Gary C Gibson. - 11:59am Nov 5, 2005 EDT God ordered Noah to save all endangered species--and more than half of the ship was reserved for animal habitat
“Be a man .. Defend your ideas resoultely!”
Spell your words resolutely!
One need not waste time rephrasing perfectly good sentences or words that express ideas when they are all right the first time. One must defend one's time investments too, and not waste a lot of time with the vicious nihilist sort of obfuscating thug than can drift into discussions.
The ideas I presented were plain enough for the rationally able, for you Pseud1...more verbiage might be necessary ad nauseum. Perhaps rephrasing in other languages would help you. I only write in American English.
In reading tablet one or two of the tale of Gilgamesh, one can find large section in the 1949 versions where Latin is used in the translation to replace English, perhaps because sensitivities were different then than now, and the subject was sending a courtesan/prostitute out to subvert a tough guy in the field that was to be a novelty for Gilgamesh's test of strength and adventures.
Control of biohazards is a serious technical difficulty with a vast body of data. One need not too wordy to recognize it's serious nature, and to have a clue about the historical efforts to contain it.
In using a particular hypothetical vector transmission scenario you have found an object to bite into as if it were the whole world of possible transmission methods, yet it one considers HIV transmission history it is simple enough to be aware that sexual encounters were the fundamental method of international communicability, and that the infrastructure that made that possible could also bring people with the bird flu. Yet that was one trivial possible method amidst the vast number of ways that a lethal flu might be transmitted abroad and even unto the borders of the United States. As a Brit you seem to feel that border defense against a lethal flu biohazard is futile. Perhaps you're sort of resistance to bio-defense is the sort of dog-headedness that Cornwallis could have used in resisting Revolutionary soldiers in the Anglo-American war.
One doesn't want to be boorish when so much fine data is available on the subject of bird flu on-line...its possible to imagine drunks at a bar looking at specks on their whiskey glasses, or arguing about football drunkenly...yet bio-war or bio-virus with a history of killing millions is a sober subject.
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/avian/gen-info/facts.htm
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/avianflu/index.html
http://www.emoryhospital.com/press_room/ehc_news/2005/Aug/Containing_Global_Flu_Pandemic.html
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-08/aaft-pap072905.php strategies for containing bird flu in S.E. Asia
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/panflu/readings/
http://www.biologynews.net/archives.html?page=6
GaryCGibson - 01:14pm Nov 6, 2005 EDT
When a materialist culture overcomes natural boundaries, it also destroys moral boundaries without an indwelling Spirit of God.
I was disappointed with Pseud-B silly concluding ad hominem premised with completely false reasoning.
PseudB
He admitted he had not been following 'the argument' then categorically condemns it and assaults all 'rw's'.
His apparent indifference to reasoned argument is what the problem is with the Democratic Party on political issues nowadays, and one of the reasons why they may so occasionally unlikable.
The entire argument about communicability of the flu at pandemic levels is premised on easy human-to-human transmissions. To claim that any particular group of individuals would be de facto immune to transmitting the bird flu without inoculation is false.
Obviously if the U.S.A. ever wants to have any sort of quarantine ability, it would need to include stopping 100,000 illegal aliens that cross the Mexican desert into the U.S.A. each month (approx. or it would be ineffective).
I had made the point several times already, and so has the CDC and other agencies about the difference between direct contacts with infected birds and an upgraded or evolved conveyed by breath method of disease transmission.
PseudB’s desire to have something to attack with is so extreme that he resorts to the most plain dissimulations and obfuscations in order to fabricate and issue. It doesn't help address the issue meaningfully at all, and waits time with the counterproductive need for clarification of raised falsehoods and libels.
GaryCGibson - 01:23pm Nov 6, 2005 EDT
When a materialist culture overcomes natural boundaries, it also destroys moral boundaries without an indwelling Spirit of God.
Yet on the Gilgamesh/flood story I'd like to add a few points...
The Creation story is quite different than the flood story although each occurs in Genesis. Many that do not read the Bible or Bible History tend to run them all together within a certain uniform time frame. The more one reads in the area the more death and consistence becomes evinced.
I have discovered 'The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels' by Alexander Heidel c 1946 and 1949. Other books are L.W. King's 'legends of Babylon and Egypt in Relation to Hebrew tradition' c 1918 and A. Poebel's 'Historical Texts' c 1918.
The story of King Gilgamesh-probably an actual historical figure, has been unearthed on several clay text tablets and fragments of tablets dating back before the time of Hammurabi circa 18th century B.C.
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/Hammurabi
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/CODE.HTM code of Hammurabbi
Gilgamesh's story is best known for the section on tablets 10 and 11 of the flood in which an ancient Utnapishtim is told through a dream or by a mysterious wall to build an ark to ready for an inundating flood that would destroy the people of the world.
Utnaphishtim did what he was told, including loading the 'seed' of every sort of animal onto the ark. Good description of the heavy rains and upwelling of waters are provided. The story is very like that of the redaction by Hebrews in Babylonian captivity more than a thousand years later.
The ark in the more ancient Giliamesh stories is said to travel perhaps 210 miles to rest on Mt. Nipir, and in some of the others to 'the head of the waters' (Tigris and Euphrates).
Gilgamesh journeys to meet the now-immortal Utnaphishtim after a perilous journey up beyond the waters and over the mountains (Lebanon and anti-Lebanon Mountains perhaps) past the scorpions people and the 12 double hours of absolute darkness to reach possibly Sidon where Utnaphishtim's boatman take him on a journey far over what is probably the Mediterranean Sea to the island of Utnaphishtim. Gilgamesh is seeking immortality from Utnaphishtim, but fails the prerequisite of staying awake for 6 days...instead Gilgamesh falls asleep for six days.
The Gilgamesh story has descriptions of the underworld, and of course is much influenced by Mesopotamian settings with river floods and mud. The dead are believed to return to become clay, and they live in the House of dust.
The Bible of course has Adam (brown dirt) created from mud and returning to clay (earth to earth) after mortality sets in.
A lot of things seem to have been happening in the Mesopotamian world 4000 years ago. Cuneiform writing were setting down interesting oral histories of flood stories, and in approx 2068 Avrm or Abraham was given marching orders to leave Mesopotamia and take his warrior retainers and womenfolk/children on a sojourn under the instructions of Truth. I don't want to venture to far into more recent history now, however...
GaryCGibson - 01:42pm Nov 6, 2005 EDT When a materialist culture overcomes natural boundaries, it also destroys moral boundaries without an indwelling Spirit of God.
Because Utnaphismtim (hasn't anything to do with a Phish performance at U.T.) was given immortality by Enlil after surviving the flood he'd set to destroy mankind because they made too much noise and were disturbing the neo-deos (deistic evolutionary object speculations) he technically serves as an extended time link to allow the setting back of the time of the occurrence of the flood indefinitely earlier in history. A Redaction or altered version of the flood story made as late as 200 B.C. sets the time of the flood during the reign of a king that lived 64,000 years ago.
The flood story as I said earlier isn't the Creation story. The ancients would describe the whole world as the area their civilization was in, and if it was destroyed, and the ziggurats leveled when the Persian storm surged, the Tigris Euphrates spring flood, and possibly hurricane force rains dumped a 100 or 200 inches of water when weather patterns permitted (possibly) during the Neolithic people would say that the entire Urth was flooded truthfully.
After the flood Noah's sons journeyed to populate the world, yet they found other people out there by inference. Even after the New Orleans H-Kat people traveled all over the nation. What could be more natural than that after a cataclysmic flood destroyed Mesopotamian civilization survivors would go out and stimulate civilization to grow elsewhere such as in the Nile Valley?
GaryCGibson - 02:07pm Nov 6, 2005 EDT When a materialist culture overcomes natural boundaries, it also destroys moral boundaries without an indwelling Spirit of God.
"---"I was writing about Utnaphishtim, is he still politically incorrect?
PseudB
Pseudb was writing about Vietnam, and fortunately he only said what followed once.
He still is trying to make an issue out of anything instead of being very rational about pandemics and their ability to travel. He should write a paper on pandemics with lots of urls for easy reference.
He did stipulate that he 'seems' to think that penchants of various sorts including 'political incorrectness' are being 'attacked'. Mexico was given, perhaps, as 'politically incorrect. Maybe that's because it borrows too much from the Mixtec?
Swine flue and other flu’s have been crossing from Asia forever via jet aircraft. In pandemics viruses probably can't be geographically isolated as they might have been in the day of Noah or Utnaphishtim.
Border control, one million new illegal aliens annually and communicable diseases involve real politics instead of 'politically incorrect' terminology. Politically incorrect subjects would be better exemplified by the abhorrence the left would have if some right wing Frenchman claims to be the 'new Charles Martel' and saying I told you so about a second Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula right to the heart of France.
The trouble with the irrational branch of leftists is that they go on and on ad nuseum on the same subjects without getting anywhere as extreme left-wing reactionaries incapable of innovation, invention or creativity.
Personally as a classical liberal I sort the properties of rights and rights of property while realizing that capitalism isn't a substitute for government and that Smith's capitalism can produce the best products at the best prices but not the best ideas, cognition or consciousness including environmental awareness.
The two present NPR leftists are mired in defense of illegal immigration perhaps, believing that trans-nationals want it most in the U.S.A. to lower wages here, or that alternately by sending Mexico's best to the U.S.A. it will cut the heart out of Mexican democracy and economic liberty from domination by the twin dangers of oppression by transnationals and a very rich minority repressing them as 'peons' in addition to the 'politically unpopular' idea that illegal aliens can breath and be infected carriers of flue virus at the same time.
Sunday should be more for writing about Upnaphishtim/Noah and how the flood story fits nicely into the story about how God evolved the world with his swift fell sword of creationism. A brilliant designer, in the inklings of pre-history God let life progress to reach proto-civilization.
It is good that the creation parameters can adjust to water theories humanity can devise to explain the Universe and it's dimensions and history. The way the history of civilization merges into the Bible from the Neolithic and earlier disaster and dispersion of people is interesting.
GaryCGibson - 02:45pm Nov 6, 2005 EDT
Reply---
I am not an embedded independent; much less one sacked out with extreme right wing fems. Those northern blondes with Viking Helmets and plaques of wrath and ambition stayed beyond the range of my humble craft. Once I did row an 8 foot inflatable boat with leaking air chamber 150 miles to the state capital on 32 degree water, and wolves were the main shore mammal in the absence of the welcome yet sometimes dangerous bear.
Yet the promiscuous use of sexually paradigm political nomenclature is for the media, and a way of equating their publicness with private practices. A point classical liberals like is keeping privacy an integral element everyday civil rights.
The subject that prompted the radical left obsessive attack was that of the administration failure to mention what they would do to prevent bird flu from crossing the Mexican border if it arrived there before the U.S. I didn't mention the reverse, but if it developed first in the U.S.A. returning illegal aliens seeking to escape by crossing illegally to Mexico could infect that nation too perhaps causing millions of deaths. A loose promiscuous border allows politically transmitted diseases to proliferate if I may appropriate that metaphor for safe-politics.
The Economist...a made in Britain money rag (its fun to use that term for respected if not mainly heterosexual starring publications sometimes---the broadcast villains are of course live traducers immune from retaliation by mere non-corporate individual internet writers, had an article stating that the 'Imperial Presidency' is coming to an end, and that it's very early for the administration to waddles and quack like a lame duck.
Representative Delay was cited as one of the President's main centurions that criticized opponents to war as 'hand-wringers' if not worriers I'd guess.
The President's inner guard is under attack by a grand jury prosecutor reminiscent of J.F.K., and the President is making lame western hemisphere free trade zone noises in Brazil while the leader of brazil is under investigation for receiving election campaign moneys from Fidel Castro.
With the glory of the war over, and only the anti-terror mop up remaining with all that time-consuming pathos, the President's traditional low-brow, do-nothing, spend the farm approach to politics and borrow from foreigners to prop up an economy that could not go on it's own is less than optimally attractive or Teflon coated.
Fundamentally the President's best strategy to weather the storm of opparty critics for the final three years would be to use the Clinton strategy to accomplish the same survival purpose...accentuate the positive in the environmental issues and act unilaterally to improve protect national forests.
President Bush is of course at the center of the cedar forest as an evil ogre defending the rights of campaign contributors to harvest clear cut and annihilate old growth forests...it isn't likely he will be able to raise independently above the ashes of his last administration and play the environmental card to finish with a reasonably popular record.
The President will instead support trans-national plundering where he can, spend as much as possible, run up the deficit and retire as it nears 10 trillion amidst a broadcast rhetoric of support. A future President may be able to lead to national energy independence through home power energy for cars and lights (fuel cells, wind, solar etc.), lead a new zoning and tax reformation that would support start up high tech and green business in the U.S.A., and optimalize support for green autos without foreign or trans-national fuels and housing units that have no net loss of biota.
President Bush could be remembered by history as a genius in environmentalism if he did even 2/3rds of what I suggested above...politically accomplishing it is the difficulty not imagining. President Bush cannot get beyond the war scenario to move on and let American forces abroad and its allies scale the transition into democracy while he moves on to lead the Green revolution in the U.S.A.
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