Aileron

*uses death ray auto destruct remote*

I think they should sometimes. Government and Religion are both necessary parts of our society. Not that I want cardinal/governors, but both are part of our society, so both have to talk to each other. Governments should stop running around acting like religion doesn't exist and doesn't affect their policies. It does effect their policies, will always affect their policies and should affect their policies. Governments represent their people. If the people are Catholic, the government should have Catholic policies, otherwise they aren't representing their people. As long as they don't make Catholicism the state religion or make it illegal to not be Catholic, they are doing what should be done. I'm routing for one of the African candidates. They are a lot more experienced with reality.

um, no, it wasn't. The Vatican's official opinion on playing God: If it promotes life, its good, if it opposes life, its bad. Thus, a high-tech medical treatment to cure a disease is good, but an abortion is bad. It makes sense - God is way more powerfull than no matter what technology we have, so I doubt He will have any problem with us using higher technology, because to Him its all obsolite crappy material stuff. He would only care HOW we use the technology. "Playing God" will never be a justification for euthanasia. As for Shiavo, the situation wasn't even hopeless before the tube was removed...as long as she's awake, there are still options left. If the patient is awake, there's always a good chance she can recover if given enough time. You have to see the cases where doctors give up. The doctor's primary !@#$%^&*essment for giving up is age. This even comes before condition most of the time. A young person can recover from almost anything, and old person has a much more difficult time, and usually manages to get another infirmity soon anyway. They also don't give up if their patient in concious. If their patient is concious, the person is usually two steps away from recovery. When they get a young concious patient and can stabilise that patient, it usually is a matter of time until recovery happens. Remember, Shiavo is one of many patients who were administered feeding tubes, and is on of the few who did not recover. I mean, she's young and she's concious! Sure, she's suffered some brain damage, but until we tried therapy we frankly wouldn't know how much of that is physical and how much of that is atrophy. Considering that MOST of her brain functions, senses, heartbeat, breathing, were fine...it seems VERY likely that she can recover. As for the brain scans, we frankly know !@#$%^&* about the brain. Its still a giant mystery to us. We have some general clues, as to generally what goes where, but nothing detailed. We know that some portion of her upper brain was damaged, but for all we know all the damage did was remove her ability to do high level calculus, and that the rest of it could have been atrophy. I mean, after a certain amount of time you give up on patients. When I first heard of this case, I thought they should have given up. But, with more information, I learned that this was a don't-give-up-just yet case that was decided wrong because the general public doesn't know where "bad" ends and "let's give up" begins. You need to work in a hospital to understand. I worked at a local hospital doing grunt work for just two years...and strangely it has been the most educational experience of my life.

Well, that was the point Monte, neither one of us has spies, so we have to trust our governments. Yes, speculation is published all the time in the media today when they are 90% sure. Like OJ Simpson killing his wife or the Pope being shot by the Soviets. This is about 60% sure....as I said though, either way they did something extremely stupid that doesn't happen in western power plants. If you knew my father, you would know this at!@#$%^&*ude is not biased at all. He has a stick shoved so far up his !@#$%^&* that he has to push the top end of it out of the way to swallow food. He walks around spouting logic and science as the solution to all problems pretty much like Spock, and like Spock he has managed to get on every last nerve of everyone around him except his co-workers. His only flaw that means something in the workplace is that he cannot admit mistakes when he makes them. However, he LOVES to point out any mistake someone else makes. If the nuclear industry is filled with people like him, there can't be any problems, except that somewhere there's a room withed with high-strung !@#$%^&*holes argueing with each other. They rarely make mistakes, and if they do, ten co-workers jump down their throughts about it. They don't do anything without giving the entire situation a strict overanalysis. They don't change a lightbulb, they study a lightbulb, theorise on the best way to remove the lightbulb, meet and discuss the ways to change a lightbulb, and only after that they change the lightbulb. If that's the way they change lightbulbs...how could they possibly forget to turn the switch off? If one dared to miss it in the meeting, the people he's meeting with would love nothing more than to get in his face about it. And Monte...X-rays don't give that much radiation. They are rigged to flash...kinda like a camera flash. X-rays themselves are not really radiation, though they are the closest thing to it on the electromagnetic spectrum. So, we got low energy radiation and we are flashing it in nearly an instantaneous amount of time...that isn't very much exposure. 12.5 X-rays worth of radiation can be NATURAL...you will probably recieve that much watching a solar flare or who-knows-what from cosmic sources. Generally, health guidelines for recieving that kind of radiation are to just avoid any more radiation for a few days. The only times X-rays caused people health problems was when they were used everywhere...like shoe stores and barber shops...kids who thought it was cool were getting X-rays effectively (they didn't flash the X-rays back then) several hundred times a day.

sil, make your own opinions. And no, I did not read your little article because I have my information on this issue and everyone else does too. I've read articles, you've read articles, everyone's read articles...this forum is for disscussing your opinion, not for !@#$%^&*uming the other guy doesn't have enough information, because everyone in this forum has read plenty of information on whatever issue they post in, or they wouldn't care enough to post. If I ever do get around to making formal rules for this forum, I'll include posting links without adding your own comments under "disrespectfull behavior towards other posters". Monte, other experts claimed that she could feel something...though that is besides the point. It goes back to one of the things dav said. If we are uncertain about her ability to recover, she shouldn't have been taken off the tube in the first place. The justification for removing the tube was that it was impossible for her to recover. If its impossible, then such a test is unecessary. If you aren't sure, you err on the side of letting her live. If you are "pretty sure", then swallow your doubt and give the injection. Expecting most people to make tough decisions like that is pretty harsh, except...these guys are supposed to be judges-its their job to make tough decisions and to stand by them. If they are so weak that they doubt their decision so much to make a woman starve to death to test if they are right, then they shouldn't be on the stand in the first place. Now, back to what Monte said, maybe she couldn't feel herself starving to death. If so, then using the starvation test to make positive would seem like a logical idea. But yet again, she might very well could have felt pain. This is dependant upon Monte's experts being wrong, and if they are wrong then she could have recovered. So, either Monte's experts were right and she neither can feel pain nor would have recovered or Monte's experts were wrong, she did feel pain, but would have recovered. That seems logical and neither is a negative outcome. Such logic is flawed because that is !@#$%^&*uming that removing the feeding tube was going to induce recovery if it was ever going to happen. Basically, if we work under the !@#$%^&*umption that the experts were wrong, there is still the possibility that she could have felt pain and died, but would have recovered, only that removing the recovery wasn't going to occur because the tube was removed. That leads us back to my response to Dav's quote. Either Monte's experts were right and that she could neither recover or feel pain, and we should give her the injection because we know she couldn't recover, or they were wrong and she could both recover and feel pain, in which case we should give her therapy. Either way, starving her to death isn't what should be done. The starvation test is only justifiable if (1) we KNOW she can't feel pain, (2) we don't know whether or not she can recover, and (3) know that removing the feeding tube would induce said recovery. (3) is clearly an !@#$%^&*anine !@#$%^&*umption, but in this case the failure of justication of the starvation is in 1 & 2. In this case, (1) is only correct if and only if (2) is incorrect, because both are dependant upon the same experts. In short, if we believe Monte's experts, we don't need to use the starvation test to test their statements. If we don't believe them or are unsure, then we should assume that she could have recovered and should have tried more therapy. Starving her to death requires contradictory !@#$%^&*umptions. I realise speaking against theorists in one post and providing one nice long theory with proof in the next is almost the mother of all contradictions. However, this is a theorhetical forum. Theory is discussed here because 'here' is not a real place, but an imaginary place specifically devoted to theory. In real life, I don't sit in the CCU spouting out theories to doctors while they are working on patients. BTW, the point about the "It was time to cut the power." isn't about whatever validness the acronym might have. The point is a human being, even if they are flat-out dead and buried, should not be described in that manner. If its wrong to talk about a dead person like that, then it is wrong to disrespect the living no matter how bad their condition is, because their condition is always more than and at very least "dead". It was a callast statement that undercuts the seriousness of the situation.

I think its called a Conclave actually. The cardinals basically go into a room and they don't come out until the next pope is decided. No recessess, they don't get to go home, and any food or drink is brought to them. I don't know, or want to know, how they go to the bathroom during this period. Clearly, its much more efficient than any parliament or congress, because this arrangement makes it more desirable to come to a decision quickly rather than get the guy who's policies you favor in. Its not really a vote in the formal sense, but rather just until most people can agree on somebody. Basically, they stop when one candidate recieves such a large majority that everyone there knows that bothering to count votes would be pointless. Kind of like how a group of friends decide which movie to go to. I mean, the Catholic Church was founded millenia ago when the ROMANS were still in charge of the world. Many governmental styles occurred since then that it really becomes inefficient to model the church in any style. If they modeled themselves in one style at a certain time, and a hundred years later a new style of government came to dominate, the church would have to reform itself again and again. I mean, voting may be great today, but tomorrow it might go the way of emperors and kings, so meetings that occur seldomly and unpredictably like the choosing of a new pope really don't HAVE any set rules, becuase by the time they could get such rules set, the rules of the world change.

Dammit...this isn't cutting off power to a house, this is killing somebody by starvation!!!! You think its uncivilized to give murderers a painless execution, but think its just to make an innocent suffer for two weeks just because she doesn't happen to have upper brain function? At very least, they should have given her a morphine injection. I wouldn't let my DOG die of starvation. If one's dog gets old and sick to the point that its better to kill it than let it suffer, you either shoot it in the head or take it to the vet for a lethal injection. You know WHY the judges decided to remove the feeding tube instead of injecting her with morpine? Its for moralistic purposes, because technically, its not the decision that kills her, but her condition. That is the what's truly disgusting on this matter. The judges were trained in textbook philosophy and made their decision by the textbook. They didn't care about life or suffering, they just wanted to make sure that at the end of the day the philosophical theorists couldn't pin them with anything. This kind of theorhetical moralism is getting more and more twisted and disgusting with each new philosopher who adds his theories to the bowl. As I said, I don't know why the doctors submitted themselves to the judgement of the theorhetical moralists. Doctors don't act in the theorhetical, they act in the actual. When push comes to shove, they don't have the luxery of passing off the decision to a higher court or dodging responsability and making a patient suffer me just so that THEY aren't responsable by theorhetical standards. I can understand after fifeteen years why somebody might want to give up. I can even understand if after fifeteen years, somebody might not want to pay the money anymore. However, I can not understand why somebody might, if someone else was willing to pay, override their judgement. And I really can't understand why somebody would rather watch someone suffer for two weeks rather than give her a morphine injection.

Well, generally that blackout was caused by lack of power plants. Alot of wierd things occurred that day, all technology and operators did what they were supposed to, the problem was caused by the fast that the supply of power just barely reached demand, and when one powerplant shut down, there wasn't enough power to go around. Power plant's are themselves dependant upon the power grid...their instruments are not run off of their own turbines. So, the the powergrid couldn't supply power, the electronic regulating equipment turned off, and when the equipment turned off, the reactors were shut down automatically. It simply takes a couple days to get a reactor up and running again.

No its not. As I said, the heat engine was invented about thousands of years after the horse was first utilized. We aren't really due for advancement until year 5000.

*earns $5,000,000 in tips from women who watch that sort of thing* *buys Death Ray* *fraggs Paine with Death Ray*

Ah

[OOC] So true *creates microscopic army of Paine eating paramecia* *army of paramecia eats all of the mini-Paine bits*

*closes and locks a blast door, trapping Paine on the other side* *watches via videocamera the dynamite boomerang returning to the person who threw it* (that's what boomerangs do) *watches Paine get blown to tiny bits*

I know what a vegetable is thank you very much!!! I never had any naive hopes that she would jump out of her chair and ask what is for breakfast either. The doctor whose article I read could very well be a quack, but he was right about one thing...in every case I've seen doctors give up, the patient was WAY worse off than Shiavo. They are almost always flat out unconcious, a lot older, and have several organ failures. The medical advice offered by the hospital was to let her live and infact give her therapy, so quit with the routine that its simple naitivity you are facing. The expert opinion was to not give up just yet, you are the ones simply being pessimistic. I don't think judges know more about medicine than doctors. They made their judgements from their comfortable courtrooms, having never seen first hand what these cases are like. Its rather disgusting, and the doctors by no means should have listened to them. What were the judges going to do about it? Pe!@#$%^&*ion the AMA to pull their licenses? The AMA wouldn't submit themselves to such harr!@#$%^&*ment. Shiavo never reached the point of giving up.

I don't buy into this political pressure arguement because in the U2 flights, the Bay of Pigs, and the Cuban Missle Crisis the CIA were the ones pushing the presidency around. I could be convinced that that is one of the differences between Bush and Kennedy, but still that's a big turnaround. If the intelligence services were in fact being pushed around it was because of their own weakness. Since its their job to play mind games with the world, anyone who can be manipulated isn't worthy of the job, because if the presidency could push them around, someone else might be able to. Still, I'd agree that they are being made scapgoats here. In reality the signs all pointed to Hussein having WMDs, its just that there weren't any. The intelligence services, the presidency, and congress !@#$%^&*umed the most likely outcome, and as luck would have it the least likely outcome occured. The government really just happened to roll snake eyes.

How so?..the NRC REGULATES nuclear power...if my father had stock in Westinghouse, sure, but... 12.5 x-rays in one day? I've seen doctors order that many, not on a routine basis, but... I don't know which statistic to quote, but the average radiation emission of a coal power plant per month is greater than the radiation emission of TMI. What abundence of scientific evidence? The whole thought process on thermal pollution is that it changes the envronment so it can't be good. I mean, its sound, but still thermal pollution is trivial. I'll take a bit of thermal pollution over air pollution or deforestation any day. How did the article stand the test of time? All it did was be published in 1983 and hasn't deleted itself since that time. I remember seeing a TIME article after the USS Cole bombing saying Bin Laden would be captured in a few months. It hasn't happened, though I could show you the article. Would it imply that if I showed you the 5 year old article that it "stood the test of time" and that the information inside is correct? If I got my hands of a 400 year old do!@#$%^&*ent saying that the world is flat, would the fact that the paper survived 400 years imply that the information on it is credible? There are some things people discuss in publications and some things people don't. Any distrust of the Soviet Union wasn't going to be published without proof. And since I don't have any spies working for me, I can't provide the proof either. The only people who would have proof of that are the intelligence agencies and they don't publish their findings in magazines. So, those in our position are left to the unscientific method of guessing. Neither of us have the resources to prove anything and you know it. All I can say is from what I have heard on how power plants are operated, that story is false.

[OOC/] one more time in English please? [/OOC]

*watches as Paine falls on his !@#$%^&* while no foot is touching the ground* *steps on Paine's chest* *crams stick of dynamite in Paine's mouth* *runs away real fast*

*quickly bites Paine's foot off while he is kicking me in the face*

Actually the warm waterways make good fishing spots in the winter and late fall. I've stood in the water and know why, in the winter it make the water a comfortable temperature that was kinda hard to climb out of actually. I'm sure it might be worse closer to the source, but fish are smart enough to stay away if it gets too hot. Generally, the fish probably view it as a vacation area. Gysers and hot springs are naturally occurring phenomna that do more damage, because they raise temperature and add sulfur. As long as we don't do too much we will be fine. In the grand scheme of things, it shouldn't count for nothing, the air pollution caused by coal power or the deforestation and land consumption that would be caused by solar power does far more damage than warm water. For clarification, I think the Soviet Union rushed the people in the power plants with impossible to fulfill deadlines possibly because they wanted to make a plutonium factory out of it. The evidence of this is the design of the reactor, the way it was run, and all the things the workers did in a short time period. Remember the time the article was published. The Soviets only admitted they had a nuclear meltdown after all of Europe's radiation detectors were going haywire and US spy satellites had taken pictures of a burning power plant. They were great at covering their tracks, though it does not seem like it now. After their collapse a lot was revealed that was not known the time that article was published. Three Mile Island was a near-miss...no radiation was leaked and no evidence of radiation leakage has been noticed in the area since then. That puts this "disaster" behind the radiation from cigarette smoke, buring fossil fuels, and being in front of a computer monitor. Most of nuclear waste comes from medicine anyways. While there are a few power plants here and there, virtually every decent hospital has a nuclear medicine facility and thus produces nuclear waste. Since a lot of times this is life-saving medicine, we can't really get rid of this. So, we will need to develop a way of getting rid of the stuff regardless. Since solar power plants can only become viable "with development", it is reasonable to permit that we develop a solution to this problem, especially given that we have to solve waste problems with nuclear medicine anyway. The problems with solar are rarely discussed. They require large amounts of land area. Pro solar people love to cite how life on Earth is powered by a solar reaction. However, which percentage of land area is covered by plantlife? Virtually all of the land area is covered by plants, whether it be grass bushes, or trees, and the amount of land area we need for solar power is roughly the same. We would need to destroy lots of evironments just to get the land area. Solar panels require silicon for construction, and this means lots of silicon, and this means major mining operations. If we were to impliment solar power, the mining necessary would quickly surp!@#$%^&* iron mining, and I don't know if the Earth even has that much silicon...after all, this planet is made out of iron, not silicon. Yes, nuclear power requires Uranium, but not nearly as much due to E=mc2. With a nuclear reaction, we only need a tiny amount of energy to produce a lot of heat. Generally though, a few nuclear power plants will produce a continent's worth of solar panels while consuming the land area similar to a small town. Solar power is really one of those things that can reduce energy consumption, but can't really provide power. Your approval of solar panels is simple...they are expensive. Thus, you automatically assume that the reason people don't use them is to be cheap smucks, though that is not the case. The reason they are expensive is because they require a lot of material, energy, and land area to construct, which each translates into environmental damage. Oh, and trust me, those who run power plants are NOT human. They have plenty of faults socially, but I can't imagine them making mistakes at work anymore...remember, after TMI there were huge reforms in the industry. (BTW, my father works for the NRC, so you can say my information comes from them.)

*smacks Paine with stick for bumping up old topic*

That isn't much of a conspiracy, the fact that oil companies paid to limit gasahol is public knowledge. But, other than that, keep in mind that inventing new technologies is not easy. The technology before the car...the domestic horse, was used thousands of years before the combustion engine was invented. Like it or not, it will most likely take a superintelligent inventor like Edison or DaVinci to replace heat engines, and the world currently has no one of that calibur.

Well, I don't see why the doctors had to listen to the courts. They really have the right to do whatever they want in this matter and !@#$%^&* the courts. I started with the opinion of letting her die. I've seen cases where saving the patient's life is hopeless and found out the hard way that the best thing to do in these cases is let go. However, after reading some editorials written by physicians, I realised that that is not this case. Shiavo was in stable condition and with therapy could eventually improve, even if not entirely recover. She was awake, and the point of giving up is where the patient is unconcious. Death by removal of feeding tube is sick. If the judges had any guts at all, they would order death by morphine injection, something quick and painless rather than watching her starve to death for two weeks.

sigh...I tried to post a picture and got banned from the site for ugliness.

Sigh...its pure arrogance is what it is that's hurting Delic. Sever, ur a fool. The "dissension" in Luke12:53 is all of the arguements and wars over religion, particularly the rise of Christianity and the fall of the pagan religion. Its frankly impossible to set the world on a better course without creating dissension. Even God can't change the world without changing the world. "Spreading fire" is something only God does. Fire only got incorrectly !@#$%^&*ociated with evil because that is what is what evil gets cast into. Luke 6:27 and Luke 19:27 don't contradict themselves at all...you are supposed to love YOUR enemies and kill GOD's enemies. Luke 22:36 was merely an at the moment advice for the apostles at the time. It's really inacclicable now except to show that Jesus knew what they needed to do in order to spread Christianity - he could tell when violence wasn't necessary and when it was. It all stems from the misconcieved notion in modern times that Jesus was a pacifist, which he never was. He got pissed and layed the smackdown on the merchants inside the temple.