16 June 2011

Osama's stiff and Bill Warren's alternatives

That one was guarantied to get me going:

A California diver and treasure hunter hopes to find evidence of the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden by scanning the Arabian Sea with sonar.

"I am serious about this, I am not joking," Bill Warren, a 59-year-old professional diver from San Diego, told the German Press Agency DPA. "The main motivation is to try to see if my president was really telling the truth and if bin Laden is truly dead on the bottom of the ocean."
So, of course, I have started to check the possible alternatives:

1. POTUS  told the truth

   1.1 Bill finds Osama intact
   1.2 Allah took Osama to his place, soul and stiff included. Bill decides that POTUS lied
   1.3 Bill finds Osama partially consumed by local fauna, cannot identify him, decides that POTUS lied
   1.4. Bill doesn't find Osama, decides that POTUS lied 

2. POTUS lied

   2.1 Osama is alive and frolics elsewhere
   2.2 Osama died years ago of gout (not to be confused with goat) 
   2.3 There wasn't any Osama, it was a Mossad simulacrum to start with
   2.4 Osama is on the bottom of the ocean, but not dead, leading an underwater Jihad. Kills Bill
   2.5 Osama is dead but instead of the bottom of the ocean the stiff is in Camp David, in the trophies room
   2.6 Osama is dead, but the stiff was traded to a foreign collector (Putin?) for another rare specimen, such as Yeti, Bigfoot, Jimmy Hoffa, Lenin, ...

So, we have now a total of 10 possible outcomes, with only 1 (one) favoring the POTUS, Assigning equal weight to every possible outcome (no reason not to), we come out with 9/10 = 90 % probability that Bill will conclude that POTUS is lying.

All things considered, Bill could very well call off his expedition and save the investors their dough.

He won.

5 comments:

Dick Stanley said...

Putin's got the stiff. No doubt about it. Which is a good thing because the bottom there must be so littered with shipwrecks (and other unmentionables) that the sonar picture will be hopelessly muddled.

Yitzchak Goodman said...

What if he's in the Bermuda Triangle?

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Oh, the whole story is a crude publicity stunt, no more, I am sure. I only wonder about these investors: what do the intend to get out of it? I doubt that there will be enough money to share after all.

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Then it will be another trip, another movie and another book for intrepid Bill W.

jams o donnell said...

Ach some would not believe Obama if he brought Bin Laden's corpse and dropped it at theur feet