More on DU

Okay, I'm back and "I'm feeling much better now"*.

Turns out that I was suffering from a low-grade and nearly asymptomatic sinus infection. Except for the extreme fatigue. Finally I recognized it for what it was, crawled to my doctor to get some horse-pill antibiotics and slept 14 hours on Saturday night-Sunday morning.

In the meantime a guy named Roger Helbig tried to lure me into a debate over my post from nearly four years ago, "Depleted" Uranium and Sick Veterans:

The only criminals are those who lie about DU and mislead America's veterans and their families, hoping to get them to send them money. DU use never was a crime by any standard, international or otherwise. The liars, though, make a very convincing case and political writers like Fisk are easily duped because it looks politically correct.

There's more. Apparently Roger is on a high horse about the "lies" surrounding the dangers of Depleted Uranium. He also wanted my personal email address so we could exchange ideas... I told him no thanks on that since I prefer not to interact with the external world other than through my blog...

However, I did thank him graciously (well, sort of, for me...) and agreed that there is some controversy over the issue.

To which he replied:

You are buying the "new Agent Orange" claim without any facts to support it. Agent Orange is a man-made chemical; no human being has any naturally occuring Agent Orange or dioxin in their body. Every human being on Earth and all other animals as well has naturally occuring Uranium-238 (aka DU)in their body every day of their lives and ingests an infinitessimally tiny amount every day of that life as well.

As if that is supposed to make me feel better about it. But Roger says it's okay and not at all harmless. Yeah, I think I can remember a guy from Dow Chemical actually drinking a glassful to prove it was safe. I wonder whatever happened to him? I'm sure that the company "disappeared" him when he starting coming down with those classic symptoms, and his birth-defective deformed children were all sold to freakshow carnivals in South America...

Roger is also apparently easily confused. First he starts out by accusing me of saying something my first commenter left:

Farnworth - you and your wife have a lot to learn. You both are doing Saddam Hussein's bidding after he has been moldering in his grave.

And he doesn't seem to quite "get" the function of an indented blockquote:

The following does not sound like the AP reporter's writing - is this your personal commentary or what?

"Depleted" uranium is anything but. It still holds 60% of its original radioactivity, and it's used not only in artillery shells but also in tank armor. On impact it explodes into zillions of microscopic fragments and creates a cloud of toxic dust with a half-life of 4.5 BILLION years."

"Zillions" does not sound like it is out of the AP style book - it is a cartoon like word, not particulary descriptive.

So who is this guy? you ask. Well, he seems to be a professional pentagon-flack gadfly on the subject of DU -- here's a sample of Google hits on his name.

Since he appears to be on a mission to provide the officially-sanctioned "truth" about DU, it makes me wonder why he's just now getting around to my post from way back in 2006.


[* Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2]