We are in the midst of the 148th anniversary of Sherman's march to the sea.

[Hauldren Collider]

Federal judges are usually pretty good. State judges, depends a lot on how the state picks its judges. Elected judges are a pretty terrible thing.

[Dr Strangelove]

Sherman used agent Orange? D**n you Yankee ingenuity! Can someone post pics of the three headed rebel kids resulting from this Northern atrocity?!

[regexcellent]

Hell no. I would only feel better in the arena of technical matters when and if judged by competent individuals capable of understanidng the evidence placed before them. (Which is why arbitration often is the preferred route) A judge is often times merely a political appointee without many firing nuerons but replete with ambitions. The jury solution is only poor in that our general public is so woefully inadequate. Likewise the jury slection process designed to include the most woefully inadequate people possible to make up the jury.

I'm talking about in criminal matters, in which case the technical matter at hand is law, which judges are eminently more qualified to consider than juries.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Southerners have been mutants since the 1860's. Northeasterners became mutantized after love canal et.al. in the 50's and 60's.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

I'm talking about in criminal matters, in which case the technical matter at hand is law, which judges are eminently more qualified to consider than juries.

And more apt to be swayed by political ambition.

[regexcellent]

If I were the guy who shot Trayvon Martin (I still insist, what the hell kind of name is Trayvon, seriously) then yes, political aspirations of the judge would be something to worry about. However if it's just an ordinary trial with no media attention like 99% of the trials in this country then I wouldn't be worried about it.

[Hauldren Collider]

If I were the guy who shot Trayvon Martin, I'd still feel better about a judge than a jury.

[giblets]

Here is the very simple Bayesian case against believing the charges laid against Agent Orange:

There is some chance that the controversy surrounding Agent Orange is a purely social phenomenon, with no basis in scientific evidence. We've seen such phenomena elsewhere - I alluded to one such earlier, the anti-vaccine movement. The notion that vaccines cause autism has been an ongoing controversy for nearly 15 years, but is complete bull****. It originated from a single (incorrectly interpreted) experiment published in 1998. Even if the experiment itself had been done correctly, one paper would generally be insufficient evidence for a conclusion like this, but it was seized upon by some (hysterical) elements of the public. They then generated a whole bunch of extra data that supposedly demonstrated the link.

Other examples: cell phones causing cancer, depleted uranium weapons doing various terrible things, fluoridation being a Communist mind-control plot. The public is well-disposed to believe this sort of thing, especially if the accused is scary-sounding.

Also consider the diversity of claims about Agent Orange. Agent Orange isn't just accused of being a carcinogen, it is also accused of causing all kinds of birth defects. There is not and probably cannot be any scientific evidence for that (it is just too hard to study, absent enormous effect sizes).

Finally, there are a bunch of vocal people who have a political interest in making the US look bad.

The conclusion from all of this is that even if Agent Orange had no harmful effects whatsoever, we would not be surprised to see the controversy that we do.

Except people have tried suing the makers of vaccines in court for supposedly causing their child's autism and the lawsuits have failed miserably.

[Aeson]

There is some chance that the controversy surrounding Agent Orange is a purely social phenomenon, with no basis in scientific evidence.

It can't be a purely social phenomenon, as there is actual scientific evidence that components of Agent Orange can cause physiological defects in laboratory animals. Even if much of the controversy was due to the social phenomenon, it clearly had roots in response to real findings in laboratories.

Read up on how it started. The US government became aware of the potential health effects of components of Agent Orange in the late 60's, and it was due to studies on agricultural use of some of the components of Agent Orange. It had nothing to do with the war initially. The issue post-war exploded when those and similar findings were first researched by veterans and their families to explain health problems (rightly or wrongly).

We've seen such phenomena elsewhere - I alluded to one such earlier, the anti-vaccine movement.

Equating the two is absurd. They occupy completely different realms of plausibility. On one hand you have 4 decades of rather consistent findings in laboratories about the effects of dioxins on laboratory animals. On the other you have one debunked study and a bunch of nutjobs who don't make any sense.

The conclusion from all of this is that even if Agent Orange had no harmful effects whatsoever, we would not be surprised to see the controversy that we do.

Actually it would be extremely surprising. Without the specific studies (or something like them) which specific actors latched onto to spark the controversy, there's no reason to think that Agent Orange would have been chosen as a scapegoat over any other thing. Once you eliminate all the evidence, it could have just as easily been the toothpaste the military distributed, the paint on the trucks, or a any number of other things that have no real evidence to support them.

It's rather clear that Agent Orange was latched onto by these specific actors (rightly or wrongly) because of specific studies that showed physiological effects in laboratory animals. Pretending that it's just something hippies thought up while protesting on campuses is rather absurd.

I would also be surprised to see Monsanto paying money if there was absolutely no scientific basis for the claims. They don't willingly pay money to GM nutjobs, because that's all they are is nutjobs without any actual evidence of potential harm, even though there's a lot of nutjobs gnashing their teeth about GM crops. It's not like we've gotten rid of juries either ...

[MichaeltheGreat]

However, the literature is inconclusive, particularly on the specific question of whether the concentrations of TCDD in contaminated Agent Orange were sufficient to cause the diseases attributed to it. Much of it is also suspect - either because it was politically motivated (this goes for both sides) or (more seriously) because medical research in general is in a sorry state and is statistically crippled.

The political motivation came later on, but probably only in response (at first) to the VA medical system stonewalling. Real information didn't start to become available until VA started subcontracting some of its oncology cases to various university and specialty hospitals. Originally, VA was stonewalling to screw vets on disability claims and to reduce USG liabilities over service-related causes of death. Then when the implication started being raised that rainbow agents were a common exposure, political influence was exerted top down.

I am sorry for your loss - that sounds like a particularly awful situation to go through, for him and for you - but this is no more evidence than Jenny McCarthy has against the MMR vaccine.

If it was a one-off, isolated case. correct. However, there were other Orange exposed vets who had similar combinations of the same cancers appearing in the same way, and no known cases of the same cancers occuring concurrently in others who did not have a background of significant Orange exposure.

I'll admit that I'm not familiar with this, but it isn't convincing on its own. There are a large number of rare diseases, so any small population might be expected to have a wildly disproportionate incidence of some of them. There's also the general "maybe there was some other exposure that was well-correlated with Agent Orange" etc. that you allude to earlier.

Some, but a diverse population with relatively little in common other than Orange exposure being the only group developing this and a few other combinations of rare cancers concurrently, and no other individuals developing the same cancer combinations creates a nice little evidentiary barrier to overcome. The "maybe there was some other exposure" comment is a phantom - you can't prove that there wasn't some other exposure years after the fact - if you had a lab full of millions of concurrent air, soil, water, uniform, food and other samples and those samples had been analyzed at the time, and a virtually unlimited staff, then you could do almost do so, but then the argument would be raised that maybe the phantom exposure was so non-persistent that it broke down even before the lab analysis was done. In other words, no matter how much anecdotal evidence, or how much evidence of results, anyone with an axe to grind can create hypothetical phantoms and claim "its not proven."

The diseases attributed to Agent Orange are also much more diverse than this - birth defects, etc. - so even if Agent Orange did cause elevated incidence of a few rare cancers, it is almost certainly not guilty of most of its charges.

Which is pretty much irrelevant. The vast majority of the birth defect claims are from Vietnam, so throw in the various rainbow agents, byproducts of ordnance explosions and other factors, and yep, they probably have a pretty significant problem - but that's irrelevant to the Dow class action, which concerned only US vets.

The fact is, even knowing its effects, I would have used the stuff under the circumstances that applied in that war - not for broader purposes of forced urbanization and support of the "strategic hamlet" program (the pre-Orange rainbow agents), but for limited purposes of creating FOB perimeter security zones, and exposing supply routes such as parts of the Ho Chi Minh trail. However, Dow still knowingly sent contaminated product, and USG knowingly accepted it, and both tried to stonewall any communication or collection of information about the effects. From a legal standpoint, that's enough, and the question of which disease processes were caused to what extent by Orange specifically is pretty much moot. Knowing there is a hazard, concealing the hazard, and obstructing communication regarding the effect of that hazard creates liability. End of story.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Sherman used agent Orange? D**n you Yankee ingenuity! Can someone post pics of the three headed rebel kids resulting from this Northern atrocity?!

Hell, doc, ever been through back country West Virginia or northern Georgia or deep in the Ozarks?

[Aeson]

The fact that it was used in an unpopular war and has a menacing-sounding name makes it even more likely to capture the public's imagination. Nobody ever talks about Agent Pink. Or Agent White.

Real men don't find the names of colors menacing.

[kentonio]

I'm talking about in criminal matters, in which case the technical matter at hand is law, which judges are eminently more qualified to consider than juries.

It's quite incredible that the same people who whine about government power are the same ones who think having judges ruling solely on cases would be a good idea. Personally I find your jury selection process to be ridiculous, but even so it's still a million times better than putting your freedom purely in the hands of a single state sponsored individual. There are countless examples of how 'well' that works out.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

F*ck you Kentonio, you made my point and agree with me again. :mad! q:

[MichaeltheGreat]

Michael, you suck at statistics. That's all I have to say. Until you learn up a bit, you're going to keep being insistently, confidently wrong.

Statisticians are the junior-level whores one hires to support consultant or expert witness whores to make whatever point you want made. Once you get out of canned data sets in school and into the real world, you can pretty much find a method to conclude whatever you want. Which is one reason why the only real function of an expert witness in litigation is to nullify the other side's experts. In consulting, it's to justify whatever action the client already wants to take.

You probably weren't even a gleam in your daddy's eye when this issue started, so your internet research is laughable. It wasn't leftists and hippies who started raising the issue, and it wasn't an anti-war crowd - they didn't give a rat's ass about a bunch of baby-killers. It wasn't a bunch of greedy vets looking to sponge off the government and make a ton of money. The original issue, back in the days before the internet when dinosaurs roamed the earth, was raised by vets who were generally proud of their service, had no connection with or liking for the hippies and fashionable anti-war crowd, and the issue was being able to share and communicate medical records and information in the face of an unusual degree of stonewalling from VA.

You weren't there, so read what you want off of whatever internet site passes for reality in your world, but the simple fact remains, you weren't there. So we all know which orifice you're posting from.