Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste

According to Scientific American:

 

Strange but True -  December 13, 2007

By burning away all the pesky carbon and other impurities, coal power
plants produce heaps of radiation.

 

~ Full article ~

 

the 'Denialists' Deck of Cards'

" ... With "Duh!," the denialist deliberately misunderstands, misinterprets, or plays dumb when presented with others' questions or proposals. One is sometimes amazed at how smart an industry lobbyist can be until they're asked a question they don't want to answer!

In the Hewlett-Packard pretexting scandal, this exchange between Rep. Eshoo and Fred Adler, a company investigator, is an excellent "duh" moment:

ESHOO: ...If you say no, then I'll accept your answer.

ADLER: OK.

ESHOO: You said no?

ADLER: No in regard to what?

ESHOO: Well, you know what, you have to be smart to play dumb. So I think I've been pretty direct about my questions. I asked you if rusing has been used. And you asked me to define it. I give it to you, and then..." House Hearing on the Hewlett-Packard Pretexting Scandal, CQ Transcriptions, Sept. 28, 2006. ... "

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/deck.php

quote from rich@math.missouri.edu

54% of americans believe that drugs will never be legalized because
the cops would have to buy their own.

                   - Poll taken for Michael Moore's "The Awful Truth"

Mark Morford: Priests now coming with warning labels

" ... Take the Archdiocese of New York. It has apparently just released a
coloring book for kids all about how to be safe in an age of fear and
predation. It is full of nice pictures of kids being sweet and
virginal and right, engaging in happy activities that praise Almighty
God while protecting themselves from, say, online predators and vegans
and atheists. It is about awareness, about listening to your parents
and saying your prayers and never, ever being alone with a priest and
being nice to animals and never hitting your sister and ...

Wait, what? What was that, about the priests? ... "

 

~ Full article ~

 

'There are different ways of doing it. It's like swimming, freestyle, backstroke'

Lawmakers Investigate CIA Interrogation Tape Disposal

11 Dec 2007

" ... GWEN IFILL: Let me ask Senator Bond a little bit about this issue of waterboarding. And let me describe for our viewers first to remind them what it is. It's when there's a piece of cloth that's placed over the mouth of a person who's been strapped down, and water is poured on their face so they feel like they're inhaling water, and it gives a sensation of drowning. Do you think that's torture?

SEN. KIT BOND: First, let me go back and take issue with some of the things that have just been said. Number one, what the CIA is doing is not torture. It conforms to the Detainee Treatment Act, the Geneva Convention, the Convention against Torture. None of these things that are being used, by any stretch of the imagination, could be described as torture.

Now, I think it was a terribly bad idea that in the intelligence authorization bill there was a ban imposed on the CIA using any techniques other than those in the Army Field Manual. The Army Field Manual is meant to advise junior officers in the field who are questioning the people picked up in the field who perhaps have tactical knowledge.

The information in those field manuals are included in all of the al-Qaida training, and they know how to resist those. If we are to get any information from high-value detainees, such as the ones on whose these enhanced techniques were used, then there have to be different techniques.

And I think, as a side note, I think it was absolutely outrageous that a former CIA agent would discuss these kinds of things, because once you describe what techniques are being used, and they are far less serious and threatening than techniques we use on Marines and pilots who go through our training, then the high-value detainees will never speak to us. That's why they used....

GWEN IFILL: I just would like to -- but do you think that waterboarding, as I described it, constitutes torture?

SEN. KIT BOND: There are different ways of doing it. It's like swimming, freestyle, backstroke. The waterboarding could be used almost to define some of the techniques that our trainees are put through, but that's beside the point. It's not being used.

There are some who say that, in extreme circumstances, if there is threat of an imminent major attack on the United States, it might be used, but I certainly would not favor it in any circumstance... "

~ Full transcript ~

'Contrary to belief, fluoridation is damaging teeth with little cavity reduction'

Fluoridation Doing More Harm Than Good, Studies Show - New York State Coalition Opposed To Fluoridation, Inc

12 May 2007

 

Contrary to belief, fluoridation is damaging teeth with little cavity reduction, according to a review of recent studies reported in Clinical Oral Investigations.(1)

Pizzo and colleagues reviewed English-language fluoridation studies published from January 2001 to June 2006 and write, "Several epidemiological studies conducted in fluoridated and non-fluoridated communities suggest that [fluoridation] may be unnecessary for caries prevention…"

They also report that fluoride-damaged teeth spiked upwards to 51% from the 10-12% found over 60 years ago in "optimally" fluoridated communities. Dental fluorosis is white-spotted, yellow, brown-stained and/or pitted teeth.

Fluoridation began in 1945 when dentists thought that ingested fluoride incorporated into children's developing tooth enamel to prevent cavities. However, Pizzo's group reports that fluoride ingestion confers little, if any, benefit and fails to reduce oral health disparities in low-income Americans.

Also, any difference in fluoride tooth enamel surface concentration between fluoridated and low-fluoridated areas is minimal. And the relationship between higher enamel fluoride levels to less tooth decay was not found.

"Some risk of increasing fluorosis may be attributed to the ingestion of powdered infant formula reconstituted with fluoridated water… [and] foods and beverages processed in fluoridated areas… Furthermore, the use of dietary fluoride supplements during the first 6 years of life is associated with a significant increase in the risk of developing fluorosis," they write.

Lawyer Paul Beeber, President, New York State Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation says, "Recent news reports claiming fluoride-free bottled water caused the cavity increase trends in toddlers are implausible because rising fluorosis rates clearly indicate that children are over-fluoridated, not under-fluoridated."

"There's no dispute that too much fluoride damages teeth, actually making them more decay-prone. Research is indicated to see if fluoride is causing the cavity escalation," says Beeber.

Some studies Pizzo reviewed focused on communities that stopped water fluoridation. "…after the cessation, caries prevalence did not rise, remained almost the same or even decreased further," writes Pizzo's group.

"In most European countries, where [water fluoridation] has never been adopted, a substantial decline [75%] in caries prevalence has been reported in the last decades," they report.

To avoid dental fluorosis, the American Dental Association and the Centers for Disease Control advise against mixing concentrated infant formulas with fluoridated water.

"Fluoride is bone- and health-damaging as well," says Beeber.

-- www.newmediaexplorer.org/chris/Pizzo-2007.pdf

New York State Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation, Inc
PO Box 263
Old Bethpage, NY 11804
www.orgsites.com/ny/nyscof www.FluorideAction.Net

 

 

Article URL: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/70558.php

How the Nazis Stole Christmas

A seasonal tale of politics, propaganda and paganism in Hitler's Third Reich
By David Sutton

December 2007

 

If the Nazis were sworn enemies of Christianity, why were they so obsessed with Christmas? And how did they square celebrating the season of goodwill with their racialist policies?

 

~ Full story here... ~

The Grateful Dead - The History of a Folk Story

New addition at Sacred Texts:

 

The Grateful Dead
The History of a Folk Story
by Gordon Hall Gerould
[1908]

 

"Every rock band has its own mythological creation story. The Grateful Dead claim that Jerry Garcia was looking through a 'large book' one day (no doubt in some altered state of mind), and the phrase just popped out at him. The specific book is unknown, but scholars of the band have suggested it was a large dictionary of folklore, with an article on the topic originally proposed in this book.

The term The Grateful Dead originally referred to a set of folklore motifs relating to stories where the hero does a good turn for a dead person and gets rewarded thereby. This motif appears in a wide set of cultures, not all of which have an obvious connection. In the late 19th and early 20th century the field of folklore had matured to the point to where there was enough data to analyze these motifs cross-culturally. This book was one of the first to do a comprehensive study of one such motif on a world-wide basis, and as such occupies an important position in the study of folklore. Gerould analyzed over a hundred variants of the story, mostly from European, Near East and Asian sources. He used techniques originally used by comparative linguistics to compare the stories and untangle the development of the motif.

Of course, there is also extensive folklore about the band of the same name, much of which I was exposed to in college. A popular motif in deadhead lore is the Magic Ticket. However, I've never encountered any variant where the Ticket appeared because someone did an actual dead person a favor. . . "

Complete book at: http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/gd/index.htm