Im not a doctor - but this was my first thought/prognosis

Elephantiasis (/ˌɛlɨfənˈtaɪ.əsɨs/ el-i-fən-ty-ə-sis) is a disease that is characterized by the thickening of the skin and underlying tissues, especially in the legs and male genitals. In some cases the disease can cause certain body parts, such as the scrotum, to swell to the size of a softball or basketball.[1] It is caused by filariasis or podoconiosis.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephantiasis

@csnel3 @dag

Steve Jobs had 7 years since his diagnosis to found a think tank or research institute. He had unusual assets to bring to the problem in the form of his abilities, capital, and influence on many of the smartest people alive. 7 years is an eternity for a radical science project helmed by a genius and funded by Jobs' own 6 billion plus donations from other sources that would want to help.

How far are we really from being able to extend the life of people in his position? What steps need to be put in place before failing body parts can be replaced well enough to sustain life?

He didn't even need to directly cure his cancer within those 7 years. Extending the amount of time he had could have allowed him to then find other interventions that extended his time even more.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'women, look, bicepts, bpdy parts, camera, crotch, butt, glasses, cosmo' to 'women, look, biceps, body parts, camera, crotch, butt, glasses, cosmo' - edited by xxovercastxx

@marbles:

First you need to acknowledge what a conspiracy is. When two or more people agree to commit a crime, fraud, or some other wrongful act, it is a conspiracy. Not in theory, but in reality. Grow up, it happens.

Thanks for the vocabulary lesson, but I used the term conspiracy theory, not conspiracy. Conspiracy theory has a separate and more strongly suggestive definition (this one from Merriam-Webster): "a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators."

I openly acknowledge that the government of the United States has and does commit conspiracies, as you define the word. (You mentioned Operation Northwoods in a separate comment; a post on Letters of Note from few weeks ago may be of interest to you, too, if you haven't already seen it: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/08/possible-actions-to-provoke-harrass-or.html.) The actions described therein, and other such actions, I would aptly describe as conspiracies (were they to be enacted).

Definitions aside, my problem with posts like that of @blastido_factor is that most of their so-called conspiracies are easily debunked. They're old chestnuts. A few minutes' worth of Google searches can disprove them.

It may be helpful to distinguish between what I see as the two main "conspiracies" surrounding 9/11: (1) that 9/11 was, to put it briefly, an "inside job," and (2) that certain members of the government of the United States conspired to use the events of 9/11 as justification for a series of military actions (many of which are ongoing) against people and countries that were, in fact, uninvolved in the 9/11 attacks. The first I find no credible evidence for. The second I consider a more tenable position.


The Pentagon is the most heavily guarded building in the world and somehow over an hour after 4 planes go off course/stop responding to FAA and start slamming into buildings, that somehow one is going to be able to fly into a no-fly zone unimpeded and crash into the Pentagon without help on the inside?

Once again, much of what you mention can be attributed to poor communication between the FAA and the government agencies responsible for responding to the attacks (and, for that matter, between the various levels of government agencies). And again, this is one of the major criticism levied by the various 9/11 investigations. From page forty-five of the 9/11 Commission: "The details of what happened on the morning of September 11 are complex, but they play out a simple theme. NORAD and the FAA were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001. They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never before encountered and had never trained to meet."

Furthermore, it seems to me that one of the biggest mistakes made by a lot of the conspiracy theorists who fall into the first cateory (see above) is that they judge the events of 9/11 in the context of post-9/11 security. National security, on every level, was entirely different before 9/11 than it is now. That's not to say that the possibility of this kind of attack wasn't considered within the intelligence community pre-9/11. We know that it was (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks_advance-knowledge_debate). But was anyone adequately prepared to handle it? No.

In any event, when's the last time you looked at a map of Washington, DC? If you look at a satellite photo, you'll notice that the runways at Ronald Reagan airport are, literally, only a few thousand feet away from the Pentagon. Was a no-fly zone in place over Washington by 9:37 AM? I honestly don't know. But it's misleading to suggest that planes don't routinely fly near the Pentagon. They do.


And how did two giant titanium engines from a 757 disintegrate after hitting the Pentagon's wall? They were able to find the remains of all but one of the 64 passengers on board the flight, but only small amounts of debris from the plane?

In truth, I don't know enough about ballistics to speak for how well a titanium engine would withstand an impact with a reinforced wall at hundreds of miles an hour. But, if you're suggesting that a plane never hit the building, here's a short list of what you're wilfully ignoring: the clipped light poles, the damage to the power generator, the smoke trails, the hundreds of witnesses, the deaths of everyone aboard Flight 77, and the DNA evidence confirming the identities of 184 of the Pentagon's 189 fatalities (64 of which were the passengers on Flight 77).

Regarding the debris: It's misleading to claim that only small amounts of debris were recovered. This from Allyn E. Kilsheimer, the first structural engineer on the scene: "I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box ... I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts." In addition, there are countless photos of plane wreckage both inside and outside the building (http://www.google.com/search?q=pentagon+wreckage).


Black boxes are almost always located after crashes, even if not in useable condition. Each jet had 2 recorders and none were found?

You help prove my point with this one: "almost always located." Again, I'm no expert on the recovery of black boxes, but here's a point to consider: if the black boxes were within the rubble at the WTC site, you're looking to find four containers that (undamaged, nonetheless) are roughly the size of two-liter soda bottles amidst the rubble of two buildings, each with a footprint of 43,000 square feet and a height of 1,300 feet (for a combined volume of 111,000,000 cubic feet, or 3,100,000,000 liters). (You might want to check my math. And granted, that material was enormously compacted when the towers collapsed. But still, it's a large number. And it doesn't include any of the space below ground level or any of the other buildings that collapsed.) Add to that the fact that they could have been damaged beyond recognition by the collapse of the buildings and the subsequent fires. To me, that hardly seems worthy of conspiracy.


Instead we invaded Afghanistan and started waging war against the same people we trained and armed in the 80s, the same people Reagan called freedom fighters. Now we call them terrorists for defending their own sovereignty.

Here, finally, we find some common ground. I couldn't agree more. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more ardent critic of America's foreign policy.

>> ^marbles:
First you need to acknowledge what a conspiracy is ...

>> ^aurens:

>> ^rougy:
"Forensic" also means to closely study the evidence to better determine who committed the crime, something that was not allowed on any of the 9/11 attack sites.
It is possible to remove debris and still inspect it closely. That was not done for any of the WTC sites.
It would be nice to see a link of that Bingham FOI tape you mentioned. A retired military officer, a colonel I believe, questioned the plane theory on the simple fact that there were no wing marks on the Pentagon building. The official video tape released by the Pentagon is an obvious farce.
Whoever was behind 9/11 is still at large, and it wasn't Al Qaeda.

Video from the Doubletree Hotel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQeTdrQhqyc
Where do you get this idea that no one was allowed to study the evidence at any of the attack sites? What does that even mean? Are you objecting to the fact that civilians like you or I weren't allowed to walk up and start poking around in the rubble? And how can you possibly claim that none of the debris was closely inspected? How do you think one finds the body parts of human beings amongst that much rubble without closely inspecting the debris? 184 of 189 of the people who died in the attack at the Pentagon were positively identified by investigators. Yet you claim these investigators didn't exist?
"An obvious farce"? Really? Again, where is your evidence?


Thanks for taking the time to post the video you mentions. I personally found it to be worthless. It shows nothing. It also appears to have been tampered with.

Most of the evidence was summarily destroyed, which is why it's so easy for the people who buy the official 9/11 story to say "Where's the evidence?"

Forgive me for skipping the link, because I can't think of the right keywords for Google, but there was a fire inspector who was very angry at how the WTC cleanup was handled. He said that his team was not allowed to investigate the evidence, and that he was only shown partial examples of the building, offsite, after it had been sifted by the cleanup officials.

I'm done. I know I won't change your mind. Not even gonna try, really, but others will listen.

Whoever attacked America on 9/11 is still out there, and their arrogance will hang them yet.

>> ^rougy:

"Forensic" also means to closely study the evidence to better determine who committed the crime, something that was not allowed on any of the 9/11 attack sites.
It is possible to remove debris and still inspect it closely. That was not done for any of the WTC sites.
It would be nice to see a link of that Bingham FOI tape you mentioned. A retired military officer, a colonel I believe, questioned the plane theory on the simple fact that there were no wing marks on the Pentagon building. The official video tape released by the Pentagon is an obvious farce.
Whoever was behind 9/11 is still at large, and it wasn't Al Qaeda.


Video from the Doubletree Hotel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQeTdrQhqyc

Where do you get this idea that no one was allowed to study the evidence at any of the attack sites? What does that even mean? Are you objecting to the fact that civilians like you or I weren't allowed to walk up and start poking around in the rubble? And how can you possibly claim that none of the debris was closely inspected? How do you think one finds the body parts of human beings amongst that much rubble without closely inspecting the debris? 184 of 189 of the people who died in the attack at the Pentagon were positively identified by investigators. Yet you claim these investigators didn't exist?

"An obvious farce"? Really? Again, where is your evidence?

nice ,

I hope we get to the piont of growing harts or having robotic body parts that work soon though.

its funny how we have all this technology but the biggest hurdal for organ tranplants at the moment is finding enough donors.

>> ^mintbbb:

Oooo, I love the cutting board! I already received it yesterday! Now I just need to start working towards those 'fine julienne' and 'fine brunoise' stages without losing any body parts (my knives are REALLY sharp!).
Yay, happy!


Fantastic! Maybe you can chop some stuff up on it and post a photo for us all to enjoy.

Oooo, I love the cutting board! I already received it yesterday! Now I just need to start working towards those 'fine julienne' and 'fine brunoise' stages without losing any body parts (my knives are REALLY sharp!).

Yay, happy!

>> ^pyloricvalve:

Strictly speaking, it's more like 10 people since I'm paying double the normal rate due to progressive taxes. But I don't understand why you consider my earnings theft. Even if there is a limited supply of money, my money has been received through consensual exchange. If I buy a car which is in limited supply is it by definition stolen? Surely we should reserve the word theft for when things are taken from people against there will. Personally I think taxation is an example of this.


Ah yes...the standard Libertarian view of earnings = consensual exchange and taxation = stealing. The problem is, in a democracy, no amount of tax will ever be consensual to every citizen. That's kind of why we have majority rule, right? So, if one person thinks one penny in tax is theft on the part of government, does that mean we have to have zero taxes? Thankfully, the answer is no.

Most Libertarians favor some sort of basic tax for a defensive military, so consider this. For a time during the Civil War, you could buy your way out of the draft. That was consensual exchange under the law. Do you consider that type of exchange morally acceptable? If a rich father pays for a surrogate soldier for his son, is that fair? The son did nothing to earn that money through free exchange other than be born to a rich family...why does he deserve to have someone fight in his place?

With a truly free market, prostitution would be legal free exchange, you could sell body parts, offer your womb up to carry other peoples' babies, etc. If your answer is "well, let's not go that far" then where do you stop? If you sign a contract to offer up your eggs and a baby for someone else and you change your mind, who do the courts rule in favor of when someone sues?

These are real world questions that beg to be answered when you take the hardcore Libertarian position. Few people successfully argue in favor of their Libertarian position without inviting heavy criticism from wide swathes of the population...hence the lack of a strong Libertarian party in the country. This general line of thought just doesn't hold up in specific real world cases which come up, often making it to the Supreme Court.

Agreed. Culture adapts more quickly than evolution.

Now the deserts are paved and irrigated, and little boxes made of ticky-tacky dot the hillside. All with AC and all just the same. Culture can adapt again.

>> ^dag:

I think it could be that STDs have evolved quicker than us. Therefore we use culture as a way to beat their faster microbial evolution. The same goes for dietary laws. There were probably pretty good reasons for not eating shellfish, if you lived in the desert without refrigeration. >> ^notarobot:
I've never understood the argument that a normal body part, found on pretty much every mammal species on earth, evolved over millions and millions of years is flawed.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I think it could be that STDs have evolved quicker than us. Therefore we use culture as a way to beat their faster microbial evolution. The same goes for dietary laws. There were probably pretty good reasons for not eating shellfish, if you lived in the desert without refrigeration. >> ^notarobot:

I've never understood the argument that a normal body part, found on pretty much every mammal species on earth, evolved over millions and millions of years is flawed.

I've never understood the argument that a normal body part, found on pretty much every mammal species on earth, evolved over millions and millions of years, is flawed.

>> ^spoco2:

It's funny just how much worse the falls seem in slow motion. When played back at normal speed at the end they're just 'meh, get up yah pansy' type of falls.


Interesting, because I had the exact opposite impression. In the slow-mo, I thought it really accented how well/quickly their reactions put less critical / shock absorbing body parts down to take the initial jarring contact. Hands and feet take some initial hit, then arms bent at the elbow, ass, roll to back, keep the head up.

At full speed, I noticed that I'd definitely want to be wearing wrist guards as suggested by @shponglefan.

Then again, I've never skateboarded, but I enjoy inline skating (not that I'm much good at it, hence the wrist guards). In any case, upvote to the video and comments all around for the neat discussion!

^ oh don't get me wrong. and more importantly don't get me confused with some blood-thirsty moron.
let's *discuss this shall we?

I can see your point on the man being attacked by that elephant, it is not clear what the situation is, but it is also not clear what has happened to him in the end.
But on the other hand, it is pretty bad quality and I don't see any blood or body parts.
There I would find the arm being ripped of much more disturbing.

Nonetheless in general this video's message is not: "Look at these stupid humans dying in pain and laugh at them"
It is: "Nature is awesome, don't mess with that shit."
And most of the video's are indeed not any way near snuff.

FAQ-Quote:
"The presence of human fatality is acceptable and not considered "snuff" if presented as a limited portion of a lengthy educational, informative news report or documentary. Our definition of "snuff" does include but is not exclusive to any short clip in which a human fatality occurs whether or not any victims are actually visible on camera."