Looks like another case of "shorts gone bad." Kidding aside, nice work guys...

In an email discussion a while back my friend sent me a quote from a blog that hits the nail on the head:

"DDT kills Malaria mosquitos (which are of course unwitting carriers of the Malaria virus), yet also poisons ecologies and causes reproductive problems in almost every lifeform it has been tested on. There must be better ways of dealing with Malaria.

One would be to knock down many of the underperforming dams in affected areas, whose stagnant reservoirs are ideal breeding points for Malaria. Another would be to improve riverine ecologies in farming areas and improve sewage systems in cities.

These solutions, however, do not help the corporate bottom line. DDT does."

Oh,I forgot and left this out

"use of DDT has been banned in the U.S., production is not.

U.S. corporations have been producing DDT for export and sale over seas the entire time, usually in third world countries (because environmental protections are gutted by IMF and World Bank “structural adjustment programs”)."

this sounds oddly familiar to the same support for the "minute" amounts of chemicals found in non-organic vs. organic produce and the "people in the know" who say small amounts will not kill you, i disagree, same with DDT...in agreement with Joe, there has to be other options

Comment #1 - those are dive shorts that have been worn since the first frogman reconed the beaches at Normandy. The navy isn't going to jump on the baggy short hip hop trend. Sorry to disappoint.

Wow, that is a beautiful sight... all those pull-up bars. I wish my cartilage would hurry up and heal so I can get back on the bar.

don't believe anything from that website. it's so slanted to the right it's ridiculous. plus, never trust a man with a mustache.

Ah, The guys in the picture are wearing Army Tee Shirts. If this is really a Navy facility, and Navy guys are wearing Army Tee shirts, I wonder if they sing kumbaya at the end of the day?

Uh-oh, Jonathan drank the kool-aid...

Why is the soldier the only one in the picture performing an actual exercise? What exactly are all those sailors doing?

(Yeah, let me hear a "Kumbaya.")

Comment # 5: slim...i totally agree, but are they actually comfortable???

comment # 9: hey, jonathan. being a man with a mustache, i take offense to that, as i am extremely trustworthy. ; )

...what would ultimatly cost less. getting rid of malaria infested areas or getting rid of people who live in them?...which begets the question....

If no one lives in mosquito/malaria infested areas, who gets malaria?

If your villiage has been infested with mosquito's your entire life and you've experienced people dying from a disease spread by these mosquitos then you deserve what happens to you for not moving out of the area. And no crap about "they don't know any better!"; a child that touches a hot stove takes his finger away because he didn't like what happened. If a bunch of people around you are dying because of where you live, MOVE!! It's called natural selection.

Comment #11

While it's a static photo, it looks like a round robin: Muscle Ups, Ring Push-ups, and bar pull-ups. Granted, none look like they've done a warm-up or gone far into the work out they're doing.

As for the article, John Stossel uses alot of weasel words in his article. However, he is correct that DDT helped in the surge of human population in the mid 20th century. That surge created issues with food supplies but that was solved by a philanthropist that aided third world nations in food productions (sadly, it was the type of food discouraged by CrossFit diet but an unhealthy diet is still better than no diet at all).

OR (that's a Big Or), you could go this route: ponds, torches, frogs, mosquitoes. Tiki torches attract the mosquitoes, frogs eat the mosquitoes, people eat the frogs. Use frog and people waste to generate methane to power the torches.

Thereby, your third world nations gets its proteins and closes a nice loop. Just don't spray DDT in the frog, mosquitoe, torch areas. Creating an anaerobic digestor tank is just as easy as a septic tank.

Treelizard & James N, thanks for the suggestions yesterday on how to sub pull ups. James, unfortunately all my buddies carry loaded rifles, and i'm not sure they would understand crossfit. have a good weekend everyone

A.M., I feel you, brother. I'm not supposed to use my right arm for a whole week!! (Then again, the guy who diagnosed that one was an idiot, so we'll see.)

Comment #8 - All military divers (with the exception of Seals and Special Forces) are trained at the Navy diving and salvage training center. The guys in the Army t-shirts are probably going through the Army engineering divers course which will qualify them as 2nd class divers.

There are some Army guys that go through there, as well as Marines. The guys in the white shirts are most likely new diver candidates going through their first couple weeks of academic and physical training.

After surviving "Pool Week" (spending about 8 hours per day getting 'Sharked' by instructors at the deep end of the pool) each class gets a little more respect, and are able to wear a blue shirt with their own class-designed insignia and saying . . . but they keep the shorts!

what if you can't swim?

then it would probably be best to go for a different branch/specialty/mos/whatever than diver, joe.

OPT, Joe, Jonathan, et. al.: think about what your saying and why. Why do you think DDT damages the environment? Where did you learn that? Is it just because DDT is a chemical? Or, perhaps you read years ago in the media that DDT was "bad" for bird eggs and salamanders and thus developed an opinion without research?

If DDT is bad just because it is a chemical, you better stop going to the dry cleaner, and, put down that paper, and stop typing on that keyboard cause they all use or were manufactured with sinister chemicals. This generation has a longer lifespan than all previous generations in large part due to chemistry.

Just wait until some nasty bugs, e.g., killer bees, or mosquitos with West Nile Virus, swarm into your neighborhood some day and threaten your children's health. I'd bet my house that you and your neighbors will be all over them with every chemical available to man to eradicate them from town.

But don't worry, it's o.k. to kill mosquitos. There are many places on the planet they can thrive in abundance. Just not in my neighborhood.

I think there has to exist options other than this. Better options. What about pants?

LOL, CraigH. We had an ant infestation about four months ago, and I immediately purchased the most potent nasty ant-killing chemicals I could find. None of that eco-friendly sh!t. My friend who was picking me up happened to walk in on my neighbor and I about to engage in our ant-killing charade on our respective porches, and was informing us on the ant-killing attributes of things like coffee grounds and essential oils. I looked at him for a few seconds, said, "That's nice," and went back to spraying. I'm a hypocrite.

The World Health Organization announced a major policy change. It's actively backing the controversial pesticide DDT as a way to control malaria. Malaria kills about 1 million people a year, mainly children, and mainly in Africa, despite a decades-long effort to eradicate it. A number of major environmental groups support the limited use of DDT, such as spraying only inside of houses and huts once or twice a year. That type of use is supported by the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense, which was originally founded by scientists concerned about DDT.

Maybe its limited use should be reviewed, if it can save lives in third world contries. Until something better is introduced should the world just stand by.

Why would you want to save lives in third world countries. Let them do it themselves.

Craig H who wrote "OPT, Joe, Jonathan, et. al.: think about what your saying and why. Why do you think DDT damages the environment? Where did you learn that? Is it just because DDT is a chemical? Or, perhaps you read years ago in the media that DDT was "bad" for bird eggs and salamanders and thus developed an opinion without research?"

Well Craig, the study in the article below determined that the more exposed a baby is to DDT and carcinogens the lower its mental and physical capabilities are.

DDT has been banned in North America but it's still sold to other countries to combat malaria, although it isn’t very effective and must be routinely re-applied, causing heavier and heavier concentrations stored in fatty cells. This is how a mother gives her son or daughter chemicals through breast feeding.

"The pesticide was banned in the US and UK in the 1970s, but it is still used in some countries to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

It was already known DDT was linked to premature births and low birthweight.

For each tenfold increase in DDT levels measured in the mother, the team found a corresponding two to three-point decrease in the children's mental development scores at 12 and 24 months.

Children with the highest DDT exposures in the womb were associated with a seven to 10-point decrease in test scores, compared to the lowest exposures.

When the children's physical skills were measured, there were two-point decreases in children's scores at six and 12 months for each tenfold increase in DDT levels in the mothers.

The University of California Berkeley researchers say their findings, published in Pediatrics, should be borne in mind when addressing malaria."

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0705-08.htm

By the way Craig,have you ever read,in your extensive research on the subject, a little book called "Silent Spring"? It's about DDT,among other things,here is a short review :

"Silent Spring took Carson four years to complete. It meticulously described how DDT entered the food chain and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings, and caused cancer and genetic damage. A single application on a crop, she wrote, killed insects for weeks and months, and not only the targeted insects but countless more, and remained toxic in the environment even after it was diluted by rainwater. Carson concluded that DDT and other pesticides had irrevocably harmed birds and animals and had contaminated the entire world food supply.

The book's most haunting and famous chapter, "A Fable for Tomorrow," depicted a nameless American town where all life -- from fish to birds to apple blossoms to human children -- had been "silenced" by the insidious effects of DDT.

Anticipating the reaction of the chemical industry, she had compiled Silent Spring as one would a lawyer's brief, with no fewer than 55 pages of notes and a list of experts who had read and approved the manuscript. Many eminent scientists rose to her defense, and when President John F. Kennedy ordered the President's Science Advisory Committee to examine the issues the book raised, its report thoroughly vindicated both Silent Spring and its author. As a result, DDT came under much closer government supervision and was eventually banned."

http://www.nrdc.org/health/pesticides/hcarson.asp

Joe #26 - I think the point of the article was to debunk the assertions made by Carson in "Silent Spring", which led to DDT's ban. There's always two or more sides to these big issues. Many involve economic and political hot potatoes. I haven't done any research on the DDT thing and I'm not a scientist with a lab, so my only source of information (like most things) is from reading whatever the press decides to publish. I don't know if DDT is bad or not, but those in responsible positions have a duty to us to reveal the pros and cons (all of them) so we can make informed decisions. Sounds like this is one chemical that might do more good than harm if used properly.
Knowledge is power and power controls the masses.

#22 Treelizard - we forgive you.

If there was more DDT in the foodchain - maybe my daughter wouldn't get nits so often (joke!)

Took a rest day on Thursday - travelling, so..

Annie
Tuck jump sub
5:15

Steve #27

Re read the article,it concludes:

"The most important legacy of Silent Spring, though, was a new public awareness that nature was vulnerable to human intervention. Rachel Carson had made a radical proposal: that, at times, technological progress is so fundamentally at odds with natural processes that it must be curtailed. Conservation had never raised much broad public interest, for few people really worried about the disappearance of wilderness. But the threats Carson had outlined -- the contamination of the food chain, cancer, genetic damage, the deaths of entire species -- were too frightening to ignore. For the first time, the need to regulate industry in order to protect the environment became widely accepted, and environmentalism was born."

Seems like, at least in the USA, malaria rates were down to nothing BEFORE DDT was banned:

http://healthsentinel.com/graphs.php?id=50&event=graphs_print_list_item

And yet we still have mosquitoes.

What if poor sanitation and a lack of nourishment have more to do with people dying in third world countries than mosquitoes? All the chemicals sprayed in the world won't end disease in Africa.

This is a stupid topic. DDT is effective...learn how to use it without overspraying everything. Again the law of unintended consequenses by pink leftists has led to the demise of millions. You can see from the above quotes banning DDT had as much or more to do with anti-industrialization/"corporate bottom line" than protecting the environment.

Good job whackos...

tug at the heart strings/build "anti-corporate"* sentiment/get government in the middle/take away "controversial solution" to poor brown people's problems/watch poor brown people suffer/tug at heart strings/get government in the middle/cry for aid to help the brown people/watch the aid go to despots/watch brown people's country and culture regress into civil strife/ support despot as legitimate leader as despot blames the US....repeat.

That is the template...

*fill in the words "Establishment", "Capitalist", "Christian/Religious Right", "Military", "Military Industrial Complex", "Haliburton" etc. as required for the "Cause du Jour"

QUESTION: Why don't they just clear the area of vegetation and drain the standing water?

ANSWER: If you have ever been attacked by swarms of mosquitoes (that potentially carry disease) you don't want to go to where they are. So your screwed because some "do-gooder" in another land has decided that using DDT is bad for bird eggs. Besides you live in a "Rain Forest" ie. "Jungle" and should not cut away vegetation and drain the land so it is productive and your people can thrive and flourish. You are to remain "indiginous" (poor, ignorant, sick, primative, and isolated) so we can give you "Aid" to make ourselves feel better and give us a reason to loathe our own success. After all we would not live there, we got ours. You are to form small bands of "rebels" lead by a "Despot" and commit "atrocities" against your own people in a twisted effort to bring "stability" through "revolution".

You will use drugs to ease your suffering from the disease you got from not killing the mosquitos and clearing the land and allow your offspring to do the same. Your Despot leader will form drug rings to pay for his lifestyle and weapons for you and your friends to continue to run rough-shod over the innocent. We will send more "Aid" which will discourage enterprise in your lands, while all the while strengthening the Despot's grasp of the people and the "revolution".

Besides, we know you were too "poor, ignorant, sick, primative, and isolated" to be enterprising anyway. You will continue to support the Despot because you can't be productive any other way since you can't use the land and no industry will be coming any time soon since they are not convince your Despot will not seize its resources down the road once it is up and running. The Despot will funnel drugs into America, so our youth can use them in high school and college in an effort to escape the reality of this situation. After all, they feel guilty they have it so good in America so they will demand that the "Tax-Payers" fund you more "Aid" so they can feel like they did something to help between protests and rallies.

Please know your role, I am a an American Pink-O with a cause, I know what is best for you and I am here to "HELP".

If anyone is bored with the environmental discussions, I have posted a little rant on Women's body image at

http://crossfitoakland.com

Feel free to comment.

I find it interesting that CrossFit with it's large population of supposedly "macho" types (MIL/LAW, etc.) and *gasp* right wing bias is the most egalatarian organization I have ever encountered, especially when it comes to Women's Fitness.

Well maybe we might discriminate against hippies, but they don't want to join us anyway...

I don't have any scientfic proof or research, what I do have is that the year my dad had the marsh on our farm sprayed (obviously many years ago) with DDT, out of a 50 head beef herd, 20 of the calves that year were stillborn or premature. The ones that did live never put on weight like they were supposed to, and our cattle wern't right for years afterwards.

All right, I'm in...

This one is fairly easy, in my opinion, if you accept two simple premises. One, it is necessary to "time shift" this debate and look at the third world countries as if they were turn of the century America. Turn of the 20th century, or maybe even turn of the 19th century. The second premise is the need to allow self-determination in the affected countries.

In the early 1900's malaria was, indeed, a significant killer in North and Central America. Thousands of workers on the Panama Canal died or were incapacited by malaria until an aggressive campaign to eradicate mosquitos using DDT was completed. Without the vector (a very specific species of mosquito) the malaria parasite "load" is reduced to a point at which it is effectively removed as a source of infection in a particular area. You are, in effect, immunizating a geographic area against malaria in the same way you immunize a population against measles by innoculating a certain percentage of the population with a vaccine. Temporarlily removing the vector effectively removes the disease until and unless it is re-introduced into that geography.

In my opinion it is important to discuss sub-Saharan Africa as it relates to North America at the time the Panama Canal was built. People were dying. A relatively inexpensive solution exists, albeit one with potential environmental consequences, and possible health consequences for a generation. The reason that malaria rates were "down to nothing" (Jared b #27) before DDT was banned is precisely because DDT was effective in eradicating the disease in North America. Of course we still have mosquitos; it is not necessary to permanently remove the vector if the pathogen is no longer available to be carried. The presence of mosquitos in North America is irrelevant to this discussion. It is the absence of malaria due to the widespread use of DDT decades prior to 1970 that is significant. Can these nations hope to join the second and evenually the first world if millions of children die each year from malaria?

The second premise applies to the point that Treelizard addresses in her delightful, painfully honest manner. Is it appropriate for the countries of the first world (already over the brutalities of the "survival stage" of development where the very basics of existence like sanitation and potable water are still to be provided), to impose the same cost/benefit and risk/benefit ratios on countries that are just starting the climb out of a bare sustenance economy/life? Is it not appropriate for the hard calculas to be performed in those countries by their leaders (a la Treelizard in her porch) rather than imposed from the outside by us or the EU (a la Treelizard's helpful neighbor with her morning Starbuck's)?

You are the leader of one of these nations. Your country is no more advanced than Florida in 1903, if that advanced. You are losing one million of your people each year, disproportionately children. The single most effective and cost effective way to eradicate malaria in your country is to apply DDT indoors and over mosquito breeding areas. This may have environmental consequences, and several birth years of children may have side effects (neither of which has been proven adequately, although both may well be true). What do you do?

We in the western world debate issues like oil independence, disease prevention through diet and exercise versus disease treatment with ever more expensive medications, greenhouse emissions. We have reached this priveleged position because we have already surmounted the basic survival stage of nation building. We have the luxury of engaging in these debates. There are other malaria eradication options (mosquito nets are in vogue right now), all more expensive and less effective than DDT. Faced with this scourge in our nation's developing stages we liberally applied DDT. It's not 2006 in sub-Saharan Africa, it's 1896.

Frame the debate in a way that it is local in both time and space.
We, in the west, don't need to DO anything (Travis #24), with the exceptiion that we should NOT prevent them from using something that will save literally millions of lives if they so choose.

It's 1914 in Florida and you are governor. You have 2006 knowledge. What would you do? You are Prime Minister of Anywhere, Africa. What would you do? Every week you spend reading a book or searching on the web 20,000 people die. What would you do?

Darrell

#11,

Those shorts are very uncomfortable. Lots of chaffing, even before introduced to vast quantities of sand.

Good post #34
There are similar situations that happen in other areas as well, there are still places using and manufacturing CFC's and driving on leaded gasoline.
There will be an environmental impact and it's sad that in the last 30-50 years a less damaging pesticide or mitigation has not been created.

#20, Craig..as i sit here with my 9 week old next to me, it makes me think that it comes down to personal choices, i choose to bathe her in clean water, use organic products on her and not vaccinate her based on my choices, NOT b/c "everyone" does so, as with tree lizard and the ant story, that is their choice as well...there are better OPTIONS out there as Joe points out and DDT does have more bad than good to it...my point being that a little here and there is not a good thing necessarily when there are options, and there ARE options

#1 & #5 lol They're that short because it reduces the drag while swimming; if you wear shorts that reach down to your knees, it produces incredible drag in stream line as well as becomes a pain because it floats all over.

Having been born in 1960, I have vivid memories of the annual summer ritual of the DDT trucks spraying in my neighborhood. We would ride our bikes behind the truck staying in the fog for what seemed hours at a time. This went on summer after summer.

So far the only ill effects I've noticed are the ability to score 28's on Cindy, do 30 MU's, and roll for 8 minute rounds in BJJ.

However, I did notice that I got bit by a lot more mosquitos in the 1980's while living in Florida. Solved that problem by moving to Denver.

something a lot of folks here are missing is that ddt was never banned in much of the world-as someone mentioned, it continues to be used tropical areas of africa although it is less effective there (something about no cold that allows them to breed continuously). in other words, although much of the claims of carsen's little book have been invalidated, claims of linkage to ddt banning and malarial deaths should be reevaluated by examing the number of deaths by malaria where it has been banned i.e. europe and much of north america.

as for someone's earlier suggestion that they just move: moving costs, and if you're too poor to move, you're too poor, not stupid.

#34 Darrell - You're right, I agree with you. Let them make the decisions for their people and their needs. It's hard to give a $#!~ about the environment when you don't know if your kids are going to survive the next season.

#39, Jim, D, hypothetical question then..if you find out in 10 years that you are losing your hearing and sight b/c of very small remnants of DDT in your system that are finally "coming out" would you allow your kids to ride behind trucks of DDT next week if Denver was having a misquito issue?

Looks like an improvement at the schoolhouse. Glad to see Crossfit is officially incorporated there.

organic products... hahahahaha. they are no better or worse for you than the next item in line. they are much more expensive however. i'll always opt for the cheaper product... because i'm a cheap-o. chewy chips ahoy at 1.99 or organic chocolate chip super cookies at 3.99? gimme the chips ahoy, mate.

those of us who faithfully use organics know the difference they can make in your health. I'm not talking about cookies or even lettuce. But the things that tend to be high fat in foods...such as avacodos, olive oil and meats if you are a carnivore. Pesticides concentrate in the fattiest areas of the product. So if you are buget conscious, opt for organic meats if you're so inclined and have your budget conscious chips ahoy (ewwwww...sorry, just an editorial reaction).
By the way, (obviously) I am a left leaning, vegetarian tree hugger who loves this site and really enjoys the workouts and the community. Diversity of opinion is what it's all about. I think the Coach is amazing and have the utmost respect for those of you who serve our country and communities...from the first responders to the military. You guys (and women) put it all on the line every day so that conservatives and we liberal social worker types can express our views equally.
Have a great day, all!

#44 Joe, i'll be hahaha ing my way to 100 years old and die in the midst of a Fran workout and those who eat non organic will be part of the soil used to make my organic veggies, not sure where you are but organic and non-organic are big differences where i come from...and if your thought process is organic cookies versus non organic cookies in the 1st place, i need not continue my argument on education of what REAL food is..

I am looking for a weight vest. Right now it is between the x-vest or the v-max weight vest. Does anyone have any information?

how about adding a workout journal page to the message board.WOD page used to be full of interesting insights to the WOD.Now theres only journals in it where people arent even doing the wod..Just a thought

Hey-

Warmup: ESPN's College Game Day x 2 hrs
Final: Iowa 47 - Purdue 17
Run: 2 miles x 2 [out and back]
16:27 [tailwind]
16:52 [headwind]

CoolDown: Frosty Cold HoneyBrownLager x 2

-Yeah Hawkeyes

OPT, #37, #46
Lay off the organic "brownies" sober up and VACCINATE your kid! The nonsense surrounding this issue is a classic example of woo woo emotion replacing rational thought. The rest of us don't need to carry the cost of your "choices" K-

#41
Actually, if you teach the poor people about the environment and how to conserve the environment you will help them to see their children live to another season. The whole of idea conservation is not just doing it in your own backyard but helping educate others that are not aware. So, yes it is your option to conserve or not conserve but does that make it ok for the uneducated to remain uneducated if we have the knowledge to share? Shouldn't we help out our fellow man even if they speak a different language than us or live in an area that we would never consider living in? Like certain parts of the US. You can't tell me that you all believe that this is a third world country problem only. Extreme poverty still exists in the US. If you have the knowledge on how to make something grow better would you share it or would you deny your neighbor? It's the whole teach a man to fish instead of giving a man a fish thing.
DDT has been shown to cause weak egg shells in multitudes of wildlife. Is there a better way to kill the mosquitoes? I think so, but it needs to be shown to the countries that need it. Is it cost effective? Who knows. Most countries are going to go for the cheap route. They still spray for mosquitoes here in the south in the summer when it fits into the budget. After a hurricane hits they usually will have C130's fly over and spray the whole area to kill the over abundance of mosquitoes carrying Equine ensyphelitis (spelling?) and West Nile. Who knows what is in the spray, the government tells us that it is safe so we must believe that, right? I have been places that have areas that were contaminated so bably with DDT that you have to stay 50' away for another 50 years. Yes, that was in the US.
I have a neighbor that has a lot of dogs and she has also had almost all of her dogs have weird alergies, seizures, or die from cancer. I have never met anyone's animals with so many maladies or so many to die from cancer. They also use a ton of fertilizer and pesticides in their yard. I think it's connected. It has made me rethink the how I take care of my yard and gardens. I still use pesticides but only as an absolute last resort.Believe it or not but this is the first year when I could find Horticultural soap in our area.
Buying organic has just become available in our city in the past 2 years but it is still limited to things like carrots and sprouts. Sadly, even the Farmers Market is not very organic. I would buy more if it was available.
Oh and OPT #46 the unorganic eaters won't be fertilizer for your organic vegies because of so many preservatives that are in foods now a days it takes longer for bodies to decompose than ever before. Think of it as embalming prematurely. But then again Cheetos sure do taste good! Ha!

Kate

#47

Pick which ever one is made with more "organic" materials.

220 pull ups
220 push ups
overhead squats
swim

when i'm 100 years old, i will not be doing a fran workout. i will be too busy chilling out on the front porch with a glass of lemonade and my great grandkids.

WOD consists of three sessions of picture taking of high school children all dressed up for Homecoming!

Kate, in the abstract your sentiments are unassailable. We should all choose to share our knowledge and skills with those less fortunate. We in North America are often wealthy enough (the bar for this is rather low) to choose to use alternate methods for pest control, fertilization, and food cultivation. We can do our own cost/benefit analysis, covering as wide a swath of our personal geography as we can. But in sub-Saharan Africa speed and expense are of primary concern. These nations cannot afford ANYTHING, and are therefore at the mercy of donor nations and individuals. The recent change in WHO policy will have the effect of releasing funds to buy DDT if these nations so choose.

What are the alternatives to DDT? I agree with Adam #36 that it is a shame that less noxious pesticides have not been developed, but it is what it is. You, OPT and Joe talk about options, "a better way to kill mosquitoes", but what are they? Can a third world country afford them.?

When one travels from North America to an area where malaria is endemic one takes a prophylactic anti-malarial, perhaps chloroquine. Although it's rather inexpensive by western standards it is still wildly expensive to continuously prophylax on a nationwide basis. In addition, there are side effects to all of these medicines. For example, chloroquine has an irreversible retinal toxicity which is dose-related leading to blindness. All of the anti-malarials have side effects and complications if taken long term.

How about sleeping nets? It's been shown that the majority of infections take place via bites incurred in the home. How about nets for all of the beds, or all of the children's beds? Once again, the cost in 2 orders of magnitude greater than DDT, and the effectiveness is approximately half in those villages where people deign to use them.

How about a vaccine? This is probably the most acceptable option, but it is years away, even if one can overcome cultural barriers to taking it.

This is a real problem with very real consequences. I read today (Rick Reilly, SI) that one million CHILDREN die from malaria in Africa each year. I'll ask again: you are the Prime Minister of Anywhere, Africa. You are western educated and have 2006 knowledge. People are dying.

What would you do?

Darrell

Thai kicks, knees, 100 flutter kicks and 30 squats.

kman # 50, what costs am i attributing to you?? i'm thinking you're the costly one for me paying for you to stay alive in a bed i am paying for in some home or hospital..and if you were to actually study humans as i do day to day with testing you'd see what little things like vaccines and mercury and carcinogens in food (the list goes on) does to an individual on their quest for health..if you do not see that i can understand your blind eye to REALITY...not woo woo emotion...REALITY

3:39 Fran at the Boston cert. Having an awesome time!!

OPT #57
The rare reaction to a vaccine (minor or major) is offset by at least ten orders of magnitude by the bennefits to those who have no reaction other than to gain imunity to easily preventable disease. Your kid (and the kids of those like you)will suffer from diptheria, pertussis, polio or tetnus at the expense of all who share your health care system.
Some risks are worth it. We lose Police and firefighters to local hazards on a regular basis but it's worth the cost due to the benefit we recieve. We lose soldiers in wars but it's worth it due to the security we recieve. (FYI I'm posting this from Iraq) The very rare child has a minor reaction to a vaccination and even rarer a child has a serious or debilitating reaction (perhaps even fatal)but it's worth the risk because we live in a society free from these diseases. I'm an RN and I have first hand knowledge. My "reality" is based on observation and learning from valid sources. IE epidemiologists. You're not pulling any of my wieght, rest assured of that. K-

speaking of organic products, pasted from cnn.com, affects Georgia, Iowa, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, Texas and Wisconsin:
These products are recalled [for POSSIBLE e. coli]:
10-pound boxes of "PACKED FOR: DAVIS MOUNTAIN ORGANIC BEEF, 100% CERTIFIED ORGANIC 3-1 BEEF PATTIES," with lot code G6-540 or G6-544.

Five-pound packages of "DAVIS MOUNTAINS 100% ORGANIC BEEF, LEAN GROUND BEEF 90/10," with lot code G6-544.

One-pound packages of "MASTER CHOICE 100% ORGANIC ANGUS BEEF, 90/10 GROUND BEEF," with lot code G6-544.

One-pound packages of "DAVIS MOUNTAINS 100% CERTIFIED ORGANIC GROUND BEEF," with lot code G6-544.

10.5-pound boxes of "NEBRASKA, BEEF GROUND BEEF PATTY 6 OZ," with lot code G6-541.

60-pound boxes of "SPECIALLY SELECTED FOR: FARNER-BOCKEN FOOD SERVICE BEEF PATTIE MIX 6/10," with lot code G6-542.

One-pound packages of "PACKED FOR: IRWIN COUNTRY STORE, BEEF GROUND BEEF 16 OZ," with lot code G6-541.

One-pound blocks of "PACKED FOR: IRWIN COUNTRY STORE, BEEF GROUND BEEF PATTIES 4-1," with code G6-541.

10-pound boxes of "DISTRIBUTED BY: STUBE RANCH, WAGYU BEEF, BEEF GROUND BEEF PATTIES, 8 OZ. PATTIES," with lot code G6-546.

I'm not opposed to immunization, but I think it's good to look at the side effects of both the diseases and the vaccines and see which are worse. I have a friend who did a lot of research on this, and he pointed out that in some countries like Japan it's actually illegal to administer MMR vaccines due to the high side effects. Individual dose vaccines administered on separate days (i.e. mumps on one day, measles on another, etc. instead of all three at once) are legal. He said it'd be nice of Thimerosol were taken out of them.

His research also indicated that before the polio vaccine came out the disease was already limiting itself and declining, and the only reported cases are directly linked to the vaccine. Why vaccinate against something that is gone? Especially at a time when children are trying to immunologically define self from non-self.

I'm not opposed to vaccines, just pro informed research coices.

As far as organic food, I don't think it's an accurate comparison. Maybe antibiotics are. I got really sick with strep throat once and when my little tinctures didn't cut it, I decided to get some antibiotics. The benefits of the antibiotics outweighed the negatives. This isn't always the case. I usually avoid docs like the plague (no pun intended!) and when I do go to them for a diagnosis I rarely use what they prescribe. It just depends--gotta be smart about it.

Thanks for the article, anyway. Good food for thought.

researched choices not research coices, even. I think quicker than I can type.

Treelizard # 61
Way to go,pay money to see a highly trained professional and "rarely use what they prescribe". Your far from alone. Non compliant patients are the bane of ER's and ICU's across the nation. Im trying to think of another profession where the clients pay good money for advice that gets ignored. (oops I forgot, we're all paying) K-

Comment #31 etc.

This excerpt gets to the meat of what I am saying:

"It's not about the deadly, man-made pesticides. If more people in more countries had access to basics-like, say, clean water and a living wage-the conditions those people would live in would not be conducive to preventable deaths. If more people were not subject to the whims of corrupt leaders, World Bank policies, corporate imperialism, and oblivious Westerners, they'd not be in the position to have to deal with malaria-carrying mosquitoes...or tsunamis that arrive without warning, for that matter."

Also,in regards to the pollutants:

"The issues at hand are global elimination of persistent chemicals and control of trade in toxics, and the two international treaties that address these challenges are the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade . As of August 2006, at least 127 countries had ratified the Stockholm Convention, and 110 had confirmed the Rotterdam Convention. Both conventions have been in force for more than two years, but the United States has yet to approve either.

The chemicals addressed under the Stockholm Convention are persistent organic pollutants (POPs). These toxic substances are transported across the globe, persist in the environment, accumulate in the body fat of humans and animals, and concentrate up the food chain. Even at very low levels of exposure, POPs can cause reproductive and developmental disorders, damage to the immune and nervous systems, and a range of cancers. Exposure during key phases of fetal development can be particularly damaging, and infants around the world are born with an array of POPs already in their blood. POPs are found in the current U.S. food supply, even though many of the chemicals in question have been banned in the United States for decades. "

Kman 63, I take the diagnosis they give me and treat it herbally, and I'm quite healthy, thank you. Not ER or ICUs. Actually the last doc I had told me I had a condition and ignored all of the research I brought which indicated she might be incorrect. Her counter-argument was "Do you know how many classes I've taken?" Not enough to keep up with the current research, apparently, and the test I paid for out of pocket which she insisted would be positive came out negative. She got confused and said the test must have been a false negative. Uh huh.

wow...for once, I have nothing to say. I'm going with everything that bingo (darrell) said. Well reasoned and very elegantly expressed.

#61:

Are we all paying? I have been to see an osteopath exactly twice in the last 24 years (I'm 40). Once for a motorcycle crash (they were awesome, and yes I was insured) and once for shingles. They could not do anything.

I'm quite healthy without an iota of western medicine thank you. I have cured myself of many conditons, and I believe most "treatments" western or otherwise don't work. It is simply time passing and the body healing itself: we attribute the healing to the treatment. This is called the "fundamental attribution error" and is common.

Actually 21 years: I lost an eye when I was 19: I'm so used to it I actually forgot!!

Kelly Moore, 3:39 Fran...Whoa!!

Joe #64, 65, and others. The elimination of POP's is indeed a worthwhile goal (didn't have access to any of the documents so will simply assume that you feel that DDT is among the cited substances). However, the issues at hand are the one million African children dying each year from malaria.

They are indifferent to POP's accumulating in their fat. They are dead.

They are indifferent to potential developmental disorders and the possible increase in a range of cancers. They will never develop anything. They are dead.

They need not worry about "the whims of corrupt leaders, World Bank policies, corporate imperialism". They are dead.

I'll ask yet again. You are not the armchair quarterback, you ARE the quarterback. You are not John Madden commenting on what the coach may do, you ARE the coach. You are the Prime Minister of Anywhere, Africa and your children are dying from Malaria. What would you do?

What would you do?

D

madman #67...humble thank you!

JOE #64

"If more people were not subject to the whims of corrupt leaders, World Bank policies, corporate imperialism, and oblivious Westerners, they'd not be in the position to have to deal with malaria-carrying mosquitoes...or tsunamis that arrive without warning, for that matter."

That is a lot of "ifs".

Sounds like it is all everything/everyone else's fault. I don't see how any of those things involves malaria. Perhaps if they could use DDT and increase their survivability/lifespan they would be able to worry about the all the other stuff.

western medicine has its place.
it does help alleviate the pain; however, it does not cure the problem in most cases. that is simply because it only focuses on that one factor rather than the whole person. as most know, a sickness can be attributed to many underlying factors that western medicine does not consider. eastern methods look at the person as a whole and aim to cure the person, rather than the sickness like western methods do.
i rarely get colds, the flu, or any other junk. i never got the flu when i did not have to get flu shots. i'm reluctant each year when i have to get it, but i give in because i know it is not going to kill me... and i would get yelled at if i didn't anyway.
i don't take any medication, unless it makes me feel good. if it is life or death, i would turn to western medicine for assistance. i would continue what most people consider "alternate" methods though.
in the long run, they complement one another, east and west that is. they make each more effective.

Darrell #55
You know, I agree with you about the sleeping nets and the less noxious sprays for the villages. I also understand about the poverty of sub saharan Africa. Yes, the kids are dying from malaria and the adults are too.
I could hope that I could be a president of a poor country and be able to accept help from the scientists that could provide the solution to the malaria problem. The problem is, is that I would then also accept corn that was grown in the US and distribute it instead of dumping it on the ground so my people could eat (they dump it because of it being genetically altered and they are scared that it will "harm" their corn).
Children for sure are dying from malaria but there are also children dying from malnutrition. I'm sorry I don't have the time to research the numbers to compared to two. But what should come first, the hunger or the malaria or the other diseases or the wars? Especially with a limited budget. Mosquito nets seem to be the best answer to me. My husband has been to many countries in Sub Saharan Africa and said that most people sleep under them there, even people in the bush.

Kate

I sort of agree with Old Yellar, but not entirely... often even Eastern medicine and holistic medicine does not treat the problem, but allows it to go unabated while masking the symptoms with herbs, acupuncture, you name it. The answer is usually lifestyle and diet. Of course, healthy people don't need to rely on doctors OR herbalists, so there's less incentive to get them that way.

I perhaps have over simplified my answer but lack the thought process at this time of day to answer eloquently as to what I really mean. I was trying to put across that it's not just about the malaria issue, it's all the issue's and trying to decide what comes first would really come down to your own persanal preferences. You try and do the best you can with the knowledge that you have. Provided Of course, that the ruler of a country isn't high on themselves and actually cares for the people not the position that he holds. I'm talking about Zimbabwe.

Kate

There is a big difference between approval for indoor use of a dilute solution and the old time wide area spraying. As usual the Stoessel character has an axe to grind because he is a reject. I loved it when that big pro wrestler smacked the little puke right off his scrawny feet, busted his ear drum, and had him sitting on the ground like a dazed little boy who just got a well deserved smack.
There may be other considerations at play here not existing forty years ago. Fr'xample, since the AIDS epidemic has reduced the life expectancy to 35 years in some of the hardest hit areas, these people will not live long enough to develop the human cancers suspected of being associated with DDT exposure. Or maybe the UN has decided it's better to shift the mortality out of the infant population and into the adults to look better on paper, the whole thing is an experiment. Africa is an unbelievable mess, always has been, and always will be. Nothing can be done for them.

go Kelly!!

Not quite sure why it was this particular issue that prompted me to engage, but it's a nice, tidy question. One that can be answered in isolation. All of the other issues with Africa are real and valid, but they need not apply to the basic question that Coach has laid out there for us to discuss through the choice of this article. There are many reasons that children and adults in Africa die, and malnutrition is certainly among them. But this one, malaria, is sooo much easier to address than the other recurrent Rest Day topics (global warming, etc). We have one problem, malaria and the preventable deaths of one million children each year. We have a very small number of options. Each option is flawed. We know that the status quo isn't working. Here is a unique Rest Day opportunity to make a call.

Come on. It's gut check time. Make the call. One issue. (That's how they get fixed, RobertP: one little step to start). Malaria. Make a call.

What would you do?

I say DDT. I say clear cut vegetation and drain standing water within 1/4 mile from poplation housing. I say quit sending them aid and loan them bull dozers and civil engineers.

As usual, as I read further into the subject, the mass media presentation by the likes of Stoessel and company turns out to be a very simplistic, inaccurate, and nearly criminally negligent presentation of the problem. The original WHO program for the Global Eradication of Malaria, which ran from 1955 to 1972, was *not* abandoned as a result of "junk science" condemning DDT use; it was abandoned as a result of solid scientific field studies, published in 1969, *proving* that no less than 19 strains of the anopheles mosquito family had developed DDT resistance, making continued aggressive application of the chemical useless. To listen to the idiot Stoessel, insecticide use is the total answer to eradication, when in fact it is just one small component with a naturally limited efficacy. There is nothing man can do to rid the world of mosquitos or the Plasmodium parasite, any more than he can eliminate hurricanes, floods, droughts, and pestilence of any variety. As you can see, by reading the reports by people who *really know* the scientific issues, the drug resistance of the Plasmodium is currently the most serious issue: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/ar/i2002/goodmedicine.cfm . In summary then, I conclude that the Stoessel article is pure, and typical, irresponsible mass media garbage wherein he fraudulently uses a serious subject line to lure the reader within earshot of his ulterior slam of science, something of which he obviously has very little understanding. Every bit of his implicit preconceptions are dead wrong, he lacks the intelligence to form an intelligent prepective, and his specious thesis is easily shot down with the most cursory examination of the legitimate literature.

I can't believe it!! My old stomping grounds... I was an instructor there many years ago. It's good to see that Crossfit has taken hold.

Thanks, RobertP. I had a strong feeling while reading the article that Stoessel was framing things to fit his own political points without regard for the actual facts or history of the matter. (I like how he snuck a non-sequitur jab at global warming in there as well.) I haven't read much about the DDT usage controversy, but I'll keep in mind to ignore the hype from the likes of Stoessel.

Finally got back to this post. Just wanted to acknowledge everyone's rebuttals to my early post on DDT. I did read and appreciate your responses. I also read the links.

I believe Bingo #34 best described the situation from an economic point of view. Use with discretion - especially if children are dying.

And, OPT, yes if there are alternative, more enviro-friendly methods than DDT, then I'd like to think most people would use them, including me.

Travis L, I don't believe you're as harsh and insensitive as you write. If so, a good long trip to a couple of 3rd world countries might help you gain some human perspective.

Thanks for the enjoyable discussion everyone.

And, oh yeah, TreeLizard, you crack me up.

Cheers.

*blush*

#42 OPT
In 10 years I'll be 56. My exposure to DDT would have been 43 years ago. My God, I lived throught a couple hundred carrier landings, more than my share of idiotic nights out and driving after to much to drink (when it was fashionable) and thousand's of hours flying all types of airplanes.

My eye sight has gone down the tubes (I now wear glasses to read) my hearing is bad due to hours on the flight deck as an LSO in the Navy, my family has a history of cancer and alzhiemers.

I always thought that if I made it to 45 Iwould have done well. Now I'm setting my sights on 90. I'll let you know how it goes if I remember.

CCTJOEY wrote "Sounds like it is all everything/everyone else's fault. I don't see how any of those things involves malaria. Perhaps if they could use DDT and increase their survivability/lifespan they would be able to worry about the all the other stuff."

I believe that in my original post you can find the following:

"DDT kills Malaria mosquitos (which are of course unwitting carriers of the Malaria virus), yet also poisons ecologies and causes reproductive problems in almost every lifeform it has been tested on. There must be better ways of dealing with Malaria.

One would be to knock down many of the underperforming dams in affected areas, whose stagnant reservoirs are ideal breeding points for Malaria. Another would be to improve riverine ecologies in farming areas and improve sewage systems in cities.

These solutions, however, do not help the corporate bottom line. DDT does."

Is that so hard to wrap your mind around?

I am with you until the "corporate bottom line" talk starts. Your post #64 is chock full of thoughts and irrelivancies that have no bearing on the problem only to some how link advanced western society to the 3rd world's malaria problem.

Tsunamis?? Come on brother, it is time to expect the rest of the world to step up to the plate and do its best to control its own self-determination. Subject to whims is an idea that they can not make descisions as simple as to come in from the rain. Access to a "living-wage" is code speak for wealth redistribution which hurts the economy every time it is tried.

I am pointing out that the "left speak" is not relevent to a solution...if anything it is making it worse. You could bet that if "The Corporations" got into those parts of the world...malaria would not be an issue. Investment follows stability.

Time to stop blaming western society's success for the 3rd world's failures. They would be failed regardless. Bull-dozers and civil engineers is all they NEED. The rest will follow as the stability is in place. Get rid of the leftist leaders and 3/4s of the worlds suffering would end by Friday. The other 1/4 would get sucked along in the wave of economic expansion that defines the 1st World Nations that they would be doing fine by the following Wednesday.

Is that so hard to wrap your mind around?

RobertP,

I read your link, and I don't think you drew the correct inference. It never said DDT would not be an effective treatment. It just said that some committee back in the 70's decided that the total elimination of malaria globally was not realistic, and that the current crop of drugs is decreasing in effectiveness. Because of the self-evident fact that if you have less infections, you have less need for drugs, I think that link indirectly SUPPORTS the case for DDT.

He did in fact also make the relevant point that malaria also causes reduced intelligence, and physical impediments.

General note: calling for a better solution is not the same as creating a better solution. In the real world, where people who make decisions live, you are often limited to a set of bad options. Gosh, I wish it weren't like that, but it is.

I tell this to my kids constantly. "See that guy over there in the wheelchair? He wishes he could walk, but he can't." "You know that dumb kid in your class? He wishes he were smarter, but he isn't."

The longer I live, the more I think the key to happiness is to accept your fate, whatever it is, then work to change it.

The question here is really very simple: we are giving aid to Third World (Technically, I suppose, the Second World, since we won the Cold War), and have been denying them the ability to purchase--with funds we give them--DDT, because we decided, from our seats in Washington, or the Hague, or wherever--that we knew best how they should spend their money. This is socialist thinking. It is centeralized planning, and as Hayek has made clear, it doesn't work, for the simple reason that the sum total of available facts available centrally can never equal either the speed or depth available to the sum total of individuals looking out their own windows. I may know I can buy an apple for .25 and sell it for .50, but by the time the governments gets to it, I'm buying an apple for .50 and selling it for .25. That's why Communism and Socialism don't work.

Bingo, I thought your points were excellent. Joey, as usual we're on the same page.

What bothers me is the general tone of so many of these Rest Day links and their supporters: no one is ever merely wrong; no one ever simply interprets the facts differently in good faith; In Glassman Land, people who disagree are always appeasers, leftists, dupes, unethical, selfish or stupid.

The game seems to be to find points of agreement (such as the need to spray DDT in some cases in order to fight malaria) and then find some way to restate it as a wedge issue against 'liberals.'

Obviously, according to Stossel himself, many people from Ralph Nader on down have been saying for years now that DDT is better than malaria. Does it follow that DDT is without risk or that all environmentalism is bad? Of course not. Might some healthier alternative to DDT be discovered someday? Let's hope.

If a healthier alternative to DDT is discovered, who can take credit: environmentalists or the 'junk science' PR flacks? Neither? Both? Does it matter, as long as the end goal (a higher percentage of happy, healthy people in the world) is achieved? I think not.

Environmentalists will apologize for fighting DDT when the "junk science" flacks apologize for the people killed, sickened and developmentally impaired by pollution.

This is a silly exercise, and not the slightest bit informative.

Flog,

In my own view--which is likely shared by others, but I can only speak for myself--there is not an equal divide of correctness between Left and Right. Nor does there need be.

In point of fact, some babies are ugly, little Johnny may in fact be a slobbering moron, somebody looks awful in that dress, the school production of Pinoccio was a disaster, your presentation was awful, some people are poor because they are stupid, lazy, and dishonest, and many nations are poor for the same reasons.

Personally, I do often dish on leftists, but within the context of discussing facts.

I see, over and over, people here of more leftist persuasion criticizing, not the facts, but the fact that we even have the temerity to broach a "sensitive" topic. Somebodies feelings might get hurt. "We're not about right and wrong, kids, we're about supporting one another, and helping each other feel good." You know what? That mindset has created more depression, in my view, and suicide and drug use, and general cultural malaise that was ever created whipping kids with belts.

Some ideas are good. Some are bad. If we're ever going to sort them out, we need to take the feelings out of it.

The reason this particular issue can plausibly be framed as slam on the Left is that, in my view, Socialism can be seen as a variant of the basic malignancy of Scientism, which is in effect an effort to replace actual priests with the SCIENTIST as priest.

However, in this formulation, the view of science as complex, disputational, evolving and many-sided doesn't work politically, so certain views get enshrined as "core causes", behind which the troops can rally. DDT was used politically as a wedge issue, based not on a dispassionate assessment of the facts, but rather an emotional response to dying birds.

I think you could summarize the most radical variant of this credo as "People suck, animals don't." Therefore, it is more important that birds not have thin-shelled eggs than that people not die of malaria.

I literally think of these types of thinking as a form of mental illness. It is ahistorical, uncritical, dogmatic, and passionate. It can't be discussed rationally. This site is a place people can come and see why conservatives believe what they do. If you listen to leftists rant in groups, there is no possible justification for any conservative policy but greed and corruption. That just isn't so.

It is shown, in my view, tellingly every fourth day.

Flog...you are confused...the enviromentalists (diplaced Pink-Os who celebrate the cause du jour) ARE the "Junk Science" Flacks. That is why it is called JUNK SCIENCE.

Puree' a shred of scientific truth...mix with a heaping dose of paranoia...add two cups of Hate America...a dash of ground Despot sympathy...two table spoons of Corporate Greed...a smidge of military industrial complex (Read: Haliburton) conspiracy. Coat with "Big Oil" and sprinkle on "Big Tobacco".

Promptly tuck gonads between legs when walking by thugish Terrorists or Despots on the way to the oven.

Heat with global warming for five years until it smells like an overflowing landfill complete with Sea Gulls stuck in 6-pack rings coated with oil from the Valdez and deliver to MSM for distribution to the masses during a Republican Administration. Keep talking about it until everyone takes a bite or gets labeled "heartless and mean spirited".

Save some for the U.N. "Star Wars Cantina Crowd" to chew on instead so they wont find time to deal with the important things like N. Korea.

Immediately put in freezer upon 1st day of a Democrat administration. Put up the Ted Nuggent and pull out hippy burnout music for the boomers and Hootie and the Blowfish for the younger crowd.

"Don't ...Stop... Thinkin' about tomorrow...."

Global Warming, SUV hate, Living Wages, World Bank, spotted owls, CFCs, cholesteral, bacon, eggs, Cow Farts, DDT, red meat, undocumented workers etc...blah, blah, blah.

3 rounds of 50 squats and 50 push-ups
Didn't time it, but went hard, short rests 5-10 sec max.
All 3 sets of SQ unbroken
1st PU: 30/20
2nd was 25/13/12
3rd 15,10,10,15

Barry...I will get with you soon (next week).

Joey

CCTJOEY "Time to stop blaming western society's success for the 3rd world's failures. They would be failed regardless. Bull-dozers and civil engineers is all they NEED. The rest will follow as the stability is in place. Get rid of the leftist leaders and 3/4s of the worlds suffering would end by Friday. The other 1/4 would get sucked along in the wave of economic expansion that defines the 1st World Nations that they would be doing fine by the following Wednesday."

You think that the so-called "first world" plays no part in the failure of third world governments?

Have you ever studied history at all?

Have you ever read John Perkins "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man?" in it "His job was to convince countries that are strategically important to the U.S.—from Indonesia to Panama—to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development, and to make sure that the lucrative projects were contracted to U. S. corporations. Saddled with huge debts, these countries came under the control of the United States government, World Bank and other U.S.-dominated aid agencies that acted like loan sharks—dictating repayment terms and bullying foreign governments into submission."
http://www.economichitman.com/pages/thebook.html

The "Western" countries have nothing to do with the condition of the "third world?"

Low intensity conflict is one of the biggest problems in the "third world",ever heard of it?:

"Such warfare, while "low-intensity" for the United States, is of very high intensity for the unfortunate Third World target nations. "Low intensity" conflict (LIC) is not strictly military, but includes such elements as economic destabilization, political interference, and psychological operations. A recently proposed definition of LIC for the revised U.S. Army field manual on the subject reads:

The limited use of power for political purposes by nations or organizations...to coerce, control or defend a population, to control or defend a territory or establish or defend rights. It includes military operations by or against irregular forces, peacekeeping operations, terrorism, counter-terrorism, rescue operations and military assistance under conditions of armed conflict.

An important aspect of LIC is the use of proxy military forces, which avoids the unpopularity of sending U.S. troops abroad. One aspect of proxy armies is the sale of weapons to governments and movements which carry out U.S. aims in the Third World; such arms sales increased markedly under the Reagan administration. As part of the proxy tactic, SOF personnel are heavily involved in Military Training Teams (MTT) in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Under the Reagan government, the number of MTT personnel-weeks abroad increased more than five-fold since 1980."from the book ROLLBACK:Right-wing Power in U.S. Foreign Policy
by Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould

But of course,in your opinion, none of this is a problem,it's actually all the "leftist leaders"!

Way to oversimplfy an issue again CCTJOEY!I have a question,based off of your previous reactionary posts on this topic and others,are you a "cheap labor conservative"? My second question is, where do you get your news?

You obviously have not heard of cumulative causation nor do you seem to understand first world sponsored destabilization of third world economies.

Here are some alternative news sources and some book suggestions that I am absolutely certain neither you nor your ilk will read (posted nonetheless for the benefit of other interested fellow crossfitters),before I am muzzled,oops, I mean before my comments begin to be "held for approval by the blog owner."

Remember that after you reply,my comments will be held so as to look like silence in the face of your profound reply,so email me directly if you actually are interested in my response

http://www.namnewsnetwork.org/
Non-Aligned News Network is a daily on international politicy from the Non-Aligned Movement's 116 countries

http://www.opensecrets.org/
Open Secrets is a current database identifying the corporations and interest groups financing specific politicians in the U.S. Find out who pays for the election campaigns of any current or recent politician, which businesses and interest groups are connected to which political party, and which politicians are the top recipients of donations from specific special interest groups.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
National Security Archive is an archive of declassified U.S. documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Black Vault also maintains an on-line FOIA Document Archive organized by topic.

Some reading materials:

"Ambassadors of Colonialism: The International Development Trap (Information Project for Africa 1993)--a no-holds-barred attack on "the foreign aid and lending program and certain trade activities" as perhaps "the most influential--and the most coercive--tactic in the entire arsenal of political and economic weapons wielded against the developing world by the 'big nations' of the north"

Also to help you understand the real reasons why U.S. based corporations choose these fertility destroying chemicals instead of safer options you need to understand the "Western" policy towards population growth in the third world. Particularly informative is this study conducted by Henry Kissinger "sent to the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Director of Central Intelligence, the Deputy Secretary of State and the Administrator of the Agency for International Development, with a copy to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a memorandum titled "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests" (National Security Study Memorandum 200)

Just an excerpt because I know those who need to read it the most (cheap labor conservatives) will not click the link:

"The requested study was specifically to "focus on the international political and economic implications of population growth rather than its ecological, sociological or other aspects," and to include recommendations for "dealing with population matters abroad, particularly in developing countries..." The study was to be coordinated by the Under Secretaries Committee of the National Security Council, and was to have been completed by May 29, 1974 "for consideration by the President."

"The document has less to do with the internal effects of population growth on less-developed nations ("Malthusianism") than with its projected external impact on U.S. strategic interests. It addressed such issues as the relationship between increasing LDC populations and future U.S. access to resources and favorable trade policies; potential shifts in the world's constituency that might favor the emerging nations of the southern hemisphere; the projected need for larger amounts of foreign aid to maintain stable relationships with less-developed nations; the possibility of accelerated momentum for anti-U.S. or anti-imperialist movements as a consequence of larger numbers of persons in poor nations; and the potential for nationalization or seizure of U.S. commercial investments."

"The study also identified 13 "key countries" in which there is "special U.S. political and strategic interest." Those nations, listed on page 15 of the introduction, are: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia.

The document also makes reference to the comparative high cost of making a politically-significant contribution to the economies of less developed nations, noting "how much more efficient expenditures for population control might be than [would be funds for] raising production through direct investments in additional irrigation and power projects and factories" (page 53). An alternative scenario — that "a series of crop disasters could transform some of them [LDCs] into classic Malthusian cases with famines involving millions of people" — is presented on page 33."

The study (page 37-38) advises that in the absence of political stability in LDCs (or reliable pro-U.S. policies) ...

... "concessions to foreign companies are likely to be expropriated or subjected to arbitrary intervention. Whether through government action, labor conflicts, sabotage, or civil disturbance, the smooth flow of needed materials will be jeopardized. Although population pressure is obviously not the only factor involved, these types of frustrations are much less likely under conditions of slow or zero population growth."

Thus, continues the document (page 43), the control of foreign populations becomes a matter of U.S. industrial and military security:

"Whatever may be done to guard against interruptions of supply ... the U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries. That fact gives the U.S. enhanced interest in the political, economic, and social stability of the supplying countries. Wherever a lessening of population pressures through reduced birth rates can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resource supplies and to the economic interests of the United States."

http://panindigan.tripod.com/pcns1doc.html

Wow, we have some major dishing on Reagan and Kissinger. It makes me feel like putting Neil Young on and firing up a blunt.

This is the type of disordered thinking I'm talking about.

Question: if the United States does not look out for its' own interests, is anyone else going to?

Yes, we have supported low level wars often. We backed the Contras, the Afghan rebels, the Rightist in El Salvador, and other ugly regimes throughout the world. We did this because the victory of Communism would have been worse. No system of thought has created more death and destruction in the history of humankind. This is easily documentable.

Yes, population control would be good in the developing world (actually, I just realized Third World still works better polemically for the Left, as the word "developing" means they are going somewhere, whereas most Leftist prefer having poor black people out there to bitch about), but your attempt to make DDT a sinister means of alternative birth control, is well, "intellectually disordered". If more people die from malaria than would die from DDT, then we have MORE people, not less, and keep in mind that Greenpeace and other leftist groups are ENDORSING DDT, not based on new science, but rather a shift in political winds. Among other things, they now have Global Warming as a cause de jour.

I have engaged in many, many debates with Leftists, enough to permit me to comment that as a general pattern there is

1) information dump, generally almost related to the topic at hand, but on closer inspection irrelevant, or based on an almost calculated misunderstanding, and misrepresentation of the topic.

2) reiteration of generalized core ideas of global capitalist conspiracy, and America's central role in this "great evil".

You know what? I don't think we need to apologize for being a great nation, or our manifest role in the creation of greater generalized peace in our world than has likely been seen in history.

You know what caused WW2? Do you? You read history, right?

I'll tell you. In 1929, Hitler was on his last legs. He had a bad haircut, and a Charlie Chaplin mustache. His ideas were nuts, and Germans really didn't want another war. They wanted to sit around in the parks and play guitars. They were proto-hippies even back in the 20's. Most people don't know that. The wheelbarrows full of marks, that was right after WW1.

What changed? Simple, Black Tuesday. The American economy was then, and is now, the 12 cylinder engine that keeps every nation in the world growing in prosperity. We have no interest in developing nations staying poor: they are all potential trading partners. If we went into a depression tomorrow, so would every other nation on earth. Our consumption--especially with the trade imbalance--finances growth in every nation in the world that's been able to figure out how to take advantage of it.

These are facts. These are manifest facts. Some people may be fooled by smoke and mirrors, but I've found if you pay attention, the you can sort out the hocum from the legit. That's why I follow the CrossFit program.

Joe...Thanks for the lesson in LIC...I mean how could I possibly know anything about that. (roll eyes). I fail to understand what your point is...

Of course MTT weeks went up during Reagan's administration... When you actually CARE about the scurge of leftist ideologies gone bad, like latin american communism, and "People Revolutions" that turn out to be nothing more than a reason for scum bags to play off the poor to run rough shod by gun point over the populace.

What you fail to understand is that America and Corporations like a secure and stable environment. Leftist taking their investments by gun point helps NO ONE but the Leftist Leadership.

MTTs are a response to despots....despots which took power because of failure of outside countries to protect and support those nations in the opening stages of leftist "Rebellions".

As a SOF guy myself, I see you fail to grasp the concept that I don't want to be there either. I understand also that this leftist ideology moves quick when there is little or no economic activity. It is bad enough it is taught in our Universities, we don't need it crossing our borders as well.

Do American companies want to get paid back?...yup with interest too...High risk is high return. But with an active economy and stable environment they will flurish and easily repay their debts.

Of course in your world view we should give all our wealth away so despots can use it to keep their people down...working well in N. Korea isn't it.

Funny how world wide GDP rose significantly through the Reagan/Bush years and well into the Clinton years thanks to the stability afforded to these struggling countries.

Joe.. moreover...why do you think we use proxy Armies and MTTs (SOF)? I will tell you why. Because liberals in THIS country either have their heads in the sand and don't understand that force is often neccessary or they are supporters of the leftist gangsters who seized power. The third option is a weird combination of the two which I find even more offensive.

They lead rallies and protests under the protections they themselves would not fight for. Creating a turd-sandwich environment that wears on the entire populace by doing what they do best...BITCH. Yet they offer no solutions to the problem and often like Cindy Sheehan, go over to the other side.

Which of these mission sets that you reference from your above posts is so wicked????

"The limited use of power for political purposes by nations or organizations...to coerce, control or defend a population, to control or defend a territory or establish or defend rights. It includes military operations by or against irregular forces, peacekeeping operations, terrorism, counter-terrorism, rescue operations and military assistance under conditions of armed conflict."

SAM...

Q1: No. I am free market conservative.

Q2: Newspaper, Radio, Television, Internet

Here is a link you might like: www.coasttocoastam.com

You cite:

"The document has less to do with the internal effects of population growth on less-developed nations ("Malthusianism") than with its projected external impact on U.S. strategic interests. It addressed such issues as the relationship between increasing LDC populations and future U.S. access to resources and favorable trade policies; potential shifts in the world's constituency that might favor the emerging nations of the southern hemisphere; the projected need for larger amounts of foreign aid to maintain stable relationships with less-developed nations; the possibility of accelerated momentum for anti-U.S. or anti-imperialist movements as a consequence of larger numbers of persons in poor nations; and the potential for nationalization or seizure of U.S. commercial investments."

This equals protecting US intrests from leftist thugs

"The study also identified 13 "key countries" in which there is "special U.S. political and strategic interest." Those nations, listed on page 15 of the introduction, are: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia.

Pretty much all of these countries are more stable today than in '74...good job...once the rest of the Islamo-fascists and the otherleftists are defeated the world can breathe a little easier and enjoy the fruits of stability and security.

... "concessions to foreign companies are likely to be expropriated or subjected to arbitrary intervention. Whether through government action, labor conflicts, sabotage, or civil disturbance, the smooth flow of needed materials will be jeopardized. Although population pressure is obviously not the only factor involved, these types of frustrations are much less likely under conditions of slow or zero population growth."

This is a warning about the leftist gangsters and their tactics. This helps put into perspective that American investments will not have the secure environment they would enjoy here in the US. It is also a description of why the leftists flurish and how to avoid that problem. You know, if the population does not outgrow the economy, tthe populace will see the need to not keep pumping out children they can't feed. This also helps end child labor issues. Is that a bad thing?

Whatever may be done to guard against interruptions of supply ... the U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries. That fact gives the U.S. enhanced interest in the political, economic, and social stability of the supplying countries. Wherever a lessening of population pressures through reduced birth rates can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resource supplies and to the economic interests of the United States."

Ya, and....

Let's see... promoting that a country that reaps the benefits of US investment not breed itself into economic ruin...that is a bad thing?

Well I guess we can always just let the leftist take over...significant population drops always follow as people are killed into the millions by the leaders of these "Revolutions".

USSR
CHINA
N. KOREA
N. Vietnam
Cambodia
Columbia
Laos
Venezuela
Poland
Yugoslavia
Romania
etc.

Failures....nothing but suffering of the masses.

It is worth our efforts to keep this crap out of our economy.

Here is some nice reading...for you emotional types...

http://www.tfp.org/TFPForum/TFPCommentary/venezuela.htm

Typical of what we (most of us) are trying to prevent...of course some of us are sympathetic to this sort thing because of the belief that it is a noble goal that just goes bad from time to time (actually every time). So it is easier to blame America, the military, and private business, than admit what collectivism is...ineffective and ultimately evil and deadly.

I am not sorry to be an anti-collectivist/leftist and I applaud the fact that we spend our treasure and blood to rid the world of this deadly ideology, whatever form it takes. (Communism, Islamo-fascism, etc.) In the end, we will lose far less fighting it than appeasing it.

you know, I just have to mention that those of us who regularly read science magazines and news about the environment knew about this whole DDT debate a good eight years ago.

This rest day link isn't new information, it's just spin. It's taking a debate that went on within the world of environmentalists and world health specialists and then trying to make a political point out of it.

Barry, since we're offering child rearing advice, let me share three things I teach my kids:

1. the smartest people in the world can still be wrong.

2. the greatest evils are often perpetrated in the name of good.

3. don't get science information from a fitness website.

Flog,

How is when you knew about it relevant? As near as I can determine, the information hasn't been out six years, it's been out 30 years or more. The science hasn't changed, the POLITICS have changed. That makes the discussion not the facts of science, but the political use of science. That seems clear enough.

The whole point of the article is that political spin--not science--has been keeping a potentially useful remedy for malaria out of the hands of people who otherwise might well have chosen it for themselves. I'm not--nor is Greenpeace--advocating telling people to use it, merely to offer it to them if they want it. It's taking governmental paternalism out of the mix, and letting the science speak for itself.

With respect to child-rearing, it's funny, I just pointed out to my kids not a week ago that Albert Einstein made some really bad investments with his Nobel Prize money, with that exact point in mind.

With respect to number two, obviously, I have to agree. Only, I would list Communism, socialism, and Islamism as "attempted goods." I would also include the appeasement of those "attempted goods". Neville Chamberlain meant well. He really did.

With respect to three, this is a conduit, not the content. Again, the science itself is not in question. It is the USE of the science. That seems clear enough.

well, i'm glad we're in agreement on some basics.

I also have a problem with arguments that are "ahistorical, uncritical, dogmatic, and passionate. [and] can't be discussed rationally."

But I guess where we differ is that I see it coming from both sides. cctjoey's response (#92) to my post is a good example of a passionate and dogmatic argument that does not deserve a response.

And I think that the linked article by Stossel, in fact most of the writings of Milloy on which the article was based, are also overly emotional and absurdly simplistic. Dredging through old science magazines and trying to find ammunition against 'leftists' (a label so broadly defined as to include the Christine Todd Whitman and Warren Buffett) is just plain silly.

Here's an article from early 1998 that states the same facts in an historical, critical, undogmatic, and dispassionate manner [note: this was written before the UN ban on persistent pesticides; that ban did not include DDT. DDT has never been banned by the UN or any other international body to my knowledge, although it's use has been restricted in many countries].

----------

"A necessary evil - Banning DDT might seem like a good idea in the North, but there is no more effective weapon for fighting malaria in the tropics"

A FEMALE mosquito sucks her dinner out of a malaria patient recuperating in bed. Engorged with blood and weary after her meal, she flies over to rest on the wall before taking off in search of her next victim. Little does she realise that the wall is coated with a thin layer of the insecticide DDT that will leave her disoriented and then kill her within minutes.

This scene is played out daily in Belize, Brazil, Ecuador, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Thailand and elsewhere. In the West, DDT has been demonised by governments since 1962, when Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring linked its use as an agricultural pesticide to massive ecological disruption. But in many tropical countries, where mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and yellow fever still infect around 270 million people each year, DDT remains a crucial public health tool. "I hate to be defending a chemical that causes such terrible environmental problems," says Renato Gusmão of the Pan American Health Organization in Washington DC, part of the WHO. "But it's useful, safe [to humans] and cheap."

Not everyone would agree. DDT's detractors point out that while it may keep malaria at bay, it is one of many artificial chemicals believed to interfere with people's endocrine system, which secretes hormones into the blood. Such disruption could cause cancer, although the issue remains controversial. Two recent studies in The New England Journal of Medicine (vol 337, p 1253) and the British Medical Journal (vol 315, p 81) failed to find an association between DDT and cancer.

In the 1950s, DDT was one of the chemicals that revolutionised agriculture. But the discovery that it builds up in the environment, is highly toxic to wildlife—especially invertebrates—and passes up the food chain resulted in many countries prohibiting its use. In June, 110 countries will begin negotiations for a worldwide ban on DDT and other persistent organic pollutants such as PCBs and dioxins, under the auspices of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

Public health officials from the tropics will do everything they can to avert a ban. They will argue that they use only small amounts of DDT in confined areas, doing little environmental damage while saving lives. Donald Roberts of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, who has done extensive fieldwork in Belize, says that abandoning DDT can result in large increases in malaria cases.

Belize's malaria problem spiralled out of control after it stopped using DDT six years ago, having virtually eliminated the disease. The country has a population of around 200 000, and in 1994 it reported over 10 000 malaria cases, more than at any other time in the country's history. In 1996, the country started spraying again and malaria rates dropped. Roberts concedes that other factors such as human migrations due to political unrest might have contributed to the epidemic, but he has analysed data from Brazil, Ecuador and elsewhere and found a similar pattern.

Roberts and others stress that using DDT for mosquito control is very different from using it for agriculture. Treating homes across the whole of Guyana, for example, which covers 215 000 square kilometres, uses no more DDT than would be used to spray 4 square kilometres of cotton during a single growing season. The pesticide is also confined indoors. "If it is used as recommended, we expect the environmental contamination to be minimal," says Pushpa Herath of the WHO's malaria control programme in Geneva.

But environmentalists and northern governments say that a complete ban on DDT would force health workers to explore other, less risky ways to control mosquito-borne diseases. "One of the issues that will be very hot [at the negotiations in June] is whether we have safer alternatives to the chemicals for public health," says Tryggvi Felixson of the Iceland Ministry for the Environment. The Nordic governments are pushing more strongly than any for a ban because many persistent chemicals that evaporate in the south are carried north and condense in the cold Arctic air.

Some countries have already tried replacing DDT with organophosphates and pyrethroids. Although these substances break down more quickly and do not linger in the environment, they are more acutely toxic and can injure health workers, who rarely wear full-body protection in the hot, humid tropics. And since they must be frequently reapplied, these insecticides are more expensive. They may also be less effective than DDT. Experience in several countries suggests that mosquitoes can rapidly develop multiple resistance to the seven or eight available alternative pesticides, says Herath. "Until we have enough alternatives, DDT should be one of the options."

Environmentalists would like health officials to use more non-chemical methods to prevent the spread of malaria, such as bed nets, managing waterways to eliminate pools of still water where mosquitoes breed, and using predatory fish, bacteria and other biological controls to kill larvae. Health workers claim that many of these methods, while laudable, are simply not practical in the field. But proponents of the ban believe that new opportunities would arise as DDT was phased out. "Experience has shown that when there is pressure to make changes, it yields positive results," says Felixson. "We've seen that with the ozone-depleting chemicals. We must not have an agreement with a lot of loopholes. There would be no incentive to find alternatives."

Some countries have already been forced to discontinue or minimise their use of DDT because of pressure from foreign aid organisations. Others, such as Indonesia and Bangladesh, have banned the chemical because traces have appeared in agricultural exports, endangering their international trade links. Black-market trade in pesticides often results in DDT that has been earmarked for public health purposes ending up on farmers' fields. Julie Langer of the World Wildlife Federation Canada in Toronto, which is developing ways to control malaria without resorting to DDT, says that only a total ban will prevent this illegal trade.

A ban would come too late for communities in the Arctic, whose women already have concentrations of DDT and other persistent pollutants in their breast milk and umbilical cord blood far in excess of recommended safe levels. The chemicals condense in the Arctic air, fall as rain and move up the long marine food chain ("Northern exposure", New Scientist, 31 May 1997, p 24). By the time they reach seals—which are eaten by Artic people—they are often concentrated a millionfold.

Some public health officials already see the writing on the wall. "There is no need for forcefully reducing DDT because it is happening automatically," says Herath. Fewer and fewer companies are manufacturing the pesticide, he says, and small countries are reluctant to use anything that might endanger their foreign aid.

Herath hopes that a UNEP package to ban DDT will include releasing much-needed funds for poor countries to study alternatives to DDT. Langer and other supporters of a ban claim that assistance for poor countries would automatically follow. "Everyone is aware of the fact that in dealing with persistent organic pollutants there may be a need for financial means to ease the transition," says Felixson.

Yet those who have used DDT as a public health weapon still shudder at the thought of giving up something that has worked for four decades. "We still have enormous confidence in DDT," says Gusmão. He acknowledges that the eventual abandonment of DDT would be no bad thing, but stresses: "Let's finish malaria first."

From issue 2120 of New Scientist magazine, 07 February 1998, page 18

I disagree with you Barry.

"With respect to number two, obviously, I have to agree. Only, I would list Communism, socialism, and Islamism as "attempted goods." I would also include the appeasement of those "attempted goods". Neville Chamberlain meant well. He really did. "

I truely think the leaders of these movements know what they are doing...and it is to take advantage of their people and power under the guise of they know best and will force the others to fall in line. They take away freedom at gun-point. Why do they imprison those who do not believe what they do at best and kill them at worst. The only redieming quality I can find with them as opposed to leftists/collectivists in our country....they are willing fight...ours won't even do that.

Ours are the worst kind...purely subversive...to cowardly to admit what they want in public where their colloectivist ideas can be challenged or try to use force and make it so. To make it worse, they hide in our "taxpayer" funded universities and attempt to preach to and coerce the students into buying their dribble. Or they convince the "underprivilaged" to vote them into office where they fight tooth and nail to keep the weak hooked on their programs and angry at success. Nothing about reaching potential "here's a road map"...nope, just" you need our help, you are oppressed by _________...STAND IN SOLIDARITY WITH US! (as we zap you of every fiber of your will to succeed as an individual)"

I don't think they do what they do out of sympathy...it is out of shear disdain for their fellow man. People are obviously to stupid to know what to do with their time, money, and sweat. They need to be in control of it...for the "good" of everyone.

To me it is everything counter to what crossfit is as a fitness system. There is no "teamwork" workouts. You do your own work, you keep your success or don't and CF is here to offer ADVICE, not sympathy. We come here as individuals to succeed and accomplish goals not in search of a village to ease our responsibility of self-determination. You get out what you put in. Time, money, and sweat.

I thought about this a moment further, and again, as I've pointed out often, you are attacking the discussion, not the content. You are also implying that conservatives are somehow complicit in some "great evil". Presumably, the war in Iraq is one of the issues. In point of FACT, the death rate in Iraq, as I and others have pointed out before, is DOWN since our invasion.

There is an old story about a drunk Irishman who is found searching the ground under a streetlamp/torch. His friend asks him what he's doing. He replies that he's lost his key. His friend points out to him that he surely lost it in the alleyway when he pulled his wallet to buy flowers for his wife. "Yes", he replies, "but the light is much better here."

It's much easier to level criticism against people who listen, and who don't kill you for it. People criticize Israel and the United States, because we have Leftists who can't stand to be thought ill of by anyone, however ill-intentioned. In Syria, Algeria, Sudan, Iran, and quite a number of other nations, there is no point in criticism, because nobody cares. So the magnitude of our various "crimes" gets skewed unbelievably.

We see our support of, say, El Salvador, compared--apparently sincerely--to the wholesale, planned starvation of MILLIONS of people on the part of, say, the Soviet Union or China. This error is so blatant, so stunning, that it literally boggles my mind that anyone pretending to be educated can make it. Yet it is done consistently.

Here is an interesting link using FACTS, and NUMBERS to place Israeli "atrocities" in context. The same exercise could easily be done for the U.S., but I don't have a handy link.

http://imshin.net/?p=453

Flog...My arguement is/was historical, critical, and non-dogmatic. Passionate yes. Rational to most...yes.

My point to you was that the Junk Science flaks you mentioned is mislabeled in the context of your point. The rest of it is how I see them applying their Junk politically...and accurate I might add.

This is not an issue I will ride the fence on. DDT has nothing to appologize for...however those who called for its banning do...especially since they did not offer a better solution.

Joey,

Just saw your post. I agree that Communist and Islamist leaders know full well what they are doing is wrong. What I am attempting to point to is the rationalizations that are offered to Western intellectuals in order to buy support for their programs. They are supposed to be good for "the people". Like in your link on Hugo Chavez. He got a heroes welcome from Leftists in New York, who presumably must feel he is at least attempting to do good somehow.

Reading your link, I have to make my mind turn to mush, though, to even begin to fathom how anyone on their most punch-drunk, hungover, vomiting over the window sill worst moment could believe that there is anything good there. I just don't get it.

Look me up whenever you get back from wherever you are. You can message me here, or on the other board.

Flog,

Just saw your post. Not sure what it added. Bottom line: countries that don't have malaria want DDT banned in countries that do.

Notable quote: "But environmentalists and northern governments say that a complete ban on DDT would force health workers to explore other, less risky ways to control mosquito-borne diseases."

In other words, they are demanding that "somebody do something". What that something is, and if it will work, they aren't sure. They have a few half vast ideas that are already being rejected by the people actually responsible for solving the problem. Again: a demand for a solution is not the same as a solution.

Barry,

How you jumped from DDT to Iraq is a mystery to me.

Here's another thing I teach my kids:

4. Treat people as individuals and don't assume they think or feel or behave a certain way until you get to know them. Beware labels. Don't pigeonhole people because all you ever learn about is your own categories.

My kids have a grandfather who is a member of the Sierra Club and is for the Iraq War. They've got an uncle who is against the Iraq War and drives an Escalade. They've got a cousin who is in the marines and thinks Iraq is the greatest fiasco the US military has ever been involved with.

Which one is a commie in your mind?

Alright. Explain what you had in mind when you said

"2. the greatest evils are often perpetrated in the name of good."

Please avoid abstractions. I'm much more interested in actual cases. I will offer the case of Communism as something which was embraced by American and European leftists as a "good" against which our capitalism fared poorly.

??????

I would add one other thing. This is important.

I am under no illusion that I--or conservatives generally--are always right. Depending on the day, I'm capable of losing my keys in my pocket, and my pen behind my ear.

The critical thing, though, is that I am always, persistently, working to solve problems. Sometimes my ideas are dumb. Sometimes they are great. Most of the time, if I come up with great ideas, it's the result of a long series of ideas, starting with dumb ones, that get progressively better because I keep working at them, sculpting them, and improving them. This is the nature of progress.

It is my perception that a sizable section of our "educators", and professional thinkers--here I'm including thought leaders like writers, artists, professors, and even journalists--don't really have solving the problems of our nation on their agenda. They are not just wrestling with our problems from a different perspective, they are working to subvert the efforts to solve our problems outright.

This is what I have a problem with. Anybody that wants to come on here with 25 alternatives to the Iraq War will be doing a good thing. 25 feasible alternatives to DDT that would actually work. Great. Saying, "somebody should do something". Not helpful, and harmful when enacted into law.

sure, i'll agree with your assessment of communism. I also know that some people in Russia and Eastern Europe who couldn't wait to get rid of communism are having problems. Some are even having second thoughts. Communism was a mistake; capitalism is not a non-stop picnic for everyone. We could certainly agree on an abstract generalization that capitalism is the better system for more people, but not everyone likes it. Good and evil, right and wrong are complicated issues, and again we agree: specific cases are more helpful than abstractions. I don't think Hitler set out to be evil, but he considered some people less than human: he was only interested in doing good for Arians. I don't think Union Carbide set out to kill people at Bhopal, but they weren't as careful as they should have been. It's hard to imagine Saddam Hussein having benevolent thoughts so maybe he's an exception, or maybe he thought he was doing good for his country.

I don't want to always revert to: 'first cure thyself,' but you might want to look at the clumsy abstractions in your own posts: your 'leftist'labels applied to all people who criticise the Iraq war is a useless abstraction.

It is a useless abstraction to assume that no environmentalists have solutions to any problems. That could be disproven very easily by looking at the hundreds of thousands of 'green' engineers, architects, health workers and scientists.

Does fighting malaria in Africa have to mean that women in Iceland must have DDT in their breast milk? Both sides must work out a solution. Labeling either side in that debate leftist or rightist is not only absurd but counter-productive to the common good of mankind.

Don't be offended if this is my last post ... I gotta go make a living.

OPT #3. Minute amounts of chemicals kill? Good, OPT! Don’t let science and logic get in your way.

Dose-response is critical, but is often ignored or simply misunderstood by poorly trained would-be scientists. D-r may not be assumed to be linear, but routinely is, as in accelerated testing.

If an analysis does not include determining the shape of the d-r curve, it does not yield a valid model.

Suppose a group of untrained scientists wanted to determine the safe height for curbs. They could push rats off the ledge of a highrise. From 20 stories up, 95%, say, died. From 30 stories, maybe 99% died. That’s 4% per 10 feet. Deduction: 87.2% would die from a fall of 6 inches. Can’t wait until they get the humans.

Minute amounts of substances lethal at high doses can be harmless, or even beneficial, as in aspirin, alcohol, many prescription pharmaceuticals, water, iron, and exercise. Often the dose-response curve has a minimum above zero doze.

OPT #36. Beware, OPT, and don’t be overprotective. Sunlight causes cancer, but a small amount is essential to prevent rickets. When Ciji Ware was a mere hopeful author and commentator on KABC, she recommended zero sunlight for children! Polio epidemics in the US have been attributed to sanitation. Too much protection will weaken immunity, but as a vaccinologist, you probably know that.

OPT #42. You suggest minute amounts of DDT might emerge 10 years after exposure to cause a loss of senses. Where’s your skepticism? How would you ever learn such a thing? Is there any parallel for such an improbable sounding scientific model? Or is this just another triumph of fear over skepticism and knowledge?

OPT #45. Isn’t it true, OPT, that organic foods come from the same source as other foods? That suppliers just sort them by appearance, the crappy looking ones to be packaged as organic and marked up for liberals? At least, that was my anecdotal observation.

OPT # 56. You study vaccines in humans, OPT? Share some data with us, won’t you? Would one be right to assume that if you actually do study vaccines, that it’s with the objective of proving them harmful? You do have so little appreciation for cost benefit or risk benefit. Science has come to be the vaccine against liberalilsm, don’t you see?

You have to understand: I have a graduate degree in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. I can equivocate with the best of them. That's why I recognize it.

Good. Evil. These words make some people very, very queasy. The debate rapidly becomes a referendum on even conducting the discussion. Can we even use these words any more, the question becomes. It is a short step from there to complete moral paralysis.

Here's a fun ethical question: (assuming the link between the two is correct, which is not proven) would the women of Iceland be OK with indirectly causing the deaths of ten African children each to reduce the amount of DDT in their breast milk?

I take no offense. I just keep hoping somebody will give me a better run for my money. I like challenges. I used to post a lot on another site, and realized quickly there were no new ideas. I persisted, because I myself came up with a lot of new ideas in trying to find new ways to say the same obvious things. Eventually, that dried up too. I think I'm a ways away from that here, though. As in the workouts, the goal is constant variation.

BTW, I don't call all opponents of the Iraq War Leftists. However, I do tend to slip people who criticize without alternatives into that category.

RobertP #80.

Assuming your assumptions about published articles on mosquito resistance is correct, you have established only a choice between building resistance in mosquitos to the deaths of millions of humans. This contains at least three falacies.

(1) The overriding concern must be the humans.

(2) Who gives a fig if mosquitos become resistant? If we stop using DDT, the mosquitos win! This is a gold star for false logic.

(3) The lesson learned from resistance is to apply DDT most beneficially, not to ban its use altogether, as the US and WHO appear to have done.

Logic and the ban reinforce the conclusion that the concern was not over changes in mosquito species, but in pelican and eagle eggshells, as reported elsewhere. The trade off was between human lives (on the right) and the lives of some birds (on the left).

Liberals think collectively. A few million individual humans don't matter. The threat didn’t rise to the level of homosapiens, the species. Weakened eggshells, though, could have resulted in extinction, notwithstanding evolution and natural extinctions anyway.

Now, if the resitant mosquitos were more harmful, e.g., Godzilla mosquitos, that would have been a different issue – one not raised.

Doubtful that your attack on Stossel’s knowledge and integrity could be any better founded.

I note Ken #83 took your bait.

I love the way you just declared yourself winner of the argument. You have an extraordinarily high opinion of yourself. The fact that I see dozens of holes in your logic that you don't is my problem, in your mind.

Lay it on me, brother. I've done my best to speak clearly, to make my positions clear, and to not equivocate. All I ask is the same.

Sheryl Crow has a line I've always liked: "She doesn't believe in anything/but if you ask her she'll tell you there's plenty of things to believe in."

I don't expect a response, and I doubt many people are even looking at this, but I mostly write for my own education anyway.

It occurs to me there is an interesting element to this discussion. I am perfectly content to see myself as mostly right, with the mostly thrown in simply to keep myself open to my own potential bone-headedness.

However, within certain intellectual communities, the very notion of right is wrong. This is the post-modern, deconstructionistic, lit-crit crowd, who are reasonably adept at tearing down, but who as a premise of their own doctrine can't stand anything up. Therefore, you are, ipso facto, LIMITED to criticism. No other stance conforms to the canon of irony, and intellectual self-abnegation.

This must be very frustrating. You can never state what is right without it being something other than what is. Other than Bush. Other than Republicans. Other than poverty. Other than war. Other than Evangelical Christians. Other than intolerance.

It seems to me this must be the soil where anti-Americanism grows. I feel there are people who long for certainty, for an intellectual home and place to land. They admire, covertly, the absolute confidence with which Islamists proclaim the rectitude of their place in the universe and world. This is all that is left, since all the ideals which the West stands for have long since been dispensed with as untenable. This place was held previously by Communism, which is still used in this fashion by some in the academy, especially, but for most attacking America and its' ideals suffices. Self evidently, attacking us without any constructive intent amounts to support for the enemy.

On some level, this fact is not lost on certain weary souls eager for an end of some sort. It is an End sought emotionally, without really grasping all that it means intellectually.

This is how I see it. The alternative is what I try and articulate most Rest Days.

Barry, I'm sure there are many grains of truth in your last post. I see the longing for clarity and certainty in your own posts, and I see it in my own. But the fact that we want it doesn't necessarily mean that it's always possible.

I'm not saying there is no right and wrong. I'm saying that knowing it and agreeing on it in all cases requires more than just certainty. It takes honesty and many other virtues. Acting on it takes winning consensus and not merely browbeating those who disagree.

It seems that you criticize environentalists for their goals, and then accuse them of having none. You criticize 'leftists' as being 'uncritical' and then you say they can do nothing but criticize.

You assume that the public health advocates in sub-tropical countries who are using DDT to fight malaria are not, in fact, leftists or 'liberals.' In my experience many people in the social services are liberals of some stripe, although if they've been doing it for a while they are also realists. Environmentalists tend to be idealists, but that doesn't mean they are not also sometimes chemists working on real alternatives to DDT.

If you don't admit there's a problem, you can't fix it. Progress is always brought by people who see problems, not by those who say that what we have here now is perfect.

Most corporations that once fought environmentalism have discovered that they actually save money in a few years because 'green' technology is almost always more efficient. Just as environmentalists' worst scare tactics about mass death from DDT might not have occurred quite as predicted, neither did concerns in the business community that cutting pollution would cost them billions. Both sides have used overblown rhetoric to win their arguments and you can't really judge each side only on their hyperbole.

One last thing: I don't know you and you don't know me, but I'll match your morality any day. Can you see why I might find your implication that I have no moral compass insulting? And also self-aggrandizing on your part?

I am not actually a zen Buddhist, but there are a couple of concepts that I find useful: compassion is the only real virtue because all others are corruptible. Care for other people, don't be smug, be respectful, don't assume you can see into others' hearts, don't label people. It's rude and you merely rob yourself of their input. This does not mean that there is no right and wrong, no good or evil people. It just means that seeing the world without categories -- although impossible -- is a worthy goal. It is a key to compassion and compassion is good.

Of course the samurais were zen buddhist, so go figure.

Your question "would the women of Iceland be OK with indirectly causing the deaths of ten African children each to reduce the amount of DDT in their breast milk?" is a good one. I never pretended to know the answer. But understanding that this is at least a question is a step beyond Stossel's article.

Here's an ethical question for you, since you posit yourself as one who knows the difference between right and wrong: is torture good or evil?

You made so many points let me just address a few of them:

Off course the U.S. will look after it's own best interests,my question is does it need to come at the expense of third world countries populations?

As for DDT,a number of scientific studies are pointing at a broad class of chemicals that have demonstrated the ability to interfere with the body's natural hormone balance. These suspect chemicals,often reffered to as endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC's) have been linked to many of the same consequences as chemical birth control. This is the underlying goal,to add these chemicals to the mix.

"The world was horrified in April, 1977, when Dr. Reimert Ravenholt, the head of USAID's population office, publicly hinted that the Agency intended to sterilize one quarter of all women in the developing world in order to protect a "strong U.S. commercial presence" overseas."

To Bingo who wrote "However, the issues at hand are the one million African children dying each year from malaria."

Let's check this "1 million dying from malaria" out,where are the stats about the 1 million dying every year coming from? I checked the CIA world fact book and found that almost all African countries have a positive population growth rate (more births than deaths) so my question is how many have died and in which particular country?

Barry Cooper wrote "Wow, we have some major dishing on Reagan and Kissinger"

You seem to have missed the point again it was not dishing,it was merely a report of their activities.

To all the proponents of vaccination as the solution to nything "To understand why you likely have not heard about most of these vaccine dangers, don't miss the excellent summary of a highly revealing book by the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine at http://www.WantToKnow.info/truthaboutdrugcompanies. Dr. Angell clearly depicts how the pharmaceutical companies have used their immense wealth to exert control over all branches of government and prevent information which might hurt their profits from getting significant media coverage."

Finally to B. Cooper who believes that he is a rightist wrote "This is the post-modern, deconstructionistic, lit-crit crowd, who are reasonably adept at tearing down, but who as a premise of their own doctrine can't stand anything up. Therefore, you are, ipso facto, LIMITED to criticism."

Let me leave you with a few quotes:

"The United States has only one party - the property party. It's the party of big corporations, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican."

Gore Vidal

We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had -- the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it, all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.

Howard Zinn

Intolerance of dissent is a well-noted feature of the American national character."

Senator J. William Fulbright

"We weren't raised to protest. We weren't raised to question. We were raised to wave the flag. To pledge allegiance. "My country, right or wrong." It's a terrible, terrible trap."

Phil Donahue

"To criticize one's country is to do it a service .... Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism-a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation."

J. William Fulbright, American senator

"You believe you are dying for the fatherland - you die for some industrialists."

Anatoly Franace, French writer

Barry Cooper

Thanks for your dissertation on leftists,etc.it is very informative in regards to your particular belief system.

First let me address this statement of yours "Yes, population control would be good in the developing world"

Really? Why?

Not according to this excerpt from an extensive study "Most of the [African] continent is underpopulated," argues Dr Margaret Ogola, who runs a health centre in Nairobi. "The evidence of the world so far is that countries with a lot of people with high population densities tend to be the richer ones. I believe that this is why you are having the phenomenon in some of the Asian 'Tiger' countries, as I believe they are called— people create wealth and ways of using it more effectively."

Machakos is a thriving district in southern Kenya with a growing town and a green hinterland. But 50 years ago there was no town and the hinterland was almost a desert. Few people lived here and the soil was typical of most sub-Saharan Africa: red, short of nutrients and hostile to crops.

Then, in the 1940s, the population began to rise, and as the population grew, so did the town, creating a market for food. Farmers used the income from selling their produce to buy fertilisers and pesticides and to improve irrigation and water storage. Today there are five times as many people in Machakos as there were in the 1940s, and far from destroying the land, the use of chemicals has enormously improved the quality of the soil, which is now comparable with that of southern Italy. Consequently, agricultural production has increased tenfold and Machakos has 10 times the number of trees.

The lives of the people have been transformed. They now have more shops, markets, schools and hospitals. Having more people has made them healthier, better fed and better educated.

"When you have low population densities, as in north-eastern Kenya, for example, you find it's very expensive to provide schools and health centres," says Dr Rachel Musioki, an economist and adviser to the government. "So this is one area where sufficient density of population is essential."

Now here is the best breakdown on conservatives I have read:http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/showthread.php?id=80

"At bottom, conservatives believe in a social hierarchy of “haves” and “have nots” that I call “corporate feudalism.” They have taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a “respectable” sounding ideology"

“Less government,” “personal responsibility” and lots of flag waving. They are “shorthand” for an entire worldview, and the right has been pounding their slogans out into the public domain for getting on forty years.

Included within the slogan “less government” is the whole conservative set of assumptions about the nature of the “free market” and government’s role in that market.. In fact, the whole “public sector/private sector” distinction is an invention of the cheap-labor conservatives. They say that the “private sector” exists outside and independently of the “public sector”. The public sector, according to cheap-labor ideology, can only “interfere” with the “private sector”, and that such “interference” is “inefficient” and “unprincipled”

Using this ideology, the cheap-labor ideologue paints himself as a defender of “freedom” against “big government tyranny”. In fact, the whole idea that the “private sector” is independent of the public sector is totally bogus. In fact, “the market” is created by public laws, public institutions and public infrastructure.

But the cheap-labor conservative isn’t really interested in “freedom”. What the he wants is the “privatized tyranny” of industrial serfdom, the main characteristic of which is – you guessed it – “cheap labor”.

When you cut right through it, right-wing ideology is just “dime-store economics” – intended to dress their ideology up and make it look respectable. You don’t really need to know much about economics to understand it.

Cheap-labor conservatives have a long and sorry history of opposing virtually every advancement in this country’s development going right back to the American revolution Cheap-labor conservatives have hated Social Security and Medicare since their inception. Many cheap-labor conservatives are hostile to public education. They think it should be privatized. But why are we surprised. Cheap-labor conservatives opposed universal public education in its early days. School vouchers are just a backdoor method to “resegregate” the public schools.

Cheap-labor conservatives hate the progressive income tax like the devil hates holy water. Cheap-labor conservatives like budget deficits and a huge national debt for two reasons. A bankrupt government has a harder time doing any “social spending” – which cheap-labor conservatives oppose, and . . ."

Nuff said for now.

Sam...I don't know what a cheap-labor conservative is...please define.

"At bottom, conservatives believe in a social hierarchy of “haves” and “have nots” that I call “corporate feudalism.” They have taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a “respectable” sounding ideology"

nope...conservatives accept that people have and have not.

“Less government,” “personal responsibility” and lots of flag waving. They are “shorthand” for an entire worldview, and the right has been pounding their slogans out into the public domain for getting on forty years."

Like "living wages", "entitlements", "manditory contributions" the left has sabatoged our economy with since the Bolsheviks.

Included within the slogan “less government” is the whole conservative set of assumptions about the nature of the “free market” and government’s role in that market.. In fact, the whole “public sector/private sector” distinction is an invention of the cheap-labor conservatives. They say that the “private sector” exists outside and independently of the “public sector”. The public sector, according to cheap-labor ideology, can only “interfere” with the “private sector”, and that such “interference” is “inefficient” and “unprincipled”

Yup...me and you can trade goods and services with out the government or permission from the government. That is called the private sector.

"Using this ideology, the cheap-labor ideologue paints himself as a defender of “freedom” against “big government tyranny”. In fact, the whole idea that the “private sector” is independent of the public sector is totally bogus. In fact, “the market” is created by public laws, public institutions and public infrastructure. "

Tyranny only comes from Government as does censorship. Is it really bogus that the private sector is serperate from the Public sector?...(then I is it the government's right to know what a woman is doing with her body and eve's drop on conversations.)? The market is most definatly not created by thepublic laws, public institutions, and public infrastructure. The Market is a creation of 2 or more entities looking to exchange goods and services....at best government is there to facilitate what is the right of people to do.

Government is to protect the market...not establish it.

"But the cheap-labor conservative isn’t really interested in “freedom”. What the he wants is the “privatized tyranny” of industrial serfdom, the main characteristic of which is – you guessed it – “cheap labor”. "

Nice try but as stated before that tyranny can only come from a geovernment...I can not tyrannize you without "Governing" you. If you "work" for me...you can QUIT and start your own enterprise.

"When you cut right through it, right-wing ideology is just “dime-store economics” – intended to dress their ideology up and make it look respectable. You don’t really need to know much about economics to understand it. "

That is right, it is "dime-store"...what is wrong with "dime-stores" You should not need to know much about econimics to understand it...not like our tax code.

"Cheap-labor conservatives have a long and sorry history of opposing virtually every advancement in this country’s development going right back to the American revolution Cheap-labor conservatives have hated Social Security and Medicare since their inception. Many cheap-labor conservatives are hostile to public education. They think it should be privatized. But why are we surprised. Cheap-labor conservatives opposed universal public education in its early days. School vouchers are just a backdoor method to “resegregate” the public schools."

Really... name one that isn't wealth redistrobution. Many conservatives believe in vouchers so some competition can be introduced to teachers...so they work like the rest of us at staying current and effective...why would anyone be against that. Perhaps I don't want my son to ride an hour on a bus to get him across town so he can go to a certain school because of the color of his skin. Perhaps since I pay the taxes for schooling, I should have a say who teaches and what they are taught and where they are taught it....What are you afraid of? Since vouchers have worked everywhere they are tried...it might be time to try it every where. I find it funny that it is the liberals in Congress that send their children to private schools at a far higher rate than conservatives...yet we are to send ours to these failing schools....That is elitism at it most hypocritical.

"Cheap-labor conservatives hate the progressive income tax like the devil hates holy water. Cheap-labor conservatives like budget deficits and a huge national debt for two reasons. A bankrupt government has a harder time doing any “social spending” – which cheap-labor conservatives oppose, and . . ."

Progressive income taxes are unfair...period. If everyone payed the same rate...people would be motivated to create more wealth...not steal it from others through wealth redistribution. They penalize hard work and enterprise.

Budget deficits does not equal bankrupt....Deficits mean you are "borrowing" money that you pay back with interest knowing you will create wealth with what you borrowed...you know like a business loan.

Social-spending, in-large part, does not create wealth it only serves to redistribute it.

Yes, what I mean is STEAL it...accept when the Government does it liberals call it many other names.

SAM here are some questions...

1. Are you a leftist?

2. Do you believe that wealth belongs to the person who is in possession of it or does it really belong to the government?

3.What are private property rights?

4. What program or project have you ever seen, that has been done better (higher quality at lower cost) by government than a "private sector" business?

5. What is your feeling about MARXISM?

6. If I am a "cheap-labor conservative" does that mean you are an "expensive labor collectivist"?

Your views brought to fruition by collectivist governments have proven to be the scuge of almost a full century. The millions of lives MURDERED in the name of these views in in the tens of millions that only tried to speak out against them. Sadly that number pales in comparison to those who have/are suffered through the failed policies influenced by these views. It has never worked...it will never work...why don't you leftists/collectivists just let people live their lives.

just admit it..you are a communist ideology sympathizer arn't you. You truely believe the average person can not function without your "caring" philosphy.

CASTRO
MAO
Stalin
Lenon
Il
Che
Chavez
Hitler
TITO
POL POT
Khmer Rouge

Hell that list alone is over 100,000,000 dead. These arn't from state wars either...this is intra-state. Let alone the property stolen and scorched earth.

Murderous regimes... all of them. Name me just one Marxist style government that is not murderously corrupt.

Practice your collectivism with those that "WANT" to participate. No wait...you would be alone in under 2 weeks without the use of force.

Every where in the WORLD their is issues...it is your collectivist brethren that are causing the problems...Taliban, Communists, Islamofascists, etc. All think thier local populace is better served by their guidance...so much so they kill or jail those that don't want to go along. Murderous thugs.

Sam...way to pick a winner for your quotes...a racist and anti-semite, pink-o

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

James William Fulbright

U.S. Senator, Arkansas

Term of office:
January 1945–January 1975

Political party:
Democratic

Preceded by:
Hattie Caraway

Succeeded by:
Dale Bumpers

Born:
April 9, 1905
Sumner, Missouri

Died:
February 9, 1995
Washington, D.C.

Spouse:
Elizabeth Williams

James William Fulbright (April 9, 1905–February 9, 1995) was a well-known member of the United States Senate representing Arkansas. Fulbright was a Southern Democrat and a staunch multilateralist, supported racial segregation, supported the creation of the United Nations and opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee. He is also remembered for his efforts to establish an international exchange program, which thereafter bore his name, the Fulbright Fellowships. Further, Fulbright was an outspoken critic of the organized pro-Israel community in the US, and was in turn labelled "consistently unkind to Israel and our supporters in this country" in 1974 by the Anti-Defamation League, the leading Jewish defense organization.

CCTJOEY wrote "just admit it..you are a communist ideology sympathizer arn't you. You truely believe the average person can not function without your "caring" philosphy.

CASTRO
MAO
Stalin
Lenon
Il
Che
Chavez
Hitler
TITO
POL POT
Khmer Rouge

Hell that list alone is over 100,000,000 dead. These arn't from state wars either...this is intra-state. Let alone the property stolen and scorched earth.

Murderous regimes... all of them. Name me just one Marxist style government that is not murderously corrupt.

Practice your collectivism with those that "WANT" to participate. No wait...you would be alone in under 2 weeks without the use of force."

Hmmm let's look at some former and current U.S. allies :

"Many of the world's most repressive dictators have been friends of America. Tyrants, torturers, killers, and sundry dictators and corrupt puppet-presidents have been aided, supported, and rewarded handsomely for their loyalty to US interests.

Unwavering "anti-communism" and a willingness to provide unhampered access for American business interests to exploit their countries' natural resources and cheap labor are the excuses for their repression, and the primary reason the US government supports them. They may be linked internationalIy to extreme right-wing groups such as the World Anti-Communist League, and some have had strong Nazi affiliations and have offered sanctuary to WWll Nazi war criminals.

Friendly dictators

IDI AMIN
General of Uganda
Amin was one of the most notorious of Africa's post-independence dictators. A former heavyweight boxing champion in Uganda and a non-commissioned officer in the British Army there, Amin caught the attention of his superiors because of his efficient management of concentration camps in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s, where he earned the title of "The Strangler". Because of his loyalty to Britain and his strongly anti-communist stance, Amin was picked by the British to replace the elected Ugandan government in a 1971 coup. While in power, he earned a reputation as a "clown" in some circles in the West, but he was no joke at home. Amin brutalized his people with British and US military aid and with Israeli and CIA training of his troops. The body count of his friends, the clergy, soldiers, and ordinary Ugandans rose daily, but the West ignored his cruelty. As he continued to demand more aid and sophisticated weapons, he finally lost support. In 1979, his quest for more power lead him to invade Tanzania. In retaliation, he was overthrown by an invading Tanzanian / Ugandan army. Amin fled to Saudi Arabia, where he now lives a quiet life in a modest villa outside Jeddah, looking after his goats and chickens and cultivating his vegetable garden. Traditional Arab garb has replaced the bemedalled Field Marshal's uniform of his heyday.

FULGENCIO BATISTA
President of Cuba
Cuban Army Sergeant Fulgencio Batista first seized power in a 1932 coup. He was President Roosevelt's handpicked dictator to counteract leftists who had overthrown strongman Cerardo Machado. Batista ruled or several years, then left for Miami, returning in 1952 just in time for another coup, against elected president Carlos Prio Socorras. His new regime was quickly recognized by President Eisenhower. Under Batista, U.S. interests flourished and little was said about democracy. With the loyal support of Batista, Mafioso boss Meyer Lansky developed Havana into an international drug port. Cabinet offices were bought and sold and military officials made huge sums on smuggling and vice rackets. Havana became a fashionable hot spot where America's rich and famous drank and gambled with mobsters. As the gap between the rich and poor grew wider, the poor grew impatient. In 1953, Fidel Castro led an armed group of rebels in a failed uprising on the Moncada army barracks. Castro temporarily fled the country and Batista struck back with a vengeance. Freedom of speech was curtailed and subversive teachers, lawyers and public officials were fired from their jobs. Death squads tortured and killed thousands of "communists". Batista was assisted in his crackdown by Lansky and other members of organized crime who believed Castro would jeopardize their gambling and drug trade. Despite this, Batista remained a friend to Eisenhower and the US until he was finally overthrown by Castro in 1959.

SIR HASSANAL BOLKIAH
The Sultan of Brunei
To illegally fund what they referred to as the "Democratic Resistance" in Nicaragua, Oliver North and Former Assistant Secretary d State Elliot Abrams solicited funds from several authoritarian regimes, including Taiwan, South Korea and the more obscure Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam. Sir Hassanal Bolkiah, the Sultan of Brunei, the world's richest monarch, was indeed generous to the Contras -- to the tune of $10 million. But, this generosity was not because of any commitment to democracy in Nicaragua or anywhere else, for Brunei is a monarchical dictatorship, under a State of Emergency since 1982. The Sultan also allows Brunei to be the ClA's ears on the explosive Malaysian-lndonesian border. His Royal Highness was also involved with the infamous Nugan Hand Bank of Australia, a 1960s-70s CIA front for South East Asian drug operations and money laundering. In fact, according to a secret 1978 memo, Nugan Hand submitted a proposal to provide His Highness the Sultan with a bank structure and depository system which he alone can control should any change of government take place. The Sultan lives in a new palace that may have cost as much as a billion dollars, while over 90% of his subjects live in abject poverty. Those who protest such inequalities don't fare well with the authorities. According to Amnesty International, Brunei's jails hold "at least five prisoners of conscience who have spent 25 years in detention without having been convicted of any crime."

P.W. BOTHA
President of South Africa
During P.W. Botha's first term as President, the former Secretary of Defense altered the structure of government, giving the military and police unprecedented power. To justify this, he pointed to increasingly vocal discontent among South Africa's disenfranchised blacks, the large number of black states In Africa, and a so-called "growing Marxist" threat in the region. South Africa, he said, was engaged in a "total war' and must develop a "total strategy" to fight the battle. South Africa's apartheid regime was quietly supported by the US government, despite a UN boycott and Congressional efforts to reduce US investment there, Ronald Reagan significantly increased military expenditures in the country. But few Americans realized that Botha's total strategy against blacks had turned his nation into a ruthless aggressor. When Portugal withdrew from its colonies in Mozambique and Angola, Botha, claiming he wanted to strengthen capitalism on the continent, financed the Mozambique National Resistance (MNR) against the country's popular government. The MNR, who receive direct training from South Africa, cut off the ears, noses, and limbs of civilians. After killing their parents and raping young women in front of 10 year old boys, they recruited these boys to fight. In 1989, P.W. Botha suffered a stroke and later resigned. In early 1990 his successor, F.W. De Klerk, watching as international sanctions ruined S. Africa's economy, legalized political opposition parties and freed several important black political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela who had been imprisoned for 27 years for political activities against apartheid. Apartheid finally fell when Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa."

You also asked what a cheap labor conservative is:

"cheap-labor conservatives are defenders of corporate America – whose fortunes depend on labor. The larger the labor supply, the cheaper it is. The more desperately you need a job, the cheaper you’ll work, and the more power those “corporate lords” have over you. If you are a wealthy elite – or a “wannabe” like most dittoheads – your wealth, power and privilege is enhanced by a labor pool, forced to work cheap.

Cheap-labor conservatives don’t like social spending or our “safety net.” Why. Because when you’re unemployed and desperate, corporations can pay you whatever they feel like – which is inevitably next to nothing. You see, they want you “over a barrel” and in a position to “work cheap or starve.”

Cheap-labor conservatives don’t like the minimum wage, or other improvements in wages and working conditions. Why? These reforms undo all of their efforts to keep you “over a barrel.”

Cheap-labor conservatives like “free trade,” NAFTA, GATT, etc. Why? Because there is a huge supply of desperately poor people in the third world, who are “over a barrel,” and will work cheap.

Cheap-labor conservatives oppose a woman’s right to choose. Why? Unwanted children are an economic burden that put poor women “over a barrel,” forcing them to work cheap.

Cheap-labor conservatives don’t like unions. Why? Because when labor “sticks together,” wages go up. That’s why workers unionize. Seems workers don’t like being “over a barrel.”

Cheap-labor conservatives constantly bray about “morality,” “virtue,” “respect for authority,” “hard work” and other “values.” Why? So they can blame your being “over a barrel” on your own “immorality,” lack of “values” and “poor choices.”

Cheap-labor conservatives encourage racism, misogyny, homophobia and other forms of bigotry. Why? Bigotry among wage earners distracts them, and keeps them from recognizing their common interests as wage earners.

The Cheap-Labor Conservatives’ “Dirty Secret”: They Don’t Really Like Prosperity."

"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."

Edward Abbey

"We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?"

Lucius Annaeus Seneca - the Younger, Roman statesman, philosopher

"Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the nonconformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress indeed."

Josiah Gitt American editor

"Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.... Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others."

Emma Goldman

CCTJOEY #123

"There is a hard core of people in the United States who will not be moved, whatever facts you present, from their conviction that this nation means only to do good, and almost always does good, in the world, that it is the beacon of liberty and freedom."

Howard Zinn

"fascism - A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

The American Heritage Dictionary, 1983

Joe...what is your point?

What dictatorship do we have here in America?

let's look at who your heros are...

Emma Goldman..... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman

Anarchist, Communist, Radical Leftist, and attempted assassin....nice job Joe

Josiah Gitt...though he was a progressive he realized the Communists were dangerous...it appears his comments were about the Communists as well...especially when considering the root of Collectivism is conformity. Thanks JOE

Edward Abbey... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Abbey

Hero to the Eco-warriors. ELF's prototype. You know ELF JOE...the guys that put spikes in trees so lumberjack chainsaws break, mame the lumberjack. What a bunch of quality citizens they are...destroying personal property and terrorizing the populace. Good job JOE!

Lucius Annaeus Seneca... Stoic Philosopher

Looks to me he was talking about the Roman Empire and it land grab and enslaving of peoples through out the Eurasia...sounds like the who???? That's right Joe...the collectivists...the USSR Communists that killed 10's of millions of political disenters. Thanks again Joe!

Howard Zinn's right in this quote if not much else...there are people who believe such things...I know I do...I believe we do mean to do go and try our best to...though we fail at times... like when we stand by and appease dictators and let them run rough shod over our own domestic policy and foriegn policy. Thanks again Joe!

Merriam-Webster defines Fascism as such...defines fascism as "a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition"

This part bears repeating...

"...that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition"

now lets compare to what is described as "Communist State"

n the 20th century, a number of Communist Parties based on Marxist-Leninist ideology established governments in various countries. In those countries, the aforementioned Communist parties made themselves the only legal political parties. Generally they were, or continue to be, totalitarian with a rigid plan economy; embracing market reforms isn't necessarily coupled with as much socio-political liberalisation, they may remain authoritarian.

Pretty similar huh?? How about that.

Sounds like collectivism to me. Looks a lot closer to your leftist leanings you and your "notable-quotables" aspouse especially when one considers the political model works in a circle. So we know They (the Fascists) were collectivist in nature and they acted just like the Communists but with a different slant.

If your point was to make light of America as a Fascist country you are misguided...If your point was to make me out as a Fascist you are also misguided. I am conservative libertarian. This means for the most part I think the government should stay out of my life except to Protect the Nation with a military, Protect the populace with Law Enforcement, Rescue-services, Justice system and build infrastructure so that it compiments the Free-market.

What is clear is that both you and SAM have used a collection of self described Leftist Radicals and/or Anarchists as your noteable-quotables. I have to infer from this that they are people that espouse beliefs similar to yours.

Here is an idea...practice what you preach in a private environment and let people leave who later do not want to be part of your experiment.

Please leave the rest of us alone to live our lives.

CCTJOEY

CCTJoey also stated:

"Like "living wages", "entitlements", "manditory contributions" the left has sabatoged our economy with since the Bolsheviks."

and

"Yup...me and you can trade goods and services with out the government or permission from the government. That is called the private sector."

Lets address these points:

"In fact, the largest beneficiaries of all government built infrastructure, including hydroelectric dams, railroads, air traffic control systems, and even roads and schools, are the corporations who buy power, transport goods by rail and over the roads, and employ workers educated at public expense. They are the primary beneficiaries of the banking system, of Federal Reserve efforts to stabilize the currency, and of the regulation of securities creating confidence in the financial markets.

But Conservatives are oblivious to all this government spending, government infrastructure, and government regulation that directly benefits American corporations. They only see the government spending that helps the wage earner – and hypocritically claim that the "wage earner" should "stand on his own two feet" – as if they do.

In fact, they stand on the backs of labor. Having formed hugely powerful corporations, they complain when wage earners respond by forming unions to counterbalance the power of these giants. Apparently, it is okay for capital to "stick together", but not labor.

So don't even bother suggesting to these cheap-labor conservatives that we build a "wage earner friendly" economic environment. Don't suggest that we strengthen unions. Don't suggest that we adopt labor friendly trade policies – that at a minimum restrict the ability of American corporations to take advantage of third-world police states. Don't suggest that we put full employment over controlling inflation in our list of priorities. Don't suggest fiscal policies – read that, "balanced budgets" – the help create a low inflation environment supporting "full employment".

All of those things are "big government". Cheap-labor conservatives believe in "less government" – for them anyway."

CCYJOEY "the collectivists...the USSR Communists that killed 10's of millions of political disenters. Thanks again Joe!"

A few more quotes then I'll leave it alone

"Our fear that communism might someday take
over most of the world blinds us to the fact
that anti-communism already has."

Michael Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse

"What was there about this Bolshevik Revolution that so alarmed the most powerful nations in the
world? What drove them to invade a land whose soldiers had recently fought alongside them for
over three years and suffered more casualties than any other country on either side of the World
War?

The Bolsheviks had had the audacity to make a separate peace with Germany in order to take
leave of a war they regarded as imperialist and not in any way their war, and to try and rebuild a
terribly weary and devastated Russia. But the Bolsheviks had displayed the far greater audacity of
overthrowing a capitalist-feudal system and proclaiming the first socialist state in the history of
the world. This was uppitiness writ incredibly large. This was the crime the Allies had to punish,
the virus which had to be eradicated lest it spread to their own people.

We in the West are never allowed to forget the political shortcomings (real and alleged) of the
Soviet Union; at the same time we are never reminded of the history which lies behind it. The
anti-communist propaganda campaign began even earlier than the military intervention. Before
the year 1918 was over, expressions in the vein of "Red Peril", "the Bolshevik assault on
civilization", and "menace to world by Reds is seen" had become commonplace in the pages of
the New York Times.

During February and March 1919, a US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee held hearings before
which many "Bolshevik horror stories" were presented. The character of some of the testimony
can be gauged by the headline in the usually sedate Times of 12 February 1919.

DESCRIBE HORRORS UNDER RED RULE. R.E. SIMONS AND W.W. WELSH TELL
SENATORS OF BRUTALITIES OF BOLSHEVIKI -- STRIP WOMEN IN STREETS --
PEOPLE OF EVERY CLASS EXCEPT THE SCUM SUBJECTED TO VIOLENCE BY
MOBS.

Historian Frederick Lewis Schuman has written: "The net result of these hearings ... was to
picture Soviet Russia as a kind of bedlam inhabited by abject slaves completely at the mercy of
an organization of homicidal maniacs whose purpose was to destroy all traces of civilization and
carry the nation back to barbarism."{6}

Literally no story about the Bolsheviks was too contrived, too bizarre, too grotesque, or too
perverted to be printed and widely believed -- from women being nationalized to babies being
eaten (as the early pagans believed the Christians guilty of devouring their children; the same
was believed of the Jews in the Middle Ages). The story about women with all the lurid
connotations of state property, compulsory marriage, "free love", etc. "was broadcasted over the
country through a thousand channels," wrote Schuman, "and perhaps did more than anything else
to stamp the Russian Communists in the minds of most American citizens as criminal perverts".{7}
This tale continued to receive great currency even after the State Department was obliged to
announce that it was a fraud. (That the Soviets eat their babies was still being taught by the John
Birch Society to its large audience at least as late as 1978.){8}

This, then, was the American people's first experience of a new social phenomenon that had
come upon the world, their introductory education about the Soviet Union and this thing called
"communism". The students have never recovered from the lesson. Neither has the Soviet Union.

From the Red Scare of the 1920s to the McCarthyism of the 1950s to the Reagan Crusade against
the Evil Empire of the 1980s, the American people have been subjected to a relentless
anti-communist indoctrination. It is imbibed with their mother's milk, pictured in their comic books,
spelled out in their school books; their daily paper offers them headlines that tell them all they
need to know; ministers find sermons in it, politicians are elected with it, and Reader's Digest
becomes rich on it."

Joe and Sam...seriously...I don't care that you are Communist sympathizers..I only care that you take your poison alone and quit forcing it down everyone else's throat. It has only caused suffering around the world.

You are obviously scared of self-determination and to go it alone in this world.

I don't endorse "Corporate Welfare" either...at least they can be exposed and those that prop it up can be booted out of office.

You collectivist are the worst kind of corruption...mere snake oil salesmen, pedaling your fears as truth in an effort to shield yourself from the harsh realities of self-responsibilty. I believe you are weak in spirit and hopelessly cruel for trying to get others to join you in your misery. This does not mean I hold my disdain for the dupes that buy into your dribble. For them I only have frustration and a microphone.

I can only imagine what it must be like not to be a self-determined man, like yourselfs, who rose out of construction making minimum wage to a University Graduate and leader of men and warrior for freedom. I must be all that you hate.

You seem able, by the looks of your writing ability, to be so much more, yet you strive to be so much less and drag others with you. I have no pity for you.

Rewording of 2nd to last paragraph:

I can only imagine what it must be like not to be a self-determined man (like yourselves), as I rose from working construction making minimum wage to a University Degreem a leader of men, and warrior for freedom. I must be all you hate.

CCTJOEY

Forcing poison down who's throat? How can I,who have access to but a few people, be said to be forcing anything down anyone's throat? That is the job of Fox,et al who reach over a quarter of the households on the planet with their vitriolic brand of Cheap labor conservatism.

You wax poetic about "self-responsibility" but as stated above "to the Cheap labor Conservative if you have nothing, and can accumulate nothing "its your own fault". Thus does the conservative wash his hands of the poverty and exploitation inevitable in such an economic environment. It isn't his fault, it is "impersonal market forces". It is the "natural order" of things – which government has no business correcting, according to him.

All of which utterly overlooks all of the laws, institutions and government created infrastructure that benefits the wealthy. First on the list of these is the corporation itself. Corporations exist because state law creates their possibility. State laws give them a benefit no partnership enjoys – limited liability for investors. They were and are a government created means to encourage investment in large scale industrial enterprises.

In fact, the largest beneficiaries of all government built infrastructure, including hydroelectric dams, railroads, air traffic control systems, and even roads and schools, are the corporations who buy power, transport goods by rail and over the roads, and employ workers educated at public expense. They are the primary beneficiaries of the banking system, of Federal Reserve efforts to stabilize the currency, and of the regulation of securities creating confidence in the financial markets.

But Conservatives are oblivious to all this government spending, government infrastructure, and government regulation that directly benefits American corporations. They only see the government spending that helps the wage earner – and hypocritically claim that the "wage earner" should "stand on his own two feet" – as if they do."

By the way CCTJOEY,just for a little history lesson

"Cheap-labor conservatives have a long and sorry history of opposing virtually every advancement in this country’s development going right back to the American revolution Cheap-labor conservatives have hated Social Security and Medicare since their inception. Many cheap-labor conservatives are hostile to public education. They think it should be privatized. But why are we surprised. Cheap-labor conservatives opposed universal public education in its early days. School vouchers are just a backdoor method to “resegregate” the public schools.

Cheap-labor conservatives hate the progressive income tax like the devil hates holy water. Cheap-labor conservatives like budget deficits and a huge national debt for two reasons. A bankrupt government has a harder time doing any “social spending” – which cheap-labor conservatives oppose, and .

The ugly truth is that cheap-labor conservatives just don’t like working people. They don’t like “bottom up” prosperity, and the reason for it is very simple. lords have a harder time kicking them around. Once you understand this about the cheap-labor conservatives, the real motivation for their policies makes perfect sense. Remember, cheap-labor conservatives believe in social hierarchy and privilege, so the only prosperity they want is limited to them. They want to see absolutely nothing that benefits the guy – or more often the woman – who works for an hourly wage."

Joe...seriously, if yu can't back up your arguement with facts just stop. This fantasy character you constantly refer to as "The Cheap Labor Conservative", who is he/she? Seriously names...places...deeds...misdeeds.

You keep repeating the same bluster in an effort to prove a point, only I can give you less and less credibility towards your sanity.

WHO hates the "working peope"? Who are these "Lords"? Why are they evil as to want absolutely nothing that benefits a guy?

WHO?
What?
WHERE?
WHEN?
HOW?

Examples?

Are they the Bildaburgers?

Are they the the "New World Order"?

Answer up man? Otherwise just drop the reinforcing of your pathetic and imaginary points with more of them.

It is just creepy and paranoid...

Just like most leftist I have known...

So Joe, you got anything that you can post that was not already posted on Conceptual Gorilla or another website?? How about school or life?? Work??...of course not.

If you have to re-post that dribble, you must really be hurtin' for an original thought or experience.

Victim of public schools eh?

I am out man...I have training to do that will help some islamo-fascist P.O.S. meet his 72 virgins. Nice talking to such a mental giant....I will be sure to look out for some of those "cheap-labor conservatives" I will pass along their e-mail.

Let me give you some facts and an example of a "who" and in regards to reposting,if it has been put eloquently somewhere else why try and reinvent the wheel?:

"Unemployment was 23 percent when FDR took office in 1933. It dropped to 2.5 percent by time the next Republican was in the White House in 1953. It climbed back to 6.5 percent by the end of the Eisenhower administration. It dropped to 3.5 percent by the time LBJ left office. It climbed over 5 percent shortly after Nixon took office, and stayed there for 27 years, until Clinton brought it down to 4.5 percent early in his second term."

Wealthy cheap-labor conservatives like say, George W. Bush, buy the bonds and then earn tax free interest on the money they lend the government.[Check out Dubya’s financial disclosures. The guy is a big holder of the T-bills that finance the deficit he is helping to expand.] The deficit created by cheap-labor conservatives while they posture as being “fiscally conservative” – may count as the biggest con job in American history. “Free Trade,” globalization, NAFTA and especially GATT are intended to create a world-wide “corporate playground” where national governments serve the interests of corporations – which means “cheap labor.”"

By the way,in regards to your repeated bogus conservative idea that I am a "collectivist" "communist sympathizer" etc.

"it helps to know what "communism" really is. A few of the highlights. Communist countries have no or very little private business. The Communist manifesto calls for the abolition of land ownership. Centrally planned "command economies" are a central feature of Communist governments. And of course, Communist governments all have a "gulag" like police state.

So where is America's gulag? How many political prisoners did FDR, Truman, LBJ or Bill Clinton have? What was the name of our central planning agency? And when have Democrats even advocated – much less passed – anything like abolition of land ownership. Our FHA has in fact broadened land ownership, not restricted it. And how many personal fortunes have been built since the beginning of the New Deal in 1933. Where are your "facts" conservatives, to support this "liberals are really communists" crapola?

As for destroying the country, consider these unemployment numbers. This is the unemployment rate on the last day of the Truman, Johnson and Clinton administrations, respectively. 2.5%, 3.5% 4.5%. Under Clinton's presidency, unemployment dropped below 5 percent for the first time in 27 years. Yes, I kow about Jimmy Carter, he left with 7.5%, the same percentage he came in with. Now look at unemployment on the last day of the Hoover, Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan, and BushI adminstrations. 25%, 6.5%, 7.5%, 5.5%, 7.5%. For Hoover thats twenty five not two point five. Only Reagan left office with lower unemployment than he inherited, and his finishing unemployment rate pales beside that of Democratic administrations. Pitiful isn't it?

And of course, we know about the explosion in deficit spending under Reagan, BushI and now BushII. Under Clinton, he ended his presidency with a budget surplus, low interest rates, low inflation, and low unemployment – the same conditions that prevailed in every other Democratic administration except for one. Kennedy/Johnson sent men to the moon, in the age of the Detroit "muscle car". The modern suburban middle class was born after the war, when Democrats controlled Congress and occasionally the White House. New Deal and Great Society initiatives are so popular, even George W. Bush praises them. "

CCTJoey wrote "I have training to do that will help some islamo-fascist P.O.S. meet his 72 virgins"

Maybe you can help the Iraqi Police clean up the streets.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/10/04/while-all-eyes-are-on-foley-iraq-is-rapidly-deteriorating/