bombus

He disagreed with our politics and threatened us. It was in our best to remove him from power.

What politics were they then? Isn't destroying Al Qaeda in our best interests?

That does not correlate with the video evidence, which shows plumes of smoke for a long period of time. For fuel to explode or burn up rapidly, there must be sufficient oxygen in mixture with the fuel vapor. The confined space of a tower would almost certainly not offer enough, and the fuel would exist at least partly in liquid form, which does not burn as rapidly.

That would most likely have been office furniture, curtains, blinds and carpets (wood, plastic, rubber) burning after the fuel had ignited it all.

Does a puddle of gasoline burn up in a flash? NO, its only the vapors that ignite, as it is with jet fuel

A puddle of gasoline is different. Have you ever seen a flamethrower being used?

"Those that wish to believe the official truth of 911 will go to the most extraordinary lengths to defend their position, as it represents, at a deep psychological level, a defence of all they hold true. It is in effect a defence of their reality."

 

Interestingly, the same is true of those who wish to believe the conspiracy theory.

Since it's clear that nobody is going to change their mind about this, I wonder what this thread can hope to achieve.

Yes, I would agree with that. The difference though is that those who believe in the conspiracies are often dubbed whackos (and many probably are of course!) but those who refute all such theories are thought of as being level headed.

As a fortean I find both positions suspect!

Considering the wind and the fact that the only visible fire is two floors above her, not too hot at all.

 

It amazes me that some people can't seem to believe that thousands of gallons of jet fuel and burning office fittings can get hot enough to weaken steel so that it deforms under pressure when a blacksmith does it with hand bellows and 4 pounds of coal.

 

Getting things hot enough to bend steel is not hard. We've only been doing it for a thousand years or so.

I think almost all the fuel would have been consumed on impact in a flash. Jet fuel is highly flammable.

Those that wish to believe the official truth of 911 will go to the most extraordinary lengths to defend their position, as it represents, at a deep psychological level, a defence of all they hold true. It is in effect a defence of their reality.

This vid could be a fake of course!

ignore this

Irrelevant. Your point was that Germany had not withdrawn from any occupied territory in WWI. The data shows that claim to be wrong.

My original point was that Iraq and offered to withdraw completely before the US launched their attack.

And just how many does it take for the action to be wrong? Obviously enough invaded to defeat Kuwait's military force and occupy the country. Does it have to be more than that?

Not the point. The point is that the whole affair was designed to destroy Iraq's military and civilian infrastructure for other goals - not just to remove Iraq from Kuwait.

The articles were talking about a possible threat to Saudi Arabia. You seem to be trying to use the alledged small number of Iraqi troops in Kuwait to say the invasion was OK. That position is simply not going to be valid by this argument.

No I'm not. See answer above.

No, they weren't. Someone has told you a whopper here. Remember the Marines fighting on the southern border of Kuwait? Just use some elementary logic here, bombus. IF most of the Iraqi troops were dug in along the border with Iraq, the flanking movement would not have worked! We would never have captured as many Iraqi prisoners as we did.

I didn't see any of the war as I was in the UK and just saw news on TV. There was plenty of misinformation going around.

I don't know about the intention to invade Saudi Arabia. I talked about capability,but you seem to have ignored the point.

Why did you mention it then?

As to "willing to leave without a shot being fired", you are re-writing history. Remember the Iraqi attack against Khafji? Before the ground war started:

"At Khafji, the deserted, oil-soaked Saudi coastal town, and at two other points west of there, Saddam Hussein again coldly miscalculated. The Iraqi army made probing attacks that were geared toward drawing the Coalition ground forces prematurely into battle—inflict heavy casualties and the anti-war movement would increase the pressure, leading to a U.S. withdrawal. The Marines and their Arab allies received their baptism of fire, and came out of the experience with more confidence than they had when they went in. It took 36 hours of fighting to push the Iraqis out." http://www.qrmapps.com/gw1/khafji.htm

What was the date of that encounter? If war was by then inevitable as the US had refused to allow the withdrawal of Iraqi troops then maybe Iraq thought it had no alternative.

No, it's not. You may not like attacking retreating troops, but it is well within international law. Unless the troops surrender, they are still combatants. And again, you misstate the facts when you say these were "surrendered soldiers". They weren't. You can argue that it would have been humane to stop the air attacks on the Iraqis fleeing Kuwait City earlier, but you can't argue that it was either against international law or that the toops had surrendered.

Again you show your complete ignorance. The Geneva Convention of 1949, common article 3 outlaws the killing of soldiers who "are out of combat." It was clearly a war crime. They were retreating,many in civilian vehicles, and put up no resistance. There is film of iraqi troops waving white flags but still being mown down by helicopter gunships. I would guess that if they same happened to US troops you'd be up in arms!

Extract:

More than 2,000 vehicles and tens of thousands of charred and dismembered bodies littered the sixty miles of highway. The clear rapid incineration of the human being [pictured above] suggests the use of napalm, phosphorus, or other incindiary bombs. These are anti-personnel weapons outlawed under the 1977 Geneva Protocols. This massive attack occurred after Saddam Hussein announced a complete troop withdrawl from Kuwait in compliance with UN Resolution 660. Such a massacre of withdrawing Iraqi soldiers violates the Geneva Convention of 1949, common article 3, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who "are out of combat." There are, in addition, strong indications that many of those killed were Palestinian and Kuwaiti civilians trying to escape the impending seige of Kuwait City and the return of Kuwaiti armed forces. No attempt was made by U.S. military command to distinguish between military personnel and civilians on the "highway of death." The whole intent of international law with regard to war is to prevent just this sort of indescriminate and excessive use of force.

You provided the evidence. From your post "The implication is obvious: Iraqi troops who were eventually deployed along the Kuwait-Saudi Arabian border were sent there as a response to U.S. build up and were not a provocation for Bush's military action. "

 

1. That contradicts your statement above "They were dug in mostly on the border in Iraq" Nope. They were dug in on the southern border of Kuwait!

Some troops certainly were, and AFTER the US build up.

2. As I noted before, you can't have it both ways. If Hussein intended to give up Kuwait without a shot, then why move troops IN? He would only do that if he intended to fight.

Because the US refused to accept it.

3. Hussein launched offensives at 3 places into Saudi Arabia Jan. 29 - Feb 3. The refutes the idea that he was going to leave without a shot being fired.

As per previous anwer

I did. In fact, I quoted it. The material YOU posted 1) refutes your position and 2) makes your position internally inconsistent.

No it does not!

Bombus, you don't like war. I don't like war. But the sad fact is that some wars just have to be fought.

But this was not one of them. The US could have easily warned Iraq not to invade, as Iraq had been threatening to invade for months. The US chose to do the opposite and suggested that it would not intervene. The question is WHY, but it's not hard to answer.

For the simple reason that wars can be profitable for one side, and sometimes you just have to defend yourself and others. If you don't, the end result is a massacre. I obviously don't think that every war the US has fought was justified; I opposed the second Iraq war from the start. But you seem to go whole hog and think NO war the US has ever fought was justified.

Some wars are necessary, but most are not!

The problem I'm having, on a science forum, is that you are misstating the facts to support your belief. Why can't you take the attitude of science over to other subjects and try to divorce your personal feelings from the data?[

I am not deliberately mis-stating any facts. I am merely coming to a different opinion on the meaning of the information.

And you commonly make misstatements of fact. You did so when you tried to denigrate the reviewer by saying an Associate Professor was not a "real" professor.

An associate professor (nor an assistant) is NOT a full Professor, as you pointed out.

Translation: you still won't provide us with any evidence.

I have a life. Just borrow the book and you won't have to rely on my mis-statements of facts.

Since you stated it as a belief and not science, fine. You can believe what you like. Data will tell us whether your belief corresponds to reality, as it always does in science.

Well, I am fine with that. I have seen the data. When you see the data you can decide for yourself. I am not going to spend half my life putting it up here on this forum though. That's what libraries are for:-)

Please provide examples.

 

 

 

ROFL! Bombus, please don't display your ignorance quite so openly. An Associate Professor is a "real" professor. The ranks go: Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor. ALL are "professors". In the USA Assistant Professor is a rank before you have tenure. When you are promoted to tenure you get the rank of Associate Professor. When you have served on an NIH Study Section, an editorial board of a journal, and a few other things, you are promoted to Professor. The chairman of my department is ranked Associate Professor!

 

You are easily amused

 

 

 

Now you are just trying to trot out the Argument from Authority.

Often a very good one

 

 

 

She isn't going on meeting him personally, but what he wrote in the book! The issue is still whether the book is as Dr. Walker portrayed it (and yes, you should use her professional title). So far, you haven't given us any evidence to the contrary.

 

I did start doing a critique of her review, but realised it would take too much of my precious time. Why don't you just borrow the book from a library and judge for yourself? You won't have to take my word for it then.

 

I firmly believe he is on to something BIG.

What's more, the time an object can stay in superposition is inversely related to size.

How does one actually define how big an object is? If it is touching another object, does that object include the object it is touching? How does one define touching?

I'm just interested...

anothers hope, anothers game

anothers loss, anothers gain

anothers lies, anothers truth

anothers doubt, anothers proof

anothers left, anothers right

anothers peace, anothers fight

anothers name, anothers aim

anothers fall, anothers fame

anothers pride, anothers shame

anothers love, anothers pain

anothers hope, anothers game

anothers loss, anothers gain

anothers lies, anothers truth

anothers doubt, anothers proof

anothers left, anothers right

anothers peace, anothers fight

marx had an idea from the confusion of his head then there were a thousand more waiting to be led the books are sold, the quotes are bought you learn them well and then you're caught

anothers left, anothers right

anothers peace, anothers fight

Hitler had ideas from the confusion of his heart then there were a thousand more waiting to play their part the stage was set, the costumes worn and another empire of destruction born

anothers name, anothers aim

anothers fall, anothers fame

Jung had an idea from the confusion of his dream then there were a thousand more waiting to be seen you're not yourself, the theory says but i can help, your complex pays

anothers hope, anothers

anothers loss, anothers gain

Satre had an idea from the confusion of his brain then there were a thousand more indulging in his pain revelling in isolation and existential choice can you truly be alone when you use anothers voice?

Anothers lies, anothers truth

anothers doubt, anothers proof

the idea born in someones mind is nurtured by a thousand blind anonymous beings, vacuous souls do you fear the confusion, your lack of control?

you lift your arm to write a name so caught up in the identity game who do you see? who do you watch? who's your leader? which is your flock? who do you watch? who do you watch? who's your leader? which is your flock?

Einstein had an idea from the confusion of his knowledge then there were a thousand more turning to advantage they realised that their god was dead so they reclaimed power through the bomb instead

anothers code,

anothers brain

they'll shower us all in deadly rain

Jesus had an idea from the confusion of his soul then there were a thousand more waiting to take control the guilt is sold, forgiveness bought the cross is there as your reward

Anothers love, anothers pain anothers pride, anothers shame do you watch at a distance from the side you have chosen? whose answers serve you best? who'll save you from confusion? who will leave you an exit and a comfortable cover who will take you oh so near the edge, but never drop you over? who do you watch?

That still does not negate that Kuwait WAS an independent nation.

Yes, but only if you happen to agree that international law is valid, which some do not (including the USA:-))

Not in the West. However, in the war against Russia, peace was signed in 1917 because Germany did offer to withdraw.

Yes, and Russia stopped killing Germans - unlike the US vs the Iraqis.

Excuse me, but Iraqi troops DID invade Kuwait. That is not in doubt. So exactly when did the invasion take place? I don't see the relevance of this. If Bush threatened action BEFORE Iraq invaded, then that was clear signal to Hussein that invasion would be opposed! Which would supposedly have deterred him. If he invaded after this, is it any less aggression on his part?

So we are told. Some troops probably did invade, but nowhere near the amount we were lead to believe.

1. By the start of the air war there were certainly LOTS of Iraqi troops dug in in Kuwait. Exactly when do your sources think they got there? They didn't come in AFTER the air campaign started, did they? So the sources are obviously wrong by testing against the data.

They were dug in mostly on the border in Iraq

2. The reports dispute whether Hussein intended to continue into Saudi Arabia. Irrelevant. The invasion of Kuwait, IMO, was enough justification to use force to oust him. In military terms (subject to Armygas' corrections), the big thing is capability and not intention. Hussein had the capability to continue by invading Saudi Arabia. In fact, he did so when the Iraqis launched the attack on that coastal town (can't remember the name off the top of my head).

He did not at all intend to invade Saudi Arabia! He was willing to leave without a shot being fired, so why did we attack? Why did we kill retreating defeated troops? This against international law, which you think was valid enough to declare Kuwait an independent state, but not valid enough to stop surrendered soldiers being massacred.

Irrelevant. The provocation was the invasion of Kuwait. So Hussein decided to defend his conquests. Which means he never had any intention of withdrawing, does it?

Please provide evidence of this. You have seen plenty to the contrary.

Sorry, but your arguments are internally inconsistent. First you say Hussein was willing to withdraw but now you tell us he built up forces in Kuwait so as to hold it! Can't have it both ways, Bombus.

I can, and do and just have. Re-read my other post!

Thank you, Bombus, for posting the smoking gun that showed just how dumb Hussein's logic was!

Dumb to us maybe, but maybe he felt that that the British had no right in the first place to declare Kuwait as an independent state. Saddam Hussein was dumb in not seeing the trap, and under international law had no right to do what he did regardless of how fair he thought the situation was, but we know how random the policing of international law seems to be!

Actually, in period of mobilization prior to the start of troop movements in August 1914, the Germans did indeed discuss refraining from invading Belgium. They made several offers to both Britain and France to avoid war with them. See Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. There were huge arguments within the German government about whether they should go to war against France at all. And whether an invasion of Belgium would bring in Britain and how to avoid that. In the end, they misunderstood Britain's committment to Belgium and decided that Britain would not fight for what the Germans thought was just a "point of honor" that didn't seem to be vital to Britain's interests.

This seems similar to Iraq's actions before the invasion - they didn't think it would actually lead to a war. Germany didn't offer to retreat once they'd invaded though.

Also, some of the stuff I said I'd post up is below:

On September 11, 1990, Bush also told a joint session of Congress that "following negotiations and promises by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein not to use force, a powerful army invaded its trusting and much weaker neighbor, Kuwait. Within three days, 120,000 troops with 850 tanks had poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia. It was then I decided to act to check that aggression." However, according to Jean Heller of the St. Petersburg Times (of Florida), the facts just weren't as Bush claimed. Satellite photographs taken by the Soviet Union on the precise day Bush addressed Congress failed to show any evidence of Iraqi troops in Kuwait or massing along the Kuwait-Saudi Arabian border. While the Pentagon was claiming as many as 250,000 Iraqi troops in Kuwait, it refused to provide evidence that would contradict the Soviet satellite photos. U.S. forces, encampments, aircraft, camouflaged equipment dumps, staging areas and tracks across the desert can easily be seen. But as Peter Zimmerman, formerly of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Reagan Administration, and a former image specialist for the Defense Intelligence Agency, who analyzed the photographs for the St. Petersburg Times said:

We didn't find anything of that sort [i.e. comparable to the U.S. buildup] anywhere in Kuwait. We don't see any tent cities, we don't see congregations of tanks, we can't see troop concentrations, and the main Kuwaiti air base appears deserted. It's five weeks after the invasion, and from what we can see, the Iraqi air force hasn't flown a single fighter to the most strategic air base in Kuwait. There is no infrastructure to support large numbers of people. They have to use toilets, or the functional equivalent. They have to have food.... But where is it?

On September 18, 1991, only a week after the Soviet photos were taken, the Pentagon was telling the American public that Iraqi forces in Kuwait had grown to 360,000 men and 2,800 tanks. But the photos of Kuwait do not show any tank tracks in southern Kuwait. They clearly do show tracks left by vehicles which serviced a large oil field, but no tank tracks. Heller concludes that as of January 6, 1991, the Pentagon had not provided the press or Congress with any proof at all for an early buildup of Iraqi troops in southern Kuwait that would suggest an imminent invasion of Saudi Arabia.

The usual Pentagon evidence was little more than "trust me." But photos from Soviet commercial satellites tell quite a convincing story. Photos taken on August 8, 1990, of southern Kuwait - six days after the initial invasion and right at the moment Bush was telling the world of an impending invasion of Saudi Arabia - show light sand drifts over patches of roads leading from Kuwait City to the Saudi border. The photos taken on September 11, 1990, show exactly the same sand drifts but now larger and deeper, suggesting that they had built up naturally without the disturbance of traffic for a month. Roads in northern Saudi Arabia during this same period, in contrast, show no sand drifts at all, having been swept clean by heavy traffic of supply convoys. The former DIA analyst puts it this way: "In many places the sand goes on for 30 meters and more." Zirnmerman's analysis is that "They [roads] could be passable by tank but not by personnel or supply vehicles. Yet there is no sign that tanks have used those roads. And there's no evidence of new roads being cut. By contrast, none of the roads in Saudi Arabia has any sand cover at all. They've all been swept clear."[6]

It would have taken no more than a few thousand soldiers to hold Kuwait City, and that is all satellite evidence can support. The implication is obvious: Iraqi troops who were eventually deployed along the Kuwait-Saudi Arabian border were sent there as a response to U.S. build up and were not a provocation for Bush's military action. Moreover, the manner in which they were finally deployed was purely defensive - a sort of Maginot Line against the massive and offensive mobilization of U.S. and Coalition forces just over the border with Saudi Arabia.

Sounds good, but even then the proximity of Venus to the sun is simply going to lend problems. On mars you may have to warm up, but on Venus you will have to cool down, and I don’t know how much cooling you would have to do even if Venus had an atmosphere similar to earth. Another aspect about using bacteria or microbes to farm the planet is simply an evolutionary one. After X amount of generations any bacteria that could survive in such an environment might start to find ways to become better at that rather then turning the environment into something more hospitable. I mean bacteria in sea vents is nice, but they adapted to survive there, not the other way around. The bacteria would most likely have to have something “programmed” into it killing it in so many generations while we constantly replaced the populations and monitored various mutations or what not.

Venus isn't close enough to the sun for it to greatly increase temperatures much above Earth.

There's plenty of water on Venus in the form of steam. I think the increased pressure is due to te CO2 content of the atmoshpere.

Did you give that any thought bombus? What is your pacifist answer for a country that invades another country just to rape and pillage and then leave? You're advocating that it would have been a great idea to allow him to simply withdraw since he made the offer. What was to be his punishment? Let me guess...more sanctions (to punish his people with)?

 

When you establish a precedence of negotiating with an aggressor who viciously attacks a country like that, it emboldens every other aggressor with similar thoughts. Just invade, kill, rape, destroy - then leave...no problem, no consequences - they'll be happy you withdrew and leave you alone.

 

If you're going to play world police, or sign a treaty to resist aggressors, then you have a responsibility to do it. Personally, I don't agree with pre-established alignments and military commitments, but since we're here, let's be realistic.

I'll post up some stuff that questions your beliefs about what happened regarding Kuwait. I'm on a different PC at the moment so have not access to it. Much of what was supposed to have happened to Kuwait was probably propoganda.

Question everything!

Bombus, nice to see you immediately went to ad hominem. The "mouse" was run past the "cat" many times. While the "cat" is in a state of coherence the mouse does not interact. So we get many "results". Some of which are the cat is still both dead and alive, and then a "result" that the wave function has collapsed.

 

So, which of these are "observations"? According to you the wave function collapses with observation. But several mice can run by the cat and report their "observations" to the humans. Those observations say coherence is maintained. By your idea, coherence should collapse on the FIRST observation, right? But it didn't.

 

 

Quit trying to force your ideas upon science. Instead, listen to what the data is telling you. Coherence/decoherence exists or not independent of observation

Take this article:

7. GP Collins, Schrodinger's SQUID. Scientific American 283: 23-24, October 2000. Electric current flows both ways around a superconducting loop at the same time.

 

Now, why didn't the current flow just ONE way upon observation? Here we have a wave that doesn't collapse upon the first observation.

I apologise for my flippant behaviour - too many beers! But, isn't this essentially the same as the double slit experiment which observation over time shows that electons/photons interact with 'non existent' interferring photons. I thought the problem occured when following individual electrons/photons one at a time and observing their progress continually throughout.

Honestly, after the ruthless massacre, mass rape and pillaging of the citizens of Kuwait - the part you left out - military conflict was necessary. The alternative is that any country can invade any other country - terrorize it's people and destroy it's infrastructure - without any retaliation, as long as they leave right afterwards...

For somone so intelligent, you don't question much do you?

Define "torture". You are basing your objection to "torture" on an inherent quality within the animal. One you can't demonstrate. I base my objection on how the torturer would react to humans. Inflicting physical damage on either living organisms OR inanimate objects without a goal other than to inflict damage indicates a person who would do this to another person. Notice I included inanimate objects. Think about a person who goes around setting fires or explosions for goal of inflicting damage ...

I am not going to define torture as its obvious and I don't wish to waste my time.

THANK YOU for making my argument that you can't project human emotions onto animals! Of course, you just destroyed your own argument.

Hardly! By definition you can't project HUMAN emotions on to animals. Thats no the same as saying animals have no emotions.

Let's look at this again from a human pov. It's a forced injection against their will! IOW, people ultimately choose to have injections because of the health benefit to them. Here there is no choice on the part of the rat, the needle is much larger in comparison to the one used on humans (bigger needles hurt more). So the rat is having pain inflicted on it every day. Would humans be "bored"? NO! They would view this as torture. They would struggle and resist. EVERY DAY. But the rats have none of the reactions humans would have.

What is your point? Rats have evolved to respond to significant stuff. They probably don't enjoy being injected but quickly learn that it's nothing to worry about. Humans, even those injected by force, would soon learn not to worry about it. Slaves learned stuff like this. It applies equally to humans.

Evolution cannot be tested??!! Oh boy. Sorry, Bombus, but in your zeal for an emotional position, you have completely abandoned science.

Evolution by natural selection takes many generations. Experiments by definition ae not natural selection and just SUGGEST what happens in 'nature'.

Sorry, but I'm not. It's called the Duhem-Quine Thesis. Look it up. So our "educated guesses" are more than likely to be wrong.

Speak for yourself

Thank you for admitting you are arguing from emotion: "intuative leaps". Making a leap from "sound science" doesn't do you any good unless you can scientifically test what we are considering. Scientists made an intuitive leap from sound science that proteins were the hereditary material.

 

Of course, you said evolution can't be tested, either! Which means you just excluded it from "sound science". If you keep digging this hole, Bombus, you are going to come out on the other side of the earth.

 

Remember, evolution is "descent with modification" You are denying the "modification". Why do you think we do clinical trials on treatments we worked out in animals? because those modifications by evolution sometimes have changed us so that we are no longer close enough for data on animal trials to work on humans. We can all think of treatments that had excellent animal data that don't work on humans. I'll contribute one: Carticell.

I do understand evolution by natural selection you know!

Behaviors/responses evolved like this. The error is attributing "emotional" to them. All science does is test the behavior/response. It is your non-scientific value judgement to say they are "emotions"

What do you think emotions are?

We have to distinguish between "self-aware" and cognitive abilities and the quality called "sapience". Now, why are you "sure" when you say "This can never really be proven."? Those contradict. If you can't prove it, then you have to retain some uncertainty.

I am as sure as I can be. As sure as I am that physical reality exists.

Now, what do the behavioral experiments measure? Are identical experiments made on human children? Can you cite these studies?

If I could be bothered I probably could.

We are not discussing that. We are discussing projecting HUMAN emotions onto them. I'm saying that, even IF animals have emotions, those are not the same in the same circumstances as humans have. You conceded that above with the rats. Therefore, insisting that humans behave toward animals based on their emotions being the same as ours is flawed logic.

I am discussing that. I am maybe not as aspergic as you might be, so can infer wider meanings from words. Dogs ae capable of being 'happy' in a dog type way, which IMO isn't so far removed from human 'happiness' to be treated in a different way.

Not compared to other humans! Here you are moving the goalposts of "close". They are still outside the normal curve of human genetic diversity.

They are close enough, or can we torture dogs because they are actually little automotons and don't REALLY feel distressed when tortured as it's just an emotionless reaction. I think not.

Then I saw "boredom" on the rats that were being "painfully" injected into the stomach each and ever day!

Maybe rats do get bored. Dogs do.

This cuts both ways, Bombus. If we were picked up every day against our will and had a (equivalent) 8 guage needle jabbed into our abdomen, we would be pissed! We would fight and struggle. They didn't. The rats just hung there passively.

Maybe it's not much of a big deal to them! It's over in a few seconds and hardly hurts. Most humans fear of injections is actually pretty irrational.

LOL! First you invoke the mantle of science, then discard it! You say that science is based on hunches that are "proven". By that you mean tested. But since in emotions you can't do the testing, then you abandon science and then reach the conclusion.

Not at all. In the same way that evolution cannot be tested but can be inferred by our knowledge of geology, paleontology, genetics (essentially), physics, dendrology, maths etc... we can use our accumulated knowledge to make educated guesses.

A

nd, actually, Bombus, you are wrong about the "much of science is based ..." If we look at ALL "hunches"/hypotheses in science, we find that 99.9999+% of them are WRONG! So wrong that officially the odds of a new hypothesis being right is basically 0. So, on that basis, we emphatically should NOT do as you advise; it's almost certainly wrong.

I think you are probably 98.345798765% wrong about that:-)

What "judgement"? What "accumulated knowledge"? About how WE feel? That doesn't count because we don't know it applies to pigs. What do WE feel about eating our babies? Does that apply to rats? Nope. So our "accumulated knowledge" is wrong there, isn't it?

Well, as I said, the accumulated knowledge of our past years of human existence - particularly the last 400 years. As I said above, we can make intuative leaps based on sound science from related areas (like the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection) without actually being able to scientifically test that which we are considering.

This isn't "emotion". You are making a real hash out of evolution. Animals don't "develop" a "fear" of heights. Rather, ancestors who avoided heights were less likely to fall of cliffs. It's not an "emotion", it's a genetically wired behavior. Same with evacuating. Those ancestors that did not pee when receiving signals to do so died of toxemia.

Emotional behaviours/responses evolved like this.

I like your argument about self-aware vs behavior and that you can't reliably read emotions into behavior in other species, especially "distress". So stick to whether animals are "self-aware" and stay away from the claims they have emotions -- especially trying to attribute them to evolution.

The thing is, I am sure chimps are about as 'self aware' as, say, a 2 - 3 year old human child, and this could also be applied to other great apes. This can never really be proven. Although behavioural experiments have suggested this, we still have to rely on our 'common sense' which is based on our accumulated knowledge to interpret those experimental results.

Dogs are probably less 'self aware' than great apes, but one can still tell when they are 'happy' or 'sad' or 'distressed' or 'scared'. These attributes are human descriptions, but I think it's reasonabe to assume that dogs have similar feelings going through them as us albeit less developed or 'fine tuned', but in the same ballpark.

However, an earwig defending it's young would most probably IMO be acting at a totally different level of conciousness, more akin to robotic behaviour.

Now just because we can't prove that animals have [lets call them] emotions doesn't mean that I should reject my 'common sense' and assume that a bear acts at a similar conscious level as an earthworm.

Yes, we should be careful when applying human emotions to animals, but we shouldn't just be stupid about it either.

it doesn't matter whether or not animals have emotions. what matters is whether or not they are aware of them. and you will find that for the most part animals aren't.

 

in fact you are right about emotions coming from somewhere. they came from evolution. they are needed because animals aren't aware of things and are not smart. (most animals i'm gonna just say animals but there are some exceptions and we are one of them). an animal will not know from watching another plummeting to its death off a precipice that falling off of precipices will cause you to die. therefore since animals lack this intelligence they require another way to know not to fall off of cliffs. they develop a fear of heights. animals will not act independently from their emotions they are slaves to them. they know what to eat because some stuff smells yummy. they know to pee because they feel like peeing and the longer they wait the more they feel the desire to pee and the greater the reward when they do. that's why you can't train your dog by showing it something you need to shape it's emotions by conditioning it with a reward system like food. being able to be conditioned is a fairly advanced trait in creatures. your dog is not aware it will not develop an unconditional trust with you. if it fears something it won't trust you to hold it near that thing unless you condition its emotions to tell it otherwise. animals don't "know" they are not aware of what's going on like if they were sleep walking and never wakeup. therefore if they are mistreated, for certain animals it's not unethical really since they are as self aware as a stone. Even if they display behaviour of pain or whatnot emotions are not indications of self awareness whatsoever, they actually only exist because of a lack of it. you are right to attribute emotions to them but not to attribute their awareness of them. a venus fly trap will react from touch, but not self aware. an insect moves around and reacts to stimuli also, not self aware, and still not conditionable either. other animals developed more complex emotions and the ability for them to be molded and affected by their environment. but that doesn't then mean they are self aware.

Well, I agree with most of that but I think 'self awareness' is a gradient, not a threshold.

His logic about Kuwait being an "internal border" and similar to the Germanies is just dumb.

That's an opinion!

In the Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1913, the British concurred with the Ottoman Empire in defining Kuwait as an "autonomous caza" of the Ottoman Empire and that the Shaikhs of Kuwait were not independent leaders, but rather qaimmaqams (provincial sub-governors) of the Ottoman government. After World War I, the Ottoman Empire was financially crippled and the invading British forces invalidated the Anglo-Ottoman Convention, declaring Kuwait to be an "independent sheikhdom under British protectorate.

Also in WW1 the germans never offered to retreat:

That the Bush administration wanted the war is obvious by its steadfast refusal to enter into any genuine negotiations with Iraq that could have achieved a diplomatic solution. Iraq's August 12, 1990, negotiation proposal, which indicated that Iraq was willing to make significant concessions in return for a comprehensive discussion of other unresolved Middle East conflicts, was rejected out of hand by the Bush administration. So was another Iraqi offer made in December that was reported by Knut Royce in Newsday.

President Bush avoided diplomacy and negotiations, even refusing to send Secretary of State Baker to meet Saddam Hussein before the January 15, 1991 deadline as he had promised on November 30, 1990. Bush also rejected Iraq's withdrawal offer of February 15, 1991, two days after U.S. planes incinerated hundreds of women and children sleeping in the al-Arneriyah bomb shelter. The Iraqis immediately agreed to the Soviet proposal of February 18, 1991 - that is four days before the so-called ground war was launched - which required Iraq to abide by all UN resolutions.

The U.S. ground war against Iraqi positions resulted in the greatest number of casualties in the conflict. As many as 50,000 to 100,000 Iraqi soldiers may have died after the Iraqi government had fully capitulated to all U.S. and UN demands. It is thus obvious that the U.S. government did not fight the war to secure Iraq's eviction from Kuwait but rather proceeded with this unparalleled massacre for other foreign policy objectives.

Copyright © 1992 by The Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal

That was an idea that was put forward in the late 1980s and 1990s. Paul Davies toyed with the idea of a "quantum god" in several of his books.

 

This was built around the thought experiment often called "Schroedinger's Cat". Put a cat in a box and hook a cyanide system to some radioactive substance such that, the next time a nuclei decayed, it would release the cyanide and kill the cat. Now, without looking, could you know if the cat was dead or alive? According to quantum mechanics, it was both at the same time, however much that offends common sense. This condition of superposition of two possibilities is called "coherence" and the collapse "decoherence". The idea was that the wave function did not collapse until someone opened the box and looked.

 

That all came to an end recently when it became possible to make a version of "Schroedinger's Cat" using microwave photons in an indeterminant state and then use an unconscious atomic "mouse" to see if the cat was "alive" or "dead". The mouse could be run by the photons and, if the wave function had collapsed, that would be detected (see next post). It turned out that just running the mouse by the microwave photon cat did NOT collapse the wave function by itself. Instead, the wave function collapsed on its own without an observer. Here are some of the papers so you can read about it yourself:

5. G Taubes, Atomic mouse probes the lifetime of a quantum cat. Science, 274 (6 Dec): 1615, 1996.

6. P Yam, Bringing Schrodinger's cat to life. Scientific American, June, 1997, pp. 124-129. Summary of recent experiments of superposition (coherence) and dechoherence.

7. GP Collins, Schrodinger's SQUID. Scientific American 283: 23-24, October 2000. Electric current flows both ways around a superconducting loop at the same time.

 

The idea of God serving as the ultimate observer to ensure reality is now out the window. It was a nice idea while it lasted ...

 

 

 

5. G Taubes, Atomic mouse probes the lifetime of a quantum cat. Science, 274 (6 Dec): 1615, 1996.

 

"How do you tell whether a cat is alive or dead without looking directly at it? Simple, answers Serge Haroche, a physicist at the École Normale Superieure (ENS) in Paris: You let a mouse run past its nose and see what happens to the mouse. Haroche is not, however, thinking of an ordinary cat. The cat in this case is Schrödinger's cat: a version of the elusive beast pictured by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in a thought experiment. Schrödinger imagined a cat shut in a box with a radioactive atom that has a 50-50 chance of decaying in an hour. If the atom decays, it kills the cat. If it doesn't, the cat lives. This setup is supposed to transfer the quantum indeterminacy of the atom to the cat, leaving it neither dead nor alive but in a superposition of both states: dead and alive.

 

To detect this strange state, says Haroche, you make a small hole in the box and send in the mouse: "You should have one probability for the mouse to escape if the cat is alive and another one--presumably larger--if the cat is dead. With the cat in a quantum superposition, both dead and alive, these probabilities would combine in a strange way, incompatible with classical logic, in an effect called quantum interference." He adds, however, that such an experiment will never work with such macroscopic systems as cats or mice. A ubiquitous process known as decoherence will instantly destroy the quantum superposition, making the cat either dead or alive and washing out the quantum interference between the two outcomes.

 

But by constructing minute versions of Schrödinger's cat and mouse, Haroche, Jean-Michel Raimond, Michel Brune, and their ENS colleagues have actually measured this decoherence process, as they report in the 9 December Physical Review Letters. They created a Schrödinger's cat consisting of a few microwave photons in an indeterminate quantum state and sent in a mouse--an atom prepared so that it can react to the dead-and-alive state of the cat. Investigators have caught glimpses of Schrödinger's cat before (Science, 24 May, p. 1101), but the mouse allows the ENS group to monitor its condition: to see how long the quantum superposition survives before collapsing into one state or the other.

 

"The experiment is one of the first very controlled measurements of decoherence," says physicist Chris Monroe of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who has also been involved in creating laboratory versions of Schrödinger's cat. "Everyone thinks that you can't have live and dead superpositions in the macroscopic world. The theory shows how these things just shouldn't last long, and this is really one of the first measurements that vindicates that point of view."

 

Laboratory versions of Schrödinger's cat look nothing like the original, but they do resemble it in existing in two distinct states at once. In the ENS experiment, for instance, the cat is a dead-and-alive superposition of two phases of an electromagnetic field resonating in a centimeter-sized cavity. (The phase of the field can be thought of as the timing of its crests and valleys.) What generates the superposition of phases is a passing Rydberg atom, an atom excited to such high levels that it swells to 2500 times the size of a normal atom. One such huge atom can easily create macroscopic changes in the electromagnetic field, explains Haroche.

 

Before reaching the cavity, the Rydberg atom encounters microwaves that excite it into a superposition of two different energy states. When the atom enters the cavity, each energy state induces its own phase shift in the electromagnetic field, resulting in the superposition of two field states, each with a different phase. In essence, the atom transfers its own indeterminacy to the electromagnetic field.

 

Having set up the Schrödinger's cat-type field, the physicists then probe its collapse, which is triggered by the quantum state's environment. Now they use a second Rydberg atom--the Schrödinger's mouse. "The first atom prepares this strange state," says Haroche, "and the second atom goes across the cavity and interacts with this strange state, again by shifting its phase, and then it goes out and you detect it" and compare its state with the final state of the first atom. By repeating the experiment many times, the physicists can measure the probability that the second atom emerges in a given state relative to the first atom. This "conditional probability" has a measurable quantum interference term if the electromagnetic field is in a quantum superposition when the second atom passes through.

 

The strategy allows for two crucial measurements of decoherence. First, the ENS physicists can determine how long the field takes to decay into one phase or the other, by changing the time delay between the two atoms. "If you have a longer delay between the two atoms," says Haroche, "the coherence decays, and the second atom does not detect it anymore." They can also measure how the lifetime of the catlike field superposition changes with its size. Injecting more microwave photons into the cavity or increasing the phase difference between the two states both make the cat more macroscopic, and the researchers found, as theory predicted, that both changes sped up the decoherence. "The decay becomes faster and faster," says Haroche.

 

This size effect, he continues, may be the explanation for why even Schrödinger's mouse would never be able to detect a full-grown Schrödinger's cat. "If you had a real Schrödinger's cat in a box," says Haroche, "you would never see the superposition, because the decoherence time is so short for big systems."

This is all based on rubbish. The observation occurs as soon as the results of the experiment are observed for the first time. You can't get away with it like this!

Remember "descent with modification" What we have is not necessarily the same as the evolutionary ancestors and, since other species have continued to be modified since the common ancestor, our modifications may not correspond with theirs.

 

Let me give you an example. Both flies and mammals have the TGF-beta superfamily of genes. In flies it is a member of the family is Ubx and in mice it is BMP. In flies, transfection of Ubx into fly cells causes the formation of wings. But when Ubx is transfected into mice, it causes bone formation. Similar genes with very similar gene products, but very different result.

 

Other humans share your evolution: they are members of your species. But other species have had different evolutionary histories and their "emotions" may have evolved very differently.

Yes, and other humans are very close to me genetically. Similarly, chimps are also pretty close, and so are baboons. Relative to worms, flies and bacteria, dogs and pigs are very very close too. I think in general terms its stupid NOT to see 'human' emotions in higher vertebrates. Much of science is based on hunches that are then proven. It's very hard to prove subjective issues scientifically so we use our common sense based on sound science to make judgements. Think of the way bears (for example) go mad in captivity and display repetitive behaviour. Are we going to say that becasue we can't prove in human terms that they are distressed they are fine?

According to our human standards! But not necessarily according to pig standards. Again we see the projection. We value certain living conditions, partly due to our evolution. But pigs have had a separate evolution since the common ancestor. You don't know that their concept of "good life" is any longer the same as ours.

As alluded to above, judgement based on all our accumulated knowledge of the past 100,000 years or so can help us. One could choose to ignore it, but I think that would be foolish.

Venus is a better bet than Mars despite what has been said above. It still has a thick atmosphere and active plate tectonics - which are actually very important in maintaining life. The reason why it's so hot is due to a runaway greenhouse effect. If we could seed the atmosphere with photosynthesising bacteria/algae/whatever we could in time convert the CO2 into fixed carbon and molecular oxygen.

The planet would cool and become good for sustaining life.

Far better than the possibilities available on Mars.

Yah, well put. I still suspect that sooner or later Hussein would have let them in. (This is where I disagree with Bombus' post above -- he stopped being "our guy" in 1991.) But we should have waited for that to happen, and I would have supported action once it did.

 

You know, reading the way you put that is giving me a new perspective on what you guys mean when you complain about the phrase "war on terror". It's not that you don't agree that we're fighting bad guys, and it's not about Bush-bashing. It's about something getting enlarged that simply didn't need to be enlarged.

 

Thank you for that insight.

Saddam hated Al Qaeda etc as much as us, because he was a believer in secular government. They hated him more than they hate us. He'd have NEVER let them in as they would have challenged his authority.

He didn't really stop being our guy in 1991. In late July, 1990, as negotiations between Iraq and Kuwait stalled, Iraq massed troops on Kuwait’s borders and summoned American Ambassador April Glaspie for an unanticipated meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.According to the transcripts, Saddam outlined his grievances against Kuwait, while promising that he would not invade Kuwait before one more round of negotiations. In the version published by The New York Times on September 23, 1990, Glaspie expressed concern over the troop buildup, but went on to say:

"We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late ’60s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via [Chadli] Klibi [then Arab League General Secretary] or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly."

Some have interpreted these statements as diplomatic language signalling an American "green light" for the invasion. Although the State Department did not confirm (or deny) the authenticity of these transcripts, U.S. sources say that it had handled everything “by the book” (in accordance with the US’s official neutrality on the Iraq-Kuwait issue) and had not signaled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein any approval for defying the Arab League’s Jeddah crisis squad, which had conducted the negotiations. Many believe that Saddam’s expectations may have been influenced by a perception that the US was not interested in the issue, for which the Glaspie transcript is merely an example and that he may have felt so in part because of U.S. support for the reunification of Germany, another act that he considered to be nothing more than the nullification of an artificial, internal border.

So, maybe he was tricked into invasion so that we had an excuse to impose sanctions and bomb Iraq for 10 years to allow a ground invasion to seize the oil!

Damn conspiracy theories...

Our war in Iraq is a type of success in some perspectives.

We increased the tensions between Shiites and Sunnis. Let them kill each other.

We're there as a referee, referees get hurt sometimes.

We've turned terrorists groups against Al Qaeda. We're finding more evidence for the Irano-Syrian axis involvement in Iraq, and that includes Hizbollah terrorist guerrillas controlling Beirut's southern suburb in Lebanon.

 

The opposite will happen if we back up. Nobody will clean our crap for us, we need to clean it before we leave .

If we wanted to destroy Islamic extremists, and Al Qaeda, we should have given Saddam more support, not deposed him. He killed more Al Qaeda operatives, and Islamic extremists that anyone. He was our best defence against them! As they say, he was a bastard, but he was our bastard.

I think Venus is a far better bet than Mars