Well, if the vets testimony will not work and our government manipulates our media and anything else it wants, what can anyone believe?
Hard science tends to get respect in these parts. Try diggin some up for us.
So now the government is manipulating the media? You know what, maybe you’re rig
The government does not manipulate the media.
The government does not manipulate content on the Internet, and especially not this post.
The government is not in control of your every source of information.
The Government is your friend.
Trust the Government.
That is all.
This message not manipulated by the US Government’s Department of Misinformation. Which doesn’t exist.
Joe Random, you’re my new hero 
One last off topic. Boyscouts posts sound a lot better if you imagine them in the voice of Dale Gribble from king of the hill.
Boy Scout11, how is it that these minute particles are small enough to enter the bloodstream, large enough to make these tiny cuts, and then small enough to be undetectable to doctors, etc.
To any here that may consider what I have said in this thread, I would also add, that many substances like the Anthrax shots and and other chemicals, that like many medicines in your medicine chest that claim they can cause such things as vomiting, convulsions and other nasty side effects, even unto death, even told of in the national media, the men and women in the armed forces are put at much higher risk, even though they are healthy before the shots and chemicals they encounter in the service.
That being said, I do firmly believe that the DU weapons that detonate do enter thru the lungs as told to me and they do course thru the blood system, making tiny cuts thru our soldiers, which can and will be almost undetectable. I further believe this government does not want to take responsibility for its actions, so it covers the cause and effect, which eliminates the burden of them having to pay our soldiers for what they suffer. An analogy would be, that just a hand full of our service people that make it back alive, that are maimed, are truly treated as heros, with all the recognition and pay, while the rest that are terribly maimed and killed, recieve nowhere near the same treatement.
This part of the board is called GREAT DEBATES and yet, people on this very thread use nothing more than insults to draw your attention from the realities in these matters. I offer things I see, that are not mainstream and always look for the real answers. I ask the toughest of questions and understand that I will be showered with insults as on every other board, but that is not to say, that I am right at any momjent or that I am wrong. As a matter of fact, I don’t mind being wrong at all, because I learn from it. I don’t even mind admitting it, but I also bring some good debate, even when my thinking is out on a limb, according to some.
If any here seek the truth, hard enough and long enough, they will hear the ring of truth in any persons words.
With respect to this board,
Jim Ryan
“Even unto death”? Speakest thou in sooth, stout yeoman? Egads, gadzooks, by our Lady! Thy pithy words do strike in terror at mine very soul, and I wettest my codpiece in very mortal panic!
Yet, I pray thee, ere we continue, would that thou wouldst make clear the connection betwixt anthrax inoculations and depleted uranium, as this vile groundling followest not thy mighty intellect as it doth leap like Nijinsky from topic to topic. Verily do I wallow in the excremental mire of ignorance. Enlighten me, and all generations will rise up and call thee blessed.
And what, prithee sirrah, mightest be the basis for yon belief of the Invasion of the Invisible Particles of Death and Unpleasantness? There be others - vile and contemptible caitiffs, I doubt not - who yet find little to value in the above. Some, as it haps, have engaged in scientific study of the very topic! I grant thee that many of the poltroons do work for that very nest of conspiracy and dark doings, the US government. And yet their words are fair and plausible, and do speak to the heart in a way that an anonymous poster named warbird, whose qualifications cannot be evaluated, fail to do.
What sayest thou? Doth thy vast and ranging powers, before which all lesser mortals must cower, extend so far as to provide a cite? May this coarse and cringing one, who hangs his laundry out to dry in the radiant sun of thy insight, be so bold as to request a trifle of back up for thy bold and daring assertions?
Yet do I extend unto thee the right hand of fellowship, and welcome thee to the merry band of adventurers we call the SDMB. May both thy loins, and the discussion, be fruitful.
Regards,
Shodan
BoyScout11:
How about factual references not “I have been told…”
No statements like: “I firmly believe…”
I have had an opportunity to examine a piece of depleted uranium. It is as described above as a heavier that lead METAL. It is a silvery color and after contact with air the surface oxidizes to a dark grey color. Easily cut with a hacksay, giving off sparkler like chips.
You appear to rely on unreliable sources of information. :rolleyes:
The easiest solution here is to remove things like Dran-O from your medicine chest. Likewise, Anthrax is no longer regarded as a cure for anything besides long-term oxygen toxicity (the leading cause of death among people who don’t die of other ailments first). I suggest you carefully review the contents of your own medicine chest before rooting around in mine.
You should have said so earlier. Here at the Straight Dope, we generally tend to ask for a “cite” when a new poster rests his argument on hearsay or belief. The fact that you firmly believe this to be true, however, casts your argument in a different light.
The fact that our soldiers “can and will be almost undetectable” makes me proud to be an American. Stealth fighters and bombers, new camouflage uniforms, and specially-bred Arabian horses whose hooves are practically silent in the desert all contribute to our advantage over any foe who would oppose us, and over several who wouldn’t!
Like I said, the Masons have been doing this for years. Your first sign that it’s a conspiracy is when the cause and the effect are completely hidden from public view. There’s an old conspiracy that was finally debunked about a particular kind of mammal that supposedly hid in trees, aided by protective coloration on its claws. Skeptics dismissed this as “an elephant painting its toenails” but you’ve never seen an elephant up in a tree, have you? Your case is clearly airtight.
No, an analogy would be four goats crossing a bridge, each exposed to the dangers of the troll lurking below. When they get home, the goats that didn’t get eaten by the troll get eaten by the farmer, whereas the goats that did get eaten by the troll don’t get eaten by the farmer.
I didn’t say it was a good analogy, just that it was an analogy.
I am shocked – shocked, and appalled – to find that insults are being handed out here. Where are mine?
So if you keep bringing up these arguments place after place, and keep getting showered with insults… maybe it’s for your own safety? I understand that a good shower often washes off dirt, dust, and other ceramic-like particles. Also, you can’t be too careful with the Illuminati around.
Now that would make a Great Debate.
You’re saying that the toxicity spreads all the way out to the limbs? So from the lungs, to the bloodstream… well, okay, so naturally to the limbs. Seriously, though… when are you going to bring this “good debate” you speak of?
I’m telling you man, they won’t hear the “ring of truth”. They’re going to hear the footsteps of the Illuminati and the Masons coming to silence them! I fear it may already be too late for you. If you leave now, you may yet escape. Here, take my Arabian horse – please! Now ride! Ride, as if Hell itself were at your heels!
Why don’t you detonate a bomb tipped with the DU and then tell us all what it looks like, if you can find it. Using one part of the senario is incomplete and rolling your eyes and complaining you know something when you don’t, is not part of a great debate. As this government refuses to confirm or deny many things to our maimed soldiers, so do they do the same with explosive, DU weapons.
For confirmation, just look at all the medical testing done on soldiers, without their knowledge. Just look at the nuclear testing done above ground in the early 50’s. I believe that is easily confirmed and the fallout rained down on our own people for countless, hundreds of miles downwind and how that cause many cancers, like thyroid and many others this government refuses to acknowledge.
My god… it’s full of ceramic-like stars! Seriously, though, can you name any US munitions that are both explosive and tipped with DU? More to the point, can you provide a link to a more-or-less authoritative source to back up your assertion? To my knowledge, DU is only used to tip projectiles such as 30mm ammunition, which leave their explosive components with the gun.
I’m glad we’re all on the same page now.
I’ve got a cunning plan. We should have some maimed soldiers dress up as un-maimed soldiers (or perhaps as Arabian horses) and sneak in there and ask them the questions that they won’t answer. Better yet, you and I can go in disguised as an Arabian horse. I’m absolutely riveted by your assertions, and I feel a burning need to hear these answers, so I’ll go in front.
No, don’t look! It’s nuclear testing, you fool; the flash will melt your eyeballs like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Speaking of which, did you see that warehouse at the end of the movie? Spooky, huh? I bet that’s where they keep the Roswell stuff and the proof that Uranium is really a ceramic.
We’ve been over this: “I believe” doesn’t cut it around here. You need to say “I firmly believe,” or else provide a link to some evidence. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if the second method might be far better after all. That Shodan fellow would probably calm down if you’d just cite your sources. Then again, he might not.
Countless hundreds? Try to narrow this down a little. I’ll admit that the fallout went a few hundreds of miles downwind, or even dozens of hundreds… how many times do you contend that the fallout circled the earth? And if it did circle the earth, then when did it finally descend down to ground level and cause Al Capone to have a burning sensation whenever he had to pee like a racehorse?
Besides, that was an atomic blast, which uses pleated uranium. The pleats give it the extra surface area necessary for a fission reaction. While those samples are out fission, however, their wife is home ironing, to get the pleats out of the remnants. That’s where we get de-pleated uranium.
I read on another forum, from a guy whose handle was LabelFiend, that the government actually puts warning labels on their nukes now, so that as the bomb is falling, you can read the Surgeon General’s warning. It lists the many side effects of nuclear blasts, like thyroid cancer, sunburn, and being blown into itsy bitsy ceramic-like things.
Of course, that was just his nickname, and it didn’t have a “U” in it, so perhaps he can’t be considered a reliable source.
Jurph says,–My god… it’s full of ceramic-like stars! Seriously, though, can you name any US munitions that are both explosive and tipped with DU? More to the point, can you provide a link to a more-or-less authoritative source to back up your assertion? To my knowledge, DU is only used to tip projectiles such as 30mm ammunition, which leave their explosive components with the gun.
Try DU tipped, explosive, Tomahawks and bunker buster bombs.
I don’t want to try them. They’re made of uranium, for god’s sake! Don’t you know that stuff’s dangerous?
Dude,
Well, it's a good thing that you don't mind being wrong.
You can firmly believe anything you want, but it won't make it right. You haven't produced one iota of evidence, despite the fact that if your hypothesis was correct, it would be absurdly easy to demonstrate. You are claiming that tiny shards of a radioactive substance are being circulated in the bloodstream and bodily fluids in large enough quantities that they can be passed on to others. If this were true, the materials could be centrifuged out and identified. Your claim that this isn't being done because the government wants to avoid taking the blame doesn't hold water because there are many, many civilian doctors who are not under the control of the military and who would love to get an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.
So, let us summarize why you are being raked over the coals here.
a) You posit a theory with no supporting scientific evidence whatsoever. No evidence of the shardlike ceramic nature of DU dust. No evidence of this substance being isolated from bodily fluids.
b) You believe that “I heard x on another message board” is compelling evidence.
c) Your theory violates what we know of biology and materials science.
d) You claim that your theory is true but is being covered up by the government which exponentially increases the likelihood that the person proposing that theory wears tin foil headgear.
You also have a mistaken idea about how the Great Debates forum works. If your post laughable theories, people will laugh at them.
Verily, I wouldst not bet thereon.
All seriousness aside, Boy Scout11, you need to focus the discussion. What is the basis for your belief that depleted uranium is causing widespread and serious health issues for Gulf War vets? And what symptoms, specifically, are you alleging it causes?
The thing of it is, it really doesn’t establish a point to say “somebody told me so on another messageboard”. We need better evidence than that. Stories like “Joe Blow was in the military during Desert Storm, and now his wife comes out in hives every time they do the horizontal bop” are what’s known as anecdotal evidence, which is considered weak evidence. We don’t know that the story is really true, if it only happened to one person, if Joe was ever really in contact with depleted uranium, if DU really caused it, etc. Whereas valid studies that state “the incidence of developing a third eye in your armpit is one in sixty million for the general public, but for Gulf War vets it is one in three” are a good deal more definitive. This is, of course, subject to the usual caveats about the difference between causation and correlation.
It may be well and true that you firmly believe in what you say. That’s fine. Here on the SDMB we subscribe more to what might be known as the Bohr Horseshoe theory of intellectual inquiry.
Niels Bohr was a famous physicist, who created the first modern theory of hydrogen atomic structure. An interviewer in his office saw that Bohr had a lucky horseshoe nailed over his door. The interviewer asked if Bohr really thought that a horseshoe over your door would bring you good luck. Bohr replied that no, he was too much a scientist to believe any such thing. “But,” Bohr added, “I am told that a horseshoe will bring you good luck whether you believe in it or not.”
That’s the sort of thing the scientific method studies - things that are true whether you believe in them or not. Unless and until you can come up with evidence to convince people who don’t already believe, you are going to be treated pretty as you have been to date - as an opportunity for us smarty-pants to show off for each other.
Not that anyone is likely to do better at it than Jurph. 
Regards,
Shodan
Please provide a cite for either of those using Uranium. “I heard it from some guy” is not a cite.
By the way, you may also want to consider that Uranium is significantly less hard than a good tool steel. According to www.matweb.com Beta-Annealed Uranium has a Vickers hardness of 190. S5 tool steel has a Vickers hardness of 340. Uranium is used in projectiles not because it is sharp - we have far cheaper ways of making harder, sharper materials - but because it is remarkably dense and flammable when shattered into powder by impact.
Okay, well if we’ve got to cite our sources, then I submit the following.
The Washington Post on January 28, 2001, printed the following article, entitled “Risks from uranium limited, experts say.” Now, in this article, they don’t quote warbird, but they do quote several studies dating back to the 1940s. I’ll include a short excerpt here:
The bolding above is my own, and while I’ll admit it’s not entirely on topic – since it addresses the concerns of soldiers from the more recent Kosovo conflict, I submit that the percentage of precision-guided munitions (PGMs) used in Kosovo was 17%, where in the first Gulf War it was only 7.4%. What does precision guidance have to do with anything? Well, as you said before, Tomahawks and “bunker busters” have depleted uranium tips – it turns out that you don’t put DU on the nose of a weapon unless you’re reasonably sure it will go in nose-first and on target. So, PGMs have a larger DU content than other weapons. That means that a given soldier standing near a given blast in Kosovo would be much more likely to inhale DU dust than in a similar situation in Gulf War I.
Also, notice the large number of countries doing the studies – surely not all of them are controlled by the Bavarian Illuminati, in sinister league to hide the truth from us?
Hopefully you’ll be along to refute my facts now that I’ve cited a few. I really hoped you’d send out at least a stalking horse of an argument before I was forced to go dig up some real evidence.
Having worked with DU, I can tell you its most dangerous aspect is the possibility of being dropped on one’s foot. INAC…wait, I am a Chemist…it does behave like a metal, not exploding into minute little jagged knife blades. I think the whole DU thing is a smoke screen. What’s really threatening our loyal soldiers is DHMO, dihydrogen monoxide. http://www.circus.com/~nodhmo/
I think you should put some serious research into DHMO before accusing poor DU.
LOL,
LOL, you claim it would be absurdly easy to demonstrate, if what I claim was true. Ok, why don’t you show us why a DU tipped bunker buster or Tomahawk could not produce what I claim, when number one, DU seems to be very soft according to one person here and during the heat and explosive power of one of those bombs, how it could not superheat and crystalize those particles during the blast, so that those tiny, hard ceramic, or glass like shards could not enter the blood stream, thru the lungs.
We’re not allowed to use personal insults in Great Debates. However, we are allowed to say that your * argument * is idiotic without drawing any conclusions as to the person who is making that argument.
I don’t see why I have to take on the burden of proof when you’re the one making the extraordinary claims. There have been many studies on DU, many of which are published on the internet. Many of these are from organizations that are not sympathetic with the government. Find a citation from a respected scientific organization that states that DU forms a hard ceramic-like oxide with characteristic sharp edges and we can continue this debate. Otherwise it’s not really worth our time.
That’s not how this works. He says, “it should be absurdly easy to demonstrate,” which is an invitation for you to prove it. The burden of proof lies with you. You assert that a metal can become a ceramic; all you have to do is use the URL tag to cite a few examples, and you should be able to convince us.
Not “seems to be” – DU is softer than steel. We know that now, because he used the URL tag to cite his source. Notice that you quoting him is not the authoritative cite! It’s his citation, which contains an external link to a reputable website.
I could just as easily ask, “during the high winds of a hurricane, how could the raindrops not turn into maple syrup and seek out pancakes?” But I didn’t ask that, because there’s no reason to think that it happens. Again, the burden of proof is on you: demonstrate to us that the after-effects of an explosion near DU result in superheated and crystalized particles.
…seems reasonable…
…seems less reasonable since URANIUM IS A METAL…
Under the white-hot spotlight of scrutiny, I can’t see anything: the glare from your tinfoil hat is blinding me. Seriously: “glass like shards”? Find me a source, just one source, that states that uranium does this. PLEASE. I want to see it. In the immortal words of Fox Mulder, I WANT TO BELIEVE.
Use Google. Call Dr. Science. Quote me lyrics from a They Might Be Giants song. Cite any source, however trivial. Please?
Oh, I can answer this one! In my post above, I quoted the Washington post article as saying “Most inhaled uranium is immediately exhaled, with only about 1 percent retained in the lungs. Similarly, ingested uranium is rapidly excreted, with little absorbed into the bloodstream.” Now, I don’t want to overtax you – we’re still working on getting you to cite anything, let alone anything relevant – but could you provide some sort of source that refutes this article?