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

[kentonio]

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

[MichaeltheGreat]

And more apt to be swayed by political ambition.

State systems differ a lot. In California urban counties, I'd go for a judge, especially since if you draw a poor one, you have a one-time automatic, no-cause needed peremptory challenge. You can also challenge for cause, and as long as you're not clearly judge shopping, the tendency is to favor any reasonably plausible challenge for cause so as to avoid appellate issues later.

[kentonio]

State systems differ a lot. In California urban counties, I'd go for a judge, especially since if you draw a poor one, you have a one-time automatic, no-cause needed peremptory challenge. You can also challenge for cause, and as long as you're not clearly judge shopping, the tendency is to favor any reasonably plausible challenge for cause so as to avoid appellate issues later.

What should we chose if we don't understand what any of those words mean?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

State systems differ a lot.

Translation for Kentonio - It depends.

[MichaeltheGreat]

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 for one minor detail. The real, original issue was non-political, not in the public eye for years, and even when it made the news (the class action case), that was really a sideshow - the settlement was a joke because the class definition was so broad, so vets who applied received less than $1,000 each. There were separate legal issues about class definition, noticing, exclusion, etc., so a majority of vets at the time who had significant medical issues did not participate in the settlement. The real issue, for years, was VA insisting these were non-service related fluke cases that they'd never seen before, when in fact many similar cases were occuring all over the country - and VA handling the matter even to the extent of (either incompetent or deliberate) misdiagnosis. VA also routinely dragged its feet on FOIA requests (even using EO12356 exemption claims)

Your analogy to the vaccine study is perfect - this is the exact opposite situation. Instead of one inaccurate study and an effort to legitimize that study, you had a few thousand cases appearing all over the country and a systematic, deliberate effort to isolate and contain information and pretend that each of these cases were random one-off events until the number became too high to hide.

[MichaeltheGreat]

What should we chose if we don't understand what any of those words mean?

Hopefully your lawyer does. Otherwise, set your mattress on fire and try to jump out a window claiming Brittney Spears is using telepathy to control you.

[Aeson]

Make sure before jumping out the window that you put on one of her earlier videos. Leave it playing on a continuous loop. (Just don't go too early or you'll be branded a pedophile.) Everyone knows Britney Spears lost most of her ability to influence mens' minds years ago.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Hence the strength of the resulting insanity plea.

[Kuciwalker]

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 may be wrong about this, but I believe the original complaints about Agent Orange were about the effects on the Vietnamese, and were first made by the usual assortment of Communist sympathizers. The complaints to the VA about the effects on veterans came later.

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.

Not as much as you might think. Here are some actual numbers from a Monte Carlo run with 1000 trials:

If there are 100 rare cancers (let's say rare cancer = 1 death in 10,000 is due to that cancer) then let's see what the frequency distribution of particular rare cancers would look like in a randomly selected population of 1,000 people:

9.067 rare cancers showed up 1 time (10x higher incidence than in the general population)
0.437 rare cancers showed up 2 times (20x higher incidence than in the general population)
0.009 rare cancers showed up 3 times (30x higher incidence than in the general population)
0.001 rare cancers showed up 4 times (40x higher incidence than in the general population)

If the randomly selected population has 10,000 people, we get:

1: 3.7041
2: 1.8384
3: 0.6085
4: 0.1501
5: 0.0298
6: 0.0043
7: 0.0004
8: 0.0000
9: 0.0001

Admission: these numbers are actually slightly smaller than I had expected.

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."

There were presumably pretty strong patterns to which regions were chosen for Agent Orange use. "Doing a proper experiment is hard" only goes so far in weakening our epistemic requirements for belief; if proper data collection is basically impossible then we likely should just fall back on our priors about the carcinogenic effects of TCDD in the concentrations present in contaminated Agent Orange.

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.

I think HC and regex are over- or at least mis-stating the problems with jury trials. That said, courts of law are not well-designed to make judgments of scientific fact. There are good reasons for this, and in many cases we want to hold companies liable for actions that we can't scientifically demonstrate were harmful. (e.g. strict liability.) It does mean, however, that we shouldn't rely on court decisions to inform our scientific beliefs.

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.

I agree with this, but I don't agree with downplaying the anti-American rhetoric that assigns all kinds of ills to Agent Orange.

[Kuciwalker]

Except for one minor detail. The real, original issue was non-political, not in the public eye for years, and even when it made the news (the class action case), that was really a sideshow - the settlement was a joke because the class definition was so broad, so vets who applied received less than $1,000 each.

I'll accept this claim, though as I mentioned above my recollection (for which I don't have a cite handy) was that the original criticism of Agent Orange came from Communist sympathizers in the U.S.

[MichaeltheGreat]

I may be wrong about this, but I believe the original complaints about Agent Orange were about the effects on the Vietnamese, and were first made by the usual assortment of Communist sympathizers. The complaints to the VA about the effects on veterans came later.

You could lump that in with the general "baby killer" and "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" noise without even getting into rainbow agents. The same people *****ed about Napalm as well, and the war in general. They didn't get any particular traction on rainbow agents, and more to the point, they were not interested in the cases of US vets nor did they benefit from, or have standing in, the class action and other claims against USG.

Also, it's a fallacy to lump all the early general anti-war sentiment as "communist sympathizers" - a lot of people simply didn't buy the need, or the benefit, and things like Madame Nhu offering to provide fuel for BBQs, or funny way ARVN and AFRVN generals had a habit of being "democratically elected" leaders made people a bit suspicious. Things like the strategic hamlet program also raised a few "what exactly the **** are we doing over there?" eyebrows in distinctly non-communist circles. It was just a constant tactic of the right at the time to label anything that disagreed with your point of view as "communist" - as kids in the 60s we used to joke about it, how if you didn't like something, it was a bunch of communist propaganda. Fallout shelter drills, saying the pledge of allegiance every ****in' class (in my illegally segregated public schools in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi), etc. So it's a nice bit of jingoistic revisionism on the part of the right now to try to discredit opposition, but regardless, none of those people ever gained any real traction on rainbow agents.


Not as much as you might think. Here are some actual numbers from a Monte Carlo run with 1000 trials:

If there are 100 rare cancers (let's say rare cancer = 1 death in 10,000 is due to that cancer) then let's see what the frequency distribution of particular rare cancers would look like in a randomly selected population of 1,000 people:

9.067 rare cancers showed up 1 time (10x higher incidence than in the general population)
0.437 rare cancers showed up 2 times (20x higher incidence than in the general population)
0.009 rare cancers showed up 3 times (30x higher incidence than in the general population)
0.001 rare cancers showed up 4 times (40x higher incidence than in the general population)

If the randomly selected population has 10,000 people, we get:

1: 3.7041
2: 1.8384
3: 0.6085
4: 0.1501
5: 0.0298
6: 0.0043
7: 0.0004
8: 0.0000
9: 0.0001

Admission: these numbers are actually slightly smaller than I had expected.
[/quote]

Let's look at three population groups, some 100k vets with significant, repeated aerosol exposure, other Vietnam vets, and the US general population of males of the same ages, and compare those.

There were presumably pretty strong patterns to which regions were chosen for Agent Orange use. "Doing a proper experiment is hard" only goes so far in weakening our epistemic requirements for belief; if proper data collection is basically impossible then we likely should just fall back on our priors about the carcinogenic effects of TCDD in the concentrations present in contaminated Agent Orange.

You can't break it down regionally. You'd need to go to much finer granularity, to the point of tracing all Ranch Hand and related missions, and correlate those with the timing of unit movements down to the company level (since you'd have AARs at that level), then look at personnel records and match them up to who was on the line that day and who might have been at the battalion aid station getting treatment for the clap. And do that over a decade. Order of magnitude, 100 million pages of data. That would give you a very strong, non-statistical profile of exposure incidents and you could classify troops on that basis, then correllate with actual medical records (which would of course require consent)

Anything less than that, and you're just making bald ass assumptions, because a lot of troops never got ass in the grass in the same way as LRRP teams, SF Mike and Alpha teams, DA and PA and RF/PF adviser teams, ASH company crews, etc. Even sorting by unit and MOS wouldn't be adequate.

I think HC and regex are over- or at least mis-stating the problems with jury trials. That said, courts of law are not well-designed to make judgments of scientific fact. There are good reasons for this, and in many cases we want to hold companies liable for actions that we can't scientifically demonstrate were harmful. (e.g. strict liability.) It does mean, however, that we shouldn't rely on court decisions to inform our scientific beliefs.

They're not designed at all to make judgments of scientific fact. Only judgments of fact according to the applicable standards of evidence.

I agree with this, but I don't agree with downplaying the anti-American rhetoric that assigns all kinds of ills to Agent Orange.

They're two separate issues. Even without rainbow agents, there is plenty of reason to not have particularly pro-American (or pro-Soviet, PRC, RVN, DRV) sentiments about the conduct of that war. A lot of civilians were used up and ****ed with as pawns in a big geopolitical pissing match that was really of secondary importance, even at the time.

Even if, arguendo, rainbow agents were "harmless" to humans, Dow, Monsanto and others didn't make any real effort to establish this, didn't give a rat's ass about contamination, and frankly, there is really no getting around war crimes issues with respect to the pre-Orange agents' use in some areas to enforce the strategic hamlet and related programs by destroying agricultural capability. The mindset of the time was that it was just a bunch of ignorant peasants, and they're all VC or VC sympathizers anyway until we get them under government control. It may have been deemed militarily effective (actually, the relocation programs were a severe case of Taurine Mammary Syndrome), but there's plenty of valid reasons for anti-American (and everyone else) rhetoric resulting from that war.

[MichaeltheGreat]

I may be wrong about this, but I believe the original complaints about Agent Orange were about the effects on the Vietnamese, and were first made by the usual assortment of Communist sympathizers. The complaints to the VA about the effects on veterans came later.

You could lump that in with the general "baby killer" and "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" noise without even getting into rainbow agents. The same people *****ed about Napalm as well, and the war in general. They didn't get any particular traction on rainbow agents, and more to the point, they were not interested in the cases of US vets nor did they benefit from, or have standing in, the class action and other claims against USG.

Also, it's a fallacy to lump all the early general anti-war sentiment as "communist sympathizers" - a lot of people simply didn't buy the need, or the benefit, and things like Madame Nhu offering to provide fuel for BBQs, or funny way ARVN and AFRVN generals had a habit of being "democratically elected" leaders made people a bit suspicious. Things like the strategic hamlet program also raised a few "what exactly the **** are we doing over there?" eyebrows in distinctly non-communist circles. It was just a constant tactic of the right at the time to label anything that disagreed with your point of view as "communist" - as kids in the 60s we used to joke about it, how if you didn't like something, it was a bunch of communist propaganda. Fallout shelter drills, saying the pledge of allegiance every ****in' class (in my illegally segregated public schools in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi), etc. So it's a nice bit of jingoistic revisionism on the part of the right now to try to discredit opposition, but regardless, none of those people ever gained any real traction on rainbow agents.

Not as much as you might think. Here are some actual numbers from a Monte Carlo run with 1000 trials:

(snip)

Admission: these numbers are actually slightly smaller than I had expected.

Let's look at three population groups, some 100k vets with significant, repeated aerosol exposure, other Vietnam vets, and the US general population of males of the same ages, and compare those.

There were presumably pretty strong patterns to which regions were chosen for Agent Orange use. "Doing a proper experiment is hard" only goes so far in weakening our epistemic requirements for belief; if proper data collection is basically impossible then we likely should just fall back on our priors about the carcinogenic effects of TCDD in the concentrations present in contaminated Agent Orange.

You can't break it down regionally. You'd need to go to much finer granularity, to the point of tracing all Ranch Hand and related missions, and correlate those with the timing of unit movements down to the company level (since you'd have AARs at that level), then look at personnel records and match them up to who was on the line that day and who might have been at the battalion aid station getting treatment for the clap. And do that over a decade. Order of magnitude, 100 million pages of data. That would give you a very strong, non-statistical profile of exposure incidents and you could classify troops on that basis, then correllate with actual medical records (which would of course require consent)

Anything less than that, and you're just making bald ass assumptions, because a lot of troops never got ass in the grass in the same way as LRRP teams, SF Mike and Alpha teams, DA and PA and RF/PF adviser teams, ASH company crews, etc. Even sorting by unit and MOS wouldn't be adequate.

I think HC and regex are over- or at least mis-stating the problems with jury trials. That said, courts of law are not well-designed to make judgments of scientific fact. There are good reasons for this, and in many cases we want to hold companies liable for actions that we can't scientifically demonstrate were harmful. (e.g. strict liability.) It does mean, however, that we shouldn't rely on court decisions to inform our scientific beliefs.

They're not designed at all to make judgments of scientific fact. Only judgments of fact according to the applicable standards of evidence.

I agree with this, but I don't agree with downplaying the anti-American rhetoric that assigns all kinds of ills to Agent Orange.

They're two separate issues. Even without rainbow agents, there is plenty of reason to not have particularly pro-American (or pro-Soviet, PRC, RVN, DRV) sentiments about the conduct of that war. A lot of civilians were used up and ****ed with as pawns in a big geopolitical pissing match that was really of secondary importance, even at the time.

Even if, arguendo, rainbow agents were "harmless" to humans, Dow, Monsanto and others didn't make any real effort to establish this, didn't give a rat's ass about contamination, and frankly, there is really no getting around war crimes issues with respect to the pre-Orange agents' use in some areas to enforce the strategic hamlet and related programs by destroying agricultural capability. The mindset of the time was that it was just a bunch of ignorant peasants, and they're all VC or VC sympathizers anyway until we get them under government control. It may have been deemed militarily effective (actually, the relocation programs were a severe case of Taurine Mammary Syndrome), but there's plenty of valid reasons for anti-American (and everyone else) rhetoric resulting from that war.

[regexcellent]

Haha, napalm.

See those kids down by the lake
Drop some napalm watch them bake
NAPALM sticks to kids!
Napalm sticks to kids!

We sing that in ROTC sometimes. I don't think cadre likes it very much though.

[DaShi]

[MRT144]

Haha, napalm.

See those kids down by the lake
Drop some napalm watch them bake
NAPALM sticks to kids!
Napalm sticks to kids!

We sing that in ROTC sometimes. I don't think cadre likes it very much though.

Ah yes, murdering civilians...