Craig, if you're referring to "the decision to blow trillions" in terms of the Iraq War, "intel" didn't make that decision. Congress and the President made it. Intelligence deals with a lot of information which cannot be gleaned from "open sources". Other nations and groups are trying to hide that information from us. So there's a certain element of guesswork involved. Intel concluded that Iraq did not have nukes and would not have them for several years (correct), but that they did have chemical and biological weapons, and missiles that violated the ceasefire agreement from the Gulf War. The missiles were actually found and destroyed before we invaded. Chemical weapons . . . the insurgents used chemical artillery rounds in some of their IED's. That fits the WMD category. The only miss they made, as far as I know, was in finding those mobile bio weapons labs. That was based on bad intelligence. So . . . the President and Congress decided, based in part on what intel told them about WMD's--most of which was correct--to take us to war. That's no more intel's fault than it is the weatherman's fault if he predicts a sunny day, you go on a picnic and get caught in the rain. Should the weatherman pay for being wrong? And in his case, nobody's trying to hide information from him.
I have no problem with individual Muslims paying for crimes they've committed. That's as it should be. Likewise anyone who actively supported acts of terrorism. Also as it should be. But why should all Muslims pay for acts committed by some of their fellow Muslims--acts they may well oppose? All Catholics aren't paying for the crimes of a few. The Catholic CHURCH is paying, because it's clear that the church, as an institution, knew about the pedophile priests and didn't stop them. There is no Muslim "church" structure similar to Catholic hierarchy. I assume you know what a fatwa is: It's a religious directive within Islam. Fatwas are issued regularly by various imams, pretty much whenever they feel like it. There is no higher authority to tell them they can't do that. In contrast, the Catholic Church has a hierarchy, from the pope through cardinals down to archbishops, bishops and priests. Your local priest can't do very much of anything strictly on his own authority. People often have trouble understanding that Islam does not work that way. Who told Bin Laden that he could issue a fatwa telling Muslims to kill Americans? No one. He just went ahead and did it. And the only authority that fatwa has is whatever support it receives from Muslims in general. It told Muslims that it was "an individual duty for every Muslim" to kill Americans. Obviously, not very many of the millions of American Muslims paid any attention, since we have a body count of 90 killed in this country by Muslims in the last 18 years. That's an average of 5 per year . . . or a quiet weekend in Chicago.
Check again on the end date of that report card, Craig. Continues into 2011, and shows the number of charges brought for material support of terrorism--which includes financial support--to be INCREASING. Those are charges filed IN THIS COUNTRY. Nothing international about them--other than where the money is going. But it has to be proven that the money is going to a terrorist cause. It can be hard to sort out, if someone donates to the Red Crescent (Muslim Red Cross) in Gaza . . . because maybe some of that money ends up in the hands of Hamas.
Re ducks, if small, round particles of lead are found in a duck's digestive system, it's pretty darned certain that's lead shot they've ingested. Can they, and do they, ingest lead from other sources? Sure. But there's also plenty of proof that they ingest lead shot and die from lead poisoning. Besides which, that train left the station 25 years ago. If flaws in the "science" are so obvious that you and maybe Keith spotted them, why didn't the biologists themselves spot them? Are we talking one huge conspiracy here--and no one to come forward in the 25 years since and admit it was a conspiracy? Or just a lot of stupid biologists, and you and Keith smarter than they are . . . without being biologists? Seems quite a stretch to me. If it were me and if I spotted "flaws" in the supporting evidence, I would get in touch with someone knowledgeable in the field and see if maybe the flaws I see really aren't flaws at all. Just stuff that doesn't make sense to me because I'm not a biologist. Kinda like Keith telling me I'm making fun of RWTF's Spanish, when I don't speak Spanish. Foreign language is my field of academic study, and I know darned well it's impossible to make fun of someone's ability in a language you don't speak. So every now and then, people get in over their heads . . . and in Keith's case, refuse to be pulled out.
What industrial sources of lead look like lead shot? Pretty much nothing I know of . . . except lead shot. If we're talking about lead poisoning without the presence of lead shot in the digestive system, then said poisoning may have come from other sources. But if there's lead shot, then there's pretty good reason to think lead shot is the culprit. Right? Similarly, down at the Tall Timbers Research Station, with much heavier shot fall than we typically find in upland hunting, they checked the gizzards of 241 healthy quail harvested by hunters. Only 3 contained lead shot. Just over 1%. So they reached the logical conclusion that the ingestion of lead shot is a very unlikely cause for significant mortality among upland birds.
