A depressing thread

[Hauldren Collider]

He's saying he'd rather be a billionaire. What's so weird about that?

[DaShi]

That he thinks he's making a point.

Anyway, pm me if this gets back to the topic I was responding to.

[Dinner]

Actually, probably not. Chiang Kai-Shek wasn't interesting in developing China's economy or modernizing, for that matter.

It's not like he really had a chance. I mean first there was the civil war, then the Japanese invaded, then there was civil war again. He did do a decent job in Taiwan after the war though.

[regexcellent]

Agent Orange was not used on food crops. Concentrations of those chemicals required to make the leaves fall off trees was very low, low enough not to be dangerous to humans. Cancer is is the only disease linked to 2,4,5-T and cancer is only one of a myriad of symptoms reported, most of which have absolutely no link whatsoever to the active ingredients, even tenuously. The most common cancer reported is lung cancer. The elevated risk of lung cancer among Vietnam vets is wholly explained by the higher rate of tobacco use among military personnel.

Moreover, the dangerous chemicals in Agent Orange degrade after a couple days or so of sunlight.

Many studies have been commissioned on Vietnam War personnel studying the effects of Agent Orange. Nobody ever found any connection between level of Agent Orange exposure and any diseases. Not even the airmen who drank the stuff had elevated risks for cancer.

(x-post @gribbler)

[DaShi]

It's not like he really had a chance. I mean first there was the civil war, then the Japanese invaded, then there was civil war again. He did do a decent job in Taiwan after the war though.

Chiang Kai-Shek would not have likely brought China out of the dynastic cycle. I don't think he could have handled the problems that China had with modernizing. He certainly could never had united China the way Mao did. That said, his methods seemed to work well with Taiwan.

[kentonio]

Agent Orange was not used on food crops. Concentrations of those chemicals required to make the leaves fall off trees was very low, low enough not to be dangerous to humans. Cancer is is the only disease linked to 2,4,5-T and cancer is only one of a myriad of symptoms reported, most of which have absolutely no link whatsoever to the active ingredients, even tenuously. The most common cancer reported is lung cancer. The elevated risk of lung cancer among Vietnam vets is wholly explained by the higher rate of tobacco use among military personnel.

Moreover, the dangerous chemicals in Agent Orange degrade after a couple days or so of sunlight.

Many studies have been commissioned on Vietnam War personnel studying the effects of Agent Orange. Nobody ever found any connection between level of Agent Orange exposure and any diseases. Not even the airmen who drank the stuff had elevated risks for cancer.

That's why the VA paid out $2.2 BILLION to 89,000 Vietnam vets over it, you ****ing idiot.

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2011/0...ayouts-090111w

[Krill]

Agent Orange was not used on food crops. Concentrations of those chemicals required to make the leaves fall off trees was very low, low enough not to be dangerous to humans. Cancer is is the only disease linked to 2,4,5-T and cancer is only one of a myriad of symptoms reported, most of which have absolutely no link whatsoever to the active ingredients, even tenuously. The most common cancer reported is lung cancer. The elevated risk of lung cancer among Vietnam vets is wholly explained by the higher rate of tobacco use among military personnel.

Moreover, the dangerous chemicals in Agent Orange degrade after a couple days or so of sunlight.

Many studies have been commissioned on Vietnam War personnel studying the effects of Agent Orange. Nobody ever found any connection between level of Agent Orange exposure and any diseases. Not even the airmen who drank the stuff had elevated risks for cancer.

(x-post @gribbler)

You sir, are a moron and a liar.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-19190509

The US government is providing $41m (£26m) to the clean-up project, which is being carried out by two American companies in co-operation with the Vietnamese defence ministry.

The US has in the past helped fund some social services in Vietnam, but this is its first direct involvement in clean-up work.

The contaminated soil and sediment is to be excavated and then heated to a high temperature to destroy the dioxins, a US embassy statement said.

Frank Donovan of USAID told Radio Australia the project would last until 2016.

"We expect it will be cleaned up to rid the contaminated areas of dioxins down to harmless levels that are accepted both by the government of the US and the government of Vietnam, and so safe for industrial, commercial or residential use," he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/world/asia/us-moves-to-address-agent-orange-contamination-in-vietnam.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Forty years after the United States stopped spraying herbicides in the jungles of Southeast Asia in the hopes of denying cover to Vietcong fighters and North Vietnamese troops, an air base here is one of about two dozen former American sites that remain polluted with an especially toxic strain of dioxin, the chemical contaminant in Agent Orange that has been linked to cancers, birth defects and other diseases.

[Aeson]

Basically, it's an herbicide, and people aren't herbs. That's a simplistic stupid way of looking at it of course.

[Kidlicious]

[regexcellent]

*sigh*
The VA has thrown lots of money at this political hot potato, because it would be insulting the veterans or something to deny it, and there would be an uproar. The lie of Agent Orange being dangerous has been repeated so much that it has become accepted fact.

The fact that the US government is spending lots of money to atone for Agent Orange is a political decision, not a scientific one.

[Hauldren Collider]

The fact that Uncle Sam has a federal pork program is not evidence for said pork program's validity.

[kentonio]

Yeah, nothing to see here..

[regexcellent]

At least, nothing to see related to Agent Orange.

Those birth defects are allegedly caused by dioxin, which is only found in trace quantities in Agent Orange. Dioxin breaks down in direct sunlight. Ordinary soil contains way more dioxin than Agent Orange.

It's pretty goddamn easy for the Vietnamese government to whip up a bunch of kids with crazy birth defects in a country with nearly 90 million people and then assign a convenient boogeyman to them for international sympathy.

[Dinner]

Reg, you say stupid **** all the time but this is worse than average. You haven't a clue what a dioxin is, do you?

[regexcellent]

So are you going to come in and present some actual study linking Agent Orange to birth defects in humans? Because so far, nobody has. kentonio served up some scary-looking pictures although there's no way of knowing if those are actual victims of Agent Orange or just the google image search results for "flipper baby."

Agent Orange had not greater than 5 parts per billion of dioxins or dioxin-like compounds. Once sprayed on the ground that got highly diluted. And it's not like people eat the ****ing grass or something.

Besides, I'm pretty sure dioxins themselves don't cause birth defects, although they are a carcinogen.