Posted by Tara C. Smith on February 23, 2006 You don’t need to worry about security.
I don’t know whether having a UAE company manage our ports would increase our vulnerability to terrorism or not, but I find it highly, highly ironic that an administration who’s spent so much time telling us how *not* safe we are (wasn’t electing Kerry going to bring on another terrorist attack?) are now reassuring us that there’s nothing to worry about. I bet the folks in New Orleans would beg to differ.
Well it’s not like any of the 9-11 hijackers or Al Qeada has links (like Iraq) to the UAE you know. 
I made that exact statement earlier today – I find it highly ironic that an administration who’s spent so much time telling us how *not* safe we are is now telling us not to worry about security.
Here is a topic on which *you* and I see more than eye to eye, and Esmay and me couldn’t be further apart.
Quien sabes?
Here is a copy of the very first customer review posted on Amazon after my biography of Duesberg was published. It is *not* meant as a plug for my book, which is receiving quite enough play as a result of this month’s Harper’s magazine. It *is* meant to show the similarities between the two political issues under discussion (at least in the disussions here that get my attention).
War on Terror, War on Cancer, War on Aids?, July 28, 2004
Reviewer: Charles Stein (Barrytown, New York) –
War on Terror, War on Cancer, War on AIDS. We know now how flimsy the justifications on which the first metaphorical war’s battleground was launched and is being fought to such disastrous consequences turned out to be. What Bialy shows us in his treatise on the pursuit of truth is that all of these ‘wars’ have been waged on precisely the same kind of righteously determined, but fatally flawed premises. Metaphor is the stock and trade of poetry, and Bialy, besides being a resident scholar at the Institute of Biotechnology of the National University of Mexico, and the founding scientific editor of Nature Biotechnology, is a serious poet. He does not dabble in verse or dash off an occasional line or two. He has produced a recognizable opus over 40 years of single-minded pursuit, and his poet’s intellect maintains, among many other things, a critical awareness of the power of metaphor. Thus Bialy the poet offers Bialy the scientist a wary alertness in regard to this power, and he casts a cold eye on the governing metaphors of his biological compadres, making him qua scientist a sceptic, because of his habitus as poet. Biology is particularly vulnerable to distortion by metaphor, which then operates upon the narratives it governs. If I say that an oncogene is “an enemy within,” the vividness of the image ‘infects’ the credibility of that for which it is an image. Now narratives can be constructed of how the oncogene corrupts its cell, and it becomes easy to confuse the hypothesis with its governing metaphor. Yet apparently we cannot do without narratives, at least in a biology that has gone so public. Without stories of cellular function we have only analyses of the assays by which the facts of the case are determined. Borrr-ing. But for this very reason the metaphor must be measured vigorously against the quantifiable facts, and we must insist that an understanding of the mechanical processes always be available to unpack it. A happy metaphor is never eo ipso a happy explanation. Bialy takes us through the past twenty years of Duesberg’s published science, with style, wit, and the authority that comes from having lived what he is writing about. We understand Duesberg and his scientific opponents’ thinking through their words, stripped of preconception-laden adjective and metaphor, and follow the only enduring story – how new ideas in biology originate – as though reading a high-grade detective novel. In the end, however, the book does not contain a solution as much as a message: We must remain faithful to the rigorously logical, quantifiable and testable principles of explanation that Duesberg has championed, for they are the only bases of our trust in science. These principles are hardly anyone’s personal possession, and they ought to belong to the character of every scientist. They are grounded in the same thinking that grounds the principles of democracy and fair debate; and they are abandoned in the same interests of panic (money), expediency (money), and the need for public notice (money money). It is truly ‘terrifying’ that they are both suffering such erosion at the same moment in history. Dr. Charles Stein is the author of The Secret Of the Black Chrysanthemum: The Poetic Cosmology of Charles Olson & His Use of the Writings of C.G. Jung and The Hat Rack Tree: Selected Poems from theforestforthetrees. Website: http://www.stationhill.org/artists/CS/cspage.html
Is there a reason Tara has banned me from previous thread?
Barnes
Here’s what I would have posted, if Dr. Smith not banned my incisive commentary:)
____________________________________________________________
Oh my! … it’s a mutating attack from all angles:) (Tara, Dale, Dave S, Orac, some dude name Tony L, Guitar Eddie)
Or, I reckon, a swarm of gnats to be swatted.
I’d like to single out Dale, though. In all seriousness, he has (without all this circumlocution, snark, obfuscation, and evasion) answered the questions, and for that, he deserves genuine credit.
The best answer, of course, is No. 7:
7. When did you first learn of the existence of the Padian study?
I think I learned about it from you Hank.
I might frame this — Hey, you take what you can get:)
Gentlemen, Doctors, Scholars:
Had Padian’s prospective study resulted in, say, 125/175 seroconversions (71%) or 100/175 (57%) or 42/175 (24%), you would be touting Padian as evidence that HIV was in fact heterosexually transmissible, and, hence, that AIDS is an infectious disease. (As would I).
Padian, herself, starts out her paper with the following:
As of June 1996, a total of 44,980 cases (8 percent) of AIDS among adults and adolescents have been reported to the CDC that were attributed to heterosexual contact with a high risk or infected partner.
An honest scientist, conducting an honest study, in hopes of honestly trying to explain this phenomenom known as AIDS, in hopes of honestly helping and/or curing patients would — after obtaining zero seroconversions — pause (one would hope), reflect on this result, and seriously question the afore-mentioned 44,980 cases attributable to heterosexual contact. Perhaps, they would also question what they believe about AIDS and why they believe it. (As I did).
They might also question how the infinitesimal risk of heterosexual transmission explains how 1 million people in US are infected with HIV, and, why Padian’s data doesn’t strongly suggest that these 1 million HIV+ were simply born with said retrovirus.
We might go back and forth all day on this, but I can confidently state 4 things:
1. Y’all were ignorant of the Padian study for 9 years.
2. Y’all are furiously trying to disregard/reinterpret its findings so that it is harmonized with your pre-existing beliefs and biases.
3. The one fellow who figured all this out well before any of you, is Dr. Peter Duesberg, National Academy of Science.
4. And you hate Dr. Duesberg, because he exposed y’all as absolute poseurs and charlatans on this topic.
To conclude: We know that Dr. Hwang Woo Suk of stem cell frame is a fraud. We also know that Dr Robert Gallo of AIDS fame is a fraud, too.
Does that mean our scientific system is corrupted on the whole? I don’t know. But the question remains: Is there any more fraud we should know about?
Hammerin’ Hank Barnes
Terrorism is a distraction. The problem with all of this is that we are selling out America’s vital infrastructure to foreign companies/countries. Either we do that or they start dumping their dollar reserves that are becoming more and more worthless. Dubai Ports already owns a few of our port terminals and a railroad company. China owns lots of this stuff and so does GB. This is something that’s been going on for about a decade and only started to get worse with the formation of the EU and the Euro. All of this: 9/11, the Afghan War, the Iraqi War, threatening Iran and Venezuela, selling off infrastructure. It’s all related to the people who actually run this country trying to keep the petrodollar going or at least keep foreign reserves of fiat dollars from being dumped for stringer currencies, like the Euro. They know that before this decade is out, the dollar will be in the toilet, we will have rampant inflation and sky high interest rates. They are trying to prolong the inevitable.
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