Toadfish Monastery

That is something I don't get, if everybody is after me and the only person who cares about me is me how is letting those who prey on me off the hook a good policy?

Paranoid? Who said that? WHO SAID THAT?!?!?!

Quote from: Zan on September 29, 2009, 09:16:26 PM
............They called it Greenland, and according to the World Net Daily - a fine and reputable news agency, if ever there was one - ..........

Do you realise WND is only one letter away from WMD ?

Quote from: Sibling Zono (anon1mat0) on September 29, 2009, 11:58:41 PM
That is something I don't get, if everybody is after me and the only person who cares about me is me how is letting those who prey on me off the hook a good policy?

Paranoid? Who said that? WHO SAID THAT?!?!?!

1.  It's not good policy.  It IS, however, THE policy.  Notice the subtle difference.  This is obviously due to the fact that the people who are preying on you are the people making the policy.

2.  Paranoia is impossible these days, by its very definition.

Quote from: Griffin NoName on September 30, 2009, 12:15:52 AM

Quote from: Zan on September 29, 2009, 09:16:26 PM
............They called it Greenland, and according to the World Net Daily - a fine and reputable news agency, if ever there was one - ..........

Do you realise WND is only one letter away from WMD ?

Yeah, and having read their fine paper, I now realize that President Obama is a fascist, a communist, a radical Islamacist, AND a peace freak all at the same time.  Naturally, this generates a conflict, but I just hammered the nagging questions away with an evening of television and the intoxicant of my choice.

BTW, Switzerland does not have a public healthcare system. It has a very regulated private Health Insurance system.

Quote from: The Meromorph on September 30, 2009, 03:23:48 AM
BTW, Switzerland does not have a public healthcare system. It has a very regulated private Health Insurance system.

I did not know that...so I looked it up, and apparently they have a public option as well:

http://www.justlanded.com/english/Switzerland/Switzerland-Guide/Health/Health-insurance

QuoteBasic sickness insurance is provided by many public and private insurance companies – you are free to choose. Benefits are identical from all providers, but premiums can vary considerably, so shop around (and have a look at www.comparis.ch).

But, yes, it appears to be mostly private, though universal and compulsory.

HANS ISLAND IS OURS, DAMNIT!!!

(and gimme Dokdo for the wife while I'm at it)

Quote from: Zan on September 29, 2009, 06:52:48 PM
There's no denying they're talented...after all, they survive in an environment that can best be illustrated by the "Hoth" scenes from Star Wars.

Survive? Ha! I work 14-hour days outdoors in that crap. Admittedly, we tend to shut things down if it gets below -35 C or so; the steel on our equipment gets too brittle and is prone to breaks.  Such a weak metal....   

Quote from: Agujjim on September 30, 2009, 03:49:01 AM
HANS ISLAND IS OURS, DAMNIT!!!

(and gimme Dokdo for the wife while I'm at it)

The Dronning Julianne Marie begs to differ:

Looks like she's frozen in hard and easy meat for the Muskox Cannon Brigade.

Quote from: Agujjim on September 30, 2009, 01:49:54 PM
Looks like she's frozen in hard and easy meat for the Muskox Cannon Brigade.

Poor Denmark.  Doomed by the harsh Canuckistani environment.  Why did they have to test? 

Quote from: Opsanus tau on September 29, 2009, 05:59:04 PM
Our Canadian Toadfish will be thrilled by your generous acknowledgement of their many talents.

As the token commie hippie pinko Swede I must question what makes you prioritise Canada over us?
We even have a beef going on with Israel at the moment! Canada can't beat that can they?

Quote from: Darlica on October 01, 2009, 10:55:21 PM

Quote from: Opsanus tau on September 29, 2009, 05:59:04 PM
Our Canadian Toadfish will be thrilled by your generous acknowledgement of their many talents.

As the token commie hippie pinko Swede I must question what makes you prioritise Canada over us?
We even have a beef going on with Israel at the moment! Canada can't beat that can they?

Wait.  What?  Sweden has a beef with someone?  That hasn't happened in centuries, has it?

What's the beef about?

There are two:

Apparently, there are some loose evidences that some people in the Israeli army are harvesting organs from the bodies of young Palestinians shot to death during street combat and a Swedish photographer and journalist witnessed a corpse grabbing 2005 took pictures and wrote about it then.
These allegations got new fire beneath them by the New Jersey Scandal when one of the accused said the organs that they traded with came from Israel, as it is well known that Israel constantly suffer a shortage of transplantable organs. A big Swedish newspaper printed this journalists story again with the speculation that perhaps maybe this was where those organs came from.

The Israeli government went ballistic, after reading what in hind site seem to have been a babble fish interpretation of the article. They demanded the Swedish government to punish the Newspaper and apologise to the Israeli people to prove that they weren't goddles commi nazi fascists.
When the Swedish MP said "no we don't meddle in what our news papers write we call that freedom of speech" Israel answered by launching a campaign in international media accusing the Swedish media and government of spreading lies about Jews and reviving the mediaeval myth that Jews eat babies and drink blood.

Then a few weeks later the Russian army finally caught a Russian cargo ship that got hijacked on Swedish water about a month earlier... Now the Baltic sea isn't really known for it's pirates so every body was in a bit of a shock when a cargo ship suddenly disappears outside the Swedish coast.
The investigation goes on and after a while more and more evidence turns up that someone thought this ship might be smuggling weapons from Russia to Iran and that some one in this case was the Israeli intelligence Mossad... Now them boarding a ship in the Baltic sea would breach many international conventions so apparently they hired a bunch of second grade Russian gangsters and thugs to do the deed, not telling them what to look for in the cargo but just to hold the ship and wait for instructions...

Funny enough, after this not a word of complaint about the Swedish newspaper was heard from the Israelis again...



Nota bene:
No one in any public position what so ever has ever accused the Israeli army of organ theft, it has been said that there are indications that some individuals employed by the army might harvest and sell organs on the black market but more than that, people have questioned the practise (which the army commit to) of picking up the bodies of fallen Palestinians especially Muslim ones keep them for 3 days to a week and do an autopsy on them even if the cause of death very clearly is a bullet to the head. As Muslims on religious grounds oppose to autopsy and want their dead buried as fast possible this might be used as psychological warfare, a way to punish the families.

That's kinda weird.  I would think that would be a horrible way to harvest organs, as the odds of getting a match would be astronomically low.

Maybe they were just mutilating people to offend their religious beliefs.

Or maybe there's nothing to it.

Still, having them lean all over journalists is pretty bad.

I suspect the story is what we Aussies call a Furphy*.

I recently listened to a lecture given by one of the top transplant surgeons here in Melbourne and he said that the big problem with organ donation was that unless the donor actually dies in hospital on life support, there is virtually no prospect of being able to use the organs for transplant purposes.  Someone killed by gunfire in a firefight is not going to be a suitable donor no matter what somebody thinks - the time lag between death and harvesting the organs would be way too great for there to be any point to it.

I suspect that although the journalist may have seen something, it was not what he or she apparently thought it was.

---

*Furphy.  This comes from the WWI when Aussie diggers would gather around the water cart and share various stories - much like workers around a water cooler today.  These water tanks bore the manufacturer's name emblasoned on the tank, "Furphy and Sons"   The stories often were gross exagerations or the work of some overly fertile imagination and so unreliable stories came to be known as Furphies.