A primary function of regulators in the marketplace is to define standard units of measure and minimum terms of standard classes of contracts, such as contracts for retail sale of durable goods. Just as standards for weight of produce are needed, so too are standards of durability for durable goods, otherwise the customer can't compare costs on a level basis.
Yet in fact they have given unfettered access to their nuclear sites. You also left out the fact that the Security Council has no right to override the NPT with demands that Iran cease enrichment, thus the legal basis for sanctions just isn't there. Not to mention the fact that we were willing to give the brutal Shah a plutonium reprocessing plant (uncompleted), but as soon as the popular revolution threw out the corrupt regime , we not only stole all the Iranians' foreign assets, including all of Iran's uranium which had been sent out to an Iranian joint venture company in France to be enriched.
Iran's oil is going to run out, and in the meantime, it's their only major foreign trade item. They need nuclear power, they have a right to nuclear power and any idea that the US or Israel or the UN Security Council has the right to deny the ancient and sovereign nation of Iran the rights allowed even some private corporations in the West is just pure chutzpah. If any part of the nuclear cycle is subject to foreign veto, Iran will never be independent, it will be unable to even keep the lights on without being a servile subject to foreign powers.
Yeah, because it was the Iranians killing people in Gaza, not the Israelis. And those Lebanese Christian Phalangists who, working directly with the IDF, massacred thousands of defenseless women and children at Sabra were really misunderstood heroes, standing up to islamofascism by castrating little boys and gutting them in front of their mothers. Got it. And when Israel invaded Lebanon again (lying their asses off every step of the way, too), Hezbollah's defense of their nation and homes from the invaders was really the most murderous sort of terrorism. And when the US killed something over a million people in Iraq, most of them small children who shit themselves to death because water treatment supplies were banned by sanctions, that was really the Iranians' fault somehow.
You disgust me. May God have mercy on you, for if justice were done, you yourself would suffer what you condone being done to others.
"But the president is just one facet of our government. He doesn't have the ability to rule by decree.." You should really start paying attention to what is in those executive orders. Under several statutes the President has the unreviewable authority to declare emergencies and then do essentially anything he wants. We have, as far as can be determined, been living under a formally declared state of emergency at least since Roosevelt seized the nation's gold in the early 1930s. The President can institute martial law anytime he wants and to any degree or manner he wants, and can keep as much as he wants of the orders he gives secret, too. The widely known fact that he can designate any individual or group as "terrorist" with no evidence, and seize any assets and indefinitely imprison or kill anyone he wants is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the powers secretly claimed by the executive.
A tri-defecta! 1.)Iran is not properly in the Middle East. "In 1958, the State Department explained that the terms "Near East" and "Middle East" were interchangeable, and defined the region as including only Egypt, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar.[Wikipedia article "Middle East", citing The New York Times. 1958-08-14.] Others have used the term more loosely to mean more, even including India, but that makes the term geographically meaningless. 2.) There is no credible evidence that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. 3.)Iran's leadership has never said anything about "wiping Israel off the map", let alone Jerusalem, which you may recall has many Palestinians and the Dome of the Rock in it, and which is only partly in Israel.
Also Israel is not a NPT signatory, refuses to allow inspections, and has a sizable nuclear arsenal as well as submarines capable of a nuclear counter-strike. They have also engaged in the transfer of nuclear weapons technology and materials to the apartheid regime in South Africa, a state under UN arms embargo at the time.
The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 was amended by the Symington Amendment (Section 669 of the FAA) in 1976. It banned U.S. economic, and military assistance, and export credits to countries that deliver or receive, acquire or transfer nuclear enrichment technology when they do not comply with IAEA regulations and inspections. This provision, as amended, is now contained in Section 101 of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA).
The Glenn Amendment (Section 670) was later adopted in 1977, and provided the same sanctions against countries that acquire or transfer nuclear reprocessing technology or explode or transfer a nuclear device. This provision, as amended, is now contained in Section 102 of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA).
All aid to Israel since then has been illegal, and it's about time to start following the law.
You do recall the last time the Iranians took that deal for enrichment abroad that their uranium was all stolen by France, right? It's understandable that the Iranians would want a little stronger guarantees than "trust us" this time. The Iranians have been consistently open to any scheme that was structured in some way other than an obvious setup for a ripoff, but the US isn't at all interested.
Following the 1979 Revolution, most of the international nuclear cooperation with Iran was cut off. Iran has later argued that these experiences indicate foreign facilities and foreign fuel supplies are an unreliable source of nuclear fuel supply.[49][50]
At the time of the revolution, Iran was a joint owner in the French Eurodif international enrichment facility, but the facility stopped supplying enriched uranium to Iran shortly afterwards.[49][51]
"Iran began their atomic weapons program in the early 1980's, stopped in the late 80's and began again in earnest in 1994. " Bullshit. If you're going to make shit up, accept "evidence" that isn't evidence, and try to use that to start a war, then the blood of millions of innocents will be on your hands. Don't expect to be treated any better than those innocents you are recklessly threatening, you lying warmonger.
Bullshit. Al Qaeda and Iran are about as likely to work together as the Amish and the Knights of Malta. Actually I can't think of two groups on earth that hate each other more than the Shia and the Wahabi. You certainly cite no evidence, and given that you are an AC and that you repeat the bogus "wiped off the map" line that has been refuted at least a dozen times on this page alone, anybody who finds you persuasive is a hopeless case anyway, so I'll leave it there.
No, Iraq invaded Iran, not the other way around. Weapons peddlers? Compared to US, Russia, Israel (proven to have sold nuclear bomb technology to apartheid South Africa), or even Belgium? I think not. Assistance to Hezbollah is about the only thing that can legitimately be laid at Iran's feet, but given the result in fending off the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, it's hard to see why they would regret that.
"And both their crazy idiot president and the Mullahs are on record on what they would do to Israel if they 'had the means,' often including the words 'wipe Israel off the face of the map.'" Oh, Jesus, not this old lie again. The phrase that was intentionally mistranslated by Israeli partisans, was in context approximately: "other great powers have decayed and slipped from their places, and I [Ahmadinejad, who isn't really in charge anyway] believe that one day, Israel too will be wiped from the page of history." Also the Ayatollah Khamenei - who really runs the country - has issued an iron-clad fatwa against nuclear weapons.
Mossad is not a figment of the imagination, they have been caught assassinating people several times, and given that Iran is the boogeyman du jour, it would be inconceivable that Mossad wasn't assassinating some Iranian scientists in addition to any sabotage operations they could arrange. The numbers of violent deaths of Iranian scientists bears out this suspicion. I hope they won't get as far as they did killing Iraq's scientists.
"We should take over the Israeli government by force and set up a puppet state?" Now that's just willfully stupid. The US is Israel's ally, the reverse has never been true. They are the little brother, constantly picking fights and expecting their big brother to back them up - if big brother says: "if you want to attack the biggest kid on the block again, you're on your own", that is just good sense, and better for little brother in the long run. The rest of your paragraph is just ignorant propaganda, and bears no resemblance to the actual history of Israeli terrorism, violence, bribery, blackmail, betrayals of its few allies and above all constant, shameless lies .
"the decadence and harems enjoyed by the Mullahs." see! there is another lie, right on schedule.
Given all the hateful idiocy your post contains, it should have been modded "troll" or "flamebait", certainly not "insightful".
Err... there is no credible evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, despite all the inspections. As signers of the non-proliferation treaty, Iran is entitled to the assistance of all other signatories in developing the full nuclear cycle, including enrichment and reactors. The US is not meeting its obligations under the treaty, to say the least. There is quite literally nothing Iran could do that would satisfy the US government, let alone Israel, so they might as well carry on.
The rest of your post is also wrong. If we invaded Afghanistan because "they attacked us", then how come Pakistan ans Saudi Arabia weren't given the same treatment, though they has as much or more to do with the attacks as the government of Afghanistan? How come we refused to give any evidence of OBL's crimes to the Afghans when they offered to put him on trial, prior to the invasion? How come the forces for the invasion were already in place on 9/11? Sure looks like a convenient excuse for what was already in the works. And is it really a coincidence that opium production went from near-zero to 90% of the world market immediately after the invasion, with our buds the Northern Alliance producing the lion's share?
As for Iraq, we know that the intelligence was deliberately falsified by those at the very top, who literally would not listen to anything that didn't confirm their preconceptions. They may have believed that there were WMDs, but they had no factual reason to believe that. More likely they were deliberately lying to the public for their own greedy, corrupt reasons.
Try Frink. It has no trouble with that sort of thing. Over 58K of plain-text units. (Typical section of the latter: siegbahn:= xunit// of X-rays. It is defined to be// 1/3029.45 of the spacing of calcite// planes at 18 degC. It was intended// to be exactly 1e-13 m, but was// later found to be off slightly. fermi:= 1ee-15 m// Convenient for describing nuclear sizes// Nuclear radius is from 1 to 10 fermis barn:= 1ee-28 m^2// Used to measure cross section for// particle physics collision, said to// have originated in the phrase "big as// a barn". shed:= 1ee-24 barn// Defined to be a smaller companion to the// barn, but it's too small to be of// much use. (Please pardon the fucking Slashdot idiot-designed piece-of-shit worse than TI-994/A FORTRAN formatting.)
Or you could just use Frink, which is so cool in so many ways that even the highlights would be too long to list here. It will deal with pretty much any unit of measure or abbreviation, and additional temporary or permanent units can be added with minimum effort.
Um... leaving aside the totally batshit "crude nuke delivered via cruise missile" idea (Iran does not have nukes, there is no evidence that hasn't been thoroughly debunked that it is seeking nukes, nor would a crude one fit on any sort of missile, nor would a cruise missile have much chance of hitting a well-defended ship like the Enterprise)...
so you're hypothesizing the Iranians would think they have sufficient influence on the US media to get that false false-flag story widely accepted? That the "USA can't respond" when every political candidate is making pilgrimages to Israel and constantly emitting the dog-whistle phase "all options are on the table", meaning nuclear first-strikes? And the advantage to the Iranians of this tricky plan would be worth the near 100% risk of precipitating a war that will leave their country devastated?
Whereas the US (or at least its leading politicians) wants to go to war, could use a more photogenic and sensational causus belli than they currently have, would not mind if this carrier were sunk, saving billions in decommissioning costs and attracting hundreds of billions more in war funding.
Do you think all of our dozens of intelligence agencies do nothing but sit on their thumbs, or that they obey the laws the rest of us do? That psy-ops is a myth or limited to leaflets? This sort of operation isn't at all beyond the realm of possibility, and given that the theorists have predicted this one, I'd say in the event of Iran supposedly attacking the Enterprise, it'll at least be worth examining the evidence very closely.
What of those who refuse to even entertain the possibility that powerful people and organizations sometimes work together for criminal ends? That's all "conspiracy theory" really means, anyway. It's particularly telling when the "conspiracy theory" epithet is used with regard to 9/11 as a synonym for "crazy theory", since the official theory is a conspiracy theory. Really we're just arguing about which conspiracy theory we prefer to believe. Those who would rather not question the official story versus those who would prefer to let the evidence lead where it may. The former group seems to be made up of frightened, submissive types with a Stockholm-syndrome like set of symptoms that leads them to lash out at anyone who questions their masters' lies, while the latter is made up of people who think for themselves.
The one written by DHS secretary Chertoff's cousin? The one with all the straw man arguments? Of course those are easy to refute, that's their whole purpose. It's like refuting the idea that things fall down ("Og's theory of gravity") by digging up some nut who believes that things fall because of the wind from invisible space elves flapping their ears. Things still fall, and much of the official 9/11 story still does not add up, or adds up to something different than the official account. Evidence which should exist either does not (black boxes, FAA tapes, steel recycled with unseemly haste) or has been suppressed for no obvious reason (e.g. surveillance tapes of the gas station and the hotel that recorded the Pentagon crash - my theory is that suppression was specifically to set off crazy theories.)
What about the 9/11 commission, the ostensible source of the official narrative? A real investigation would have happened sooner, with better funding, fewer dependable political hacks appointed, Bush and Cheney testifying publicly and under oath, and a report actually written by the commission members, rather than a political partisan with orders from the White House. That it was done in the way it was suggests that getting at the truth was seen as beside the point, at best, and it doesn't seem to me to be crazy to wonder if they were actually trying to cover certain things up, and if so, what?
Not that they are dishonest - though they often are - but their perceptions are of course skewed by their preconceptions. If they already believe the patient is dead or "better off dead", they will be less likely to see slight responses to the neurological tests and more likely to write off such responses as mere reflex or whatever. Doctors also often have delusions of competence, believing anything they say is true simply because they said it, even - no, especially - when the evidence is equivocal.
There is very little risk to declaring a patient dead - if the patient dies, there is not going to be much evidence of the premature judgement; if the patient lives, usually everybody's happy about the "miracle". Even if there is a problem, other doctors will generally cover even egregious screw-ups, except in the most well-documented cases where that becomes too risky.
If they have an active EEG, they're not brain-dead. There is an element of subjectivity to the other tests - no organs should be allowed to be taken for transplant without an EEG. It's not like it's an expensive or difficult test.
Sadly, that sort of treatment is typical, even at many big-name and research hospitals. Also typical is falsification of the records and lying to cover each other when they commit malpractice.
Me either. Considering the lack of trouble for Bush outright stealing two presidential elections, I wouldn't hold my breath, even if whatever the GP is frothing about is actually true.
"Ya know what else doesn't get calibrated? The scanners run by the SA at airports."
I know that was a typo, but it's a good one (Godwin? ha.) Refreshing my memory, Google gives as the 2nd result: "In 1921 Adolf Hitler formed his own private army called Sturm Abteilung (Storm Section). The SA (also known as stormtroopers or brownshirts)..."
I think we should start referring to the TSA as the " 'SA".
Baseless assertion. Psychological factors have a huge role in physical illness, from conscious and subconsciously determined patterns of physical actions and lifestyle, autonomic nerve and hormonal signals to the immune system. Placebos affect the disease indirectly, via psychology, but the results are also physical and sometimes profound. You may not be able to heal a broken leg with it, but you could possibly reduce the swelling, and potentially do many other biochemical tricks, including some that look unreasonably complicated and difficult from the outside.
There are many case studies of spontaneous remission of tumors, and they often aren't explainable by the official treatment - that's why they get called "spontaneous." The patient will typically tell the doctor that it was because of prayer or fruit juice or vitamins or laetrille or some other weird thing, and the doctor will be briefly puzzled/annoyed in the few seconds before he is distracted by something else. In the rare event the case is published, the patient's explanation will of course never appear. These are probably mostly instances of successful placebos.
Slashdot Mirror
A primary function of regulators in the marketplace is to define standard units of measure and minimum terms of standard classes of contracts, such as contracts for retail sale of durable goods. Just as standards for weight of produce are needed, so too are standards of durability for durable goods, otherwise the customer can't compare costs on a level basis.
Yet in fact they have given unfettered access to their nuclear sites. You also left out the fact that the Security Council has no right to override the NPT with demands that Iran cease enrichment, thus the legal basis for sanctions just isn't there. Not to mention the fact that we were willing to give the brutal Shah a plutonium reprocessing plant (uncompleted), but as soon as the popular revolution threw out the corrupt regime , we not only stole all the Iranians' foreign assets, including all of Iran's uranium which had been sent out to an Iranian joint venture company in France to be enriched.
Iran's oil is going to run out, and in the meantime, it's their only major foreign trade item. They need nuclear power, they have a right to nuclear power and any idea that the US or Israel or the UN Security Council has the right to deny the ancient and sovereign nation of Iran the rights allowed even some private corporations in the West is just pure chutzpah. If any part of the nuclear cycle is subject to foreign veto, Iran will never be independent, it will be unable to even keep the lights on without being a servile subject to foreign powers.
Yeah, because it was the Iranians killing people in Gaza, not the Israelis. And those Lebanese Christian Phalangists who, working directly with the IDF, massacred thousands of defenseless women and children at Sabra were really misunderstood heroes, standing up to islamofascism by castrating little boys and gutting them in front of their mothers. Got it. And when Israel invaded Lebanon again (lying their asses off every step of the way, too), Hezbollah's defense of their nation and homes from the invaders was really the most murderous sort of terrorism. And when the US killed something over a million people in Iraq, most of them small children who shit themselves to death because water treatment supplies were banned by sanctions, that was really the Iranians' fault somehow.
You disgust me. May God have mercy on you, for if justice were done, you yourself would suffer what you condone being done to others.
"But the president is just one facet of our government. He doesn't have the ability to rule by decree.."
You should really start paying attention to what is in those executive orders. Under several statutes the President has the unreviewable authority to declare emergencies and then do essentially anything he wants. We have, as far as can be determined, been living under a formally declared state of emergency at least since Roosevelt seized the nation's gold in the early 1930s. The President can institute martial law anytime he wants and to any degree or manner he wants, and can keep as much as he wants of the orders he gives secret, too. The widely known fact that he can designate any individual or group as "terrorist" with no evidence, and seize any assets and indefinitely imprison or kill anyone he wants is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the powers secretly claimed by the executive.
A tri-defecta!
1.)Iran is not properly in the Middle East. "In 1958, the State Department explained that the terms "Near East" and "Middle East" were interchangeable, and defined the region as including only Egypt, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar.[Wikipedia article "Middle East", citing The New York Times. 1958-08-14.] Others have used the term more loosely to mean more, even including India, but that makes the term geographically meaningless.
2.) There is no credible evidence that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.
3.)Iran's leadership has never said anything about "wiping Israel off the map", let alone Jerusalem, which you may recall has many Palestinians and the Dome of the Rock in it, and which is only partly in Israel.
Also Israel is not a NPT signatory, refuses to allow inspections, and has a sizable nuclear arsenal as well as submarines capable of a nuclear counter-strike. They have also engaged in the transfer of nuclear weapons technology and materials to the apartheid regime in South Africa, a state under UN arms embargo at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symington_Amendment
All aid to Israel since then has been illegal, and it's about time to start following the law.
You do recall the last time the Iranians took that deal for enrichment abroad that their uranium was all stolen by France, right? It's understandable that the Iranians would want a little stronger guarantees than "trust us" this time. The Iranians have been consistently open to any scheme that was structured in some way other than an obvious setup for a ripoff, but the US isn't at all interested.
Wikipedia:
"Iran began their atomic weapons program in the early 1980's, stopped in the late 80's and began again in earnest in 1994. "
Bullshit. If you're going to make shit up, accept "evidence" that isn't evidence, and try to use that to start a war, then the blood of millions of innocents will be on your hands. Don't expect to be treated any better than those innocents you are recklessly threatening, you lying warmonger.
Bullshit. Al Qaeda and Iran are about as likely to work together as the Amish and the Knights of Malta. Actually I can't think of two groups on earth that hate each other more than the Shia and the Wahabi. You certainly cite no evidence, and given that you are an AC and that you repeat the bogus "wiped off the map" line that has been refuted at least a dozen times on this page alone, anybody who finds you persuasive is a hopeless case anyway, so I'll leave it there.
No, Iraq invaded Iran, not the other way around. Weapons peddlers? Compared to US, Russia, Israel (proven to have sold nuclear bomb technology to apartheid South Africa), or even Belgium? I think not. Assistance to Hezbollah is about the only thing that can legitimately be laid at Iran's feet, but given the result in fending off the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, it's hard to see why they would regret that.
"And both their crazy idiot president and the Mullahs are on record on what they would do to Israel if they 'had the means,' often including the words 'wipe Israel off the face of the map.'"
Oh, Jesus, not this old lie again. The phrase that was intentionally mistranslated by Israeli partisans, was in context approximately: "other great powers have decayed and slipped from their places, and I [Ahmadinejad, who isn't really in charge anyway] believe that one day, Israel too will be wiped from the page of history." Also the Ayatollah Khamenei - who really runs the country - has issued an iron-clad fatwa against nuclear weapons.
Mossad is not a figment of the imagination, they have been caught assassinating people several times, and given that Iran is the boogeyman du jour, it would be inconceivable that Mossad wasn't assassinating some Iranian scientists in addition to any sabotage operations they could arrange. The numbers of violent deaths of Iranian scientists bears out this suspicion. I hope they won't get as far as they did killing Iraq's scientists.
"We should take over the Israeli government by force and set up a puppet state?" Now that's just willfully stupid. The US is Israel's ally, the reverse has never been true. They are the little brother, constantly picking fights and expecting their big brother to back them up - if big brother says: "if you want to attack the biggest kid on the block again, you're on your own", that is just good sense, and better for little brother in the long run. The rest of your paragraph is just ignorant propaganda, and bears no resemblance to the actual history of Israeli terrorism, violence, bribery, blackmail, betrayals of its few allies and above all constant, shameless lies .
"the decadence and harems enjoyed by the Mullahs." see! there is another lie, right on schedule.
Given all the hateful idiocy your post contains, it should have been modded "troll" or "flamebait", certainly not "insightful".
I'm going to assume that was snark. There are people crazy enough to believe that though, so maybe you could add a tag next time to make it clear?
Err... there is no credible evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, despite all the inspections. As signers of the non-proliferation treaty, Iran is entitled to the assistance of all other signatories in developing the full nuclear cycle, including enrichment and reactors. The US is not meeting its obligations under the treaty, to say the least. There is quite literally nothing Iran could do that would satisfy the US government, let alone Israel, so they might as well carry on.
The rest of your post is also wrong. If we invaded Afghanistan because "they attacked us", then how come Pakistan ans Saudi Arabia weren't given the same treatment, though they has as much or more to do with the attacks as the government of Afghanistan? How come we refused to give any evidence of OBL's crimes to the Afghans when they offered to put him on trial, prior to the invasion? How come the forces for the invasion were already in place on 9/11? Sure looks like a convenient excuse for what was already in the works. And is it really a coincidence that opium production went from near-zero to 90% of the world market immediately after the invasion, with our buds the Northern Alliance producing the lion's share?
As for Iraq, we know that the intelligence was deliberately falsified by those at the very top, who literally would not listen to anything that didn't confirm their preconceptions. They may have believed that there were WMDs, but they had no factual reason to believe that. More likely they were deliberately lying to the public for their own greedy, corrupt reasons.
1 horsepower = 746W.
100kW = 134hp
Watts = J/s ; generic unit of power, nothing to do specifically with electricity.
Try Frink. It has no trouble with that sort of thing. Over 58K of plain-text units. := xunit // of X-rays. It is defined to be // 1/3029.45 of the spacing of calcite // planes at 18 degC. It was intended // to be exactly 1e-13 m, but was // later found to be off slightly. := 1ee-15 m // Convenient for describing nuclear sizes // Nuclear radius is from 1 to 10 fermis := 1ee-28 m^2 // Used to measure cross section for // particle physics collision, said to // have originated in the phrase "big as // a barn". := 1ee-24 barn// Defined to be a smaller companion to the // barn, but it's too small to be of // much use. .)
(Typical section of the latter:
siegbahn
fermi
barn
shed
(Please pardon the fucking Slashdot idiot-designed piece-of-shit worse than TI-994/A FORTRAN formatting
Or you could just use Frink, which is so cool in so many ways that even the highlights would be too long to list here. It will deal with pretty much any unit of measure or abbreviation, and additional temporary or permanent units can be added with minimum effort.
Silly examples:
cubic hectofurlongs / tropicalyear -> exascotswheatlippies / plutoyear
0.89894198315626957388
microgreatgross gilbert crocodile -> hp
1.8440377432226315066
Best way to rob a bank is to own one. Next best is to borrow so much that it's the bank that has a problem when you can't make the payments.
I hear Bolivian admirals are usually high, though.
Um... leaving aside the totally batshit "crude nuke delivered via cruise missile" idea (Iran does not have nukes, there is no evidence that hasn't been thoroughly debunked that it is seeking nukes, nor would a crude one fit on any sort of missile, nor would a cruise missile have much chance of hitting a well-defended ship like the Enterprise) ...
so you're hypothesizing the Iranians would think they have sufficient influence on the US media to get that false false-flag story widely accepted? That the "USA can't respond" when every political candidate is making pilgrimages to Israel and constantly emitting the dog-whistle phase "all options are on the table", meaning nuclear first-strikes? And the advantage to the Iranians of this tricky plan would be worth the near 100% risk of precipitating a war that will leave their country devastated?
Whereas the US (or at least its leading politicians) wants to go to war, could use a more photogenic and sensational causus belli than they currently have, would not mind if this carrier were sunk, saving billions in decommissioning costs and attracting hundreds of billions more in war funding.
Do you think all of our dozens of intelligence agencies do nothing but sit on their thumbs, or that they obey the laws the rest of us do? That psy-ops is a myth or limited to leaflets? This sort of operation isn't at all beyond the realm of possibility, and given that the theorists have predicted this one, I'd say in the event of Iran supposedly attacking the Enterprise, it'll at least be worth examining the evidence very closely.
What of those who refuse to even entertain the possibility that powerful people and organizations sometimes work together for criminal ends? That's all "conspiracy theory" really means, anyway. It's particularly telling when the "conspiracy theory" epithet is used with regard to 9/11 as a synonym for "crazy theory", since the official theory is a conspiracy theory. Really we're just arguing about which conspiracy theory we prefer to believe. Those who would rather not question the official story versus those who would prefer to let the evidence lead where it may. The former group seems to be made up of frightened, submissive types with a Stockholm-syndrome like set of symptoms that leads them to lash out at anyone who questions their masters' lies, while the latter is made up of people who think for themselves.
The one written by DHS secretary Chertoff's cousin? The one with all the straw man arguments? Of course those are easy to refute, that's their whole purpose. It's like refuting the idea that things fall down ("Og's theory of gravity") by digging up some nut who believes that things fall because of the wind from invisible space elves flapping their ears. Things still fall, and much of the official 9/11 story still does not add up, or adds up to something different than the official account. Evidence which should exist either does not (black boxes, FAA tapes, steel recycled with unseemly haste) or has been suppressed for no obvious reason (e.g. surveillance tapes of the gas station and the hotel that recorded the Pentagon crash - my theory is that suppression was specifically to set off crazy theories.)
What about the 9/11 commission, the ostensible source of the official narrative? A real investigation would have happened sooner, with better funding, fewer dependable political hacks appointed, Bush and Cheney testifying publicly and under oath, and a report actually written by the commission members, rather than a political partisan with orders from the White House. That it was done in the way it was suggests that getting at the truth was seen as beside the point, at best, and it doesn't seem to me to be crazy to wonder if they were actually trying to cover certain things up, and if so, what?
Not that they are dishonest - though they often are - but their perceptions are of course skewed by their preconceptions. If they already believe the patient is dead or "better off dead", they will be less likely to see slight responses to the neurological tests and more likely to write off such responses as mere reflex or whatever. Doctors also often have delusions of competence, believing anything they say is true simply because they said it, even - no, especially - when the evidence is equivocal.
There is very little risk to declaring a patient dead - if the patient dies, there is not going to be much evidence of the premature judgement; if the patient lives, usually everybody's happy about the "miracle". Even if there is a problem, other doctors will generally cover even egregious screw-ups, except in the most well-documented cases where that becomes too risky.
If they have an active EEG, they're not brain-dead. There is an element of subjectivity to the other tests - no organs should be allowed to be taken for transplant without an EEG. It's not like it's an expensive or difficult test.
Sadly, that sort of treatment is typical, even at many big-name and research hospitals. Also typical is falsification of the records and lying to cover each other when they commit malpractice.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
(It's hard to hit a vein with vi users, anyway - or maybe I'm just going dyslexic.)
Me either. Considering the lack of trouble for Bush outright stealing two presidential elections, I wouldn't hold my breath, even if whatever the GP is frothing about is actually true.
"Ya know what else doesn't get calibrated?
The scanners run by the SA at airports."
I know that was a typo, but it's a good one (Godwin? ha.) Refreshing my memory, Google gives as the 2nd result: "In 1921 Adolf Hitler formed his own private army called Sturm Abteilung (Storm Section). The SA (also known as stormtroopers or brownshirts)..."
I think we should start referring to the TSA as the " 'SA".
"Placebos don't kill cancerous tumors..."
Baseless assertion. Psychological factors have a huge role in physical illness, from conscious and subconsciously determined patterns of physical actions and lifestyle, autonomic nerve and hormonal signals to the immune system. Placebos affect the disease indirectly, via psychology, but the results are also physical and sometimes profound. You may not be able to heal a broken leg with it, but you could possibly reduce the swelling, and potentially do many other biochemical tricks, including some that look unreasonably complicated and difficult from the outside.
There are many case studies of spontaneous remission of tumors, and they often aren't explainable by the official treatment - that's why they get called "spontaneous." The patient will typically tell the doctor that it was because of prayer or fruit juice or vitamins or laetrille or some other weird thing, and the doctor will be briefly puzzled/annoyed in the few seconds before he is distracted by something else. In the rare event the case is published, the patient's explanation will of course never appear. These are probably mostly instances of successful placebos.