Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates, by Arundhati Roy

[Count Zero]

No man, the info on DU doesn't hold. You know, I'm in my last semester in college and I'm a physics student. He's knowledge on nuclear physics isn't up to squat.

No element decays through gamma. They only change internal energy states through gamma. And since the half-line on U-238 is huge, it barely decays at all! _That_ is what half-life means. The guy has no idea of what he's talking about. He didn't even know what a Becquerel was....

If the chart on the webpage is correct, 1 kilogram of U-238 has an activity of around 12 MBq (megabecquerels), that's in the order of milicuries, and _will_ cause you cancer (as I said, all that stuff is gamma or x-rays). And that's a whole lot more than the radioactive isotopes found normally in the human body as he suggested in the other text.

Seriously Undertoad, you should review your sources. Some guy ranting on a website is not enough to debunk something like that. If DU wasn't harmful all they had to do is put some physicist saying so on TV.

About Hugo Chavez, here's some things I found quickly:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0416-03.htm
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/v...ditorials.html
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=27302
http://www.observer.co.uk/internatio...688071,00.html

And if you don't trust any of it, keep in mind that all the stuff happening here on South America in the seventies wasn't acknowledged in the US until the CIA papers leaked some decades later.

One often-quoted progressive argument is that the Arabic area is incapable of supporting Democracy, why make such a historical gamble by leaving everything in the hands of the people?

Then why the hell is Bush doing all this in the name of democracy?

By the way, that's one of the most stupid and racist comments I've heard from you. Iraq was enjoying democracy before Saddam was put into power by the US. Same is true for other countries in the region.

And about taking Saddam out, the reasons why supporting popular movements didn't work was because they never tried it. The reasons for that is that a democratic government in Iraq that reflects the people's interest wouldn't reflect the interests of the US. That's why Saddam was there in the first place, and he would continue to be there hadn't him taken a mind of his own and gone against the US.

To Whit:

The morale of the soldiers isn't a justification for war. And saying that backing off would kill more soldiers than advancing is ridiculous. With the type of equipment they have, they could back out and the Iraqis wouldn't be able to follow them even if they wanted to.

You can stop the war with public pressure. If congress, even after the elections, knows that the public is against it, they'll comply with the wishes of the population.

About wiping out the whole population, doing that while everyone is looking would look pretty bad. And why even bother with them? They wouldn't gain much by wiping them out. All I'm saying is that they're certainly not doing this _for_ the people. And if they get in the way, they'll be killed. There's no such thing as "humanitarian war".

About the silent majority, they're the ones that are being polled. They're not silent when speaking on the phone.

Saddam came into power through a coup, and not through popular movements. I'm saying the world community should support _popular_ movements. It's much harder than bombing the whole place, but it's ethically correct.

On the rigging of the polls, suppose you're correct and both ABC and NYTimes rigged them. Why? They're generally pro-war.