LEAVE YOUR CRITICAL THINKING AT THE DOOR THEN........
LAUGH NOW.............CRY LATER
QueEx said:
<font size="4">LOL</font size>
MALCOLM X:
.....
If you don't think that they [the Government and the Press]
are in cahoots -- watch! They are ALL interested, or NONE of them
are interested! It's not a staggering thing. They're not going to
say anything in advance that's being given by any Black people who
believe in functioning beyond the scope of the ground rules that are
laid down by the liberal element of the power structure. When you
begin thinking for yourself, you frighten them. And they try to
block your getting to the Public for fear that if the Public listens
to you, then the Public won't listen to them anymore.
They've got certain Negroes whom they have to keep pumping up in the
newspapers to make them look like leaders, so that the People will
keep on following them no matter how many knots they get on the head
following him. This is how "the man" does it. And if you don't wake
up and find out HOW he does it -- I tell you -- they'll be building
gas chambers and gas ovens pretty soon. I don't mean those kinds you got at home in your kitchen.
Another example, at the international level, of how skillfully they
use this trickery, was in the the Congo. In the Congo, airplanes
were dropping bombs on African villages. African villages don't have
a defense against bombs. And the pilot can't tell who the bomb is
being dropped upon. When a bomb hits the village, EVERYTHING goes.
These pilots -- flying planes filled with bombs, dropping these
bombs on African villages -- were destroying women, were destroying
children, were destroying babies. You never heard any outcry over
here about that! And it had started way back in June. They would
drop bombs on African villages that would blow that village apart,
and everything in it: man, woman child and baby.
No outcry! No sympathy! No support! No concern! Because the PRESS
didn't project it in such a way that it would be designed to GET
your sympathy. They know how to put something so that you will
sympathize with it, and they know how to put it so that you'll be
against it. I'm telling you, they are MASTERS at it. And if you
don't develop the analytical ability to read between the lines of
what they're saying -- I'm telling you again -- they'll be building
those gas ovens. And before you wake up, you'll be in one of them,
just like the Jews ended up in gas ovens over there in Germany.
You are in a society that is just as capable of building gas ovens
for Black people as Hitler's society was.
This was mass murder, in the Congo, of women and children. But there
was no outcry, not even from the White liberals -- not even from
your friends. Why? Because they made it appear that it was a
humanitarian project. They said that the planes were being flown by
American-trained, anti-Castro, Cuban pilots. This is propaganda,
too. As soon as you hear that they're American-trained, you say:
"Oh, that's alright. That's us." And of the anti-Castro Cubans, you
say: "Oh, that's alright, too, because if they're against Castro,
whoever else they're against, that's good, because Castro is a
monster."
Do you see how, step-by-step, they grab your mind?
These pilots are hired ... their salaries are paid by the United
States Government. These pilots are called "mercenaries."
A mercenary is not someone who kills you because he is patriotic.
He kills you for blood money. He is a hired killer! This is what is
meant by "a mercenary". And they are able to take these HIRED
KILLERS, put them in AMERICAN planes, with AMERICAN bombs, and drop
them on African villages, blowing to bits Black men, Black women,
Black children, Black babies. And you Black people are sitting over
here, cool, like it doesn't even involve you. You're a FOOL !!
They'll do it to them today. They'll do it to you tomorrow.
eewwll said:
LOL.
I'm never amazed by the conspiracy theories posted here.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. . . . clearly racist.
—President Clinton's apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment to the eight remaining survivors, May 16, 1997
For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,”1 their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”
Using Human Beings as Laboratory Animals
The true nature of the experiment had to be kept from the subjects to ensure their cooperation. The sharecroppers' grossly disadvantaged lot in life made them easy to manipulate. Pleased at the prospect of free medical care—almost none of them had ever seen a doctor before—these unsophisticated and trusting men became the pawns in what James Jones, author of the excellent history on the subject, Bad Blood, identified as “the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history.”
The study was meant to discover how syphilis affected blacks as opposed to whites—the theory being that whites experienced more neurological complications from syphilis whereas blacks were more susceptible to cardiovascular damage. How this knowledge would have changed clinical treatment of syphilis is uncertain. Although the PHS touted the study as one of great scientific merit, from the outset its actual benefits were hazy. It took almost forty years before someone involved in the study took a hard and honest look at the end results, reporting that “nothing learned will prevent, find, or cure a single case of infectious syphilis or bring us closer to our basic mission of controlling venereal disease in the United States.” When the experiment was brought to the attention of the media in 1972, news anchor Harry Reasoner described it as an experiment that “used human beings as laboratory animals in a long and inefficient study of how long it takes syphilis to kill someone.”
A Heavy Price in the Name of Bad Science
By the end of the experiment, 28 of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis. How had these men been induced to endure a fatal disease in the name of science? To persuade the community to support the experiment, one of the original doctors admitted it “was necessary to carry on this study under the guise of a demonstration and provide treatment.” At first, the men were prescribed the syphilis remedies of the day—bismuth, neoarsphenamine, and mercury—but in such small amounts that only 3 percent showed any improvement. These token doses of medicine were good public relations and did not interfere with the true aims of the study. Eventually, all syphilis treatment was replaced with “pink medicine”—aspirin. To ensure that the men would show up for a painful and potentially dangerous spinal tap, the PHS doctors misled them with a letter full of promotional hype: “Last Chance for Special Free Treatment.” The fact that autopsies would eventually be required was also concealed. As a doctor explained, “If the colored population becomes aware that accepting free hospital care means a post-mortem, every darky will leave Macon County…” Even the Surgeon General of the United States participated in enticing the men to remain in the experiment, sending them certificates of appreciation after 25 years in the study.
Following Doctors' Orders
It takes little imagination to ascribe racist attitudes to the white government officials who ran the experiment, but what can one make of the numerous African Americans who collaborated with them? The experiment's name comes from the Tuskegee Institute, the black university founded by Booker T. Washington. Its affiliated hospital lent the PHS its medical facilities for the study, and other predominantly black institutions as well as local black doctors also participated. A black nurse, Eunice Rivers, was a central figure in the experiment for most of its forty years. The promise of recognition by a prestigious government agency may have obscured the troubling aspects of the study for some. A Tuskegee doctor, for example, praised “the educational advantages offered our interns and nurses as well as the added standing it will give the hospital.” Nurse Rivers explained her role as one of passive obedience: “we were taught that we never diagnosed, we never prescribed; we followed the doctor's instructions!” It is clear that the men in the experiment trusted her and that she sincerely cared about their well-being, but her unquestioning submission to authority eclipsed her moral judgment. Even after the experiment was exposed to public scrutiny, she genuinely felt nothing ethical had been amiss.
One of the most chilling aspects of the experiment was how zealously the PHS kept these men from receiving treatment. When several nationwide campaigns to eradicate venereal disease came to Macon County, the men were prevented from participating. Even when penicillin was discovered in the 1940s—the first real cure for syphilis—the Tuskegee men were deliberately denied the medication. During World War II, 250 of the men registered for the draft and were consequently ordered to get treatment for syphilis, only to have the PHS exempt them. Pleased at their success, the PHS representative announced: “So far, we are keeping the known positive patients from getting treatment.” The experiment continued in spite of the Henderson Act (1943), a public health law requiring testing and treatment for venereal disease, and in spite of the World Health Organization's Declaration of Helsinki (1964), which specified that “informed consent” was needed for experiment involving human beings.
Blowing the Whistle
The story finally broke in the Washington Star on July 25, 1972, in an article by Jean Heller of the Associated Press. Her source was Peter Buxtun, a former PHS venereal disease interviewer and one of the few whistle blowers over the years. The PHS, however, remained unrepentant, claiming the men had been “volunteers” and “were always happy to see the doctors,” and an Alabama state health officer who had been involved claimed “somebody is trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.”
Under the glare of publicity, the government ended their experiment, and for the first time provided the men with effective medical treatment for syphilis. Fred Gray, a lawyer who had previously defended Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, filed a class action suit that provided a $10 million out-of-court settlement for the men and their families. Gray, however, named only whites and white organizations in the suit, portraying Tuskegee as a black and white case when it was in fact more complex than that—black doctors and institutions had been involved from beginning to end.
The PHS did not accept the media's comparison of Tuskegee with the appalling experiments performed by Nazi doctors on their Jewish victims during World War II. Yet in addition to the medical and racist parallels, the PHS offered the same morally bankrupt defense offered at the Nuremberg trials: they claimed they were just carrying out orders, mere cogs in the wheel of the PHS bureaucracy, exempt from personal responsibility.
The study's other justification—for the greater good of science—is equally spurious. Scientific protocol had been shoddy from the start. Since the men had in fact received some medication for syphilis in the beginning of the study, however inadequate, it thereby corrupted the outcome of a study of “untreated syphilis.”
In 1990, a survey found that 10 percent of African Americans believed that the U.S. government created AIDS as a plot to exterminate blacks, and another 20 percent could not rule out the possibility that this might be true. As preposterous and paranoid as this may sound, at one time the Tuskegee experiment must have seemed equally farfetched. Who could imagine the government, all the way up to the Surgeon General of the United States, deliberately allowing a group of its citizens to die from a terrible disease for the sake of an ill-conceived experiment? In light of this and many other shameful episodes in our history, African Americans' widespread mistrust of the government and white society in general should not be a surprise to anyone. —BB
1. All quotations in the article are from Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, James H. Jones, expanded edition (New York: Free Press, 1993).
Information Please® Database, © 2005 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved
vitrifier said:
For real, this goes right along with the government technology to create Hurricanes. These folks in Vegas probably paid the Japanese for the technology, picked N.O. as a perfect target, created a Hurricane and aimed it at N.O. to create a distraction so that they could blow up the levy in the perfect spot so it would flood the city and force the poor black people out.
Man, what a perfect plan....
The Nazis harassed and brutalized the Jews throughout the 1920s during the "struggle for power." Speech after speech painted the Jews as Germany's "misfortune" and prophesied a time of reckoning.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Jews were their very first target. The infamous boycott against Jewish businesses took place in April 1933 and the first laws against the Jews were enacted as early as on April 7, 1933.10 Jews were progressively erased from almost every facet of German life.11 The Nuremberg Laws, passed in 1935, further tightened the noose, depriving the Jews of almost every remaining right and freedom.12 This culminated in the bloodiest pogrom to date the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) in November 1938. Over 100 Jews were murdered and a "fine" was levied against the Jews in excess of 1 billion RM.
By the outbreak of World War II, actions taken against the Jews included marking them13 and ghettoizing them.14 By the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the decision had been taken to kill the eastern European Jews
Fuckallyall said:
Blah, Blah, Blah. This is such bullshit. For one, the reason the government could not fix the levees earlier is because the water pressure from the break was too high. They actually tried before it was advisable, and the 6,000 ponud sandbags got washed away. Where is that AP report. I have a Lexis account and had all NO articles flagged, and never recieved that one. Please post something more substantial than this. If they wanted to gentrify, they would.
LSU storm expert rejects levee failure explanation
By MIKE DUNNE
mdunne@theadvocate.com
Advocate staff writer
Advocate staff photo by RICHARD ALAN HANNON
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers uses steel pilings Wednesday to close off the 17th Street Canal to protect it from any storm surge caused by Hurricane Rita. Floodwalls along the canal broke during Hurricane Katrina, allowing water to pour into New Orleans.
An LSU hurricane expert said floodwalls on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals in New Orleans weren't "overtopped" by Hurricane Katrina's storm surge, meaning the structures failed for other reasons.
Paul Kemp, director of the Natural Systems Modeling Group at LSU's Center for Coastal, Energy, and Environmental Resources, said researchers studying watermarks and other evidence to sharpen their future predictions saw no evidence that walls along the two canals had been overtopped. Breaches along those canals accounted for much of the flooding in New Orleans.
The findings of the LSU center, which predicts hurricane storm surges for emergency officials, clashes with the explanation that has been given by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The corps has said the floodwalls collapsed after water flowed over them, eroding the back-side levees inside which the floodwalls were erected. Once that support was eroded, the floodwalls burst, sending water pouring into the Lakeview area and all the way to downtown, the corps surmised.
But Kemp said his group's models are designed to predict levee overtopping. The predictions called for 11- to 12-foot surges in the canals, he said. Overtopping would have required about 14 feet, he said.
Observations on the ground after the storm support those predictions, he said.
"I could not find evidence of overtopping inside the canals," Kemp said.
Water cascading over the tops of the floodwalls would have eroded trenches in the levees in which the walls were built, he said. That doesn't appear to have happened, he said.
"If they are not overtopped, it means they failed at some lower elevation" of water, Kemp said.
Corps spokesman Mitch Frazier said Wednesday that the agency is focused on pumping the water out of New Orleans and preparing for problems that could spin off Hurricane Rita as it crosses the Gulf of Mexico.
The corps' headquarters will conduct an investigation into why the floodwalls broke and other issues associated with Katrina's flooding, Frazier said. Knowing what went wrong will help the agency design a solution to keep flood waters out of New Orleans during hurricanes, he said.
As of Wednesday, 90 percent of New Orleans had been pumped dry, well ahead of original projections, Frazier said.
Kemp said his researchers did see evidence of overtopping along the Industrial Canal. Breaches in the levee along that canal helped flood the 9th Ward and parts of St. Bernard Parish.
Kemp's computer models show a combination of the intersection of two shipping channels and the levee system conspired to drive water high enough to overwhelm flood protection along the Industrial Canal.
One of those shipping channels is the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a deep-draft channel cutting through St. Bernard Parish.
The other is the Gulf Intracoastal Water Way, which barges use to avoid the open water of the Gulf of Mexico. It cuts through marshlands between Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne.
"The model shows that's where the largest surges in the Louisiana system built up," Kemp said.
Another large surge was around the mouth of the Mississippi at Buras, he said.
The shape of the levees works with the shipping channels to funnel water into the Industrial Canal, where it has no place to go but up, he said.
A surge coming into Lake Pontchartrain would have more space to spread out, Kemp said.
While the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet provided an easy channel for storm surge, the flooding in the St. Bernard area was almost tsunami-like, covering the whole parish, he said.
"There was a lot of momentum in the wave," Kemp said.
A pressing question is where Hurricane Rita's storm surge will go, he said. Even a small one of 3 feet could threaten the battered and weakened levee system in New Orleans, Kemp said.
On Wednesday, the corps was shoring up that system by driving sheet pilings into the mouths of the 17th Street and the London Avenue canals where they empty into Lake Pontchartrain.
The canals will remain closed until the threat of severe weather passes. More than 800 filled sandbags are on hand, and an additional 2,500 have been ordered.
