furthermore, it always comes out around the edges of the blackened region, as predicted.
Your thermophysics have a long way to go. Your "field lines" seem not to be such an impediment, perhaps be
A famously unemployed planetary scientist, it looks like. You have get papers accepted in peer-refereed journals, and draw peer-refereed NSF grants, to stay employed as a scientist. (Of course these "peers" haven't studied plasma physics.) One might as well apply for a grant to study the cause of DNA damage in brain tissue exposed to low-magnitude modulated microwaves.
Actually, I happen to know there are some very competent electrodynamicists on the Cassini science team (these folks, for example), and no doubt they'll be involved in vetting hypotheses.
Or they'll be told to sit down and shut up, as they evidently have been so far. They know better than to stick their necks out. It would be easy to tie them to cranks and biblical literalists.
Fine. This makes an enormous difference, doesn't it?
For a sufficiently dissimilar grade of "similar". Jupiter doesn't have any craters that I know about. (Maybe you have private information.) SL9 pieces hit thousands of miles apart. What broke up something, but kept all the bits right next to one another and right in a perfect line, and furthermore arranged they would all hit at precisely the same instant? And what happened to the stuff that was in the holes?
They don't look anything like the grabens we know about, although they do look like other things called grabens on, e.g., the moon, which begs the question. (Expand your definition enough and any hole is a graben.) Anyway, Mars (like the moon) is supposed to be geologically inactive. How long are these things supposed to have been there?
our third image is...consistent with the breakup of a comet or asteroid before impact
An exceptionally well-trained, tidy, and cooperative comet, evidently. Notice the perfectly-formed ridges between craters ("graben"?), and the lack of ejecta.
As technical as it may seem, your reply amounts to, "I can't handle big numbers where electrical phenomena are involved." There's no denying that the amount of energy you quote carved out those cavities. It certainly can be terrifying to contemplate lightning bolts that large, but no more so (if you think clearly) than the corresponding rocks zooming about.
Deep Impact: The predicted impact size was about not more than ... [yadda yadda]
The amount of energy released was several times the largest value predicted and, in particular, much larger than could be accounted for by the kinetics. (Kinetics is a pretty mature topic.) I note that you don't address the flash that occurred prior to (what I would interpret as) impact, or the x-radiation. The one-mile-deep burrow wasn't my idea; it came from a JPL press release, as an explanation for the delay between the initial flash (interpreted as impact) and the ejecta. As you note, it's obviously silly, which demonstrates my own original point nicely, thank you.
The only way the amount of volatiles could square with expectations is by out-and-out revisionism. Before impact Tempel was described as a "dirty snowball" (or "snowy dirtball" by more lately fashionable models), and the ejecta was predicted to be mostly, or largely, volatiles. (The disagreement was just over whether it was mostly snow, or maybe as little as a third snow.) Instead, there were only traces, and it is now acknowledged to be a rock and not a snowball at all. Now the "cometary jets" that were supposed to be suddenly-vaporizing pockets of volatiles are entirely unexplained (again). Now everybody pretends they knew that all along.
It cannot be a "waste of taxpayer money" to publish papers: researchers pay "page fees" to publish. Considering what does get published, any suspicion about the ultimate correctness of the ideas contained obviously has little or nothing to do with the decision to accept or reject. To reject a paper because you quail at the amperage implied is inconsistent with the bold spirit of inquiry. If this was science, you'd publish the stuff you disagree with, and other papers that show what's wrong with it, and any that show what's wrong with them. Censorship is for churchmen and cowards.
That would be fine, except the explanations make no sense at all, and also fail to account for the features observed. What's worse is when they doctor the pictures to make them seem more like the explanation, as in the Io volcano pictures where they painted in flaming geysers in place of white-outs in the actual images. The white-outs were from something way hotter than any volcanic eruption could be.
Based only on the assumption that nothing but gravitation can produce x-rays and high-velocity jets, or affect motion of large (electrically-conductive) masses. Even your "super-massive black holes" aren't enough to account for galactic rotation; you need to make up "dark matter" too.
galactic lensing, ... This definitely exists.
Sure, here and there. But it gets trotted out every time somebody points out that quasars are all clustered around nearby galaxies.
the Big Bang has quite a bit of evidence for it.
Meaning, really, that the mountains of evidence against it are neatly hidden behind an even bigger pile of ghostly "dark matter".
zero-point energy This exists too.
Sure, and any astronomical or cosmological event that demands an unlimited energy supply can tap into it at need.
That, and cropping from Hubble pictures anything embarrassing, such as quasars actually in front of opaque nearby galaxies. Cite?
OK:
The Discovery of a High Redshift X-ray Emitting QSO Very Close to the Nucleus of NGC 7319
Missing Quasars of M82
and Big Bang is looking iffier every month. Doubtful.
I will note here that respondent fails to defend "dark matter", never mind "inflation" or "dark energy".
Observation is that there are whole lines of flat-bottomed, overlapping craters on Mars, consistent in human experience only with Electric Discharge Machining. Theory says that nothing much electromagnetic can ever have happened on Mars because the planet's intrinsic magnetic field is weak. Which wins?
Observation is that the explosion when comet Tempel was hit by a projectile was much, much larger than any of the principal experimenters predicted. Observation is that there was a flash (producing X-rays) long enough before any ejecta emerged for the projectile to have traveled a mile. Observation is that the ejecta contained essentially zero volatiles (also counter to every principal experimenter's predictions). Theory offers that the projectile burrowed a mile (or just a half?) through the (stony) comet before properly exploding, with no explanation for x-rays. Which wins?
Of course this doesn't prove these events were electromagnetic. All that has been proved is that the people making the announcements have disregarded better explanations for their observations, not from aversion to speculation, but because it would be personally inconvenient to learn enough to follow them up. All this would be benign if they didn't also sit on review committees reflexively rejecting papers and grant proposals that even mention the topic.
That would be fine, except that every single one of these press releases is filled with wild speculation -- subsurface water, volcanism, recent meteor strikes, martians, what have you -- anything and everything except the only thing that has ever been observed to cause (e.g.) polar heating.
Never mind trotting out black holes, billion-solar-mass black holes, "dark matter" (imagined to constitute 90% of the mass of the universe), "dark energy" (part of it? supposed to repel matter), the "Great Attractor", galactic lensing, "magnetic reconnection", WIMPs, MACHOs, the Big Bang, Inflation, zero-point energy, and worse, without even a trace of embarrassment. That, and cropping from Hubble pictures anything embarrassing, such as quasars actually in front of opaque nearby galaxies.
After the last cosmic background experiment concluded, Georg Smoot at a podium announced, in the the most smug of terms, that it proved the Big Bang theory "correct, once and for all." Of course no single experiment, or even a dozen, can do any such thing, and Big Bang is looking iffier every month.
"Scientists are baffled! We can't account for polar heating / overlapping flat-bottomed craters on Mars / volcanoes drifting around the surface of Io / particles blasting out of the sun at a quarter of lightspeed / gullies that cross over one another / the enormous explosion out of that comet!"
Of course they're baffled. They won't let anybody competent explain it to them. These guys never studied plasma fluid dynamics in school, and they figure that now they're too old to learn it. Anyway the math was too hard even back then. If they had even one experienced plasma physicist on-staff (or took his gag off) they'd have easy explanations -- at least the beginnings of them -- for most of these things.
As it is, every time they run across something that's unavoidably electromagnetic in character, they're absolutely astonished. Then they instantly forget all about it. Each time, they're astonished anew. Yet it never occurs to them that any new impossibility could also involve similar stuff.
Here's a hint: is there a magnetic field somewhere nearby? That means there's electric current, too, either generating it, or at least being induced by the (conductive) moon moving through it. Where's it flowing? What sort of ions are carrying it, and are transported by it? What happens when they hit a planetary surface? What happens when a charge builds up for a long time, and then gets released? Polar heating... hey, guess where auroras happen? Look at Saturn's poles, in x-rays and infrared.
Jeez. What do we pay these mooncalves for, if they're afraid of fluid dynamics maths? Hire somebody mentally better-equipped.
It is objective fact that PTSD is most traumatic in soldiers who have killed, moreso in those who have killed civilians (under orders, or otherwise).
It is objective fact that the supposed "weapons of mass destruction" claimed to justify the invasion have not turned up, nor even any hint of their existence. It is objective fact that assertions of cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda, also used to justify the invasion, remain unsupported. It is objective fact that many of those most involved in summarizing intelligence have reported heavy pressure to remove relevant facts from their reports. It is objective fact that the writers of Bush's speech promoting invasion knew, even when they wrote it, that the claim Iraq had sought uranium was baseless.
Lying about those facts and their implications doesn't help your case, whatever you imagine it to be. Readers may easily verify them. Any "good things ... in this 'conflict'" are as far off-topic as the first time you tried to distract readers with them.
If those troops who slaughtered civilians and draftees suffer as a result of knowing the facts above, that is directly the responsibility of those who sent them. Blaming, instead, people who point out facts is worse than a rhetorical gambit; it's frankly despicable. Lying here won't protect troops from psychological harm; the facts are readily available. (We may pray they are someday drawn upon to support a verdict of treason.)
"Anyone who can make you believe falsehoods can make you commit atrocities." -- Voltaire
Repeating a false assertion with lots of periods in it ("we. do. not. deliberately. slaughter. civilians") doesn't make it true, or even any less false. The only truth your statement reflects is that mass slaughter of civilians was the main point of relatively few missions between 1973 and 2001. Maybe that means progress, but such progress seems easily turned back.
Nothing you have posted bolsters any of your claims. It remains that soldiers have been and are ordered to kill civilians, and that the military brass do not openly discuss PTSD that arise most directly from those orders. You have offered nothing more than brute pragmatism to distinguish conscripts from civilians. You have no grounds to claim that discussing the truth here actually causes or worsens anyone's PTSD, never mind that it "endangers innocents". You have revealed no connection between PTSD and distribution of food to subject people not (yet?) shot.
Claiming that facts are "left-wing talking points" does not refute them. Truths, as talking points, are much less expensive to propagate than lies. (The corollary is that lies may suffice, if you spend enough.) People who are not war profiteers must needs pursue the less costly approach.
Finally, my heart goes out to those poor souls you have "counseled". Judging by the evidence, you must have just repeated louder the lies they'd already heard. Here's a hint: shouting lies makes them the more suspect.
Please try to pay attention. The topic under discussion concerns psychological consequences of people's actions.
Whatever rationalizations you have for distinguishing this police-action from that mass-murder are irrelevant to the topic. I used a variety of descriptions of the same act to emphasize that the distinctions are arbitrary. It's telling that you don't object to the others, considering that they all describe the same act.
So tell me now, since you brought up the food, healthcare, etc: who is helping the people of Iraq?
Please try to pay attention. The examples of routine slaughter in Iraq were in response to the trivially false assertion that U.S. troops aren't under orders to kill civilians, and that talking about it somehow "endangers innocents". Let's ask the innocents which they would prefer: me talking about how their son didn't deserve to die, or you blasting their guts all over the wall?
Can you even remember the topic? Many thousands of U.S. troops have their own guts in knots over having followed orders to slaughter people (civilian or otherwise) whose only offense was to be in front of them. It would rip up anyone who's not a psychopath. It's obviously worse for those soldiers when they learn that they were there as a result of deliberate, and possibly treasonous, deception. (Treason is of particular concern to soldiers; treasonous orders must be disobeyed.)
I doubt anyone's guts are in knots about having fed people, so I don't understand why you bring it up.
(This is off-topic, but ... the operators weren't profiteers. They were just unlucky working stiffs. The profiteers are sitting safe at home, perhaps even chuckling at how dumb those guys were to have been there.)
It's telling to me that you will not acknowledge the ethical upsides of this conflict along with the negatives.
Please try to pay attention. The topic is not about ethical upsides or downsides of "conflicts". The topic is the psychological effects on the poor dumb stiffs sent (by your profiteers' pals) to slaughter people in uncounted thousands, conscript and civilian alike. Illegitimacy doesn't create the problems, it just makes them worse.
But then again, your cries of "jingoism," "personal vendetta," and the like tell me all I need to know about your ideological bias.
I suppose accusations of "ideological bias" make it much easier for you to ignore the facts.
There's no such thing as "rabid anti-war" anything. Rabid jingoism, sure. Rabid treasonous jingoism, even, given the pattern of systematic deception we've found. Rabid toadyism, too, and rabid war profiteering, yes. Anti-war attitudes might be reflexive, but not rabid.
They are not, NOT "civilians."
Please try to pay attention. Nobody said the Iraqi conscripts were civilians. I said they were draftees, and thus not appreciably different from civilians, as far as blowing their guts out or burning their faces off goes. You can swear like Cartman that they're no different from stampeding wildebeest or black-widow spiders, but deep down you know better. They're people like yourself, with wives and kids, and doing their best to do what they think is right. Most of those ripped to bloody shreds in Iraq never, like the civilians, pointed a gun at anybody, nor even had a chance to.
Maybe somebody made up rules that say it's not murder, but that doesn't really make so much difference. Anybody can make up fancy rules, and even give them fancy capitalized names. In the end, killing is killing.
your attempt ... endangers the innocents"
Hey, guess what: bombing, shooting at, and starving the innocents endangers them. So does destroying their water treatment and sewage systems, and blockading medical and food supplies and the equipment to produce and distribute it. So does leaving hundreds of tons of high explosives unguarded for the non-innocents to truck away and make into hundreds of thousands more bombs. So does blowing up half of Afghanistan and then abandoning it (again!) to the warlords and Talibaners, in favor of pursuing a personal vendetta in Iraq.
Encouraging tobacco executives to trick teenagers into lifelong addictions, and million upon million agonizing deaths by cancer, endangers innocents (not just the erstwhile teenagers, but their children besides). Forcing other countries to dismantle antismoking campaigns under threat of crippling import duties endangers innocents.
I could go on. Saying that people are people is what some of us call truth. Even "rabid" (as you say) Christians have been heard, at times, to approve of truth. If you've resolved to murder somebody (or thousands of somebodies), the least respect their memory deserves is that you be honest about it.
You are invited to look up "open secret" in the dictionary. Then, look up "elephant in the room".
the above link goes on to contradict the assertion that PTSD affects only killers, nor is it limited to soldiers.
No one I know of has ever asserted that PTSD affects only killers, or is limited to soldiers.
I love public television
Who has time to watch television? Perhaps you would better spend the time learning to pay attention to what you are reading, and the rest of the time actually reading. A half-hour of TV corresponds to three to five minutes' reading, for most topics. (Exception: anything by David Attenborough.)
Please try to pay attention. Military brass take PTSD seriously, but use euphemisms like "combat stress". PTSD resulting solely from having killed people is never mentioned to trainees.
Your statement that military leadership "orders" the slaughter of unarmed civilians is a fucking joke.
I guess you weren't fixing pipes in any of those water treatment plants they blew up at the beginning of the first Iraq invasion. I guess you weren't among of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands who died of dehydration after having had to drink water that hadn't been treated in one of those plants. Who do you think they're after when they bomb a city, the stray dogs and cockroaches? Who do you think dies when a soldier at a guard station (under orders!) machine-guns a car that didn't stop at the right place because the driver got confused?
We haven't had draftees for quite some time now, how is that statement relevant?
Guess what: Iraq did. The overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers blown to hell were draftees who would have done practially anything not to be there. They're really no different from civilians. ("Conscientious objectors", you say? How about "mass graves"?) Practically every draftee shot or blown up was -- as you'll gladly admit if you have even a shred of honesty -- no different from a civilian.
What the fuck do you know about losing arms/legs in combat and how easy it is "by comparison". I'd bet my left nut that most vets with PTSD would disagree.
Interesting that you (unlike they) won't actually be obliged to follow through. The therapists say those injured but who never shot anybody have an overwhelmingly lower incidence of PTSD. A good thing, they have lots else to worry about.
Something none of the military brass like to talk about... PTSD, overwhelmingly, debilitates soldiers who have personally killed people. "Combat stress" -- from being shot at -- is incidental by comparison. The ones ordered to slaughter unarmed civilians, particularly women and children, get it worst. (Bomber pilots and artillery specialists do the most of that, but find it easiest to pretend; they don't usually see their victims fall.) Those who think honestly know draftees are really no different from civilians. Soldiers who "only" had their legs blown off get off easy, again by comparison.
My father used to call Viet Nam vets with PTSD crybabies. I asked him if he (as a Naval officer, earlier) had ever been obliged to kill anybody. He must have thought it over carefully, because I never heard him criticize a vet after that.
I'm not sure I understand this remark. By my count I used the word "corporation" exactly zero times. Is the point that, because corporations were involved, any amount of fraud, deception, and deliberate mismanagement are OK? That Bush's involvement makes any amount of mere financial corruption trivial by comparison? That all is right with the world since the right kind of people got the money, and the undeserving suckers didn't?
Or did you read the word "corruption" as "corporation"?
Enlighten us.
I wrote of hundreds of billions of dollars changing hands via freshly-legalized malfeasance, fraud, money laundering, and logrolling, and you're talking about a dip in somebody's IRA returns? Do try to pay attention, at least to what you're saying yourself.
Changing the subject doesn't fool me, and it won't fool anybody else. (But why try to change the subject? Are you a fraudster yourself?) Nothing you've posted has addressed any substantial point. (No, saying "moonbat" does not make a substantial point.)
What do you imagine kept pension fund managers immune to pressures to "perform" as well as "the market", year after year? What do you suppose happened to the pensions of former employees of all the companies that were bought up by dot-coms (and by MCI, and Enron) with bubble money, and then ridden into the ground? What do you imagine happened to the Orange County employees' pensions when the county defaulted? Or those of the State of Oregon, even thought it didn't? Or those managed by the banks that listed doomed companies as "strong buy" long after they had been thoroughly gutted?
You'll need to find other ways to squelch your conscience than imagining that only millionaires and dopes were hurt in the crash. Maybe you should hand your own share of the take over to somebody more honest.
Management of most IRAs and 401Ks is handed over to professional fund managers.
Not any more.Clue: if the professional funds got hit badly (and they're not supposed to lose money at all, ever -- the risk is supposed to be that they won't make much, sometimes) what do you imagine happened to even less well-managed accounts?
It's obvious you are absolutely tickled at the thought of people losing money in the crash ... which is irrelevant, because I didn't. (VC money paid my salary until it dried up. I didn't give any of it back.) Furthermore, I didn't blame Bush for the crash; his lot are just some of the higher-profile beneficiaries. It was Newt and his crew who set it in motion.
What did pensioners ever do to you?
Who needs grand conspiracy theories when garden-variety white-collar crime, venality, and regulatory restructuring suffice?
Banking regulation and oversight were gutted in the Reagan years, directly bringing about the "savings and loan scandal", thence the bailout which you and I are still paying off. It's a matter of public record that the Bushes were deeply and lucratively involved. Neil Bush's indictment (successfully buried during the war) is an embarrassing footnote.
During the Clinton years -- the Newt Gingrich years -- securities regulation and enforcement were similarly gutted. The subsequent "scandals" -- the dot-com bubble, MCI, Global Crossing, Enron, Tyco -- were trivially predictable, albeit not in detail. Anyone not committing securities or accounting fraud was leaving money on the table, a much greater crime. Bush's connections with Enron make another footnote.
Here's a page tracking one of those toady CEOs installed at startups, this the one who gutted LinuxCare. The CEO installed at Cygnus Solutions, just a year before it was sold out to Red Hat, waltzed away with $100M, more than all the founders combined.
The conspiracy theorist would say that enabling what they did (and what most got away with) was the whole point, but extremist ideology must be as large a factor as ordinary greed. However, it's not always so easy to tell the difference: an idiot ideologist and a clever crook may promote the same policies. Most ideologists aren't habitual idiots, but don't care to examine too carefully what benefits them and their friends at the expense of people they don't know. It's an easy habit, and it works better than actually conspiring.
These companies weren't expected to succeed. The VCs even said so: profits didn't matter, sales prospects didn't matter, even embarrassingly stupid products didn't matter. What mattered was that large amounts of money could change hands with very little oversight. It was money launderers' heaven.
If you want to pay somebody off, buy their company at a massively inflated price. (No company to sell? Start one!) Want to hide paper profits? Stage a stock collapse. Want to reward a toady? Make him CEO or CFO of a startup. (The CEOs were all directors of one anothers' companies.) Want to pocket the investors' money? Have your CEO spend it all at your marketing or advertising service.
None of the money was wasted. It wasn't burnt. Every dollar went into somebody's pocket. Every dollar came from somebody else's. One group got most of it, another lost most of it. The ones who lost were pensioners, whose pension funds were "mismanaged" into oblivion. Did the pension fund managers suffer? Or did they make out like, er, bandits? Which do you think is more likely?
This is not to say that everybody involved was a crook. Lots of people worked really hard to try to make something new, and most of them suffered as much as the pensioners.
How do you imagine W funded his campaign? His father used banking fraud, and had to bait Saddam into invading Kuwait to keep son Neil (Silverado) out of prison. The W crew relied on more modern, less legally-risky securities fraud (Enron). They're not very imaginitive, though: count on the VCs to ramp things back up before the next election season.
Or, is this their way of telegraphing that we should consider IE no longer exploitable, because they haven't pulled it?
Probably somebody was making fun of them for putting in a command line just to catch up with the Unixy crowd.