http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11091.shtml
Harvard Fellow calls for genocidal measure to curb Palestinian births
The Electronic Intifada
Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:30 EST
Here's Martin's schizoidal idea: if we kill enough surplus Muslims, then there'll be less of them around to become radicals. Genius, no?
A fellow at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Martin Kramer, has called for "the West" to take measures to curb the births of Palestinians, a proposal that appears to meet the international legal definition of a call for genocide.
Kramer, who is also a fellow at the influential Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), made the call early this month in a speech at Israel's Herzliya conference, a video of which is posted on his blog ("Superfluous young men," 7 February 2010).
In the speech Kramer rejected common views that Islamist "radicalization" is caused by US policies such as support for Israel, or propping up despotic dictatorships, and stated that it was inherent in the demography of Muslim societies such as Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Too many children, he argued, leads to too many "superfluous young men" who then become violent radicals.
Kramer proposed that the number of Palestinian children born in the Gaza Strip should be deliberately curbed, and alleged that this would "happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies to Palestinians with refugee status."
Due to the Israeli blockade, the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza are now dependent on UN food aid. Neither the UN, nor any other agencies, provide Palestinians with specifically "pro-natal subsidies." Kramer appeared to be equating any humanitarian assistance at all with inducement for Palestinians to reproduce.
He added, "Israel's present sanctions on Gaza have a political aim -- undermine the Hamas regime -- but if they also break Gaza's runaway population growth, and there is some evidence that they have, that might begin to crack the culture of martyrdom which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men." This, he claimed, would be treating the issue of Islamic radicalization "at its root."
The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, created in the wake of the Nazi holocaust, defines genocide to include measures "intended to prevent births within" a specific "national, ethnic, racial or religious group."
The Weatherhead Center at Harvard describes itself as "the largest international research center within Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences." In addition to his positions at Harvard and WINEP, Kramer is "president-designate" of Shalem College in Jerusalem, a far-right Zionist institution that aspires to be the "College of the Jewish People."
Pro-Israel speakers from the United States often participate in the the Herzliya conference, an influential annual gathering of Israel's political and military establishment. This year's conference was also addressed by The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and, in a first for a Palestinian official, by Salam Fayyad, appointed prime minister of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority.
Kramer's call to prevent Palestinian births reflects a long-standing Israeli and Zionist concern about a so-called "demographic threat" to Israel, as Palestinians are on the verge of outnumbering Israeli Jews within Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories combined.
Such extreme racist views have been aired at the Herzliya conference in the past. In 2003, for example, Dr. Yitzhak Ravid, an Israeli government armaments expert, called on Israel to "implement a stringent policy of family planning in relation to its Muslim population," a reference to the 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
The nazis' idea of murdering Jews, Gysies and communists in gas chambers was an American idea
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/02/nazis-murder-of-jews-communists-and.html
Washingtonblog.com
Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:29 EST
Believe it or not, the Nazis' murder of Jews, communists and gypsies using gas chambers was actually an American idea.
As the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in 2003:
the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.
Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human race. In its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in 27 states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.
California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the 20th century's first decades, California's eugenicists included potent but little-known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, as well as members of the California state Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.
Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.
Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle Blood of a Nation, in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.
n 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.
The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, confinement or forced sterilization.
The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California's quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as Pasadena's Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations -- which functioned as part of a closely-knit network -- published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis.
The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a "lethal chamber" or public, locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, "Applied Eugenics," which argued, "From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated." Applied Eugenics also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."
Comment: For more information about the concept of "Lethal Selection" see the following here and here.
In light of the above, one might question whether the motivation behind the global financial meltdown was deliberately engineered for just this purpose.
Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own. One institution in Lincoln, Ill., fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to 40 percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln. Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.
Even the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes' words in their own defense.
Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.
Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti- Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own mind, but the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.
During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany's fascist eugenicists. In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."
During the Reich's early years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.
In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe, upon returning from Germany, ebulliently bragged to a colleague, "You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought . . . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."
More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany's eugenic institutions.
By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in today's money -- to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 toward creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler's systematic medical repression.
Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's complex of eugenics institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the institute, once again, was Hitler's medical henchman Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin's organization became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.
Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed.
Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, declared of Nazism, "While we were pussy-footing around ... the Germans were calling a spade a spade."
A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. For decades, American eugenicists had craved twins to advance their research into heredity.
The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an unprecedented level. On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York dispatched a radiogram to its Paris office: JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR PERIOD TO KWG INSTITUTE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON TWINS AND EFFECTS ON LATER GENERATIONS OF SUBSTANCES TOXIC FOR GERM PLASM.
At the time of Rockefeller's endowment, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Rockefeller funding of that institute continued both directly and through other research conduits during Verschuer's early tenure. In 1935, Verschuer left the institute to form a rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt that was much heralded in the American eugenics press. Research on twins in the Third Reich exploded, backed by government decrees. Verschuer wrote in Der Erbarzt, a eugenics doctor's journal he edited, that Germany's war would yield a "total solution to the Jewish problem."
Verschuer had a longtime assistant. His name was Josef Mengele.
Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenics studies in Nazi-occupied Europe before the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the great institutions they helped found, and the science they helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.
As Michel Crichton wrote in 2004:
Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.
These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.
All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.
The plan was to identify individuals who were feeble-minded --- Jews were agreed to be largely feeble-minded, but so were many foreigners, as well as blacks --- and stop them from breeding by isolation in institutions or by sterilization.
Such views were widely shared. H.G. Wells spoke against "ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens." Theodore Roosevelt said that "Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind." Luther Burbank" "Stop permitting criminals and weaklings to reproduce." George Bernard Shaw said that only eugenics could save mankind.
Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and later by the Rockefeller Foundation. The latter was so enthusiastic that even after the center of the eugenics effort moved to Germany, and involved the gassing of individuals from mental institutions, the Rockefeller Foundation continued to finance German researchers at a very high level. (The foundation was quiet about it, but they were still funding research in 1939, only months before the onset of World War II.)
Since the 1920s, American eugenicists had been jealous because the Germans had taken leadership of the movement away from them. The Germans were admirably progressive. They set up ordinary-looking houses where "mental defectives" were brought and interviewed one at a time, before being led into a back room, which was, in fact, a gas chamber. There, they were gassed with carbon monoxide, and their bodies disposed of in a crematorium located on the property.
Eventually, this program was expanded into a vast network of concentration camps located near railroad lines, enabling the efficient transport and of killing ten million undesirables.
After World War II, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eugenicist. Biographers of the celebrated and the powerful did not dwell on the attractions of this philosophy to their subjects, and sometimes did not mention it at all. Eugenics ceased to be a subject for college classrooms, although some argue that its ideas continue to have currency in disguised form.
The scientific establishment in both the United States and Germany did not mount any sustained protest. Quite the contrary. In Germany scientists quickly fell into line with the program. Modern German researchers have gone back to review Nazi documents from the 1930s. They expected to find directives telling scientists what research should be done. But none were necessary. In the words of Ute Deichman, "Scientists, including those who were not members of the [Nazi] party, helped to get funding for their work through their modified behavior and direct cooperation with the state." Deichman speaks of the "active role of scientists themselves in regard to Nazi race policy ... where [research] was aimed at confirming the racial doctrine ... no external pressure can be documented." German scientists adjusted their research interests to the new policies. And those few who did not adjust disappeared.
Washingtonblog.com
Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:29 EST
Believe it or not, the Nazis' murder of Jews, communists and gypsies using gas chambers was actually an American idea.
As the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in 2003:
the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.
Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human race. In its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in 27 states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.
California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the 20th century's first decades, California's eugenicists included potent but little-known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, as well as members of the California state Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.
Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.
Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle Blood of a Nation, in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.
n 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.
The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, confinement or forced sterilization.
The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California's quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as Pasadena's Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations -- which functioned as part of a closely-knit network -- published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis.
The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a "lethal chamber" or public, locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, "Applied Eugenics," which argued, "From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated." Applied Eugenics also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."
Comment: For more information about the concept of "Lethal Selection" see the following here and here.
In light of the above, one might question whether the motivation behind the global financial meltdown was deliberately engineered for just this purpose.
Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own. One institution in Lincoln, Ill., fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to 40 percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln. Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.
Even the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes' words in their own defense.
Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.
Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti- Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own mind, but the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.
During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany's fascist eugenicists. In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."
During the Reich's early years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.
In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe, upon returning from Germany, ebulliently bragged to a colleague, "You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought . . . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."
More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany's eugenic institutions.
By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in today's money -- to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 toward creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler's systematic medical repression.
Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's complex of eugenics institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the institute, once again, was Hitler's medical henchman Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin's organization became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.
Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed.
Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, declared of Nazism, "While we were pussy-footing around ... the Germans were calling a spade a spade."
A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. For decades, American eugenicists had craved twins to advance their research into heredity.
The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an unprecedented level. On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York dispatched a radiogram to its Paris office: JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR PERIOD TO KWG INSTITUTE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON TWINS AND EFFECTS ON LATER GENERATIONS OF SUBSTANCES TOXIC FOR GERM PLASM.
At the time of Rockefeller's endowment, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Rockefeller funding of that institute continued both directly and through other research conduits during Verschuer's early tenure. In 1935, Verschuer left the institute to form a rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt that was much heralded in the American eugenics press. Research on twins in the Third Reich exploded, backed by government decrees. Verschuer wrote in Der Erbarzt, a eugenics doctor's journal he edited, that Germany's war would yield a "total solution to the Jewish problem."
Verschuer had a longtime assistant. His name was Josef Mengele.
Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenics studies in Nazi-occupied Europe before the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the great institutions they helped found, and the science they helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.
As Michel Crichton wrote in 2004:
Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.
These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.
All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.
The plan was to identify individuals who were feeble-minded --- Jews were agreed to be largely feeble-minded, but so were many foreigners, as well as blacks --- and stop them from breeding by isolation in institutions or by sterilization.
Such views were widely shared. H.G. Wells spoke against "ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens." Theodore Roosevelt said that "Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind." Luther Burbank" "Stop permitting criminals and weaklings to reproduce." George Bernard Shaw said that only eugenics could save mankind.
Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and later by the Rockefeller Foundation. The latter was so enthusiastic that even after the center of the eugenics effort moved to Germany, and involved the gassing of individuals from mental institutions, the Rockefeller Foundation continued to finance German researchers at a very high level. (The foundation was quiet about it, but they were still funding research in 1939, only months before the onset of World War II.)
Since the 1920s, American eugenicists had been jealous because the Germans had taken leadership of the movement away from them. The Germans were admirably progressive. They set up ordinary-looking houses where "mental defectives" were brought and interviewed one at a time, before being led into a back room, which was, in fact, a gas chamber. There, they were gassed with carbon monoxide, and their bodies disposed of in a crematorium located on the property.
Eventually, this program was expanded into a vast network of concentration camps located near railroad lines, enabling the efficient transport and of killing ten million undesirables.
After World War II, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eugenicist. Biographers of the celebrated and the powerful did not dwell on the attractions of this philosophy to their subjects, and sometimes did not mention it at all. Eugenics ceased to be a subject for college classrooms, although some argue that its ideas continue to have currency in disguised form.
The scientific establishment in both the United States and Germany did not mount any sustained protest. Quite the contrary. In Germany scientists quickly fell into line with the program. Modern German researchers have gone back to review Nazi documents from the 1930s. They expected to find directives telling scientists what research should be done. But none were necessary. In the words of Ute Deichman, "Scientists, including those who were not members of the [Nazi] party, helped to get funding for their work through their modified behavior and direct cooperation with the state." Deichman speaks of the "active role of scientists themselves in regard to Nazi race policy ... where [research] was aimed at confirming the racial doctrine ... no external pressure can be documented." German scientists adjusted their research interests to the new policies. And those few who did not adjust disappeared.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
What Britain’s Assisted Suicide War Should Teach Us
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/02/17/what-britains-assisted-suicide-war-should-teach-us/
Ann Neumann
February 17, 2010
Culture wars do nothing to correct social problems and, by distracting from the underlying challenges and focusing on one contentious issue, actually exacerbate social ills and prevent practical solutions from gaining traction.
This should be common knowledge; under the weight of the abortion debate in the U.S., delivery of women’s reproductive services beyond abortion remain uncertain, erratic, and regional.
In the past few decades we’ve witnessed the deafening calls against abortion drown out all discussion of other reproductive health needs. Contraception, sterilization, condom use, sex education, tubal ligation and other reproductive services like basic testing, check-ups, and pre- and post-natal care have, for women’s choice advocates, had to take a back seat in the defense of abortion rights. Yes, some improvements have been made but after a disappointing summer of health care reform defeats, women’s rights groups have had to admit that new strategies are necessary.
A resonant scenario is playing out in the U.K. over the legality of assisted suicide. Since multiple sclerosis patient Debbie Purdy won a case during the summer that would allow her husband, Omar, to legally accompany her to Switzerland should she choose to end her life, the country has been mired in an emotional, star-studded, increasingly strange war over assisted suicide.
In Britain, “assisting suicide” is prosecutable, but supporters, like Purdy, have successfully argued that assisted suicide is not the same as aid in dying. Those who are sentenced to death by a fatal disease, they say, are not committing suicide – they’re already being killed by cancer, MS, or other illnesses – but ending the unbearable suffering that their disease has caused. But in the midst of all the noise, such distinctions are hard to make.
Since July, Director of Public Prosecutions, Kier I-wouldn’t-characterize-myself-as-a-bleeding-heart-liberal Starmer has been working to revise the prosecutorial guidelines on assisted suicide. It’s been a resoundingly thankless job. ”Anti-euthanasia” and/or “pro-life” organizations have successfully dogged his efforts to the point of standstill. He can do no right, as the situation stands. Into the debate maw have jumped countless well-meaning but colorful and high-profile individuals.
Sir Terry Pratchett, one of Britain’s most acclaimed authors, publicly voiced his support for assisted suicide in August. Noting that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Pratchett said:
‘I believe that if the burden gets too great, those who wish should be allowed to be shown the door,’ he said. ‘In my case, in the fullness of time, I hope it will be in the garden under an English sky. Or, if wet, the library.’
Another author got into the act in January. Swaggering Martin Amis suggested that the best way to deal with the encroaching “silver tsunami” of elders would be to make assisted suicide legal and convenient. ”There should be a booth on every corner where you could get a martini and a medal,” he said.
And just this week, famed British broadcaster Ray Gosling (pictured above) admitted in a BBC special that he had smothered his suffering lover decades ago with a pillow. His partner was dying of AIDS and the two had made a pact that should the suffering become unbearable, Gosling would do whatever was necessary to spare him from that suffering. Gosling now faces legal questioning. (UPDATE: Gosling was arrested for questioning today.)
Even the BBC, seemingly accustomed to accusations of bias, is not exempt from getting drawn into the assisted suicide war. They are promoting “euthanasia” say the accusers, many of whom are MPs.
All this attention on the issue of assisted suicide has made for some widely-read and sensational news. But, as Peter Beresford blogs at the Guardian today, the war over assisted suicide has done little to address the practical, non-contentious issues surrounding assisted suicide.
Beresford asks, “Why isn’t the same political and media interest given to palliative and end of life care, carers and social care generally as to assisted dying?” At first it’s a naive-sounding question. Isn’t the purpose of a culture war to drown out subtleties? But his asking makes patients’ rights advocates again face the fact that they haven’t yet learned their culture war lesson.
Un-nuanced debate has pitted organized, emotional, resource-rich “pro-life” groups against the legalization of assisted suicide, leaving supporters of end of life choice to run around flapping their hands. As we saw in the U.S. over the summer, however ridiculous it may sound to accuse government of wanting to kill the vulnerable in society, such accusations have traction when grasped by the busy-body media and dished to the uninformed public. Beresford continues:
We know that the former [palliative and hospice care, caregivers] all are under pressure and have inadequate support. Specialist palliative care services are underfunded and unequally distributed. Much-valued hospices are increasingly at risk of closure, rather than blossoming in number, while carers are still treated by the government as a resource to be exploited, rather than as family members to be supported.
The failure to bring social care policy, provision and funding into the 21st century is at last making the front pages, but what the headlines make clear is the failure of all the political parties to work for any sustainable consensus for the future.
Beresford’s solution?
The appalling lack of skilled advocacy services in England is a major problem. Policy-makers and politicians are happy to talk about providing more information, but when it comes to the ongoing guidance, support and advice that people want – and that can only really be provided by an independent, trained advocate – there is much less political will. Such advocacy has serious cost implications, but in the long run can save lives and money.
What is most needed now is a safe space for an inclusive discussion about social care, including palliative care and assisted dying, which truly involves the widest range of experience and opinion. Then we may begin to get somewhere.
Wishful thinking! When you’re in a culture war, there is no DMZ. And everybody is an “independent advocate.” Who do you ask for that safe space? The government? The media? The church? The medical profession? Because other end of life care issues have been framed into the assisted suicide debate, they can’t be addressed in a rational, meaningful way. Is the solution increased public education? A broader coalition for patients’ right?
I don’t necessarily have an answer but neither does Beresford. Clearly the same ineffective strategies of old – like interjections from high-profile advocates, and raising volume and tone to match one’s opponents – don’t work. The lesson from Britain is this: what patients’ rights advocates are doing now to win the discussion back from the war on assisted suicide isn’t working. New thinking is necessary in both Britain and the U.S.
Ann Neumann
February 17, 2010
Culture wars do nothing to correct social problems and, by distracting from the underlying challenges and focusing on one contentious issue, actually exacerbate social ills and prevent practical solutions from gaining traction.
This should be common knowledge; under the weight of the abortion debate in the U.S., delivery of women’s reproductive services beyond abortion remain uncertain, erratic, and regional.
In the past few decades we’ve witnessed the deafening calls against abortion drown out all discussion of other reproductive health needs. Contraception, sterilization, condom use, sex education, tubal ligation and other reproductive services like basic testing, check-ups, and pre- and post-natal care have, for women’s choice advocates, had to take a back seat in the defense of abortion rights. Yes, some improvements have been made but after a disappointing summer of health care reform defeats, women’s rights groups have had to admit that new strategies are necessary.
A resonant scenario is playing out in the U.K. over the legality of assisted suicide. Since multiple sclerosis patient Debbie Purdy won a case during the summer that would allow her husband, Omar, to legally accompany her to Switzerland should she choose to end her life, the country has been mired in an emotional, star-studded, increasingly strange war over assisted suicide.
In Britain, “assisting suicide” is prosecutable, but supporters, like Purdy, have successfully argued that assisted suicide is not the same as aid in dying. Those who are sentenced to death by a fatal disease, they say, are not committing suicide – they’re already being killed by cancer, MS, or other illnesses – but ending the unbearable suffering that their disease has caused. But in the midst of all the noise, such distinctions are hard to make.
Since July, Director of Public Prosecutions, Kier I-wouldn’t-characterize-myself-as-a-bleeding-heart-liberal Starmer has been working to revise the prosecutorial guidelines on assisted suicide. It’s been a resoundingly thankless job. ”Anti-euthanasia” and/or “pro-life” organizations have successfully dogged his efforts to the point of standstill. He can do no right, as the situation stands. Into the debate maw have jumped countless well-meaning but colorful and high-profile individuals.
Sir Terry Pratchett, one of Britain’s most acclaimed authors, publicly voiced his support for assisted suicide in August. Noting that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Pratchett said:
‘I believe that if the burden gets too great, those who wish should be allowed to be shown the door,’ he said. ‘In my case, in the fullness of time, I hope it will be in the garden under an English sky. Or, if wet, the library.’
Another author got into the act in January. Swaggering Martin Amis suggested that the best way to deal with the encroaching “silver tsunami” of elders would be to make assisted suicide legal and convenient. ”There should be a booth on every corner where you could get a martini and a medal,” he said.
And just this week, famed British broadcaster Ray Gosling (pictured above) admitted in a BBC special that he had smothered his suffering lover decades ago with a pillow. His partner was dying of AIDS and the two had made a pact that should the suffering become unbearable, Gosling would do whatever was necessary to spare him from that suffering. Gosling now faces legal questioning. (UPDATE: Gosling was arrested for questioning today.)
Even the BBC, seemingly accustomed to accusations of bias, is not exempt from getting drawn into the assisted suicide war. They are promoting “euthanasia” say the accusers, many of whom are MPs.
All this attention on the issue of assisted suicide has made for some widely-read and sensational news. But, as Peter Beresford blogs at the Guardian today, the war over assisted suicide has done little to address the practical, non-contentious issues surrounding assisted suicide.
Beresford asks, “Why isn’t the same political and media interest given to palliative and end of life care, carers and social care generally as to assisted dying?” At first it’s a naive-sounding question. Isn’t the purpose of a culture war to drown out subtleties? But his asking makes patients’ rights advocates again face the fact that they haven’t yet learned their culture war lesson.
Un-nuanced debate has pitted organized, emotional, resource-rich “pro-life” groups against the legalization of assisted suicide, leaving supporters of end of life choice to run around flapping their hands. As we saw in the U.S. over the summer, however ridiculous it may sound to accuse government of wanting to kill the vulnerable in society, such accusations have traction when grasped by the busy-body media and dished to the uninformed public. Beresford continues:
We know that the former [palliative and hospice care, caregivers] all are under pressure and have inadequate support. Specialist palliative care services are underfunded and unequally distributed. Much-valued hospices are increasingly at risk of closure, rather than blossoming in number, while carers are still treated by the government as a resource to be exploited, rather than as family members to be supported.
The failure to bring social care policy, provision and funding into the 21st century is at last making the front pages, but what the headlines make clear is the failure of all the political parties to work for any sustainable consensus for the future.
Beresford’s solution?
The appalling lack of skilled advocacy services in England is a major problem. Policy-makers and politicians are happy to talk about providing more information, but when it comes to the ongoing guidance, support and advice that people want – and that can only really be provided by an independent, trained advocate – there is much less political will. Such advocacy has serious cost implications, but in the long run can save lives and money.
What is most needed now is a safe space for an inclusive discussion about social care, including palliative care and assisted dying, which truly involves the widest range of experience and opinion. Then we may begin to get somewhere.
Wishful thinking! When you’re in a culture war, there is no DMZ. And everybody is an “independent advocate.” Who do you ask for that safe space? The government? The media? The church? The medical profession? Because other end of life care issues have been framed into the assisted suicide debate, they can’t be addressed in a rational, meaningful way. Is the solution increased public education? A broader coalition for patients’ right?
I don’t necessarily have an answer but neither does Beresford. Clearly the same ineffective strategies of old – like interjections from high-profile advocates, and raising volume and tone to match one’s opponents – don’t work. The lesson from Britain is this: what patients’ rights advocates are doing now to win the discussion back from the war on assisted suicide isn’t working. New thinking is necessary in both Britain and the U.S.
“There will be casualties”
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/there_will_be_casualties/
Michael Cook | Friday, 19 February 2010
Euthanasia activists in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands have lost touch with reality.
Australian euthanasia activist Dr Philip Nitschke loves publicity. But whenever he opens his mouth, even the most progressive journalists avert their eyes in squeamish embarrassment. This week’s gaffe was to defend his barely legal promotion of a suicide drug for the elderly and terminally ill. It turns out that nearly two-thirds of the Australians who died after quaffing Nembutal – at least 51 over the past 10 years -- were under 60, and quite a few were in the 20s and 30s. This suggests that mental illness or depression, not unbearable pain, was the reason for the suicide. So how did Nitschke respond?
''There will be some casualties,” he said with the tenderness of General Haig sending troops over the top at the Somme, “but this has to be balanced with the growing pool of older people who feel immense well-being from having access to this information,'' [about suicide drugs].
The notion that young people are just collateral damage in a war to defend their grandparents’ inalienable right to make a quick getaway outraged many Australians. There were calls for Dr Nitschke to be hauled into a court for putting lives at risk.
But after tracking the increasingly outrageous suggestions from advocates for assisted suicide and euthanasia, I feel that jail is not the place for people like Nitschke. They belong in a straitjacket. It is becoming increasingly clear that euthanasia advocacy is an illness characterised by an unwillingness to take responsibility for one’s actions, an inability to empathise with normal people, and a morbid desire to help others die. Like mad cow disease, it lies dormant for years. Its victims look normal, but eventually the spongy degeneration of the brain becomes evident.
Nitschke is a classical case. An intelligent man with a PhD in physics and a qualified doctor, he entered the public debate by decrying the cruelty of forcing the terminally ill to die in excruciating pain. Autonomous adults should have the right to die at a time and place of their choosing, surrounded by their loved one, he argued. It sounded vaguely plausible to the media and to his doddering but increasingly numerous groupies, it was a new gospel. But bit by bit, it became clear that his goal was death-on-demand, even for troubled teenagers. He seems incapable of grasping that most of us want teenagers to stick around for a few more years rather than kill themselves over a cruel Facebook post.
In England, the latest case of euthanasia madness is a 70-year-old veteran BBC broadcaster and gay rights campaigner, Ray Gosling. He confessed in the middle of a TV show that he had smothered an unnamed gay lover suffering from AIDS some 20 years ago.
“In a hospital one hot afternoon, the doctor said ‘There’s nothing we can do’, and he was in terrible, terrible pain. I said to the doctor ‘Leave me just for a bit’ and he went away. I picked up the pillow and smothered him until he was dead. The doctor came back and I said ‘He’s gone’. Nothing more was ever said.”
Mr Gosling sobbed a bit, but was adamant that killing someone and concealing the murder was the right thing. “If there’s a heaven and he’s looking down, he’d be proud of me,” he told the BBC. He was oblivious to all the safeguards promised by euthanasia advocates. A right to smother someone, anywhere, anytime, without consulting doctors, without notifying the police, without proving your disinterestedness, and without even consulting the victim raises questions in most sane minds about the possibility of widespread collateral damage. Perhaps only BBC journalists would be allowed to do mercy killings, but some sane people might even object to that.
In the Netherlands euthanasia loopiness has become epidemic. It is legal there and every year about 2,500 acknowledged cases of doctor-administered death take place.
But amongst the numerous Dutch victims of spongy-brained euthanasia syndrome some are more affected than others. Recently a distinguished group called “Out of Free Will” has complained that there are too many restrictions on euthanasia in the Netherlands. Even in the mercy-killing heartland, people are required to have some sort of terminal illness. But the new lobby group wants the right for to anyone sane over the age of 70 to die with a professionally-trained expert’s assistance. They have already begun collecting signatures to lobby for improvements to the legislation.
Part of their scheme is a completely new profession: specialist suicide assistants. These people will need to pass a “Completed Life” training program and to join a professional association which will maintain standards of professional, transparent and safe conduct.
The age limit of 70 is arbitrary. “Whether it should be 65 or 90 is a good question,” says legal scholar Eugene Sutorius. “We think that once someone has reached old age, he has proved abilities at living. He can then choose to leave this life in a procedural, medicalised manner.”
Three spokesmen told the NRC Handelsblad that collateral damage by “angels of death” in nursing homes – rogue doctors and nurses who enjoy killing people -- was unlikely to be a problem, especially in view of the country’s positive experience with euthanasia. “It was thought to be the first step on a slippery slope that would lead the medical profession to lose its integrity,” says Mr Sutorius. “But I have seen nothing of the kind happen.”
That last sentence is a tell-tale symptom of spongy-brain euthanasia disease. Before euthanasia was legalised, Dutch doctors were already doing it enthusiastically. It was legalised for consenting adults in pain from a terminal condition, and now it is permitted for non-consenting infants. Dutch doctors routinely lie on their official reports. If they are squeamish about lethal injections, they kill patients through the lingering death of terminal sedation – which is not counted as euthanasia. All these facts are well known. Yet Mr Sutorius sees no slippery slope, no loss of medical integrity. Mr Sutorius belongs in a straitjacket, not in a comfy chair giving interviews. (If you speak Dutch, he explains his position here in a YouTube video.)
What is happening here? How can intelligent, well-educated people be so obtuse about the dangers of legalising the killing of innocent, infirm human beings? Perhaps the conviction that some killing is permissible is so morally corrupting that it infects the intellect and distorts reality. And arguing with them is futile. As Chesterton wrote:
If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.
Michael Cook | Friday, 19 February 2010
Euthanasia activists in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands have lost touch with reality.
Australian euthanasia activist Dr Philip Nitschke loves publicity. But whenever he opens his mouth, even the most progressive journalists avert their eyes in squeamish embarrassment. This week’s gaffe was to defend his barely legal promotion of a suicide drug for the elderly and terminally ill. It turns out that nearly two-thirds of the Australians who died after quaffing Nembutal – at least 51 over the past 10 years -- were under 60, and quite a few were in the 20s and 30s. This suggests that mental illness or depression, not unbearable pain, was the reason for the suicide. So how did Nitschke respond?
''There will be some casualties,” he said with the tenderness of General Haig sending troops over the top at the Somme, “but this has to be balanced with the growing pool of older people who feel immense well-being from having access to this information,'' [about suicide drugs].
The notion that young people are just collateral damage in a war to defend their grandparents’ inalienable right to make a quick getaway outraged many Australians. There were calls for Dr Nitschke to be hauled into a court for putting lives at risk.
But after tracking the increasingly outrageous suggestions from advocates for assisted suicide and euthanasia, I feel that jail is not the place for people like Nitschke. They belong in a straitjacket. It is becoming increasingly clear that euthanasia advocacy is an illness characterised by an unwillingness to take responsibility for one’s actions, an inability to empathise with normal people, and a morbid desire to help others die. Like mad cow disease, it lies dormant for years. Its victims look normal, but eventually the spongy degeneration of the brain becomes evident.
Nitschke is a classical case. An intelligent man with a PhD in physics and a qualified doctor, he entered the public debate by decrying the cruelty of forcing the terminally ill to die in excruciating pain. Autonomous adults should have the right to die at a time and place of their choosing, surrounded by their loved one, he argued. It sounded vaguely plausible to the media and to his doddering but increasingly numerous groupies, it was a new gospel. But bit by bit, it became clear that his goal was death-on-demand, even for troubled teenagers. He seems incapable of grasping that most of us want teenagers to stick around for a few more years rather than kill themselves over a cruel Facebook post.
In England, the latest case of euthanasia madness is a 70-year-old veteran BBC broadcaster and gay rights campaigner, Ray Gosling. He confessed in the middle of a TV show that he had smothered an unnamed gay lover suffering from AIDS some 20 years ago.
“In a hospital one hot afternoon, the doctor said ‘There’s nothing we can do’, and he was in terrible, terrible pain. I said to the doctor ‘Leave me just for a bit’ and he went away. I picked up the pillow and smothered him until he was dead. The doctor came back and I said ‘He’s gone’. Nothing more was ever said.”
Mr Gosling sobbed a bit, but was adamant that killing someone and concealing the murder was the right thing. “If there’s a heaven and he’s looking down, he’d be proud of me,” he told the BBC. He was oblivious to all the safeguards promised by euthanasia advocates. A right to smother someone, anywhere, anytime, without consulting doctors, without notifying the police, without proving your disinterestedness, and without even consulting the victim raises questions in most sane minds about the possibility of widespread collateral damage. Perhaps only BBC journalists would be allowed to do mercy killings, but some sane people might even object to that.
In the Netherlands euthanasia loopiness has become epidemic. It is legal there and every year about 2,500 acknowledged cases of doctor-administered death take place.
But amongst the numerous Dutch victims of spongy-brained euthanasia syndrome some are more affected than others. Recently a distinguished group called “Out of Free Will” has complained that there are too many restrictions on euthanasia in the Netherlands. Even in the mercy-killing heartland, people are required to have some sort of terminal illness. But the new lobby group wants the right for to anyone sane over the age of 70 to die with a professionally-trained expert’s assistance. They have already begun collecting signatures to lobby for improvements to the legislation.
Part of their scheme is a completely new profession: specialist suicide assistants. These people will need to pass a “Completed Life” training program and to join a professional association which will maintain standards of professional, transparent and safe conduct.
The age limit of 70 is arbitrary. “Whether it should be 65 or 90 is a good question,” says legal scholar Eugene Sutorius. “We think that once someone has reached old age, he has proved abilities at living. He can then choose to leave this life in a procedural, medicalised manner.”
Three spokesmen told the NRC Handelsblad that collateral damage by “angels of death” in nursing homes – rogue doctors and nurses who enjoy killing people -- was unlikely to be a problem, especially in view of the country’s positive experience with euthanasia. “It was thought to be the first step on a slippery slope that would lead the medical profession to lose its integrity,” says Mr Sutorius. “But I have seen nothing of the kind happen.”
That last sentence is a tell-tale symptom of spongy-brain euthanasia disease. Before euthanasia was legalised, Dutch doctors were already doing it enthusiastically. It was legalised for consenting adults in pain from a terminal condition, and now it is permitted for non-consenting infants. Dutch doctors routinely lie on their official reports. If they are squeamish about lethal injections, they kill patients through the lingering death of terminal sedation – which is not counted as euthanasia. All these facts are well known. Yet Mr Sutorius sees no slippery slope, no loss of medical integrity. Mr Sutorius belongs in a straitjacket, not in a comfy chair giving interviews. (If you speak Dutch, he explains his position here in a YouTube video.)
What is happening here? How can intelligent, well-educated people be so obtuse about the dangers of legalising the killing of innocent, infirm human beings? Perhaps the conviction that some killing is permissible is so morally corrupting that it infects the intellect and distorts reality. And arguing with them is futile. As Chesterton wrote:
If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Nitschke unapologetic about collateral damage
I thought collateral damage was about civilians getting killed during wars not euthanasia!
http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/8851/
Nitschke unapologetic about collateral damage
posted by Michael Cook | 16 Feb 2010 | Comments
Finally, a key performance indicator for Australian euthanasia activist Dr Philip Nitschke! In Australia, after recent legislation, it is illegal to promote assisted suicide in print or on the internet, so it is hard to measure how successful he has been. However, recent figures from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine show that 51 people throughout the country have died after taking Nembutal, his drug of choice, in the past 10 years.
Somewhat embarrassingly for Dr Nitschke and his organization, Exit International, six people in their 20s and eight in their 30s had died of Nembutal poisoning. Because this drug is illegal in Australia for human consumption, Dr Nitschke has been encouraging people to smuggle it in from overseas, mostly from Mexico, or to manufacture it themselves. The most pessimistic interpretation of the figures is that 14 young people who were not terminally ill discovered how to obtain lethal doses of the poison from Exit members.
However, the figures, which were generated for The Age newspaper in Melbourne, are difficult to interpret, because only 38 of the 51 cases were thoroughly examined by a coroner. And the total could be higher, as it includes only those which emerged from a search of a national database. Of the 38, only 11 were suffering from a serious physical illness. Of the 51, nearly two-thirds were under 60. Without a more detailed knowledge of the cases, the data strongly implies that most of the people who used Nembutal to kill themselves were either mentally ill or just weary of life.
Typically, Dr Nitschke was unapologetic about possible collateral damage from his campaign for euthanasia for people suffering from terminal illness and loss of autonomy. ''There will be some casualties… but this has to be balanced with the growing pool of older people who feel immense well-being from having access to this information,'' he said. ~ The Age, Feb 15
http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/8851/
Nitschke unapologetic about collateral damage
posted by Michael Cook | 16 Feb 2010 | Comments
Finally, a key performance indicator for Australian euthanasia activist Dr Philip Nitschke! In Australia, after recent legislation, it is illegal to promote assisted suicide in print or on the internet, so it is hard to measure how successful he has been. However, recent figures from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine show that 51 people throughout the country have died after taking Nembutal, his drug of choice, in the past 10 years.
Somewhat embarrassingly for Dr Nitschke and his organization, Exit International, six people in their 20s and eight in their 30s had died of Nembutal poisoning. Because this drug is illegal in Australia for human consumption, Dr Nitschke has been encouraging people to smuggle it in from overseas, mostly from Mexico, or to manufacture it themselves. The most pessimistic interpretation of the figures is that 14 young people who were not terminally ill discovered how to obtain lethal doses of the poison from Exit members.
However, the figures, which were generated for The Age newspaper in Melbourne, are difficult to interpret, because only 38 of the 51 cases were thoroughly examined by a coroner. And the total could be higher, as it includes only those which emerged from a search of a national database. Of the 38, only 11 were suffering from a serious physical illness. Of the 51, nearly two-thirds were under 60. Without a more detailed knowledge of the cases, the data strongly implies that most of the people who used Nembutal to kill themselves were either mentally ill or just weary of life.
Typically, Dr Nitschke was unapologetic about possible collateral damage from his campaign for euthanasia for people suffering from terminal illness and loss of autonomy. ''There will be some casualties… but this has to be balanced with the growing pool of older people who feel immense well-being from having access to this information,'' he said. ~ The Age, Feb 15
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Report: No crime wave among Hurricane Katrina evacuees
Ironic this coincides with something my friend Judyth and I are writing in our Book on political ponerology! The media reported hell on earth so they could get it for the puppet masters! It was a third-person way to kill off a bunch of 'useless eaters'!!! I'm thinking of starting my 104th blog and call it 'The MADNESS of IT ALL'!!!
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2010-02-12-hurricane-katrina-crime_N.htm
Report: No crime wave among Hurricane Katrina evacuees
Dan Vergano
USA Today
Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:47 EST
Hurricane Katrina didn't lead to a massive crime wave in evacuee cities, report criminologists, despite news reports and police warnings at the time.
In the current Journal of Criminal Justice study led by sociologist Sean Varano of Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., the authors look at statistics for robbery, rape, murder, car theft and other violent crimes in Houston, San Antonio and Phoenix before and after Katrina evacuees arrived in those cities. The 2005 storm, which killed about 1,800 people and caused more than $80 billion in damages, according to the National Hurricane Center, led to the relocation of more than one million people.
Houston received about 240,000 evacuees (a 7% population increase); San Antonio, about 30,000 (a 3% increase); and Phoenix, about 3,000 (less than a 0.5% increase). The cities were selected for the study due to their spread of evacuee impact. "Public officials and news reports suggested a criminal class was arriving in these places," Varano says. After welcoming evacuees, Houston handles spike in crime, was a 2006 headline in The Washington Post.
"But if there was any effect, it was a modest one," Varano says, after his group weighed police crime data from the three cities to look for trends for each crime from 2004 to 2006. The study found a slight rise in murder and robbery in Houston, when adjusted for the long-term crime patterns, but no increase in other crimes (and suggested drops in rape and aggravated assaults); no effect at all in San Antonio; and another slight statistical rise in the murder rate in Phoenix. "Any increase in murder is intolerable," Varano says, but a lack of increase in crimes such as car theft and robbery, where economic motives most clearly would tempt so many displaced people, argues against a crime wave driven by evacuees, he says.
Meanwhile, "Many communities across the United States ... also reported increases in violent crime between 2004 and 2006," notes the study, including a 30% increase in aggravated assault in cities such as Baltimore and Detroit.
A crime wave spawned by evacuees is typical of "disaster myths" seen after catastrophes, such as the mythical Superdome riots reported in the days after the hurricane, says disaster management scholar Joseph Trainor of the University of Delaware, who was not part of the study. "This is a very strong study showing long-term effects and (showing) people's resiliency after a disaster."
Disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti almost always spawn fears of riots or criminality, seen in some early reports from Port-Au-Prince. But on Jan. 18, U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Mike Rogers, Director of Intelligence for the Joint Staff, told a news conference, "we have seen nothing that suggests to us that we have widespread disorder; no sense of widespread panic."
"Fifty years of social science show people are not victims of disasters, they are survivors," Trainor says. "People are adaptive and altruistic, mass rioting and mass looting are just disaster myths for the most part."
The crime data study, gathered from public police records, can't indicate whether Katrina evacuees were perpetrators, victims or uninvolved in the increased murders. And it can only talk about the three study cities, not the situation elsewhere, Varano acknowledges. But he suggests there are some lessons raised by the findings.
"One lesson is that after disasters we have to think about where evacuees land, and not just the disaster site itself," Varano says. He argues that crime rate changes after displaced people arrive in a city like Houston or Phoenix tells us more about the conditions at the arrival location than about the displaced people themselves. Strong communities undoubtedly handle influxes of evacuees better than already weak ones, he says.
"Another is that public officials, and news organizations, have a responsibility to speak very carefully about the reality of disaster situations," Varano concludes. "There's a danger of host cities not wanting to accept people in desperate straits because of false perceptions."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2010-02-12-hurricane-katrina-crime_N.htm
Report: No crime wave among Hurricane Katrina evacuees
Dan Vergano
USA Today
Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:47 EST
Hurricane Katrina didn't lead to a massive crime wave in evacuee cities, report criminologists, despite news reports and police warnings at the time.
In the current Journal of Criminal Justice study led by sociologist Sean Varano of Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., the authors look at statistics for robbery, rape, murder, car theft and other violent crimes in Houston, San Antonio and Phoenix before and after Katrina evacuees arrived in those cities. The 2005 storm, which killed about 1,800 people and caused more than $80 billion in damages, according to the National Hurricane Center, led to the relocation of more than one million people.
Houston received about 240,000 evacuees (a 7% population increase); San Antonio, about 30,000 (a 3% increase); and Phoenix, about 3,000 (less than a 0.5% increase). The cities were selected for the study due to their spread of evacuee impact. "Public officials and news reports suggested a criminal class was arriving in these places," Varano says. After welcoming evacuees, Houston handles spike in crime, was a 2006 headline in The Washington Post.
"But if there was any effect, it was a modest one," Varano says, after his group weighed police crime data from the three cities to look for trends for each crime from 2004 to 2006. The study found a slight rise in murder and robbery in Houston, when adjusted for the long-term crime patterns, but no increase in other crimes (and suggested drops in rape and aggravated assaults); no effect at all in San Antonio; and another slight statistical rise in the murder rate in Phoenix. "Any increase in murder is intolerable," Varano says, but a lack of increase in crimes such as car theft and robbery, where economic motives most clearly would tempt so many displaced people, argues against a crime wave driven by evacuees, he says.
Meanwhile, "Many communities across the United States ... also reported increases in violent crime between 2004 and 2006," notes the study, including a 30% increase in aggravated assault in cities such as Baltimore and Detroit.
A crime wave spawned by evacuees is typical of "disaster myths" seen after catastrophes, such as the mythical Superdome riots reported in the days after the hurricane, says disaster management scholar Joseph Trainor of the University of Delaware, who was not part of the study. "This is a very strong study showing long-term effects and (showing) people's resiliency after a disaster."
Disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti almost always spawn fears of riots or criminality, seen in some early reports from Port-Au-Prince. But on Jan. 18, U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Mike Rogers, Director of Intelligence for the Joint Staff, told a news conference, "we have seen nothing that suggests to us that we have widespread disorder; no sense of widespread panic."
"Fifty years of social science show people are not victims of disasters, they are survivors," Trainor says. "People are adaptive and altruistic, mass rioting and mass looting are just disaster myths for the most part."
The crime data study, gathered from public police records, can't indicate whether Katrina evacuees were perpetrators, victims or uninvolved in the increased murders. And it can only talk about the three study cities, not the situation elsewhere, Varano acknowledges. But he suggests there are some lessons raised by the findings.
"One lesson is that after disasters we have to think about where evacuees land, and not just the disaster site itself," Varano says. He argues that crime rate changes after displaced people arrive in a city like Houston or Phoenix tells us more about the conditions at the arrival location than about the displaced people themselves. Strong communities undoubtedly handle influxes of evacuees better than already weak ones, he says.
"Another is that public officials, and news organizations, have a responsibility to speak very carefully about the reality of disaster situations," Varano concludes. "There's a danger of host cities not wanting to accept people in desperate straits because of false perceptions."
Friday, February 12, 2010
US babies mysteriously shrinking
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18434-us-babies-mysteriously-shrinking.html?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=dn18434
26 January 2010 by Ewen Callaway
Magazine issue 2745.
Birthweights in the US are falling but no one knows why, according to a study of 36.8 million infants born between 1990 and 2005.
A 52-gram drop in the weight of full-term singletons – from an average of 3.441 to 3.389 kilograms – has left Emily Oken's team at Harvard Medical School scratching their heads. It can't be accounted for by an increase in caesarean sections or induced labours, which shorten gestation. What's more, women in the US now smoke less and gain more weight during pregnancy, which should make babies heavier. Oken suggests that unmeasured factors, such as diet or exercise, could explain why babies are being born lighter.
"For your average baby, 50 grams probably makes no difference at all," she stresses. But those born substantially lighter could be at increased risk of heart disease and diabetes later in life.
Journal reference: Obstetrics & Gynecology, DOI: 10.1097/aog.0b013e3181cbd5f5
26 January 2010 by Ewen Callaway
Magazine issue 2745.
Birthweights in the US are falling but no one knows why, according to a study of 36.8 million infants born between 1990 and 2005.
A 52-gram drop in the weight of full-term singletons – from an average of 3.441 to 3.389 kilograms – has left Emily Oken's team at Harvard Medical School scratching their heads. It can't be accounted for by an increase in caesarean sections or induced labours, which shorten gestation. What's more, women in the US now smoke less and gain more weight during pregnancy, which should make babies heavier. Oken suggests that unmeasured factors, such as diet or exercise, could explain why babies are being born lighter.
"For your average baby, 50 grams probably makes no difference at all," she stresses. But those born substantially lighter could be at increased risk of heart disease and diabetes later in life.
Journal reference: Obstetrics & Gynecology, DOI: 10.1097/aog.0b013e3181cbd5f5
'Conspiracies of Rich Men' to Commit War Crimes and Aggression
READ BELOW: Over a civilized lunch, this 'conspiracy of rich men' planned the extermination of the jews of Europe. THE SAME THING IS HAPPENING NOW!!!
http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2010/02/conspiracies-of-rich-men-to-commit-war.html
FEBRUARY 02, 2010
'Conspiracies of Rich Men' to Commit War Crimes and Aggression
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
The establishment derides conspiracies and, for awhile, it was fashionable to deny the existence of 'conspiracies'. In fact, conspiracies are how things get done. Very little is accomplished by one person working alone. If what is to be accomplished is illegal, the 'conspiracy' is called a 'crime syndicate' or 'orgnized crime'.
If the 'conspiracy' in question is legal, however questionable, it is called a corporation or a business enterprise. Theorists on the high court have said corporations are people! But, should you call five idiots who have thus conspired to subvert the U.S. Constitution by the term 'conspirators', you are likely to be called a nut job! But SCOTUS believes mere words on paper is a real, living breathing person if it happens to have a seal on it supplied to you by the Delaware Secreatary of State! So --I ask you --who is nuts?
The government often cites the specter of 'organized crime' in order to rally voters to a 'right wing' cause like 'law and order', a big issue in the 1960s. In order to fully exploit this 'threat', this 'clear and present danger' to the lives of middle America who seemed to have been cowering in fear, it was necessary to promote all manner of fears --hippies, black people, rock n' rolll, and crime syndicates. Law and order' was, therefore, a big issue among the GOP hoping to exploit the fears of 'hippies' and 'black people' --both of whom were unhappy with increasing poverty, denial of rights, the seemingly endless, mindless and destructive war in Viet Nam. It was a war fought on behalf of a 'conspiracy of rich men' --ITT, Honeywell et al --all of whom hoped to make a killing with defense contracts.
George H. W. Bush, otherwise called Sr now, had hoped to achieve high office by exploiting those fears. It is no stretch to conclude that George H. W. Bush had made a Faustian bargain with the leadership of GOP. George H. W. Bush --by the time I met him --has already sold his soul to what St. Thomas More has already described as a 'conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodites'.
The Senior Bush won two elections for a seat in the House of Representatives, but lost two bids for a Senate seat. It was in during one of his Senate races that I first met the Senior Bush who was not so well known when I interviewed Bush Sr with regard to this very issue. I was a very young reporter, somewhat naive, learning the ropes and had not yet made it to a major market or a network. Honestly --I did not know what to make of Bush's 'non'-answer. It consisted of slogans, buzzwords, and meaningless gobbledy gook. Little has changed. The Bush family still talks like that!
After Bush's second race for the Senate, President Nixon appointed him U.S. delegate to the United Nations. He later became Republican National Committee chairman. He headed the U.S. liaison office in Beijing. It was years later, in Houston, that the Senior Bush would regale me with a story about how he was 'duped' into eating 'dog lips' --apparently a Chinese delicacy --at a formal, diplomatic dinner in the Forbidden City.
Bush would eventually become Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. At the time, many wondered what, precisely, was it that qualified Bush to head up the CIA, an agency that I have called 'World's Number One Terrorist Organization'. Despite his criticism of Reagan's “voodoo economics" , Bush became Reagan's running mate in 1980; by 1984, Bush had won acclaim for his devotion to Reagan's conservative agenda. Thus would espouse an utterly failed policy and one that he himself has opposed. Reagan's 'voodoo economics' caused a two year long recession, the deepest and most severe depression since Hoover's great depression of 1929. But that clearly did not matter to Bush Sr. He would hitch his wagon to whatever star was ascendant and, at the time, it was the ascendant Ronald Reagan who would preside over a 'conspiracy' to sell arms to Iran, which was, at the time, an officially declared enemy of the United States, a sponsor of world wide terrorism. This 'conspiracy' on behalf of rich men would then funnel the proceeds of those sales to the so-called Contras in Nicaragua. There is a word for this: high treason:
The Iran/contra investigation will not end the kind of abuse of power that it addressed any more than the Watergate investigation did. The criminality in both affairs did not arise primarily out of ordinary venality or greed, although some of those charged were driven by both. Instead, the crimes committed in Iran/contra were motivated by the desire of persons in high office to pursue controversial policies and goals even when the pursuit of those policies and goals was inhibited or restricted by executive orders, statutes or the constitutional system of checks and balances.
The tone in Iran/contra was set by President Reagan. He directed that the contras be supported, despite a ban on contra aid imposed on him by Congress. And he was willing to trade arms to Iran for the release of Americans held hostage in the Middle East, even if doing so was contrary to the nation's stated policy and possibly in violation of the law.
The lesson of Iran/contra is that if our system of government is to function properly, the branches of government must deal with one another honestly and cooperatively. When disputes arise between the Executive and Legislative branches, as they surely will, the laws that emerge from such disputes must be obeyed. When a President, even with good motive and intent, chooses to skirt the laws or to circumvent them, it is incumbent upon his subordinates to resist, not join in. Their oath and fealty are to the Constitution and the rule of law, not to the man temporarily occupying the Oval Office. Congress has the duty and the power under our system of checks and balances to ensure that the President and his Cabinet officers are faithful to their oaths. --Lawrence Walsh, Special Prosecutor, Concluding Observations, FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL
FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS
No one ever called Sr a 'conspiracy theorist'. That's because he was not a theorist; he was a 'conspirator' for real!
"I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth."- Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia
Last time I checked the Cornell Univ Law Library and FINDLAW, I found hundreds if not thousands of court decisions, including SCOTUS, having to do with conspiracies large and small, of one sort or another. Someone should inform SCOTUS that conspiracies do not exist, but, I suspect, the very fact that they are recognized by the higher courts, including SCOTUS, creates them if they had not existed prior.
In his 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich', William Shirer described what St. Thomas More would have called a 'conspiracy of rich men' to invade the nations of Europe, steal their resources and divide up the booty.
Goebbels was jubilant. "Now it will be easy," he wrote in his diary on February 3, "to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money."(2)
The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its business as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed to do at a meeting on February 20 at Goering's Reichstag President's Palace, at which Dr. Schacht acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line to a couple of dozen of Germany's leading magnates, including Krupp von Bohlen, who had become an enthusiastic Nazi overnight, Bosch and Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and Voegler, head of the United Steel Works. The record of this secret meeting has been preserved.
Hitler began a long speech with a sop to the industrialists. "Private enterprise," he said, "cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality . . . All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen . . . We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced more or less with an iron fist." He promised the businessmen that he would "eliminate" the Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht (the latter was of special interest to such industries as Krupp, United Steel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most from rearmament). "Now we stand before the last election," Hitler concluded, and he promised his listeners that "regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat." If he did not win, he would stay in power "by other means . . . with other weapons." Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity of "financial sacrifices" which "surely would be much easier for industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years."
All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament. Krupp, the munitions king, who, according to Thyssen, had urged Hindenburg on January 29 not to appoint Hitler, jumped up and expressed to the Chancellor the "gratitude" of the businessmen "for having given us such a clear picture." Dr. Schacht then passed the hat. "I collected three million marks," he recalled at Nuremberg.(3) --William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34
We are fortunate that no one 'informed' informed Shirer that conspiracies do not exist before he bothered unearthing the mountain of Nazi documents that prove the meeting, the Nazi conspiracy to wage war and genocide for the benefit of global corporations that participated. This meeting of 'industrialists' took place just as surely as did the meeting of Dick Cheney's 'Energy Task Force' which carved up an 'alloted' the oil fields of Iraq long before the events of 911 would give these 'conspiractors' the pre-text they would require to attack Iraq, wage war upon that nation and, in the process, steel its resources for the likes of Dick Cheney's own Halliburton and other members of an energy consortium.
The results were published in a 'National Energy Policy' report in May 2001, several months before 911 would give them the pretext to make the report come true. This is precisely the kind of of conspiracy that had been described so accurately, precisely by St. Thomas More in his "Utopia", a classic of English literature.
I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.
They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth's sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws. But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!
Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia
Another example is Heinrich Heydrich's infamous meeting at Wansee, attended by Nazi bureaucrats, and corporate kiss ups. Over a civilized lunch, this 'conspiracy of rich men' planned the extermination of the jews of Europe.
... within a few months after the meeting, the first gas chambers were installed in some of the extermination camps in Poland. These six camps, Belzec, Birkenau, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka were in operation in Poland.
Responsibility for the entire project was placed in the hands of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, and head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS.
The Wannsee Conference did not mark the beginning of the "Final Solution." The mobile killing squads were already slaughtering Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Rather, the Wannsee Conference was the place where the "final solution" was formally revealed to non-Nazi leaders who would help arrange for Jews to be transported from all over German-occupied Europe to SS-operated "extermination" camps in Poland. Not one of the men present at Wannsee objected to the announced policy. Never before had a modern state committed itself to the murder of an entire people--The Wannsee Conference, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
Very little is EVER accomplished by one person working alone unless you happen to be Michelangelo. Conspiracies exist! Our own Supreme Court has said so and, by law, they have defined themselves as 'infallible'. They are, themselves, of late, a conspiracy of Republicans to subvert the Constitution.
Because conspiracy --in fact --exist, wars will continue to be fought by the poor for the benefit of the rich. The mechanism by which this is accomplished is called the military-industrial complex. It's job is to divide the spoils of war among Dick Cheney's oil buddies and other 'paid thugs' like Blackwater, who conveniently hide behind the monicker --'defense contractor'.
For eons wars have been fought for booty! That's why the US fights them today. Rome invaded Dacia for the gold. The U.S. wages war in the Middle East for oil, the booty du jour! To deny one the right to oppose those wars --as Supreme Court Justice Holmes denied Eugene Debs --is a recipe for military dictatorship. In a text-book example of the false analogy, Holmes likened Debs' opposition to U.S. entry in WWI to yelling 'fire in a crowded theater'. I ask: isn't it more dangerous NOT to shout fire if the theater really is on fire?
Today --the theater is on fire. Our government has repeatedly failed us on almost every front. We are expected to die abroad in order to enrich numerous conspiracies of rich men --oil barons, arm merchants, the very minions of the Military-Industrial Complex. Corporations, we are told, are people and the conspiracy we used to dignify with the term --Supreme Court --has said so! And I ask you: if the MIC is not a 'conspiracy of rich men', then what is? If the Supreme Court has not deteriorated into a conspiracy of right wing ideologues, then why are not the dictionaries re-written and the thousands of pages of case law burned or dumped offshore so that we cannot learn the truth for ourselves. We are expected to buy the lies and die for this wicked, venal conspiracy. Well, I won't and never will!
St. Thomas More would have called the Military-Industrial complex and their shills on K-street a "conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodities in the name and title of the commonwealth!" [See: Thomas More, Utopia] This is why wars have been waged throughout the ages! If Justice Holmes were alive, I would tell him that it is wrong NOT to yell fire in a crowded theater if the theater is, indeed, on fire! At this moment in our history, the American republic is threatened, and among those threatening it is the US Supreme Court itself!
I am yelling FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!
http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2010/02/conspiracies-of-rich-men-to-commit-war.html
FEBRUARY 02, 2010
'Conspiracies of Rich Men' to Commit War Crimes and Aggression
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
The establishment derides conspiracies and, for awhile, it was fashionable to deny the existence of 'conspiracies'. In fact, conspiracies are how things get done. Very little is accomplished by one person working alone. If what is to be accomplished is illegal, the 'conspiracy' is called a 'crime syndicate' or 'orgnized crime'.
If the 'conspiracy' in question is legal, however questionable, it is called a corporation or a business enterprise. Theorists on the high court have said corporations are people! But, should you call five idiots who have thus conspired to subvert the U.S. Constitution by the term 'conspirators', you are likely to be called a nut job! But SCOTUS believes mere words on paper is a real, living breathing person if it happens to have a seal on it supplied to you by the Delaware Secreatary of State! So --I ask you --who is nuts?
The government often cites the specter of 'organized crime' in order to rally voters to a 'right wing' cause like 'law and order', a big issue in the 1960s. In order to fully exploit this 'threat', this 'clear and present danger' to the lives of middle America who seemed to have been cowering in fear, it was necessary to promote all manner of fears --hippies, black people, rock n' rolll, and crime syndicates. Law and order' was, therefore, a big issue among the GOP hoping to exploit the fears of 'hippies' and 'black people' --both of whom were unhappy with increasing poverty, denial of rights, the seemingly endless, mindless and destructive war in Viet Nam. It was a war fought on behalf of a 'conspiracy of rich men' --ITT, Honeywell et al --all of whom hoped to make a killing with defense contracts.
George H. W. Bush, otherwise called Sr now, had hoped to achieve high office by exploiting those fears. It is no stretch to conclude that George H. W. Bush had made a Faustian bargain with the leadership of GOP. George H. W. Bush --by the time I met him --has already sold his soul to what St. Thomas More has already described as a 'conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodites'.
The Senior Bush won two elections for a seat in the House of Representatives, but lost two bids for a Senate seat. It was in during one of his Senate races that I first met the Senior Bush who was not so well known when I interviewed Bush Sr with regard to this very issue. I was a very young reporter, somewhat naive, learning the ropes and had not yet made it to a major market or a network. Honestly --I did not know what to make of Bush's 'non'-answer. It consisted of slogans, buzzwords, and meaningless gobbledy gook. Little has changed. The Bush family still talks like that!
After Bush's second race for the Senate, President Nixon appointed him U.S. delegate to the United Nations. He later became Republican National Committee chairman. He headed the U.S. liaison office in Beijing. It was years later, in Houston, that the Senior Bush would regale me with a story about how he was 'duped' into eating 'dog lips' --apparently a Chinese delicacy --at a formal, diplomatic dinner in the Forbidden City.
Bush would eventually become Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. At the time, many wondered what, precisely, was it that qualified Bush to head up the CIA, an agency that I have called 'World's Number One Terrorist Organization'. Despite his criticism of Reagan's “voodoo economics" , Bush became Reagan's running mate in 1980; by 1984, Bush had won acclaim for his devotion to Reagan's conservative agenda. Thus would espouse an utterly failed policy and one that he himself has opposed. Reagan's 'voodoo economics' caused a two year long recession, the deepest and most severe depression since Hoover's great depression of 1929. But that clearly did not matter to Bush Sr. He would hitch his wagon to whatever star was ascendant and, at the time, it was the ascendant Ronald Reagan who would preside over a 'conspiracy' to sell arms to Iran, which was, at the time, an officially declared enemy of the United States, a sponsor of world wide terrorism. This 'conspiracy' on behalf of rich men would then funnel the proceeds of those sales to the so-called Contras in Nicaragua. There is a word for this: high treason:
The Iran/contra investigation will not end the kind of abuse of power that it addressed any more than the Watergate investigation did. The criminality in both affairs did not arise primarily out of ordinary venality or greed, although some of those charged were driven by both. Instead, the crimes committed in Iran/contra were motivated by the desire of persons in high office to pursue controversial policies and goals even when the pursuit of those policies and goals was inhibited or restricted by executive orders, statutes or the constitutional system of checks and balances.
The tone in Iran/contra was set by President Reagan. He directed that the contras be supported, despite a ban on contra aid imposed on him by Congress. And he was willing to trade arms to Iran for the release of Americans held hostage in the Middle East, even if doing so was contrary to the nation's stated policy and possibly in violation of the law.
The lesson of Iran/contra is that if our system of government is to function properly, the branches of government must deal with one another honestly and cooperatively. When disputes arise between the Executive and Legislative branches, as they surely will, the laws that emerge from such disputes must be obeyed. When a President, even with good motive and intent, chooses to skirt the laws or to circumvent them, it is incumbent upon his subordinates to resist, not join in. Their oath and fealty are to the Constitution and the rule of law, not to the man temporarily occupying the Oval Office. Congress has the duty and the power under our system of checks and balances to ensure that the President and his Cabinet officers are faithful to their oaths. --Lawrence Walsh, Special Prosecutor, Concluding Observations, FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL
FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS
No one ever called Sr a 'conspiracy theorist'. That's because he was not a theorist; he was a 'conspirator' for real!
"I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth."- Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia
Last time I checked the Cornell Univ Law Library and FINDLAW, I found hundreds if not thousands of court decisions, including SCOTUS, having to do with conspiracies large and small, of one sort or another. Someone should inform SCOTUS that conspiracies do not exist, but, I suspect, the very fact that they are recognized by the higher courts, including SCOTUS, creates them if they had not existed prior.
In his 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich', William Shirer described what St. Thomas More would have called a 'conspiracy of rich men' to invade the nations of Europe, steal their resources and divide up the booty.
Goebbels was jubilant. "Now it will be easy," he wrote in his diary on February 3, "to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money."(2)
The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its business as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed to do at a meeting on February 20 at Goering's Reichstag President's Palace, at which Dr. Schacht acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line to a couple of dozen of Germany's leading magnates, including Krupp von Bohlen, who had become an enthusiastic Nazi overnight, Bosch and Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and Voegler, head of the United Steel Works. The record of this secret meeting has been preserved.
Hitler began a long speech with a sop to the industrialists. "Private enterprise," he said, "cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality . . . All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen . . . We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced more or less with an iron fist." He promised the businessmen that he would "eliminate" the Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht (the latter was of special interest to such industries as Krupp, United Steel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most from rearmament). "Now we stand before the last election," Hitler concluded, and he promised his listeners that "regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat." If he did not win, he would stay in power "by other means . . . with other weapons." Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity of "financial sacrifices" which "surely would be much easier for industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years."
All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament. Krupp, the munitions king, who, according to Thyssen, had urged Hindenburg on January 29 not to appoint Hitler, jumped up and expressed to the Chancellor the "gratitude" of the businessmen "for having given us such a clear picture." Dr. Schacht then passed the hat. "I collected three million marks," he recalled at Nuremberg.(3) --William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34
We are fortunate that no one 'informed' informed Shirer that conspiracies do not exist before he bothered unearthing the mountain of Nazi documents that prove the meeting, the Nazi conspiracy to wage war and genocide for the benefit of global corporations that participated. This meeting of 'industrialists' took place just as surely as did the meeting of Dick Cheney's 'Energy Task Force' which carved up an 'alloted' the oil fields of Iraq long before the events of 911 would give these 'conspiractors' the pre-text they would require to attack Iraq, wage war upon that nation and, in the process, steel its resources for the likes of Dick Cheney's own Halliburton and other members of an energy consortium.
The results were published in a 'National Energy Policy' report in May 2001, several months before 911 would give them the pretext to make the report come true. This is precisely the kind of of conspiracy that had been described so accurately, precisely by St. Thomas More in his "Utopia", a classic of English literature.
I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.
They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth's sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws. But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!
Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia
Another example is Heinrich Heydrich's infamous meeting at Wansee, attended by Nazi bureaucrats, and corporate kiss ups. Over a civilized lunch, this 'conspiracy of rich men' planned the extermination of the jews of Europe.
... within a few months after the meeting, the first gas chambers were installed in some of the extermination camps in Poland. These six camps, Belzec, Birkenau, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka were in operation in Poland.
Responsibility for the entire project was placed in the hands of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, and head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS.
The Wannsee Conference did not mark the beginning of the "Final Solution." The mobile killing squads were already slaughtering Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Rather, the Wannsee Conference was the place where the "final solution" was formally revealed to non-Nazi leaders who would help arrange for Jews to be transported from all over German-occupied Europe to SS-operated "extermination" camps in Poland. Not one of the men present at Wannsee objected to the announced policy. Never before had a modern state committed itself to the murder of an entire people--The Wannsee Conference, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
Very little is EVER accomplished by one person working alone unless you happen to be Michelangelo. Conspiracies exist! Our own Supreme Court has said so and, by law, they have defined themselves as 'infallible'. They are, themselves, of late, a conspiracy of Republicans to subvert the Constitution.
Because conspiracy --in fact --exist, wars will continue to be fought by the poor for the benefit of the rich. The mechanism by which this is accomplished is called the military-industrial complex. It's job is to divide the spoils of war among Dick Cheney's oil buddies and other 'paid thugs' like Blackwater, who conveniently hide behind the monicker --'defense contractor'.
For eons wars have been fought for booty! That's why the US fights them today. Rome invaded Dacia for the gold. The U.S. wages war in the Middle East for oil, the booty du jour! To deny one the right to oppose those wars --as Supreme Court Justice Holmes denied Eugene Debs --is a recipe for military dictatorship. In a text-book example of the false analogy, Holmes likened Debs' opposition to U.S. entry in WWI to yelling 'fire in a crowded theater'. I ask: isn't it more dangerous NOT to shout fire if the theater really is on fire?
Today --the theater is on fire. Our government has repeatedly failed us on almost every front. We are expected to die abroad in order to enrich numerous conspiracies of rich men --oil barons, arm merchants, the very minions of the Military-Industrial Complex. Corporations, we are told, are people and the conspiracy we used to dignify with the term --Supreme Court --has said so! And I ask you: if the MIC is not a 'conspiracy of rich men', then what is? If the Supreme Court has not deteriorated into a conspiracy of right wing ideologues, then why are not the dictionaries re-written and the thousands of pages of case law burned or dumped offshore so that we cannot learn the truth for ourselves. We are expected to buy the lies and die for this wicked, venal conspiracy. Well, I won't and never will!
St. Thomas More would have called the Military-Industrial complex and their shills on K-street a "conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodities in the name and title of the commonwealth!" [See: Thomas More, Utopia] This is why wars have been waged throughout the ages! If Justice Holmes were alive, I would tell him that it is wrong NOT to yell fire in a crowded theater if the theater is, indeed, on fire! At this moment in our history, the American republic is threatened, and among those threatening it is the US Supreme Court itself!
I am yelling FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!
Thursday, February 11, 2010
A Quarter of U.S. Nuclear Plants Leaking
It seems that the elites who own it all and run it all have no compassion for the regular people plus they want those pesky untermenschen to die! It's not secret that they want to depopulate the planet. Just google 'depopulation' and you'll get all kinds of hits on this. Google 'kissinger depopulation' and you'll get over 100,000 hits! *Think For Yourself* and do the research yourself. Then articles like the one below will make great sense to you!
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/01/national/main6163433.shtml
MONTPELIER, Vt., Feb. 1, 2010
A Quarter of U.S. Nuclear Plants Leaking
27 of 104 Plants Leak Radioactive Tritium, a Carcinogen, Raising Concerns About Nation's Aging Plants
The cooling towers of Three Mile Island's Unit 1 Nuclear Power Plant pour steam into the sky in Middletown, Pa., in this March 17, 2009 file photo. Radioactive tritium, a carcinogen, now taints at least 27 of the nation's 104 nuclear reactors — raising concerns about how it is escaping from the aging nuclear plants. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
(AP) Radioactive tritium, a carcinogen discovered in potentially dangerous levels in groundwater at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, now taints at least 27 of the nation's 104 nuclear reactors — raising concerns about how it is escaping from the aging nuclear plants.
The leaks — many from deteriorating underground pipes — come as the nuclear industry is seeking and obtaining federal license renewals, casting itself as a clean-green alternative to power plants that burn fossil fuels.
Tritium, found in nature in tiny amounts and a product of nuclear fusion, has been linked to cancer if ingested, inhaled or absorbed through the skin in large amounts.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Monday that new tests at a monitoring well on Vermont Yankee's site in Vernon registered 70,500 picocuries per liter, more than three times the federal safety standard of 20,000 picocuries per liter.
That is the highest reading yet at the Vermont Yankee plant, where the original discovery last month drew sharp criticism by Gov. Jim Douglas and others. Officials of the New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., which owns the plant in Vernon in Vermont's southeast corner, have admitted misleading state regulators and lawmakers by saying the plant did not have the kind of underground pipes that could leak tritium into groundwater.
"What has happened at Vermont Yankee is a breach of trust that cannot be tolerated," said Republican Gov. Jim Douglas, who until now has been a strong supporter of the state's lone nuclear plant.
Vermont Yankee has said no tritium has been found in area drinking water supplies or in the Connecticut River and that earlier, lesser tritium levels discovered last month were of no health concern. Messages left for a plant spokesman Monday were not immediately returned.
President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union address last week, called for "building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country." His 2011 budget request to Congress on Monday called for $54 billion in additional loan guarantees for nuclear power.
The 104 nuclear reactors operating in 31 states provide only 20 percent of the nation's electricity. But they are responsible for 70 percent of the power from non-greenhouse gas producing sources, including wind, solar and hydroelectric dams.
Vermont Yankee is just the latest of dozens of U.S. nuclear plants, many built in the 1960s and '70s, to be found with leaking tritium.
The Braidwood nuclear station in Illinois was found in the 1990s to be leaking millions of gallons of tritium-laced water, some of which contaminated residential water wells. Plant owner Exelon Corp. ended up paying for a new municipal water system.
After Braidwood, the nuclear industry stepped up voluntary checking for tritium in groundwater at plants around the country, testing that revealed the Vermont Yankee problem, plant officials said.
In New Jersey last year, tritium was reported leaking a second time from the Oyster Creek plant in Ocean County, just days after Exelon won NRC approval for a 20-year license extension there. The Pilgrim plant in Plymouth, Mass., like Vermont Yankee, owned by Entergy, reported low levels of tritium on the ground in 2007. The Vermont leak has prompted a Plymouth-area citizens group to demand more test wells at the Massachusetts plant.
NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan says leaks have occurred at least 27 of the nation's 104 commercial reactors at 65 plant sites. He said the list likely does not include every plant where tritium has leaked.
The leaks have several causes; underground pipes corroding and the leaking of spent fuel storage pools are the most common. The source of the leak or leaks at Vermont Yankee has not been found; at Oyster Creek, corroded underground pipes were implicated.
Many radiological health scientists agree with the Environmental Protection Agency that tritium, like other radioactive isotopes, can cause cancer.
That worries Vermont public officials and lawmakers. Rep. Tony Klein, chairman of the Natural Resources and Energy Committee in the Vermont House, said he fears public officials may be downplaying the risk.
"When you have public officials that the public depends on for their health and welfare making casual statements that a radioactive substance is not harmful to you, I think that's ludicrous," Klein said.
There's disagreement on the severity of the risk.
"Somebody would have to be drinking a lot of water and it would have to be really concentrated in there for it to do any harm at all," said Jacqueline Williams, a radiation biologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York state.
But in 2005, the National Academy of Sciences concluded after an exhaustive study that even the tiniest amount of ionizing radiation increases the risk of cancer.
"The scientific research base shows that there is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial," Richard R. Monson, associate dean for professional education and professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, said when the NAS released its study.
Paul Gunter of the Maryland-based anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear, said in many instances, it's impossible to know how much tritium is getting into the environment.
"These are uncontrolled, unmonitored releases from these plants," he said.
Steve Kerekes, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, said the public shouldn't be unduly worried.
"These are industrial facilities, and any industrial facility from time to time is going to have equipment problems or challenges," Kerekes said. "Not every operational issue rises to the level of being a safety issue."
Vermont, with a strong anti-nuclear movement, is the only state in the country where the Legislature decides whether to relicense a nuclear plant. Vermont Yankee's current 40-year license is up in 2012, and Entergy is asking for 20 more years.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/01/national/main6163433.shtml
MONTPELIER, Vt., Feb. 1, 2010
A Quarter of U.S. Nuclear Plants Leaking
27 of 104 Plants Leak Radioactive Tritium, a Carcinogen, Raising Concerns About Nation's Aging Plants
The cooling towers of Three Mile Island's Unit 1 Nuclear Power Plant pour steam into the sky in Middletown, Pa., in this March 17, 2009 file photo. Radioactive tritium, a carcinogen, now taints at least 27 of the nation's 104 nuclear reactors — raising concerns about how it is escaping from the aging nuclear plants. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
(AP) Radioactive tritium, a carcinogen discovered in potentially dangerous levels in groundwater at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, now taints at least 27 of the nation's 104 nuclear reactors — raising concerns about how it is escaping from the aging nuclear plants.
The leaks — many from deteriorating underground pipes — come as the nuclear industry is seeking and obtaining federal license renewals, casting itself as a clean-green alternative to power plants that burn fossil fuels.
Tritium, found in nature in tiny amounts and a product of nuclear fusion, has been linked to cancer if ingested, inhaled or absorbed through the skin in large amounts.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Monday that new tests at a monitoring well on Vermont Yankee's site in Vernon registered 70,500 picocuries per liter, more than three times the federal safety standard of 20,000 picocuries per liter.
That is the highest reading yet at the Vermont Yankee plant, where the original discovery last month drew sharp criticism by Gov. Jim Douglas and others. Officials of the New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., which owns the plant in Vernon in Vermont's southeast corner, have admitted misleading state regulators and lawmakers by saying the plant did not have the kind of underground pipes that could leak tritium into groundwater.
"What has happened at Vermont Yankee is a breach of trust that cannot be tolerated," said Republican Gov. Jim Douglas, who until now has been a strong supporter of the state's lone nuclear plant.
Vermont Yankee has said no tritium has been found in area drinking water supplies or in the Connecticut River and that earlier, lesser tritium levels discovered last month were of no health concern. Messages left for a plant spokesman Monday were not immediately returned.
President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union address last week, called for "building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country." His 2011 budget request to Congress on Monday called for $54 billion in additional loan guarantees for nuclear power.
The 104 nuclear reactors operating in 31 states provide only 20 percent of the nation's electricity. But they are responsible for 70 percent of the power from non-greenhouse gas producing sources, including wind, solar and hydroelectric dams.
Vermont Yankee is just the latest of dozens of U.S. nuclear plants, many built in the 1960s and '70s, to be found with leaking tritium.
The Braidwood nuclear station in Illinois was found in the 1990s to be leaking millions of gallons of tritium-laced water, some of which contaminated residential water wells. Plant owner Exelon Corp. ended up paying for a new municipal water system.
After Braidwood, the nuclear industry stepped up voluntary checking for tritium in groundwater at plants around the country, testing that revealed the Vermont Yankee problem, plant officials said.
In New Jersey last year, tritium was reported leaking a second time from the Oyster Creek plant in Ocean County, just days after Exelon won NRC approval for a 20-year license extension there. The Pilgrim plant in Plymouth, Mass., like Vermont Yankee, owned by Entergy, reported low levels of tritium on the ground in 2007. The Vermont leak has prompted a Plymouth-area citizens group to demand more test wells at the Massachusetts plant.
NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan says leaks have occurred at least 27 of the nation's 104 commercial reactors at 65 plant sites. He said the list likely does not include every plant where tritium has leaked.
The leaks have several causes; underground pipes corroding and the leaking of spent fuel storage pools are the most common. The source of the leak or leaks at Vermont Yankee has not been found; at Oyster Creek, corroded underground pipes were implicated.
Many radiological health scientists agree with the Environmental Protection Agency that tritium, like other radioactive isotopes, can cause cancer.
That worries Vermont public officials and lawmakers. Rep. Tony Klein, chairman of the Natural Resources and Energy Committee in the Vermont House, said he fears public officials may be downplaying the risk.
"When you have public officials that the public depends on for their health and welfare making casual statements that a radioactive substance is not harmful to you, I think that's ludicrous," Klein said.
There's disagreement on the severity of the risk.
"Somebody would have to be drinking a lot of water and it would have to be really concentrated in there for it to do any harm at all," said Jacqueline Williams, a radiation biologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York state.
But in 2005, the National Academy of Sciences concluded after an exhaustive study that even the tiniest amount of ionizing radiation increases the risk of cancer.
"The scientific research base shows that there is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial," Richard R. Monson, associate dean for professional education and professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, said when the NAS released its study.
Paul Gunter of the Maryland-based anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear, said in many instances, it's impossible to know how much tritium is getting into the environment.
"These are uncontrolled, unmonitored releases from these plants," he said.
Steve Kerekes, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, said the public shouldn't be unduly worried.
"These are industrial facilities, and any industrial facility from time to time is going to have equipment problems or challenges," Kerekes said. "Not every operational issue rises to the level of being a safety issue."
Vermont, with a strong anti-nuclear movement, is the only state in the country where the Legislature decides whether to relicense a nuclear plant. Vermont Yankee's current 40-year license is up in 2012, and Entergy is asking for 20 more years.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Dutch plea to allow over-70s to end life
http://www.expatica.com/nl/news/dutch-rss-news/dutch-plea-to-allow-over-70s-to-end-life_23335.html
09/02/2010
Dutch plea to allow over-70s to end life
A group of prominent Dutch has launched a people's initiative for a bill allowing people over 70 to end their lives under professional supervision.
Among the members of the group, named Of Our Own Free Will, are former ministers Frits Bolkestein, Hedy d'Ancona and Jan Terlouw, singer and Unicef ambassador Paul van Vliet and neurologist Dick Swaab, all aged around 70. The essence of the group's proposal is that assisting at suicide should no longer be punishable if several experts have given their agreement according to a narrowly defined procedure.
A people's initiative has to be discussed by the lower house when there are at least 40,000 signatories. The proposal is likely to be opposed by Christian parties in parliament. The group will begin collecting signatures after presenting its proposal to the lower house in The Hague on Tuesday.
09/02/2010
Dutch plea to allow over-70s to end life
A group of prominent Dutch has launched a people's initiative for a bill allowing people over 70 to end their lives under professional supervision.
Among the members of the group, named Of Our Own Free Will, are former ministers Frits Bolkestein, Hedy d'Ancona and Jan Terlouw, singer and Unicef ambassador Paul van Vliet and neurologist Dick Swaab, all aged around 70. The essence of the group's proposal is that assisting at suicide should no longer be punishable if several experts have given their agreement according to a narrowly defined procedure.
A people's initiative has to be discussed by the lower house when there are at least 40,000 signatories. The proposal is likely to be opposed by Christian parties in parliament. The group will begin collecting signatures after presenting its proposal to the lower house in The Hague on Tuesday.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The next big population bogeyman could well be 'overcrowding'. Should we worry?
Vincenzina Santoro | Wednesday, 3 February 2010
Monaco to Mongolia: population density and prosperity
“Stop the World -- I Want to Get Off” was the title of a hit Broadway play some years ago. Today, getting people off the planet is what the United Nations population control crowd would like to do in order to “save” it. After the failed Copenhagen climate control confabulation last December, they will be refocusing their strategy and may target the presumed horrors of overpopulation in the form of large concentrations of people in any given place.
The constantly updating “population clock” of the U.S. Census Bureau showed that the U.S. population was over 308 million and world population not quite 6.8 billion as I write. To the population worriers, these numbers are far too many. Population nihilists conjure up horrendous stories of hordes of people living extremely closely together in dire poverty, clamoring for scarce resources. Fewer people equals less carbon footprints, they claim.
What about “overcrowding?” China’s coercive one-child policy to explicitly curb population is well known, but is China that densely populated? Not at all, when one looks at the relevant data. While the population of China at 1.3 billion is the highest of any country in the world, China ranks only 53rd out of 192 countries in terms of population density, as can be observed in data assembled by the CIA.
This begs the question: Which is the most densely populated country on earth? It happens to be Monaco – that wonderful principality bordering France on the Mediterranean. Monaco is by far the most densely populated country, with a population of only 32,140 but a population density of 41,971 per square mile. Singapore is the distant second, followed by Malta.
What is life like in Monaco? Certainly not what the population doomsayers would predict. The tiny country has one of the highest standards of living, quality of life and personal wealth anywhere on earth. Per capita income is the 20th highest in the world, according to the World Bank. Monaco’s population density is 2.5 times that of next ranking Singapore, which is also among the most prosperous countries, and life in Malta is equally pleasant.
The least densely populated country is Mongolia, sandwiched between China and Russia, which has a density of only five persons per square mile and a total population of 2.8 million. A mountainous and cold country, it too has a vast territory, though much smaller than its two mega-neighbors, and its partly nomadic people rank among the world’s poorest in per capita income.
Of the five most populous countries – China, India, USA, Indonesia, and Russia – India, China, and Indonesia rank 18th, 53rd, and 60th in population density, respectively. India and China each have a population exceeding one billion, but they are not nearly as crowded as other places. The USA with a fertility rate that currently is at the replacement level of 2.1, ranks number 142 on the list, while Russia, the world’s largest country in land area, with an extremely low fertility rate of 1.4 and a population already in decline, ranks as low as 177.
Although Africa is often the target of the population monitors, data do not corroborate their concerns. The United Nations population counters let it be known recently that Africa’s population had just reached the one billion mark. Even so, Africa accounts for only 15 per cent of global population, compared with 60 per cent for Asia. Among the 50 least densely populated countries, 19 are African. Of the 50 most densely populated countries only two are on the African continent: Rwanda and Burundi, and four are small island nations – São Tomé and Principe (in the Gulf of Guinea) and Mauritius, the Comoros and the Seychelles (in the Indian Ocean) which are considered part of Africa.
At a conference in New York on January 22nd, a highly acclaimed demographer who formerly headed the Population Division at the United Nations asked the hypothetical question: What would happen if all the 6.8 billion people currently on earth were to move to the United States? His answer was that the U.S. population density would become the same as that of the Netherlands! Moreover, New York, the most populous city in the United States with a population of 8.5 million has a population density of 26, 403 per square mile – less than that of Monaco.
And a final word about Monaco. Land-wise, all of Monaco can fit comfortably into the 1.32 square miles of New York City’s Central Park.
So, when we hear the cry that there are “too many people” here or there, we should ask, “Too many people for what?” It is all relative to the culture and the economy of the place. Those are the things we should be working to change, if necessary, not the number of people.
Vincenzina Santoro is an international economist in New York City. She represents the American Family Association of New York at the United Nations.
Saving the lives of women and children
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/saving_the_lives_of_women_and_children/
Brian Lilley | Monday, 1 February 2010
Saving the lives of women and children
The G8 appears set to take on the issues of child and maternal mortality. Can they do it while saving lives, not destroying them?
Upon hearing the statistics it is hard not to be moved, to feel that something must be done to change this. Each year, in the developing world, more than 500,000 women die in pregnancy and childbirth, some 9 million children die each year before their fifth birthday. It was these grim numbers that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper used in a keynote address at the Davos World Economic Forum to call for concerted action by G8 countries.
The problems of heightened infant and maternal mortality in the poorer countries of this planet are not news, they have been known for sometime. In 2000, leaders gathered at the United Nations headquarters to endorse the Millennium Development Goals, which included reducing child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015. In the years since, not much has happened.
So in an open letter published in the Toronto Star, Montreal’s La Presse and Le Figaro in Paris, Stephen Harper announced that as president of the G8 this year, Canada will host the G8 and G20 this June, he will push leaders to make a tangible difference for the women and children of the developed world, saying relatively simple health-care solutions could alter the outcomes.
"The solutions are not intrinsically expensive. The cost of clean water, inoculations and better nutrition, as well as the training of health workers to care for women and deliver babies, is within the reach of any country in the G8. Much the same could be said of child mortality. The solutions are similar in nature – better nutrition, immunization – and equally inexpensive in themselves."
The plan laid out by Prime Minister Harper is hard to criticize and it was good to hear, during his speech at Davos, that he has spoken with other G8 leaders and they appear willing to take on this neglected Millennium Development Goal. "It is therefore time," says Harper, "to mobilize our friends and partners to do something for those who can do little for themselves, to replace grand good intentions with substantive acts of human good will."
Yet, when Harper does try to reach out to other nations and get them on board he will face several challenges in bringing about the type of change most of us think of when a world leader says they want to improve the health outcomes of the world's poorest people. The first challenge surfaced in Ottawa at the same time that word of this plan was spreading through the frozen Canadian capital; some development agencies see abortion as the key to reducing infant and maternal mortality.
The change in policy towards family planning in Washington is well documented; abortion is back on the agenda as an acceptable public policy tool for the United States to export around the world. The case in other counties of the G8, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan plus Russia is less well known.
One of the key advisors to Britain's Labour government, or at least Prime Minister Gordon Brown, is Jonathon Porritt of the Optimum Population Trust. Porritt is the man who wants Britain's population cut in half to 30 million people. In conjunction with the United Nation's Population Fund, the OPT also wants to see Africa's population reduced for environmental reasons using family planning, which is often now a program well beyond contraception and includes abortion.
My reason for pointing this out is not to engage in an overall argument about abortion but to set the stage for the argument that what you and I hear when a politician promises something may not be what actually happens. When Prime Minister Harper, as president of the G8, speaks of infant and maternal mortality rates and says, "Far too many lives and futures have been lost." Most of us think his goal is to lower the mortality rates by saving the lives of pregnant women and children under five by improving access to clean water, primary health care, vaccines. That may be what Mr. Harper has in mind and those are in fact what he lists in his speech, but the policy people have other ideas in mind.
Shortly after Harper's push for the G8 to take on this issue became known, a media event was held with Canada's minister of International Cooperation Bev Oda. Ms. Oda gathered several non-governmental groups around the table for a chat on the issue, a brainstorming session of sorts and invited the media to attend. Several well known names were there, UNICEF, CARE, Plan International and World Vision, there was also a group I had not heard of until that day, Action Canada for Population and Development. One of the goals of Action Canada, as I discovered after chatting with their official afterwards, is to promote abortion around the world as a human right.
Now I don't really care which side of the abortion debate you are on, I think we can all agree that when a politician says we should reduce the number of children that die before their fifth birthday, one of the solutions you automatically think of is not abortion. Most reasonable people would think of improving health outcomes. After calls to the offices of Prime Minister Harper and Minister Oda, I've been assured that is what they mean when they speak of this problem, saving lives. Still, they will have a fight on their hands at the G8 from not only the worldwide coalition of NGOs who back Action Canada's viewpoint, but also from other G8 members, like Britain and the United States who may take a different view.
One of the other challenges Harper will face in getting his G8 partners to "replace grand good intentions with substantive acts of human good will," is that what has been tried over the past 15 years or so has not worked. Reducing the mortality rate among mothers and young children may have been a UN Millennium Development Goal but politicians have been speaking about it much longer than the last 10 years. Go back just a bit further and you find these same goals as central to the 1994 Cairo Conference.
Clearly what has been happening so far has not worked. Whether this lack of progress is due to a lack of funds or poorly designed programs is not clear but with billions having been poured into this field over the last decade and zero progress, I'd put my bet on the latter. That won't stop activists for the status quo from trying to ensure their current methods prevail. Stephen Lewis, the former U.N. Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS is chastising Harper for coming to this issue late, "It takes a lot of chutzpah to pretend that somehow you're championing something that others have championed so vigorously before you."
We can only hope, for the sake of the women and children whose lives are at risk, that Mr. Harper can convince his fellow G8 leaders not only to get on board with his initiative, but to look at it with fresh eyes, which will take chutzpah, and possibly also include ignoring Stephen Lewis.
Brian Lilley | Monday, 1 February 2010
Saving the lives of women and children
The G8 appears set to take on the issues of child and maternal mortality. Can they do it while saving lives, not destroying them?
Upon hearing the statistics it is hard not to be moved, to feel that something must be done to change this. Each year, in the developing world, more than 500,000 women die in pregnancy and childbirth, some 9 million children die each year before their fifth birthday. It was these grim numbers that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper used in a keynote address at the Davos World Economic Forum to call for concerted action by G8 countries.
The problems of heightened infant and maternal mortality in the poorer countries of this planet are not news, they have been known for sometime. In 2000, leaders gathered at the United Nations headquarters to endorse the Millennium Development Goals, which included reducing child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015. In the years since, not much has happened.
So in an open letter published in the Toronto Star, Montreal’s La Presse and Le Figaro in Paris, Stephen Harper announced that as president of the G8 this year, Canada will host the G8 and G20 this June, he will push leaders to make a tangible difference for the women and children of the developed world, saying relatively simple health-care solutions could alter the outcomes.
"The solutions are not intrinsically expensive. The cost of clean water, inoculations and better nutrition, as well as the training of health workers to care for women and deliver babies, is within the reach of any country in the G8. Much the same could be said of child mortality. The solutions are similar in nature – better nutrition, immunization – and equally inexpensive in themselves."
The plan laid out by Prime Minister Harper is hard to criticize and it was good to hear, during his speech at Davos, that he has spoken with other G8 leaders and they appear willing to take on this neglected Millennium Development Goal. "It is therefore time," says Harper, "to mobilize our friends and partners to do something for those who can do little for themselves, to replace grand good intentions with substantive acts of human good will."
Yet, when Harper does try to reach out to other nations and get them on board he will face several challenges in bringing about the type of change most of us think of when a world leader says they want to improve the health outcomes of the world's poorest people. The first challenge surfaced in Ottawa at the same time that word of this plan was spreading through the frozen Canadian capital; some development agencies see abortion as the key to reducing infant and maternal mortality.
The change in policy towards family planning in Washington is well documented; abortion is back on the agenda as an acceptable public policy tool for the United States to export around the world. The case in other counties of the G8, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan plus Russia is less well known.
One of the key advisors to Britain's Labour government, or at least Prime Minister Gordon Brown, is Jonathon Porritt of the Optimum Population Trust. Porritt is the man who wants Britain's population cut in half to 30 million people. In conjunction with the United Nation's Population Fund, the OPT also wants to see Africa's population reduced for environmental reasons using family planning, which is often now a program well beyond contraception and includes abortion.
My reason for pointing this out is not to engage in an overall argument about abortion but to set the stage for the argument that what you and I hear when a politician promises something may not be what actually happens. When Prime Minister Harper, as president of the G8, speaks of infant and maternal mortality rates and says, "Far too many lives and futures have been lost." Most of us think his goal is to lower the mortality rates by saving the lives of pregnant women and children under five by improving access to clean water, primary health care, vaccines. That may be what Mr. Harper has in mind and those are in fact what he lists in his speech, but the policy people have other ideas in mind.
Shortly after Harper's push for the G8 to take on this issue became known, a media event was held with Canada's minister of International Cooperation Bev Oda. Ms. Oda gathered several non-governmental groups around the table for a chat on the issue, a brainstorming session of sorts and invited the media to attend. Several well known names were there, UNICEF, CARE, Plan International and World Vision, there was also a group I had not heard of until that day, Action Canada for Population and Development. One of the goals of Action Canada, as I discovered after chatting with their official afterwards, is to promote abortion around the world as a human right.
Now I don't really care which side of the abortion debate you are on, I think we can all agree that when a politician says we should reduce the number of children that die before their fifth birthday, one of the solutions you automatically think of is not abortion. Most reasonable people would think of improving health outcomes. After calls to the offices of Prime Minister Harper and Minister Oda, I've been assured that is what they mean when they speak of this problem, saving lives. Still, they will have a fight on their hands at the G8 from not only the worldwide coalition of NGOs who back Action Canada's viewpoint, but also from other G8 members, like Britain and the United States who may take a different view.
One of the other challenges Harper will face in getting his G8 partners to "replace grand good intentions with substantive acts of human good will," is that what has been tried over the past 15 years or so has not worked. Reducing the mortality rate among mothers and young children may have been a UN Millennium Development Goal but politicians have been speaking about it much longer than the last 10 years. Go back just a bit further and you find these same goals as central to the 1994 Cairo Conference.
Clearly what has been happening so far has not worked. Whether this lack of progress is due to a lack of funds or poorly designed programs is not clear but with billions having been poured into this field over the last decade and zero progress, I'd put my bet on the latter. That won't stop activists for the status quo from trying to ensure their current methods prevail. Stephen Lewis, the former U.N. Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS is chastising Harper for coming to this issue late, "It takes a lot of chutzpah to pretend that somehow you're championing something that others have championed so vigorously before you."
We can only hope, for the sake of the women and children whose lives are at risk, that Mr. Harper can convince his fellow G8 leaders not only to get on board with his initiative, but to look at it with fresh eyes, which will take chutzpah, and possibly also include ignoring Stephen Lewis.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
DID GOVERNMENT APPROVE CITIZENS AS TOXIC WASTE SITES?
http://www.apfn.org/THEWINDS/archive/medical/fluoride01-98.html
ARE WE BEING POISONED?
"Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened." -Winston Churchill-
It has been a long established joke about not drinking the water in Third World countries. Now it is here in America that the water has been declared unsafe to drink, and it is no joke. Whereas the greatest problem with water in the underdeveloped nations is usually such as amoebic dysentery, serious but reversible, in the U.S. it is rat poison one gets in the drinking water--and it is no accident.
Extensive studies, ignored with a yawn by those who believe they are being served well by the media and various dental associations, have shown that the consumption of fluoride in drinking water and prescription doses is extremely harmful and deleterious in a number of ways.
Reputable researchers from such as Harvard and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and numerable other research investigators, have shown that fluoridation of drinking water can result in brain and other physiological damage producing such abnormalities as:
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)
Hyperactivity or passive malaise -- depending on whether exposure is pre- or postnatal
Alzheimer's disease or senile dementia
The death of brain cells directly involved in the decision making processes
Cracked, pitted and brittle teeth and bones not being considered as a potential leading cause of osteoporosis
Higher hip fracture rates
Reduction in intelligence and increased learning disability
The list goes on of primary and ancillary defects and damage caused by the addition of a substance used in rat poison.
In a 1997 copyrighted article once seriously considered for publication by The New York Times Magazine, investigative reporter Joel Griffiths followed a convoluted trail of once-secret documents stretching as far back as the Manhattan Project. In a subsequent article entitled, "Fluoride, Teeth, and the Atomic Bomb" Griffiths collaborated with journalist Christopher Bryson to piece together not only the origin of water fluoridation, but its secret rationale and the insidious reasoning behind the introduction into the drinking water of two-thirds of American cities of what is nothing more than a toxic waste product.
Griffiths told The WINDS that The New York Times Magazine had shown great interest in his original article to the point of suggesting specific rewrites resulting even in the submission of a final working draft. Then, according to Griffiths, their interested suddenly disappeared. Later when Bryson joined with Griffiths the two journalists had a similar experience with The Christian Science Monitor who had actually accepted their final co-authored work for publication but never put it in print and finally canceled.
The authors, who have worked for such as the BBC, New York Public Television, The Christian Science Monitor and others, boldly introduced their work by stating, "The following article exposes the biggest ongoing medical experiment ever carried out by the United States government on an unsuspecting population," and continues with meticulously verified sources derived largely from documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. ***
"One of the most toxic chemicals known," they claim, "fluoride rapidly emerged as the leading chemical health hazard of the U.S. atomic bomb program -- both for workers and for nearby communities, the documents reveal." Other revelations include:
"Much of the original proof that fluoride is safe for humans in low doses was generated by A-bomb program scientists, who had been secretly ordered to provide 'evidence useful in litigation' against defense contractors for fluoride injury to citizens. The first lawsuits against the U.S. A-bomb program were not over radiation, but over fluoride damage, the documents show."
Dr. John R. Lee, MD[2], was chairman of the Environmental Health Committee of his local medical association in Marin County, California when he came head-to-head with the fluoride issue. According to Dr. Lee, the county had continually pushed water fluoridation on the local ballot until it passed by a slim one per cent.
"The medical society was receiving a lot of phone calls from people who were wondering what the truth was about the benefit, or lack of benefit, of fluoride. As a result, they turned it over to the Environmental Health Committee."
Dr. Lee was the perfect, unbiased investigator because, "Up until then," he told The WINDS, "I didn't know anything about fluoride, so our committee got the scientific references from both sides of the issue. We studied the references that led to more references--and we tracked it all down and found that the fluoride literature is mostly hogwash.
"Then," he continues, "we asked the medical society if we could do a study to determine how much fluoride there already was in the food--because in Canada they had been monitoring that and found that there was a lot of fluoride in their food chain due to, among other things, processing with fluoridated water.
"Our study of the food that children eat determined that there was plenty of fluoride in it and there was really no reason to add more to the water because it already exceeded what the public health department determined was the maximum daily dose.
"That's when I became aware of what was going on and went to testify at the State Board of Health. It was amazing to see these guys come out with their references that really aren't references--statements taken out of someone else's paper that wasn't based on anything--a kind of circular, self-referencing research. ["Joe said it so now I can quote Joe, even though Joe was just quoting me."] They would take statements made in textbooks that were published before there was any fluoridation and food was not being processed with fluoridated water--and they would just change the dates. We found all these tricks being played with the data. It was then that I discovered that it was not a scientific dispute but dishonest trickery. It was all a sham."
When The WINDS asked Dr. Lee why, according to his research into the controversy, he thought there was so much political force driving the fluoridation movement, the physician/scientist said, "It's a toxic waste product of many types of industry; for instance, glass production, phosphate fertilizer production and many others. They would have no way to dispose of the tons of fluoride waste they produce unless they could find some use for it, so they made up this story about it being good for dental health. Then they can pass it through everyone's bodies and into the sewer." [A novel approach to toxic waste disposal--just feed it to the people and let their bodies "detoxify" it]. "It is a well coordinated effort," Dr. Lee added, "to keep it from being declared for what it is--a toxic waste."
This could cause one to wonder if the public were not already aware of the dangers of radioactive plutonium waste, what means the government would use to dispose of it.
Dr. Lee's argument carries considerable credibility in light of the revelations proceeding from Griffiths' and Bryson's research into the previously classified documents. That research shows, as mentioned previously, that the idea of fluoride being good for people's teeth originated with the atomic bomb's Manhattan Project. That "fact" that fluoride was beneficial constituted the government's cardinal defense against lawsuits stemming from an environmental contamination that took place from the Du Pont chemical factory in Deepwater, New Jersey in 1944. "The factory was then producing millions of pounds of fluoride for the Manhattan Project, the ultra-secret U.S. military program racing to produce the world's first atomic bomb."
It should be noted here that, without exception, all scientists interviewed during the course of researching this article agreed upon one overwhelming motivation for the government's vigorous promotion of water fluoridation and other dental applications of fluoride--though they've known since the mid 30's of the highly toxic nature of the substance. That unanimous opinion was that it ultimately posed a very tidy solution to the disposal of a very nasty toxic waste. One EPA scientist quoted previously, Dr. William Hirzy, went so far as to conjecture that the red ink that would be produced by the fertilizer industry alone, if it were required to properly dispose of fluoride as a waste product, would exceed $100 million a year. As the legendary New York City Police Detective, Frank Serpico, was once warned, "With that kind of money you don't [mess] around."
The WINDS has obtained a copy of a letter dated March, 1983 on EPA letterhead, written by then U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Deputy Assistant Administrator for Water, Rebecca Hanmer. In that document Ms. Hanmer frankly admits that:
In regard to the use of fluosilicic acid as a source of fluoride for fluoridation, this agency [the EPA] regards such use as an ideal environmental solution to a long-standing problem. By recovering by-product [read that: toxic waste-product] fluosilicic acid from fertilizer manufacturing, water and air pollution are minimized, and water utilities have a low-cost source of fluoride available to them.
Keeping in mind that the EPA considers a spill of more than twenty-five pounds of common table salt an environmental hazard or "incident", in fairness it must be asked, first, is fluoride really effective in reducing tooth decay and, secondly, at the same time is it safe for drinking water?
The answer to the first question: not according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:
...Investigators have failed to show a consistent correlation between anticaries [cavities] activity and the specific amounts of fluoride incorporated into enamel.
...Since the 1970s, caries scores have been declining in both fluoridated and non-fluoridated communities in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. ...National decreases have not occurred in all countries, notably Brazil and France where the caries scores have not changed, and Japan, Nigeria, and Thailand where the scores have increased." [3] [Japan & Thailand report high dietary fluoride levels].
A TRAIL OF CASUALTIES
The political and financial forces surrounding the fluoride industry, according to Dr. Lee and others, are vicious and unrelenting in their assaults upon anyone daring to place themselves at odds with it. Dr. Lee briefly outlined cases with which he is personally acquainted where reputable doctors and scientists have had their careers either ruined or severely crippled as the result of trying to introduce truth into this darkness-shrouded global enterprise. Cases in point:
During the time of the election [to decide on whether or not to fluoridate the county's water supply], Lee said the head of the Marin County Public Health Department was claiming "it was beneficial and perfectly safe. After the election, when I discovered all these things, I presented them to her, showing her all the tricks that had been used. She then asked the state public health department if she had the power to stop the fluoridation, realizing she had been mistaken. The next thing I knew," Lee continued, "she had taken early retirement and left for New Orleans to take care of her mother. She told me that if she made any statement about it at all she would have lost all her retirement benefits."
Dr. Allan S. Gray, a British Columbia health officer, did a study of all school children's teeth in that province, which is only about 15% fluoridated. He found that the teeth of those children in British Columbia where there was no fluoridation were in much better condition than in the fluoridated areas. His findings were published in the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association, entitled, "Time for a New Baseline?" [4]. So the message was that fluoridation did not provide any benefit to children and for publishing that research the top public health dentist in British Columbia was demoted and sent to Ottawa where he was put in a basement office and ordered to never speak to anybody about the matter again. If he did, he would lose his standing in the public health department of Canada and very likely all of his retirement benefits.
Dr. John Colquhon, an Aukland, New Zealand dental researcher with a prominent university, performed studies on children's teeth and the neighboring towns that were not fluoridated and discovered the children had no difference in cavity rate--they just all had fluorosed teeth [damage done by the presence of fluoride in their drinking water]. When he published his findings he was demoted and lost all of his retirement benefits and was forced to retire. As a Ph.D. he had to take a teaching position--all of the people he had considered his colleagues for thirty years suddenly didn't recognize him any more."
Phyllis Mullenix, Ph.D., formerly of Harvard University experienced the wrath of the industry when she walked blindly into the fluoride fray as part of her research program with Harvard's Department of Neuropathology and Psychiatry. While holding a dual appointment to Harvard and the Forsyth Dental Research Institute, Dr. Mullenix established the Department of Toxicology at Forsyth for the purpose of investigating the environmental impact of substances that were used in dentistry. During that undertaking she was also directed by the institute's head to investigate fluoride toxicity. That's where, as she puts it, "things got weird."
THE DARK ODYSSEY OF DR. PHYLLIS MULLENIX
While conducting interviews and gathering the data contained in this writing, this office was repeatedly referred by EPA scientists, university professors and physicians to Dr. Mullenix's research at the Forsyth Dental Institute as a primary and seminal source of reliable scientific research on fluoride toxicity.
The Forsyth Dental Center is a highly respected research institution established in 1910 for the purpose of providing free dental care for the children of Boston. It is the largest and, considered by many, the most highly respected dental research institution in the world. All Harvard dental students are required to take a portion of their training at Forsyth.
It is interesting to note that the, then, director of the institute, Dr. Jack Hein, who was responsible for her assignment to fluoride toxicology studies was, according to Mullenix, instrumental in some of the original research that led to the introduction of fluoride into toothpaste while he was working for Colgate.
"I wasn't too excited about studying fluoride," Mullenix told this reporter, "because, quite frankly, it was 'good for your teeth' and all that, and I thought the studies would be basically just another control and I had no interest in fluoride." However, because it was part of what she was hired to do, she said, and because she had just astounded the institute by achieving the unattainable--securing a grant from the National Cancer Institute to study the neurotoxicity of the treatments used for childhood leukemia--she decided to incorporate the fluoride studies into that research milieu. In fact, Mullenix claimed, "I was in the top four per cent in the country" for such funding. "The institute was tickled pink, but I really had no idea what a quagmire I was getting into."
For her toxicology studies Dr. Mullenix designed a computer pattern recognition system that has been described by other scientists as nothing short of elegant in its ability to study fluoride's effects on the neuromotor functions of rats.
THE "MIRACLE OF FLUORIDE" -or- A DIRTY INDUSTRY?
"By about 1990 I had gathered enough data from the test and control animals," Mullenix continues, "to realize that fluoride doesn't look clean." When she reviewed that data she realized that something was seriously affecting her test animals. They had all (except the control group) been administered doses of fluoride sufficient to bring their blood levels up to the same as those that had caused dental fluorosis [a brittleness and staining of the teeth] in thousands of children. Up to this point, Mullenix explained, fluorosis was widely thought to be the only effect of excessive fluoridation.
The scientist's first hint that she may not be navigating friendly waters came when she was ordered to present her findings to the National Institute of Dental Research (NIDR) [a division of NIH, the National Institute of Health]. "That's when the 'fun' started," she said, "I had no idea what I was getting into. I walked into the main corridors there and all over the walls was 'The Miracle of Fluoride'. That was my first real kick-in-the-pants as to what was actually going on." The NIH display, she said, actually made fun of and ridiculed those that were against fluoridation. "I thought, 'Oh great!' Here's the main NIH hospital talking about the 'Miracle of Fluoride' and I'm giving a seminar to the NIDR telling them that fluoride is neurotoxic!"
What Dr. Mullenix presented at the seminar that, in reality, sounded the death knell of her career was that:
"The fluoride pattern of behavioral problems matches up with the same results of administering radiation and chemotherapy [to cancer patients]. All of these really nasty treatments that are used clinically in cancer therapy are well known to cause I.Q. deficits in children. That's one of the best studied effects they know of. The behavioral pattern that results from the use of fluoride matches that produced by cancer treatment that causes a reduction in intelligence."
At a meeting with dental industry representatives immediately following her presentation, Mullenix was bluntly asked if she was saying that their company's products were lowering the I.Q. of children? "And I told them, 'basically, yes.'"
The documents obtained by authors Griffiths and Bryson seem to add yet another voice of corroboration to the reduced intelligence effects of fluoride. "New epidemiological evidence from China adds support," the writers claim, "showing a correlation between low dose fluoride exposure and diminished I.Q. in children."
Then in 1994, after refining her research and findings, Dr. Mullenix presented her results to the Journal of Neurotoxicology and Teratology [5], considered probably the world's most respected publication in that field. Three days after she joyfully announced to the Forsyth Institute that she had been accepted for publication by the journal, she was dismissed from her position. What followed was a complete evaporation of all grants and funding for any of Mullenix's research. What that means in the left-brain world of scientific research, which is fueled by grants of government and corporate capital, is the equivalent to an academic burial. Her letter of dismissal from the Forsyth Institute stated as their reason for that action that her work was not "dentally related." [Fluoride research--not dentally related?] The institute's director stated, according to Mullenix, "they didn't consider the safety or the toxicity of fluoride as being their kind of science." Of course, a logical question begs itself at this last statement: why was Dr. Mullenix assigned the study of fluoride toxicity in the first place if it was not "their kind of science"?
Subsequently, she was continually hounded by both Forsyth and the NIH as to the identity of the journal in which her research was to be published. She told The WINDS that she refused to disclose that information because she knew the purpose of this continual interrogation was so that they could attempt to quash its publication.
Almost immediately following her dismissal, Dr. Mullenix said, the Forsyth Institute received a quarter-million dollar grant from the Colgate company. Coincidence or reward?
Her findings clearly detailed the developmental effects of fluoride, pre- and postnatal. Doses administered before birth produced marked hyperactivity in offspring. Postnatal administration caused the infant rats to exhibit what Dr. Mullenix calls the "couch potato syndrome"--a malaise or absence of initiative and activity. One need only observe the numerous children being dosed with Ritalin as treatment for their hyperactivity to draw logical correlations.
Following her dismissal, the scientist's equipment and computers, designed specifically for the studies, were mysteriously damaged and destroyed by water leakage before she could remove them from Forsyth. Coincidence?
Dr. Mullenix was then given an unfunded research position at Children's Hospital in Boston, but with no equipment and no money--what for? "The people at Children's Hospital, for heaven's sake, came right out and said they were scared because they knew how important the fluoride issue was," Mullenix said. "Even at Forsyth they told me I was endangering funds for the institution if I published that information." It has become clear to such as Dr. Mullenix et al, that money, not truth, drives science--even at the expense of the health and lives of the nation's citizens.
"I got into science because it was fun," she said, "and I would like to go back and do further studies, but I no longer have any faith in the integrity of the system. I find research is utterly controlled." If one harbors any doubt that large sums of corporate money and political clout can really provide sufficient influence to induce scientists and respected physicians to endorse potentially harmful treatment for their patients, consider the results published in a January 8th article of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)[6]. The Journal revealed their survey of doctors in favor of, and against, a particular drug that has been proven harmful (in this case calcium blockers shown to significantly increase the risk of breast cancer in older women).
"Our results," the Journal said, "demonstrate a strong association between authors' published positions on the safety of calcium-channel antagonists and their financial relationships with pharmaceutical manufacturers."
When The WINDS asked Dr. Mullenix where she planned to take her research, she said that she is not hopeful that any place exists that isn't "afraid of fluoride or printing the truth."
The end result of the dark odyssey of Phyllis Mullenix, Ph.D., and her journey through the nightmare of the fluoride industry is, essentially, a ruined career of a brilliant scientist because her's was not "their kind of science".
PRIOR KNOWLEDGE
It has become evident, as the result of the once-secret documents obtained by Griffiths and Bryson that Dr. Mullenix's research was not the first to discover the dangers of fluoride. "The original secret version -- obtained by these reporters -- of a 1948 study published by Program F [the code name given fluoride studies] scientists in the Journal of the American Dental Association shows that evidence of adverse health effects from fluoride was censored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) -- considered the most powerful of Cold War agencies -- for reasons of national security." One would necessarily have to ask what the perceived threat was to national security if fluoride was found to be toxic by the American Dental Association. Did they perhaps perceive a potential threat as proceeding from the American people?
"...Up to eighty percent," the Griffiths/Bryson article continues, "in some cities -- now have dental fluorosis, the first visible sign of excessive fluoride exposure, according to the U.S. National Research Council. (The signs are whitish flecks or spots, particularly on the front teeth, or dark spots or stripes in more severe cases)."
Dr. William Hirzy, an organic chemist and a senior scientist in Environmental Risk Assessment with EPA originally became involved in the fluoride issue "as a matter of professional ethics when one of the EPA scientists came to us and complained that he was being asked to write a Federal Register notice with which he has substantial ethical problems." The scientist protested that "the agency wants me to write this notice that says it's alright to have teeth that look like you've been chewing on rocks and tar balls. I have a real problem with that," he told Hirzy.
To issue a notice of intended regulation in the Federal Register means that after a specified period of time the notice essentially becomes law and is entered into either the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) or the United States Code (USC). This process is a much used manner of creating law by circumventing the constitutional process of legislation. It becomes what is called "administrative law."
"At that time," Hirzy said, "EPA was revising its drinking water standards for fluoride and was about to issue a notice that four milligrams per liter was an acceptable level of fluoride for drinking water." The great problem with that, Hirzy explained, "indicated that a substantial number of people who were exposed to that concentration would have teeth suffering from severe dental fluorosis eroded, cracked and pitted and stained....The agency [EPA] was saying that it was not a health effect, it was only cosmetic. Frankly," Hirzy remonstrated, "it doesn't seem to be a very ethical stance for us to say that if your teeth don't work--if they're cracked and pitted and falling out--that it's not a health effect.
"The agency," Hirzy told The WINDS, "was taking that position because of the peculiar wording of the Safe Drinking Water Act which says that EPA has to set standards that protect against adverse health effects with an adequate margin of safety." So they wanted to say, according to Dr. Hirzy, that "severe dental fluorosis is not an adverse health effect." If, in essence, you just say it is not an adverse health effect, you then effectively comply with the law by juggling the definition.
The great problem with the system, Hirzy explained, is that the EPA is not a constitutionally mandated organization and therefore cannot [or is not supposed to] make law but can only advise the executive branch of government. The dilemma arises when whatever administration is in office comes to the agency and says, "We want you to write that the science supports this particular decision, whatever it may be, that's where I draw the line and say 'no dice, we're not going to do that....You can't make us lie about the science.' It makes us complicit in deception. We do not want to have to invoke the Nuremberg defense," (i.e., I was just doing what I was told).
Hirzy said that the EPA, in fact, got away with imposing a standard that effectually ruins the teeth of very many who drink fluoridated water because, though "widely known to cause severe fluorosis at four milligrams per liter, that is the standard in effect to this day."
Of even more ominous portent, Hirzy said, is that, far from being merely cosmetic in effect, "what's going on in the teeth is a window to what's going on in the bones. What fluoride does in the hydroxy-epitite structure in teeth it does to the same structure in bone. It is well known now that fluoride produces faulty bone, more brittle, basically mimicking in the bone what is clearly visible in the teeth." A kind of artificial osteoporosis.
"It's an outrageous situation," the EPA scientist claims, when you have fluoridated household drinking water in such concentration that the agency must inform parents that they "should not be allowing their children to drink four milligrams per liter of fluoride, and if they have that in their water supply they should go to an alternative source." Does it not seem a little strange that the government authorizes the addition of a chemical to ostensibly help children's teeth and then tells parents not to allow their children to drink it? We are most certainly not in Kansas anymore, Toto!
So toxic is the fluoride added to drinking water that, according to Hirzy, if one were to take a dose of it about half the size of that "500 mg vitamin C tablet you take in the morning, you'd be dead long before the sun went down. When you're talking about something with that kind of potent toxicity," he says, "it's unrealistic to think that the only adverse effect it has is death. It must be doing something intracellularly to cause these effects."
As evidence that the government has known for over sixty years that fluoride is a health hazard, Hirzy quoted from an article, "clear back in 1934 in which the American Dental Association plainly treats the subject very matter-of-factly. It calls fluoride a general protoplasmic poison."
Robert Carton, Ph.D., twenty years with EPA and now employed as a scientist with the Army, claims that, on "July 7, 1997 the EPA scientists, engineers and attorneys who assess the scientific data for the Safe Drinking Water Act standards and other EPA regulations have gone on record against the practice of adding fluoride to public drinking water.
Question: if the Environmental Protection Agency possesses the clout to virtually confiscate a man's land because some of it is a little soggy--calling it wetlands--why do they not exercise that power to enforce de-fluoridation of drinking water, which they have declared unsafe? Does money play any role in this?
Dr. Carton informed this office that fluoride itself is not the only major hazard stemming from its introduction into city water supplies. "A very real danger lies in the fact that fluosilicic acid leaches lead from plumbing. "There are a couple of places in the country," Dr. Carton said, "Seattle being one and Thermont, Maryland...that when they stopped adding fluoride to their water the lead levels dropped in half."
The problem with the data used to determine the safety of fluoride, Carton said, is that it is all based on the original figures presented by the chief scientist in charge of the Manhattan Project's fluoride safety, Dr. Harold Hodge. He falsified or "cooked the numbers," as Carton put it, to make his data fit what the government wanted.
In addition to the dental and skeletal damage caused by fluoride, Dr. Carton also cites research that claims that a specific antibody (immunoglobulin - IgM) that is missing from patients with certain types of brain tumors is also missing from the blood of those tested with elevated blood fluoride levels. This is leading many to theorize that such brain tumors are much more likely among individuals consuming fluoride compounds in their diet. Since most juice concentrates and food stuffs are processed with fluoridated water, such blood elevations are becoming much more common.
ENOUGH ALREADY? NOPE, THERE'S MORE--
In a study published last October in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences [7], Dr. Robert L. Isaacson makes a number of astounding revelations about this toxic waste in our water.
"Probably the most startling observation from our first experiment," Isaacson states, "was the high mortality rate in the group of animals that received the lowest dose of AlF 3 [aluminum fluoride]. Different groups of rats had been given one of three levels of AlF3 in double distilled drinking water: 0.5 ppm, 5 ppm, and 50 ppm starting at about four months of age. A fourth group received only the distilled water." The experiment lasted only 45 weeks but, Isaacson stated, "Eighty per cent of the rats in the [lowest concentration group] died before the end of the experiment" which was the highest mortality rate of all. "Not only did the rats in the lowest dose group die more often during the experiment, they looked poorly well before their deaths.
Even the rats in the low dose group that managed to survive until the end of the 45 weeks looked to be in poor health. They had much thinner hair than those in the other groups and the exposed skin was bronzed, mottled and flaky. Their teeth and toe nails were excessively dark." Follow-up studies, the scientist said, "showed the same high level of mortality." The study goes on to say that, in subsequent research, low levels of the same kind of fluoride that is added to city drinking water "also allows the enhancement of brain levels of Al."
Another prominent finding by Isaacson's group was the significant reduction on the cells of the hippocampus, that part of the brain that acts like a central processing unit in a computer, telling other parts what to do and how to function. The hippocampus is the primary decision making part of the brain, damage to which causes the victim to become more submissive and less challenging to his environment. One could logically question if this is not a pivotal reason for the government's push for universal fluoridation.
In the brain of his low dose test animals, Isaacson observed a tangling of capillary blood vessels, reduced oxygen uptake along with the peculiar crystalline structures, all of which are identical to those found in Alzheimer's victims. Dr. Isaacson's research indicates that the Alzheimer's-like effects result from the transport of aluminum to the brain and the high death rates from the toxicity of the fluorine.
Aluminum has previously to this, of course, been implicated in Alzheimer's, but how is the link made between fluoridation of human drinking water and the presence of aluminum fluoride? According to Drs. Carton and Burgstahler, fluoride being the most electrochemically active of all the elements, it has a strong propensity to create metallic compounds with itself whenever fluoridated water comes into contact with such things as aluminum cooking vessels. Ergo: there is created aluminum fluoride from cooking with such vessels using fluoridated water and not incidentally, according to Dr. Robert Carton, former EPA scientist, aluminum is used in city water treatment.
"An incidental observation of possible importance must be mentioned," the research paper adds. "Pathologic changes were found in the kidneys of animals in both the AlF 3 and NaF [sodium fluoride] groups." If all this weren't enough, the research team observed a "general impairment in the immune capacities of the treated subjects." They also found that the death rate increased among those animals treated with the aluminum fluoride where stress was elevated due to a training regime.
The research clearly indicates that not only does the presence of fluoride reduce the body's ability to utilize oxygen and nutrients, but actively inhibits the system's ability to rid itself of waste. This creates an apparent synergistic assault upon the health by poisoning the body with its own toxic waste while impairing its effectiveness to use the nutrients that would help in the detoxification process.
In the face of overwhelming data proving that fluoride is not only not beneficial but extremely harmful; the reliable evidence that the government has known of this for over sixty years; the continuing press for fluoridation in the drinking water of American cities, makes all the more believable the portentous claim set forth in the Protocols:
"...We now appear on the scene as apparent saviors of the common worker, saving him from this oppression by enrolling him in the ranks of our various forces fighting for imaginary civil liberties. The upper class, which enjoyed by law the labor of the workers, was interested in seeing that the workers were well fed, healthy and strong. We are interested in just the opposite-in the diminishment, the killing out of the nations. Our power is in the chronic...physical and mental weakness of the worker. What that results in is his being made the slave of our will, and he will not find in the authorities of his own society either the strength or energy to oppose us."
REFERENCES:
1. "Fluoride, Teeth and the Atomic Bomb", Griffiths & Bryson, 1997. Author Griffiths indicated that this URL contains an accurate reproduction of their article.
2. John R. Lee, MD, article: "The Truth About Mandatory Fluoridation", April 15, 1995.
3. "Review of Fluoride Benefits and Risks", Department of Health and Human Services, February 1991, p. 7 & p. 31.
4. The Journal of the Canadian Dental Association, Vol. 53, pp 763-765, 1987.
5. "Neurotoxicity of Sodium Fluoride in Rats", Mullenix, P. Neurotoxicology and Teratology", 17(2), 1995.
6. The New England Journal of Medicine -- January 8, 1998 -- Volume 338, Number 2 [SPECIAL ARTICLE] "Conflict of Interest in the Debate over Calcium-Channel Antagonists", Henry Thomas Stelfox, Grace Chua, Keith O'Rourke, Allan S. Detsky.
7. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 825 "Neuroprotective Agents, Third International Conference." Title: "Toxin-Induced Blood Vessel Inclusion caused by the Chronic Administration of Aluminum and Sodium Fluoride and their Implication for Dementia." Robert. L. Isaacson, et al, p. 152-166.
Further reading:
FLUORIDE: Protected Pollutant or Panacea? A very extensive source for scientific papers published on fluoridation
Robert J. Carton, Ph.D., Former EPA scientist. Article: "Corruption and Fraud at the EPA"
ARE WE BEING POISONED?
"Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened." -Winston Churchill-
It has been a long established joke about not drinking the water in Third World countries. Now it is here in America that the water has been declared unsafe to drink, and it is no joke. Whereas the greatest problem with water in the underdeveloped nations is usually such as amoebic dysentery, serious but reversible, in the U.S. it is rat poison one gets in the drinking water--and it is no accident.
Extensive studies, ignored with a yawn by those who believe they are being served well by the media and various dental associations, have shown that the consumption of fluoride in drinking water and prescription doses is extremely harmful and deleterious in a number of ways.
Reputable researchers from such as Harvard and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and numerable other research investigators, have shown that fluoridation of drinking water can result in brain and other physiological damage producing such abnormalities as:
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)
Hyperactivity or passive malaise -- depending on whether exposure is pre- or postnatal
Alzheimer's disease or senile dementia
The death of brain cells directly involved in the decision making processes
Cracked, pitted and brittle teeth and bones not being considered as a potential leading cause of osteoporosis
Higher hip fracture rates
Reduction in intelligence and increased learning disability
The list goes on of primary and ancillary defects and damage caused by the addition of a substance used in rat poison.
In a 1997 copyrighted article once seriously considered for publication by The New York Times Magazine, investigative reporter Joel Griffiths followed a convoluted trail of once-secret documents stretching as far back as the Manhattan Project. In a subsequent article entitled, "Fluoride, Teeth, and the Atomic Bomb" Griffiths collaborated with journalist Christopher Bryson to piece together not only the origin of water fluoridation, but its secret rationale and the insidious reasoning behind the introduction into the drinking water of two-thirds of American cities of what is nothing more than a toxic waste product.
Griffiths told The WINDS that The New York Times Magazine had shown great interest in his original article to the point of suggesting specific rewrites resulting even in the submission of a final working draft. Then, according to Griffiths, their interested suddenly disappeared. Later when Bryson joined with Griffiths the two journalists had a similar experience with The Christian Science Monitor who had actually accepted their final co-authored work for publication but never put it in print and finally canceled.
The authors, who have worked for such as the BBC, New York Public Television, The Christian Science Monitor and others, boldly introduced their work by stating, "The following article exposes the biggest ongoing medical experiment ever carried out by the United States government on an unsuspecting population," and continues with meticulously verified sources derived largely from documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. ***
"One of the most toxic chemicals known," they claim, "fluoride rapidly emerged as the leading chemical health hazard of the U.S. atomic bomb program -- both for workers and for nearby communities, the documents reveal." Other revelations include:
"Much of the original proof that fluoride is safe for humans in low doses was generated by A-bomb program scientists, who had been secretly ordered to provide 'evidence useful in litigation' against defense contractors for fluoride injury to citizens. The first lawsuits against the U.S. A-bomb program were not over radiation, but over fluoride damage, the documents show."
Dr. John R. Lee, MD[2], was chairman of the Environmental Health Committee of his local medical association in Marin County, California when he came head-to-head with the fluoride issue. According to Dr. Lee, the county had continually pushed water fluoridation on the local ballot until it passed by a slim one per cent.
"The medical society was receiving a lot of phone calls from people who were wondering what the truth was about the benefit, or lack of benefit, of fluoride. As a result, they turned it over to the Environmental Health Committee."
Dr. Lee was the perfect, unbiased investigator because, "Up until then," he told The WINDS, "I didn't know anything about fluoride, so our committee got the scientific references from both sides of the issue. We studied the references that led to more references--and we tracked it all down and found that the fluoride literature is mostly hogwash.
"Then," he continues, "we asked the medical society if we could do a study to determine how much fluoride there already was in the food--because in Canada they had been monitoring that and found that there was a lot of fluoride in their food chain due to, among other things, processing with fluoridated water.
"Our study of the food that children eat determined that there was plenty of fluoride in it and there was really no reason to add more to the water because it already exceeded what the public health department determined was the maximum daily dose.
"That's when I became aware of what was going on and went to testify at the State Board of Health. It was amazing to see these guys come out with their references that really aren't references--statements taken out of someone else's paper that wasn't based on anything--a kind of circular, self-referencing research. ["Joe said it so now I can quote Joe, even though Joe was just quoting me."] They would take statements made in textbooks that were published before there was any fluoridation and food was not being processed with fluoridated water--and they would just change the dates. We found all these tricks being played with the data. It was then that I discovered that it was not a scientific dispute but dishonest trickery. It was all a sham."
When The WINDS asked Dr. Lee why, according to his research into the controversy, he thought there was so much political force driving the fluoridation movement, the physician/scientist said, "It's a toxic waste product of many types of industry; for instance, glass production, phosphate fertilizer production and many others. They would have no way to dispose of the tons of fluoride waste they produce unless they could find some use for it, so they made up this story about it being good for dental health. Then they can pass it through everyone's bodies and into the sewer." [A novel approach to toxic waste disposal--just feed it to the people and let their bodies "detoxify" it]. "It is a well coordinated effort," Dr. Lee added, "to keep it from being declared for what it is--a toxic waste."
This could cause one to wonder if the public were not already aware of the dangers of radioactive plutonium waste, what means the government would use to dispose of it.
Dr. Lee's argument carries considerable credibility in light of the revelations proceeding from Griffiths' and Bryson's research into the previously classified documents. That research shows, as mentioned previously, that the idea of fluoride being good for people's teeth originated with the atomic bomb's Manhattan Project. That "fact" that fluoride was beneficial constituted the government's cardinal defense against lawsuits stemming from an environmental contamination that took place from the Du Pont chemical factory in Deepwater, New Jersey in 1944. "The factory was then producing millions of pounds of fluoride for the Manhattan Project, the ultra-secret U.S. military program racing to produce the world's first atomic bomb."
It should be noted here that, without exception, all scientists interviewed during the course of researching this article agreed upon one overwhelming motivation for the government's vigorous promotion of water fluoridation and other dental applications of fluoride--though they've known since the mid 30's of the highly toxic nature of the substance. That unanimous opinion was that it ultimately posed a very tidy solution to the disposal of a very nasty toxic waste. One EPA scientist quoted previously, Dr. William Hirzy, went so far as to conjecture that the red ink that would be produced by the fertilizer industry alone, if it were required to properly dispose of fluoride as a waste product, would exceed $100 million a year. As the legendary New York City Police Detective, Frank Serpico, was once warned, "With that kind of money you don't [mess] around."
The WINDS has obtained a copy of a letter dated March, 1983 on EPA letterhead, written by then U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Deputy Assistant Administrator for Water, Rebecca Hanmer. In that document Ms. Hanmer frankly admits that:
In regard to the use of fluosilicic acid as a source of fluoride for fluoridation, this agency [the EPA] regards such use as an ideal environmental solution to a long-standing problem. By recovering by-product [read that: toxic waste-product] fluosilicic acid from fertilizer manufacturing, water and air pollution are minimized, and water utilities have a low-cost source of fluoride available to them.
Keeping in mind that the EPA considers a spill of more than twenty-five pounds of common table salt an environmental hazard or "incident", in fairness it must be asked, first, is fluoride really effective in reducing tooth decay and, secondly, at the same time is it safe for drinking water?
The answer to the first question: not according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:
...Investigators have failed to show a consistent correlation between anticaries [cavities] activity and the specific amounts of fluoride incorporated into enamel.
...Since the 1970s, caries scores have been declining in both fluoridated and non-fluoridated communities in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. ...National decreases have not occurred in all countries, notably Brazil and France where the caries scores have not changed, and Japan, Nigeria, and Thailand where the scores have increased." [3] [Japan & Thailand report high dietary fluoride levels].
A TRAIL OF CASUALTIES
The political and financial forces surrounding the fluoride industry, according to Dr. Lee and others, are vicious and unrelenting in their assaults upon anyone daring to place themselves at odds with it. Dr. Lee briefly outlined cases with which he is personally acquainted where reputable doctors and scientists have had their careers either ruined or severely crippled as the result of trying to introduce truth into this darkness-shrouded global enterprise. Cases in point:
During the time of the election [to decide on whether or not to fluoridate the county's water supply], Lee said the head of the Marin County Public Health Department was claiming "it was beneficial and perfectly safe. After the election, when I discovered all these things, I presented them to her, showing her all the tricks that had been used. She then asked the state public health department if she had the power to stop the fluoridation, realizing she had been mistaken. The next thing I knew," Lee continued, "she had taken early retirement and left for New Orleans to take care of her mother. She told me that if she made any statement about it at all she would have lost all her retirement benefits."
Dr. Allan S. Gray, a British Columbia health officer, did a study of all school children's teeth in that province, which is only about 15% fluoridated. He found that the teeth of those children in British Columbia where there was no fluoridation were in much better condition than in the fluoridated areas. His findings were published in the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association, entitled, "Time for a New Baseline?" [4]. So the message was that fluoridation did not provide any benefit to children and for publishing that research the top public health dentist in British Columbia was demoted and sent to Ottawa where he was put in a basement office and ordered to never speak to anybody about the matter again. If he did, he would lose his standing in the public health department of Canada and very likely all of his retirement benefits.
Dr. John Colquhon, an Aukland, New Zealand dental researcher with a prominent university, performed studies on children's teeth and the neighboring towns that were not fluoridated and discovered the children had no difference in cavity rate--they just all had fluorosed teeth [damage done by the presence of fluoride in their drinking water]. When he published his findings he was demoted and lost all of his retirement benefits and was forced to retire. As a Ph.D. he had to take a teaching position--all of the people he had considered his colleagues for thirty years suddenly didn't recognize him any more."
Phyllis Mullenix, Ph.D., formerly of Harvard University experienced the wrath of the industry when she walked blindly into the fluoride fray as part of her research program with Harvard's Department of Neuropathology and Psychiatry. While holding a dual appointment to Harvard and the Forsyth Dental Research Institute, Dr. Mullenix established the Department of Toxicology at Forsyth for the purpose of investigating the environmental impact of substances that were used in dentistry. During that undertaking she was also directed by the institute's head to investigate fluoride toxicity. That's where, as she puts it, "things got weird."
THE DARK ODYSSEY OF DR. PHYLLIS MULLENIX
While conducting interviews and gathering the data contained in this writing, this office was repeatedly referred by EPA scientists, university professors and physicians to Dr. Mullenix's research at the Forsyth Dental Institute as a primary and seminal source of reliable scientific research on fluoride toxicity.
The Forsyth Dental Center is a highly respected research institution established in 1910 for the purpose of providing free dental care for the children of Boston. It is the largest and, considered by many, the most highly respected dental research institution in the world. All Harvard dental students are required to take a portion of their training at Forsyth.
It is interesting to note that the, then, director of the institute, Dr. Jack Hein, who was responsible for her assignment to fluoride toxicology studies was, according to Mullenix, instrumental in some of the original research that led to the introduction of fluoride into toothpaste while he was working for Colgate.
"I wasn't too excited about studying fluoride," Mullenix told this reporter, "because, quite frankly, it was 'good for your teeth' and all that, and I thought the studies would be basically just another control and I had no interest in fluoride." However, because it was part of what she was hired to do, she said, and because she had just astounded the institute by achieving the unattainable--securing a grant from the National Cancer Institute to study the neurotoxicity of the treatments used for childhood leukemia--she decided to incorporate the fluoride studies into that research milieu. In fact, Mullenix claimed, "I was in the top four per cent in the country" for such funding. "The institute was tickled pink, but I really had no idea what a quagmire I was getting into."
For her toxicology studies Dr. Mullenix designed a computer pattern recognition system that has been described by other scientists as nothing short of elegant in its ability to study fluoride's effects on the neuromotor functions of rats.
THE "MIRACLE OF FLUORIDE" -or- A DIRTY INDUSTRY?
"By about 1990 I had gathered enough data from the test and control animals," Mullenix continues, "to realize that fluoride doesn't look clean." When she reviewed that data she realized that something was seriously affecting her test animals. They had all (except the control group) been administered doses of fluoride sufficient to bring their blood levels up to the same as those that had caused dental fluorosis [a brittleness and staining of the teeth] in thousands of children. Up to this point, Mullenix explained, fluorosis was widely thought to be the only effect of excessive fluoridation.
The scientist's first hint that she may not be navigating friendly waters came when she was ordered to present her findings to the National Institute of Dental Research (NIDR) [a division of NIH, the National Institute of Health]. "That's when the 'fun' started," she said, "I had no idea what I was getting into. I walked into the main corridors there and all over the walls was 'The Miracle of Fluoride'. That was my first real kick-in-the-pants as to what was actually going on." The NIH display, she said, actually made fun of and ridiculed those that were against fluoridation. "I thought, 'Oh great!' Here's the main NIH hospital talking about the 'Miracle of Fluoride' and I'm giving a seminar to the NIDR telling them that fluoride is neurotoxic!"
What Dr. Mullenix presented at the seminar that, in reality, sounded the death knell of her career was that:
"The fluoride pattern of behavioral problems matches up with the same results of administering radiation and chemotherapy [to cancer patients]. All of these really nasty treatments that are used clinically in cancer therapy are well known to cause I.Q. deficits in children. That's one of the best studied effects they know of. The behavioral pattern that results from the use of fluoride matches that produced by cancer treatment that causes a reduction in intelligence."
At a meeting with dental industry representatives immediately following her presentation, Mullenix was bluntly asked if she was saying that their company's products were lowering the I.Q. of children? "And I told them, 'basically, yes.'"
The documents obtained by authors Griffiths and Bryson seem to add yet another voice of corroboration to the reduced intelligence effects of fluoride. "New epidemiological evidence from China adds support," the writers claim, "showing a correlation between low dose fluoride exposure and diminished I.Q. in children."
Then in 1994, after refining her research and findings, Dr. Mullenix presented her results to the Journal of Neurotoxicology and Teratology [5], considered probably the world's most respected publication in that field. Three days after she joyfully announced to the Forsyth Institute that she had been accepted for publication by the journal, she was dismissed from her position. What followed was a complete evaporation of all grants and funding for any of Mullenix's research. What that means in the left-brain world of scientific research, which is fueled by grants of government and corporate capital, is the equivalent to an academic burial. Her letter of dismissal from the Forsyth Institute stated as their reason for that action that her work was not "dentally related." [Fluoride research--not dentally related?] The institute's director stated, according to Mullenix, "they didn't consider the safety or the toxicity of fluoride as being their kind of science." Of course, a logical question begs itself at this last statement: why was Dr. Mullenix assigned the study of fluoride toxicity in the first place if it was not "their kind of science"?
Subsequently, she was continually hounded by both Forsyth and the NIH as to the identity of the journal in which her research was to be published. She told The WINDS that she refused to disclose that information because she knew the purpose of this continual interrogation was so that they could attempt to quash its publication.
Almost immediately following her dismissal, Dr. Mullenix said, the Forsyth Institute received a quarter-million dollar grant from the Colgate company. Coincidence or reward?
Her findings clearly detailed the developmental effects of fluoride, pre- and postnatal. Doses administered before birth produced marked hyperactivity in offspring. Postnatal administration caused the infant rats to exhibit what Dr. Mullenix calls the "couch potato syndrome"--a malaise or absence of initiative and activity. One need only observe the numerous children being dosed with Ritalin as treatment for their hyperactivity to draw logical correlations.
Following her dismissal, the scientist's equipment and computers, designed specifically for the studies, were mysteriously damaged and destroyed by water leakage before she could remove them from Forsyth. Coincidence?
Dr. Mullenix was then given an unfunded research position at Children's Hospital in Boston, but with no equipment and no money--what for? "The people at Children's Hospital, for heaven's sake, came right out and said they were scared because they knew how important the fluoride issue was," Mullenix said. "Even at Forsyth they told me I was endangering funds for the institution if I published that information." It has become clear to such as Dr. Mullenix et al, that money, not truth, drives science--even at the expense of the health and lives of the nation's citizens.
"I got into science because it was fun," she said, "and I would like to go back and do further studies, but I no longer have any faith in the integrity of the system. I find research is utterly controlled." If one harbors any doubt that large sums of corporate money and political clout can really provide sufficient influence to induce scientists and respected physicians to endorse potentially harmful treatment for their patients, consider the results published in a January 8th article of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)[6]. The Journal revealed their survey of doctors in favor of, and against, a particular drug that has been proven harmful (in this case calcium blockers shown to significantly increase the risk of breast cancer in older women).
"Our results," the Journal said, "demonstrate a strong association between authors' published positions on the safety of calcium-channel antagonists and their financial relationships with pharmaceutical manufacturers."
When The WINDS asked Dr. Mullenix where she planned to take her research, she said that she is not hopeful that any place exists that isn't "afraid of fluoride or printing the truth."
The end result of the dark odyssey of Phyllis Mullenix, Ph.D., and her journey through the nightmare of the fluoride industry is, essentially, a ruined career of a brilliant scientist because her's was not "their kind of science".
PRIOR KNOWLEDGE
It has become evident, as the result of the once-secret documents obtained by Griffiths and Bryson that Dr. Mullenix's research was not the first to discover the dangers of fluoride. "The original secret version -- obtained by these reporters -- of a 1948 study published by Program F [the code name given fluoride studies] scientists in the Journal of the American Dental Association shows that evidence of adverse health effects from fluoride was censored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) -- considered the most powerful of Cold War agencies -- for reasons of national security." One would necessarily have to ask what the perceived threat was to national security if fluoride was found to be toxic by the American Dental Association. Did they perhaps perceive a potential threat as proceeding from the American people?
"...Up to eighty percent," the Griffiths/Bryson article continues, "in some cities -- now have dental fluorosis, the first visible sign of excessive fluoride exposure, according to the U.S. National Research Council. (The signs are whitish flecks or spots, particularly on the front teeth, or dark spots or stripes in more severe cases)."
Dr. William Hirzy, an organic chemist and a senior scientist in Environmental Risk Assessment with EPA originally became involved in the fluoride issue "as a matter of professional ethics when one of the EPA scientists came to us and complained that he was being asked to write a Federal Register notice with which he has substantial ethical problems." The scientist protested that "the agency wants me to write this notice that says it's alright to have teeth that look like you've been chewing on rocks and tar balls. I have a real problem with that," he told Hirzy.
To issue a notice of intended regulation in the Federal Register means that after a specified period of time the notice essentially becomes law and is entered into either the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) or the United States Code (USC). This process is a much used manner of creating law by circumventing the constitutional process of legislation. It becomes what is called "administrative law."
"At that time," Hirzy said, "EPA was revising its drinking water standards for fluoride and was about to issue a notice that four milligrams per liter was an acceptable level of fluoride for drinking water." The great problem with that, Hirzy explained, "indicated that a substantial number of people who were exposed to that concentration would have teeth suffering from severe dental fluorosis eroded, cracked and pitted and stained....The agency [EPA] was saying that it was not a health effect, it was only cosmetic. Frankly," Hirzy remonstrated, "it doesn't seem to be a very ethical stance for us to say that if your teeth don't work--if they're cracked and pitted and falling out--that it's not a health effect.
"The agency," Hirzy told The WINDS, "was taking that position because of the peculiar wording of the Safe Drinking Water Act which says that EPA has to set standards that protect against adverse health effects with an adequate margin of safety." So they wanted to say, according to Dr. Hirzy, that "severe dental fluorosis is not an adverse health effect." If, in essence, you just say it is not an adverse health effect, you then effectively comply with the law by juggling the definition.
The great problem with the system, Hirzy explained, is that the EPA is not a constitutionally mandated organization and therefore cannot [or is not supposed to] make law but can only advise the executive branch of government. The dilemma arises when whatever administration is in office comes to the agency and says, "We want you to write that the science supports this particular decision, whatever it may be, that's where I draw the line and say 'no dice, we're not going to do that....You can't make us lie about the science.' It makes us complicit in deception. We do not want to have to invoke the Nuremberg defense," (i.e., I was just doing what I was told).
Hirzy said that the EPA, in fact, got away with imposing a standard that effectually ruins the teeth of very many who drink fluoridated water because, though "widely known to cause severe fluorosis at four milligrams per liter, that is the standard in effect to this day."
Of even more ominous portent, Hirzy said, is that, far from being merely cosmetic in effect, "what's going on in the teeth is a window to what's going on in the bones. What fluoride does in the hydroxy-epitite structure in teeth it does to the same structure in bone. It is well known now that fluoride produces faulty bone, more brittle, basically mimicking in the bone what is clearly visible in the teeth." A kind of artificial osteoporosis.
"It's an outrageous situation," the EPA scientist claims, when you have fluoridated household drinking water in such concentration that the agency must inform parents that they "should not be allowing their children to drink four milligrams per liter of fluoride, and if they have that in their water supply they should go to an alternative source." Does it not seem a little strange that the government authorizes the addition of a chemical to ostensibly help children's teeth and then tells parents not to allow their children to drink it? We are most certainly not in Kansas anymore, Toto!
So toxic is the fluoride added to drinking water that, according to Hirzy, if one were to take a dose of it about half the size of that "500 mg vitamin C tablet you take in the morning, you'd be dead long before the sun went down. When you're talking about something with that kind of potent toxicity," he says, "it's unrealistic to think that the only adverse effect it has is death. It must be doing something intracellularly to cause these effects."
As evidence that the government has known for over sixty years that fluoride is a health hazard, Hirzy quoted from an article, "clear back in 1934 in which the American Dental Association plainly treats the subject very matter-of-factly. It calls fluoride a general protoplasmic poison."
Robert Carton, Ph.D., twenty years with EPA and now employed as a scientist with the Army, claims that, on "July 7, 1997 the EPA scientists, engineers and attorneys who assess the scientific data for the Safe Drinking Water Act standards and other EPA regulations have gone on record against the practice of adding fluoride to public drinking water.
Question: if the Environmental Protection Agency possesses the clout to virtually confiscate a man's land because some of it is a little soggy--calling it wetlands--why do they not exercise that power to enforce de-fluoridation of drinking water, which they have declared unsafe? Does money play any role in this?
Dr. Carton informed this office that fluoride itself is not the only major hazard stemming from its introduction into city water supplies. "A very real danger lies in the fact that fluosilicic acid leaches lead from plumbing. "There are a couple of places in the country," Dr. Carton said, "Seattle being one and Thermont, Maryland...that when they stopped adding fluoride to their water the lead levels dropped in half."
The problem with the data used to determine the safety of fluoride, Carton said, is that it is all based on the original figures presented by the chief scientist in charge of the Manhattan Project's fluoride safety, Dr. Harold Hodge. He falsified or "cooked the numbers," as Carton put it, to make his data fit what the government wanted.
In addition to the dental and skeletal damage caused by fluoride, Dr. Carton also cites research that claims that a specific antibody (immunoglobulin - IgM) that is missing from patients with certain types of brain tumors is also missing from the blood of those tested with elevated blood fluoride levels. This is leading many to theorize that such brain tumors are much more likely among individuals consuming fluoride compounds in their diet. Since most juice concentrates and food stuffs are processed with fluoridated water, such blood elevations are becoming much more common.
ENOUGH ALREADY? NOPE, THERE'S MORE--
In a study published last October in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences [7], Dr. Robert L. Isaacson makes a number of astounding revelations about this toxic waste in our water.
"Probably the most startling observation from our first experiment," Isaacson states, "was the high mortality rate in the group of animals that received the lowest dose of AlF 3 [aluminum fluoride]. Different groups of rats had been given one of three levels of AlF3 in double distilled drinking water: 0.5 ppm, 5 ppm, and 50 ppm starting at about four months of age. A fourth group received only the distilled water." The experiment lasted only 45 weeks but, Isaacson stated, "Eighty per cent of the rats in the [lowest concentration group] died before the end of the experiment" which was the highest mortality rate of all. "Not only did the rats in the lowest dose group die more often during the experiment, they looked poorly well before their deaths.
Even the rats in the low dose group that managed to survive until the end of the 45 weeks looked to be in poor health. They had much thinner hair than those in the other groups and the exposed skin was bronzed, mottled and flaky. Their teeth and toe nails were excessively dark." Follow-up studies, the scientist said, "showed the same high level of mortality." The study goes on to say that, in subsequent research, low levels of the same kind of fluoride that is added to city drinking water "also allows the enhancement of brain levels of Al."
Another prominent finding by Isaacson's group was the significant reduction on the cells of the hippocampus, that part of the brain that acts like a central processing unit in a computer, telling other parts what to do and how to function. The hippocampus is the primary decision making part of the brain, damage to which causes the victim to become more submissive and less challenging to his environment. One could logically question if this is not a pivotal reason for the government's push for universal fluoridation.
In the brain of his low dose test animals, Isaacson observed a tangling of capillary blood vessels, reduced oxygen uptake along with the peculiar crystalline structures, all of which are identical to those found in Alzheimer's victims. Dr. Isaacson's research indicates that the Alzheimer's-like effects result from the transport of aluminum to the brain and the high death rates from the toxicity of the fluorine.
Aluminum has previously to this, of course, been implicated in Alzheimer's, but how is the link made between fluoridation of human drinking water and the presence of aluminum fluoride? According to Drs. Carton and Burgstahler, fluoride being the most electrochemically active of all the elements, it has a strong propensity to create metallic compounds with itself whenever fluoridated water comes into contact with such things as aluminum cooking vessels. Ergo: there is created aluminum fluoride from cooking with such vessels using fluoridated water and not incidentally, according to Dr. Robert Carton, former EPA scientist, aluminum is used in city water treatment.
"An incidental observation of possible importance must be mentioned," the research paper adds. "Pathologic changes were found in the kidneys of animals in both the AlF 3 and NaF [sodium fluoride] groups." If all this weren't enough, the research team observed a "general impairment in the immune capacities of the treated subjects." They also found that the death rate increased among those animals treated with the aluminum fluoride where stress was elevated due to a training regime.
The research clearly indicates that not only does the presence of fluoride reduce the body's ability to utilize oxygen and nutrients, but actively inhibits the system's ability to rid itself of waste. This creates an apparent synergistic assault upon the health by poisoning the body with its own toxic waste while impairing its effectiveness to use the nutrients that would help in the detoxification process.
In the face of overwhelming data proving that fluoride is not only not beneficial but extremely harmful; the reliable evidence that the government has known of this for over sixty years; the continuing press for fluoridation in the drinking water of American cities, makes all the more believable the portentous claim set forth in the Protocols:
"...We now appear on the scene as apparent saviors of the common worker, saving him from this oppression by enrolling him in the ranks of our various forces fighting for imaginary civil liberties. The upper class, which enjoyed by law the labor of the workers, was interested in seeing that the workers were well fed, healthy and strong. We are interested in just the opposite-in the diminishment, the killing out of the nations. Our power is in the chronic...physical and mental weakness of the worker. What that results in is his being made the slave of our will, and he will not find in the authorities of his own society either the strength or energy to oppose us."
REFERENCES:
1. "Fluoride, Teeth and the Atomic Bomb", Griffiths & Bryson, 1997. Author Griffiths indicated that this URL contains an accurate reproduction of their article.
2. John R. Lee, MD, article: "The Truth About Mandatory Fluoridation", April 15, 1995.
3. "Review of Fluoride Benefits and Risks", Department of Health and Human Services, February 1991, p. 7 & p. 31.
4. The Journal of the Canadian Dental Association, Vol. 53, pp 763-765, 1987.
5. "Neurotoxicity of Sodium Fluoride in Rats", Mullenix, P. Neurotoxicology and Teratology", 17(2), 1995.
6. The New England Journal of Medicine -- January 8, 1998 -- Volume 338, Number 2 [SPECIAL ARTICLE] "Conflict of Interest in the Debate over Calcium-Channel Antagonists", Henry Thomas Stelfox, Grace Chua, Keith O'Rourke, Allan S. Detsky.
7. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 825 "Neuroprotective Agents, Third International Conference." Title: "Toxin-Induced Blood Vessel Inclusion caused by the Chronic Administration of Aluminum and Sodium Fluoride and their Implication for Dementia." Robert. L. Isaacson, et al, p. 152-166.
Further reading:
FLUORIDE: Protected Pollutant or Panacea? A very extensive source for scientific papers published on fluoridation
Robert J. Carton, Ph.D., Former EPA scientist. Article: "Corruption and Fraud at the EPA"
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