Butterfly Cauldron

So, there's a new study out that shows conclusively that being fat does indeed lead to an earlier death. Seriously. If you're fat, you're going to die earlier, we swear, so you know, diet already. And when I read the wire story at work yesterday I was a bit...uncomfortable. Not because I believed it, but because I knew a lot of people would. So, when I found Paul Campos' piece on just how those results were arrived at I had to post it. Because I'm sick of being told I'm going to die because I'm fat. Listen, we're all going to die. Why? Because we're alive and living things die. Period. We don't know when and we don't know how, but it's going to happen. The point is to live a life you enjoy while you've got the time. I'd rather live to be 75 a happy fat woman than live to be 80 a miserable, calorie-counting, food-obsessed not-so-fat person. It's a matter of quality, not quantity. Even though, the research still shows being fat won't kill you. Idiots. And so, Paul Campos on how they tormented the study to say what they wanted it to say:

Confessions extracted under torture are notoriously unreliable. A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine illustrates this point well.

The study analyzes the relationship between weight and mortality risk. In particular, it tries to determine whether being “overweight” (this is currently defined by our public health authorities as 146 to 174 pounds for an average height woman, and 174 to 208 pounds for an average height man) is associated with an increased risk of death.

This is an especially controversial issue for two reasons. First, most Americans who the government claims weigh too much are in this “overweight” category. Second, many studies find either that there is no increased mortality risk associated with being “overweight,” or indeed that the risk of death among the so-called “overweight” is actually lower than among so-called “normal weight” individuals.

In particular, a 2005 study led by CDC researcher Katherine Flegal found 86,000 excess deaths per year in the United States among “normal weight” people, when comparing their mortality risk to that of so-called “overweight” persons. Because of the current panic over fat, this study caused quite a furor, even though its findings were consistent with many other investigations of the same issue.

It seems the authors of the new study in the New England Journal of Medicine were determined to refute Flegal’s findings — even if they had to subject their data to techniques that violate the scientific equivalent of the Geneva Convention.
The researchers collected data from 527,265 AARP members, who were followed for ten years. What they found was exactly the same result reported by Flegal and her colleagues: Among both men and women, “overweight” people had the lowest mortality risk. This result, however, was clearly unacceptable. So they began torturing their data.

First, they threw out any subjects who had ever smoked. The justification for doing so in studies exploring the relationship between weight and health is that some people smoke to remain thin, so increased health risk among thin people may be a product of smoking rather than thinness. (In fact, in this study the percentage of “normal weight” people who had never smoked was higher than the percentage of “overweight” and “obese” never-smokers, but never mind.)

Yet even after limiting their analysis to never-smokers, the authors found no increased mortality risk among the “overweight” when compared to so-called “normal weight” people. So they then engaged in the methodological equivalent of waterboarding. Bizarrely, rather than using the weights of the subjects at the time they entered the study, the authors asked the subjects what they had weighed at age 50, and used this weight instead (all the subjects were over 50 at the study’s start, and some were as old as 71; 40 percent did not even respond to the question about what they weighed at age 50, which says something about the reliability of the responses the authors did get).

This, at last, produced a (modest) increase in mortality risk associated with “overweight,” thus allowing the authors to draw their conclusion that “overweight is associated with an increased risk of death.”

But notice how this result was produced. Since the “overweight” people in the study still had the lowest death risk — even after the authors tossed out 70 percent of their subject pool by limiting their analysis to never-smokers — the study found “overweight” associated with an increased risk of death only among a particular subgroup: people who had been “overweight” at age 50, but were at a “normal weight” when they later entered the study.

In other words, what the study really found is that for middle-aged “overweight” people weight loss increases the risk of death significantly! (This, by the way, is a very common finding in studies of this sort.)

The authors, needless to say, fail to note this awkward fact, which does not merely contradict, but actually inverts, the public health message their study is intended to bolster. Will journalists covering the study manage to figure this out on their own? Fat chance.

Labels: fat, health, lies

Ah, those golden promises our Frat Boy in Chief made. Standing in Jackson Square, looking all regal and presidential. Whatever it takes, he said. We're standing with you until the end, he said.

Bullshit.

Nearly half of New Orleans was still under water when President Bush stood in the Crescent City’s historic Jackson Square and swore he would “do what it takes” to rebuild the communities and lives that had been laid to waste two weeks before by Hurricane Katrina.

“Our goal is to get the work done quickly,” the president said.

He promised to spend federal money wisely and accountably. And he vowed to address the poverty exposed by the government’s inadequate Katrina response “with bold action.”

A year after the storm, the federal government has proven slow and unreliable in keeping the president’s promises.
The job of clearing debris left by the storm remains unfinished, and has been plagued by accusations of fraud and price gouging. Tens of thousands of families still live in trailers or mobile homes, with no indication of when or how they will be able to obtain permanent housing. Important decisions about rebuilding and improving flood defenses have been delayed. And little if anything has been done to ensure the welfare of the poor in a rebuilt New Orleans.

How has the government performed in the most critical areas of the recovery and reconstruction effort?

EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE: A June report by the Government Accountability Office concluded that FEMA wasted between $600 million and $1.4 billion on “improper and potentially fraudulent individual assistance payments.”

Government auditors found that debit cards distributed to Katrina victims were used to pay for things like Dom Perignon champagne, New Orleans Saints season tickets and adult-oriented entertainment. The audit also found that people used fictional addresses, fake Social Security numbers and the identities of dead people to fraudulently register for assistance. FEMA also double-deposited funds in the accounts of 5,000 out of the nearly 11,000 debit card holders.

CLEANUP: The job still isn’t done. More than 100 million cubic yards of debris have been cleared from the region affected by Katrina. So far the government has spent $3.6 billion, a figure that might have been considerably smaller had the contracts for debris removal been subject to competitive bidding.

Working through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA gave each of four companies contracts worth up to $500 million to clear hurricane debris. This spring government inspectors reported that the companies — AshBritt Inc. of Pompano Beach, Fla., Phillips and Jordan Inc. of Knoxville, Tenn., Ceres Environmental Services Inc. of Brooklyn Park, Minn. and ECC Operating Services Inc. of Burlingame, Calif. — charged the government as much as four to six times what they paid their subcontractors who actually did the work.

HOUSING: In his Jackson Square speech, Bush said his goal was to “get people out of shelters by the middle of October.”
By and large that goal was met, with all but a few thousand of 270,000 Katrina evacuees out of shelters by mid-October.
But that didn’t solve the monumental housing problem created by Katrina. Most of the people who had been in shelters went to hotel rooms, with FEMA picking up the bill. About 50,000 families who had evacuated to other cities were promised a year of rent assistance, though in April FEMA began cutting off some who the agency said did not qualify for the program. More than 100,000 families moved into trailers or mobile homes parked either in the yards of their damaged houses or in makeshift compounds.

Meanwhile, FEMA flailed and flip-flopped on its contracting policies for trailers, mobile homes and other temporary shelter. The first big contracts were handed out non-competitively to four well-connected companies — Shaw Group, Bechtel Corp., CH2M Hill Inc. and Fluor Corp. Then in October FEMA director R. David Paulison promised to rebid the contracts after Congress complained that smaller companies, especially local and minority-owned firms, should have a chance to compete for the work.

A month after that, FEMA said the new contracts would not be awarded until February. That deadline came and went, and then in March a FEMA official announced that the contracts weren’t going to be rebid after all.

A week later FEMA reversed itself again, giving up to $3.6 billion in business to small and minority-owned firms.
“I promised Congress I was going to bid them out, and that’s what I’m doing,” Paulison said.

REBUILDING: Despite Bush’s Jackson Square promise to “undertake a close partnership with the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, the city of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities,” state and local officials had a hard time reaching a deal for federal aid to help residents rebuild their ruined homes.

In January the administration rejected a $30 billion plan for Louisiana as too expensive. The White House also balked at subsidizing the reconstruction of homes in flood plains, a policy that would have excluded all but a small fraction of Louisiana homeowners whose houses were significantly damaged.

The state finally won funding in July for the $9 billion ’Road Home’ program, which pays homeowners up to $150,000 either to repair their damaged property or rebuild elsewhere in the state. People who leave the state are eligible for a 60 percent buyout. The money, which is being distributed through escrow accounts to prevent fraud, is just becoming available a year after the hurricane.

LEVEES: The federal government hasn’t broken any promises with regard to flood protection — mostly because it has assiduously avoided making any.

White House Katrina recovery czar Donald Powell has said that the administration intends to wait for the completion of a $20 million U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study, due in December 2007, before it decides whether to enhance the flood protection system in southern Louisiana enough to resist a Category 5 hurricane.

A preliminary draft of the study released in July was widely criticized because it omitted five projects that state officials say should be started right away. At the same time, it focused on a massive levee that would stretch hundreds of miles along the Louisiana coast while paying only lip service to the critical task of shoring up the state’s vanishing wetlands, which provide a natural barrier to hurricane flooding.

“We’re wasting our time and money and attention contemplating large-scale levees across the entire state,” said Tim Searchinger, an attorney with the advocacy group Environmental Defense.

The federal government has committed about $6 billion since Katrina to repair and improve the Big Easy’s existing levee system. The first goal was to bring the levee system back to “pre-Katrina” levels by the beginning of the 2006 hurricane season on June 1. That goal was largely achieved. The next step will be to make improvements that will bring the system up to what is variously called Category 3 or 100-year protection by 2010.

But planners and state and local officials say that the levees need to be brought up to Category 5 protection, a level that would cost up to $30 billion, if people are to have confidence moving back to areas destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

POVERTY: Bush offered three proposals in Jackson Square to help combat poverty around the Gulf Coast region. Two of them never went anywhere — the creation of “worker recovery accounts” that would help evacuees find work by paying for school, job training or child care while they looked for employment, and an Urban Homesteading Act that would give poor people building sites for new homes that they would either finance themselves or obtain through programs such as Habitat for Humanity.

A third proposal, the creation of a Gulf Opportunity zone, did come to pass. Signed by President Bush in December, the legislation gives $8.7 billion in tax breaks to developers of low-income housing projects, small businesses and individuals affected not just by Katrina but by hurricanes Rita and Wilma as well. The law also provides debt restructuring for financially troubled local governments in the area.

Let's see...waste, fraud, massive piles of shit still piled, lack of housing, lack of water or electricity or heat in most of the city. And $30 billion is too much to pay for New Orleans, but how much are we paying to level Middle Eastern countries? And they keep trying to downgrade Katrina, saying she wasn't really a Cat 5. She was only a Cat 4. Or no, wait, she was just a Cat 3. Why? So they can justify not building the levees up enough to withstand another one. Because we're not worth it. But I bet if New Orleans gets taken over by wealthy white people, those levees will be able to withstand higher than a Cat 5.

Labels: Katrina, lies, outrage

Of course, it's doing much, much worse to the Iraqis who cannot escape. At least our soldiers get to come home. Our government is using weapons coated with depleted uranium. The government, of course, says such weapons are perfectly safe. Or, you know, as safe as a weapon can be. And yet, we get stories like this. (Sorry, this is gonna be a long post. But I think the story is worth hearing in its fullness.)

Are depleted uranium weapons, America’s newest armaments, sickening U.S. troops?
By DEBORAH HASTINGS
AP National Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange juice to wash down all the pills — morphine, methadone, a muscle relaxant, an antidepressant, a stool softener. Viagra for sexual dysfunction. Valium for his nerves.
Four hours later, Herbert Reed will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to cut the pain clenching every part of his body. He will do it twice more before the day is done.

Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin. Migraines cleave his skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil.

There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is sure what it is. He believes, but cannot convince anyone caring for him, that the military’s new favorite weapon has made him terrifyingly sick.

In the sprawling bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he has many caretakers. An internist, a neurologist, a pain-management specialist, a psychologist, an orthopedic surgeon and a dermatologist. He cannot function without his stupefying arsenal of medications, but they exact a high price.

“I’m just a zombie walking around,” he says.

Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him. He now walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon’s arsenal of it — thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.

A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter. As tank armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous storage sites across the country. Meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.

Reed says he unknowingly breathed DU dust while living with his unit in Samawah, Iraq. He was med-evaced out in 2003 because of herniated spinal discs. Then began a strange series of symptoms he’d never experienced in his previously healthy life.

At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., he ran into a buddy from his unit. And another and another. In the tedium of hospital life between doctor visits and the dispensing of meds, they began to talk.

“We all had migraines. We all felt sick,” Reed says. “The doctors said, ’It’s all in your head.’ “

Then the medic from their unit showed up. He too, was suffering. That made eight sick soldiers from the 442nd Military Police, an Army National Guard unit of mostly cops and correctional officers from the New York area.
But the medic knew something the others didn’t.

Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, and unexploded ordnance. They’d brought radiation-detection devices. The readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the desert rather than live in the station ruins.

“We got on the Internet,” Reed said, “and we started researching depleted uranium.”

Then they hired a lawyer.
———

Reed, Gerard Matthew, Raymond Ramos, Hector Vega, Augustin Matos, Anthony Yonnone, Jerry Ojeda and Anthony Phillip all have depleted uranium in their urine, according to tests available only overseas.

In December 2003, their samples were sent to Germany, where they were analyzed by a Frankfurt professor who developed a depleted uranium test with Randall Parrish, a professor of isotope geology at the University of Leicester in Britain.
The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the U.S. Army, claiming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but concealed the risks.

The Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe, and not that worrisome.

Four of the highest-registering samples from Frankfurt were sent to the VA. The results came back negative, Reed said. “Their test just isn’t as sophisticated,” he said.

The VA’s testing methodology is safe and accurate, the agency says. More than 2,100 soldiers from the current war have asked to be tested; only 8 had DU in their urine, the VA said.

The term depleted uranium is linguistically radioactive. Simply uttering the words can prompt a reaction akin to preaching atheism at a tent revival. Heads shake, eyes roll, opinions are yelled from all sides.

“The Department of Defense takes the position that you can eat it for breakfast and it poses no threat at all,” said Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center, which helps veterans with various problems, including navigating the labyrinth of VA health care. “Then you have far-left groups that ... declare it a crime against humanity.”

An estimated 286 tons of DU munitions were fired by the U.S. in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991. An estimated 130 tons were shot toppling Saddam Hussein.

At the other end are a collection of conspiracy-theorists and Internet proselytizers who say using such weapons constitutes genocide.

There are several studies on how DU affects animals, though their results are not, of course, directly applicable to humans. Military research on mice shows that depleted uranium can enter the bloodstream and come to rest in bones, the brain, kidneys and lymph nodes. Other research in rats shows that DU can result in cancerous tumors and genetic mutations, and pass from mother to offspring, resulting in birth defects.

Iraqi doctors reported significant increases in birth defects and childhood cancers after the 1991 invasion.

Depleted uranium can contaminate soil and water, and coat buildings with radioactive dust.

In 2005, the U.N. Environmental Program identified 311 polluted sites in Iraq. Cleaning them will take at least $40 million and several years, the agency said.

———

Fifteen years after it was first used in battle, there is only one U.S. government study monitoring veterans exposed to depleted uranium.

Number of soldiers in the survey: 32. Number of soldiers in both Iraq wars: more than 900,000.
The study group’s size is controversial — far too small, say some experts — and so are the findings of the voluntary, Baltimore-based study.

It will take years to determine to what extent depleted uranium affected soldiers from this war. After Vietnam, veterans, in numbers that grew with the passage of time, complained of joint aches, night sweats, bloody feces, migraine headaches, unexplained rashes and violent behavior; some developed cancers.

It took more than 25 years for the Pentagon to acknowledge that Agent Orange — a corrosive defoliant used to melt the jungles of Vietnam and flush out the enemy — was linked to those sufferings.
———

Herbert Reed is an imposing man, broad shouldered and tall. He strides into the VA Medical Center in the Bronx with the presence of a cop or a soldier. Since the Vietnam War, he has been both.

His hair is perfect, his shirt spotless, his jeans sharply creased. But there is something wrong, an imperfection made more noticeable by a bearing so disciplined. It is a limp — more like a hitch in his get-along.

It is the only sign, albeit a tiny one, that he is extremely sick.

Sleep offers no release. He dreams of gunfire and bombs and soldiers who scream for help. He never gets there in time.
At 54, he is a veteran of two wars and a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department.
He was in perfect health, he says, before being deployed to Iraq.

According to military guidelines, he should have heard the words depleted uranium long before he ended up at Walter Reed. He should have been trained about its dangers, and how to avoid prolonged exposure to its toxicity and radioactivity.

Reed and the seven others from his unit hate what has happened to them, and they speak of it at public seminars and in politicians’ offices. It is something no VA doctor can explain. They feel like spent rounds, kicked to the side of battle.
They feel like men who once were warriors and now are old before their time because of a multitude of miseries that has no name.

Labels: lies, outrage, war

Remember boys and girls, being fat means you're going to DIE!!!

ATLANTA (AP) — Obese people face a higher risk of passing out — or worse — in the nation’s current heat wave, some health experts say.

Layers of fat make it extra difficult for a body to dissipate heat, or to move to a cool location. Add in diabetic dehydration and other conditions common in the obese, and it’s a recipe for trouble

Because, you know, being fat means you can't walk. Or move. Or, I don't know, lift a bottle of water to hydrate yourself. And you certainly can't find air conditioning. Or shade. Or dip into a swimming pool. Or cold shower. Or any of the several thousand things you can do to cool off. No, being fat means you're doomed to pass out or worse! because it's fricking hot.

As I said: bullshit.

As a fat person who has lived in a place where the temperatures routinely get to 100 or more, I've never passed out or had heat exhausting or any of the other bad things that could happen. When I get hot, I find a way to cool down. It's not that hard. A bottle of cold water can do it, a cold compress on my forehead, whatever. Being fat doesn't mean you're stupid, okay?

In the years 1999 through 2003, about 1,200 U.S. deaths were reported in which heat-related illness was a major factor, according to a CDC report published last week. The report did not examine obesity as a risk factor, but found cardiovascular disease was an underlying cause of death in 57 percent of those cases and diabetes was in 3 percent of those cases.

Ooooh. I get it. It's not being fat that's the problem, it's having heart problems or diabetes. And you know, only fat people have those diseases. And all fat people have them. Even those of us who don't.

Bullshit. Just utter bullshit.

Labels: fat, lies

I don't know why this surprises me. It's not like anyone with half a braincell believes this administration actually values human life, but this is kinda low. President Fratboy and his Band of Very Merry Monkies have plans to...reshape...1-800-SUICIDE. Pam's House Blend has the story.

So. Let's think of all the ways this could go wrong, shall we? Anyone remember FEMA? That worked really well, didn't it?

I never used suicide hotlines when I was, well, suicidal. But I could have. I could have used the reassurance that I wasn't insane or alone or as fucked up as I thought I was. Two million people helped by this hotline. Two million people. Or do they not matter? Does the figure 'millions' only count when it's totally terminated pregnancies or dollars spent in Iraq? I get so confused, what with that crazy womb of mine making me all fuzzy-headed.

And can I just scream at the notion of "faith-based" suicide prevention??? That's what my family tried with me and frankly, it only made it worse. I have a good idea of what those sessions will be like.

Preacher: Now, Susie, why do you feel like killing yourself?
Susie: Well, I just....I just hurt all the time. And I'm sad. I can't stop crying and I think sometimes I hear voices and...
Preacher: Voices? Oh, Susie, that's just Satan trying to tempt you! You can't let him win, Susie. Here, read these Bible verses everytime you start to feel a little sad.
Susie: But, I don't just feel sad. I want to carve HELP ME into my skin with a rusty knife and...
Preacher: Susie, do you want to make Jesus cry? Aren't you grateful for his sacrifice on the cross? How can you be so selfish?
Susie: *blinkblink* Can I borrow that letter opener?

And really, do we need this government having access to personal information? Of people who are in pain and apt to be...less than themselves? I know that when I was suicidial, the things I said and felt and did were not reflective of who I truely am. If those things had been recorded, put in a database and pulled up years later? Shit. I was the most unstable person on the planet, a far cry from where I am now. And I'm grateful that no one has a record of that, that it's all in my mind. Because otherwise, there'd be all kinds of reasons to deny me jobs, medical treatment, loans, whatever.

This is fucking scary, the way this government keeps collecting data on people and most people just...don't notice. Sure, today they're not coming after you, but who do you think is going to protect you when the rest of us have been collected, cataloged and put on a shelf?

Labels: culture o'death, depression, lies, mental illness, suicide