2003 q3

July

• BBC runs docco on Israel's nuclear-weapons program, Israel pitches tantrum. FPP ABC runs docco on Israel's nerve-gas weapons, Israel pitches tantrum. SMH
• US busy punishing countries that dare to not grant immunity to the ICC. RNW
• CT operating w/o a budget. Governor calls out state troopers to force legislators to pass one. He then vetoes it. Y! (Actually I may have that backwards.)
• 1 in 20 British pupils say Hitler was one of their Prime Ministers. IOL 1 in 3 Israeli students lack basic reading skills. JR

• President Bush wouldn't give UN inspectors time to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He claimed to know exactly where they were. He called the inspectors incompetent. He rushed on to war.

  Since then, front-page claims of WMD have, one by one, turned into back-page admissions of vacuum cleaners and balloon inflators.

  Meanwhile, Bush's war is still killing one American soldier per day, even if his defense secretary calls that insignificant. While Bush turns his attention to campaign fund-raisers, military spouses and mothers are asking, When will our soldiers come home?

  Time's up. We need the truth on how Bush got us into this mess. OSJ

• Here we find ourselves nose to nose with a sizable amount of free citizens who don't seem to care that Bush and Co. lied to them! Think about it. Here are the same folks who were beside themselves with anger and hatred for a president who lied about an affair now saying, basically, Bush lied? So What? What about all those mass graves and all those liberated people? Who cares about all those innocent civilians who were murdered? Saddam is gone. We kicked their butts so let's all get down on our knees and thank God that Bush is president. Right?

  Okay, sure. Whatever you say.

  But if you want to believe that then you must go take down the American flag you've been flying so proudly, go into your back yard and dig a big hole and bury the damn thing. For any member of a free society to proudly proclaim that it doesn't matter if our leaders lie to us—especially when those lies threaten our security and cost thousands of innocent lives—then he has no business flying the flag. Such a mindset is insulting and does a great disservice to those who fight and die to protect the noble principles that flag once stood for and still cries out to stand for…

  This mob mentality is truly the Bush legacy. This is what America has been reduced to while our world neighbors stare in shocked and nervous awe. But it would seem that many Americans just don't care. AHH

• unmistakable evidence of something rotten in the state of Israel grows, such as this sickening story in the Jerusalem Post about an IDF company commander and a soldier in the reserves who tortured and sexually abused a Palestinian youth. The Post reports:

  The two were carrying out searches for a man when they discovered his son. The commander threatened the youth with a loaded rifle, before commanding him to remove his pants and underwear. The two then held a flame near the youth's genitalia. In addition the two are charged with sexually abusing the boy and beating him.

  The incident occured…just as Israel's amen corner in [the US] was declaring the moral superiority of the IDF over the suicide bombers, because, you see, they don't target civilians. AW

• Poll: majority of Americans bleeve Saddam involved in 9/11. Y! (Majority bleeve Columbus was trying to prove the world was round. Majority bleeve raindrops are pear-shaped. A thing is not true just because everyone knows it. Russell: The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.) 70% say Whitehouse implied Iraq/Saddam involved in 9/11. But only 25% believe Iraq/Saddam was involved in 9/11. 52% believe US had found clear evidence Saddam was cooperating with al Qaeda. 39% thought gov't was being truthfaul about the evidence. 23% think WMD have been found in Iraq—down from 34% in May! Yay! 64% want UN leadership in Iraq, up from 50% in April. NO
• Berlesconi (sp?) takes over presidency of EU; manages to start a row in less than 4 hrs.
• 2: W tells non existent Iraqi resistance to bring 'em on. R · TS

  Yesterday, when I read that US Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush, in a moment of blustering arm-chair machismo, sent a message to the 'non-existent' Iraqi guerrillas to bring 'em on, the first image in my mind was a 20-year-old soldier in an ever-more-fragile marriage, who'd been away from home for 8 months. He participated in the initial invasion, and was told he'd be home for the 4th of July. He has a newfound familiarity with corpses, and everything he thought he knew last year is now under revision. He is sent out into the streets of Fallujah (or some other city), where he has already been shot at once or twice with automatic weapons or an RPG, and his nerves are raw. He is wearing Kevlar and ceramic body armor, a Kevlar helmet, a load carrying harness with ammunition, grenades, flex-cuffs, first-aid gear, water, and assorted other paraphernalia. His weapon weighs seven pounds, ten with a double magazine. His boots are bloused, and his long-sleeve shirt is buttoned at the wrist. It is between 100-110 degrees Fahrenheit at midday. He's been eating MREs three times a day, when he has an appetite in this heat, and even his urine is beginning to smell like preservatives. Mosquitoes and sand flies plague him in the evenings, and he probably pulls a guard shift every night, never sleeping straight through. He and his comrades are beginning to get on each others' nerves. The rumors of going-home, not-going-home are keeping him on an emotional roller coaster. Directives from on high are contradictory, confusing, and often stupid. The whole population seems hostile to him and he is developing a deep animosity for Iraq and all its people—as well as for official narratives.

  This is the lad who will hear from someone that George W. Bush, dressed in a suit with a belly full of rich food, just hurled a manly taunt from a 72-degree studio at the non-existent Iraqi resistance…exercising his one true talent—blundering—George W. Bush has begun the improbable process of alienating the very troops upon whom he depends to carry out the neo-con ambition of restructuring the world by arms. [CP by 'nam vet who quickly learned that everything he'd been told about why he hadda go to 'nam was wrong]

  Viceroy Jerry has asked for 50,000 troops to maintain his rule. There's one small problem with that. There aren't 50K to give. The US military is nearly at the end of its deployable strength and needs to withdraw the 3ID as soon as possible…The fatal error of Bush's Bring 'em On comment is that besides [being] cheap talk and bully posturing…it isn't true. We cannot handle what they're throwing at us. DKOS

  Toronto dropped from WHO's SARS list.

• 3: Iraqis bring some on. R · WA (The Weekend Australian gets it right, but Reuters calls it defiance of Bush.)

  All right already, that is more than enough! What the hell were you thinking? Were you thinking? Have you completely lost your mind? Is there anybody out there keeping an eye on you, kid?…Bring them on? Exactly what is your problem? Are you bothered by the fact that you were not man enough to actually serve when it was your turn? Are you making up for the fact that you couldn't even fulfill your cushy assignment back in the early '70s because you were a blooming mess and couldn't pass a urine test? What, now you feel the need to talk tough so nobody will question what an actual coward you are?…You pompous SOB—you spoiled little chicken stuff brat. Please, please, please, shut your stupid mouth! Your cowardice is killing Americans. And Iraqis. Your big, stupid mouth is not helping the huge mess your lies have created! The world is not Old West Texas. You're not even Texas! Every time you open your big mouth either somebody gets killed or wounded or the stock market falls. Your big mouth just got ten people wounded! There's no telling what your oral nonsense will produce tomorrow…

  The next time George W. Bush decides it's time to get macho, somebody—please—oh please, grab a roll of that duct tape and wrap it around his whole head. You'll save a life and protect our national security. AHH

  W selects the first six victims for his secret military kangaroo courts. Freepers cheer, hope we off [a couple of Frogs] first, just to send Chirac a message. FR Actually at least two of them are British—Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abbasi. M This is expected to be politically hard on Phony Tony. HT · SH Straw is going to try to get them tried in Britain. G (Good luck to you Jackie Boy.)

• Rampton & Stauber Weapons of Mass Deception: the uses of propaganda in Bush's war on Iraq (cover by Tom Tomorrow)

  In the wake of the events of 9/11, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America. According to [Rampton and Stauber] it was used to engineer a state of emergency that would justify an invasion of Iraq. [They] expose how news was fabricated and made to seem real. But they also demonstrate how a coalition of the willing—far-Right officials, neo-con think-tanks, insanely pugilistic media commentators and of course well-paid PR companies—worked together to pull off a sensational piece of intellectual dishonesty. Theirs is a study of modern propaganda.

  What occurs to me in reading their book is that the new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn't just propaganda any more, it's prop-agenda. It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false intelligence and selected leaks. J

• Here's a reversal, what? the Moscow Times on about the secret disappeances, interrogations, trials, and whatnot going on in the US—referencing US media reports.

  The secret policemen snatched the citizen from his house. There were no charges, no warrants, no warnings. They spirited him away to a secret location; no one knew where he had gone, why he'd disappeared. The covert agents grilled him, in secret, for three months. They told him that if he didn't cooperate, he'd be declared an enemy of the state—then they could salt him away in a military prison or the regime's concentration camp and hold him there, without charges, for as long as they wanted.

  Then, if they wanted, they could haul him before a military tribunal, try him in secret and, if they wanted, have him executed—with no judicial oversight, no recourse to appeal save one: a plea for mercy from the regime's unelected leader. This usurper, who liked to be known as The Commander, had given himself the arbitrary authority to strip any citizen of their liberty, and he alone—no court, no council, no legislative body—held the ultimate power of life and death over anyone he thus decreed an enemy.

  After months in secret captivity, the prisoner—a young truck driver with a history of mental problems—broke down. In a secret court session, he confessed to planning a series of crimes against the state. The success of this covert operation was announced by the head of the regime's internal police forces. His declaration—that a citizen had been snatched, interrogated, threatened and broken in secret, outside every stricture of the country's old constitution—was greeted with cries of admiration in the national press.

  Yes, it was just another day in the New America—the fearful, fawning, fortress-land that Bush and bin Laden have made. The above facts—openly attested in the mainstream media—are the raw guts of truth beneath the fancy PR frocks and propaganda implants that mask the inner moral rot of the Bush Regime. Iyman Faris, a US citizen originally from Kashmir, was nabbed, threatened and processed in the exact manner described above… the mentally disturbed trucker's chief threat to the Homeland seems to have been a quixotic plan to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge—with a blowtorch. MT

• W planning to make history by now seeking audience with Mandela while in SA. CD (Mandela, remember, retracted his endorsement of the official 9/11 conspiracy theory on Jan 1, among other anti-Bush things. He's also believed to still be listed as a terrorist by the State Dep't. SI)
• Just as the US needs to convince people it is Saddam loyalists that are causing the problems in Iraq, an audio tape appears with something like Saddam's voice encouraging more attacks on the occupiers. As if after the bring 'em on line they need Saddam's encouragement.
• 4: Dedication of Nat'l Constitution Center in Philly. Sanda Day O'Connor almost brained by collapsing backdrop. It might've been W, but he was driven off by a major protest. JIJ · IW

  The hyped July 4th whitewashing of why we actually invaded Iraq will result in dozens of American kids being picked off by Iraqi freedom fighters—until reality finally sets in and an enraged public demands a US withdrawal.

  Soon we'll mark the Hiroshima and Nagasaki anniversaries. Sadly, we'll persist in denying that our A-bombings constituted the worst war crime in human history. The ungodly horror we unleashed on Japan in 1945 set in motion an evil rationale concerning civilian casualties that's horribly defined our foreign policy in several places in ensuing years.

  The ghosts of countless Third World dead point an accusing finger our way. They tell us what we don't want to hear: You're the chief terrorist in the world, and you shouldn't be surprised when terrorism is used against you in retaliation. LS

• 6: Josh Daniel Speer dies in car crash en route to fiancée's house Greenville SC. He was a rescuer of Lynch. GVO

• When the decision was made last summer that we will have a war against Iraq, they were casting about. You'll recall White House Chief of Staff Andy Card saying you don't market a new product in August. The big blast-off was Cheney's speech in Nashville, I think it was Nashville anyway, on August 26. He said Iraq was seeking materials for its nuclear program. That set the tone right there.

  They looked around after Labor Day and said, OK, if we're going to have this war, we really need to persuade Congress to vote for it. How are we going to do that? Well, let's do the al Qaeda-Iraq connection. That's the traumatic one. 9/11 is still a traumatic thing for most Americans. Let's do that.

  But then they said, Oh damn, those folks at CIA don't buy that, they say there's no evidence, and we can't bring them around. We've tried every which way and they won't relent. That won't work, because if we try that, Congress is going to have these CIA wimps come down, and the next day they'll undercut us. How about these chemical and biological weapons? We know they don't have any nuclear weapons, so how about the chemical and biological stuff? Well, damn. We have these other wimps at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and dammit, they won't come around either. They say there's no reliable evidence of that, so if we go up to Congress with that, the next day they'll call the DIA folks in, and the DIA folks will undercut us.

  So they said, What have we got? We've got those aluminum tubes! The aluminum tubes, you will remember, were something that came out in late September, the 24th of September. The British and we front-paged it. These were aluminum tubes that were said by Condoleezza Rice as soon as the report came out to be only suitable for use in a nuclear application. This is hardware that they had the dimensions of. So they got that report, and the British played it up, and we played it up. It was front page in the New York Times. Condoleezza Rice said, Ah ha! These aluminum tubes are suitable only for uranium-enrichment centrifuges.

  Then they gave the tubes to the Department of Energy labs, and to a person, each one of those nuclear scientists and engineers said, Well, if Iraq thinks it can use these dimensions and these specifications of aluminum tubes to build a nuclear program, let 'em do it! Let 'em do it. It'll never work, and we can't believe they are so stupid. These must be for conventional rockets.

  And, of course, that's what they were for, and that's what the UN determined they were for. So, after Condoleezza Rice's initial foray into this scientific area, they knew that they couldn't make that stick, either. So what else did they have?

  Well, somebody said, How about those reports earlier this year that Iraq was trying to get uranium from Niger? Yeah? That was pretty good. But of course if George Tenet were there, he would have said, But we looked at the evidence, and they're forgeries, they stink to high heaven. So the question became, How long would it take for someone to find out they were forgeries? The answer was about a day or two. The next question was, When do we have to show people this stuff? The answer was that the IAEA had been after us for a couple of months now to give it to them, but we can probably put them off for three or four months.

  So there it was. What's the problem? We'll take these reports, we'll use them to brief Congress and to raise the specter of a mushroom cloud. You'll recall that the President on the 7th of October said, Our smoking gun could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. Condoleezza Rice said exactly the same thing the next day. Victoria Clarke said exactly the same thing on the 9th of October, and of course the vote came on the 11th of October.

  Don't take my word for it. Take Henry Waxman's word for it. Waxman has written the President a very, very bitter letter dated the 17th of March in which he says, Mr. President, I was lied to. I was lied to. I was briefed on a forgery, and on the strength of that I voted for war. Tell me how this kind of thing could happen? That was March 17. He hasn't received a response from the White House yet.

  That's the way it worked, and you have to give them credit. These guys are really clever. It worked. TO

• At talks in Montréal, US asks for end to ozone-protecting ban on methyl bromide. [NN citing I
• David Kelly, the BBC's main source for the sexing up claims, is found dead. Official story is suicide. TIL But people who knew Kelly say he was not suicidal just before his death. He just happened to be liason with the Rockingham cell, a group set up to cherry-pick intel to counter UNSCOM's negative WMD findings. G
• 22: US claims to have killed Qusay and Uday in attack on Mosul villa. (Why did Saddam name his sons in piglatin?)

  Might I point out that it would have been a hell of a lot better if Tweedleuday and Tweedlequsay had been captured instead of killed? I mean they were in a building, right? Couldn't we have surrounded the building and waited them out, grabbed them, and put them on trial? Wouldn't a new Iraqi version of the Nuremberg trials have been nice, exposing to the world what they did? Wouldn't a quick death be much nicer to a rapist than spending the next few decades in a prison being sodomized by Bubba? Isn't there a teeny weeny chance they might have had some information we could have used? Was it really necessary to bulldoze the building after the massacre? Or did we HAVE to kill them because they might have mentioned that Bush was on the phone to their dad the day before the invasion making plans for his escape? Nah, there's no doubt about it. They knew too much. We had to kill them so they wouldn't talk. Never mind. SC

  The same was supposed to happen to Daddy, but something got screwed up, and USUK now has to find a way to give him a trial noöne will watch.)

  Jessica Lynch permitted to go home.

  The other story is how the guys and gals in Ward 57 are being treated. Outside of Jessica Lynch. The nurses have to scramble and snag wound vacuums that work—some of them don't—canisters for the vacuums are in short supply. The nurses, most of them, try very hard. So does the infections doctor—a great guy. But the ortho surgeons—well, basically it is do what is quick, get it over, get them out so they have room for the next one. IW

• 23: Shootout in the NYC council room. Official story is councillor James Davis waved Othneil Askew in past the metal detectors, and the latter then gunned down the former before being killed himself. Supposedly because Askew was Davis' opponent. Except he wasn't because his paperwork was incomplete. And why would Davis wave his opponent past the security? And how would Askew know Davis, or anyone, would do that? Why did witnesses report automatic-weapon fire? What does this have to do with Bloomberg's threat, recounted by Davis, against anyone, such as Davis, opposed to Bloomberg's tax hikes? (In case you wonder what kind of a name is Askew, Isaac Newton's mother was one.)
• 26: Johns Hopkins reports finding a vulnerability in Diebold machines—sounds like it's easy to forge voters' cards. [CNN via ATV] This appears to be a ploy to divert attention from the real scandal, of one set of data for audits and a totally different set for results. GF

  I replace some 40-a-old light fixtures in the kitchen. Could not get inbuilt fluorescents that would fit the space; got Xe thingies. Discovered they have a glass plate which slides off in such a way the fixtures couldn't be put in the groove either (didn't know that until I got home). According to a warning label the glass plate prevents excessive UV exposure, and so should not be omitted. Nor can the fixture be affixed without removing the plate. A little piece of metal with two screws prevents the plate sliding out. But only one screw should be removed; remove the other and several bits of metal come loose inside. Perhaps I'd've known it was a screw to be left in place had the promised instructions actually been included in the package. (The package also promised a nonexistent hi-lo-off switch, but I didn't want that anyway.)

  The 40-a-old fixtures were marvels in simplicity and quite safe. Splendid examples of how things were done before torture by new-n-improvement. Nothing wrong with them except you can no longer get incandescent tubes that last more than a week. Ya, incandescents waste a lot of power as heat, which is not a big deal in winter in a kitchen heated only by the lights and stove in the first place. Now I have lights that waste power giving me a sunburn instead!

  Why do I rant on about all that in these pages? If we can't even design, build, and package decent light fixtures anymore, how the f*k do we think we're going to design better plants and animals!?!?

• 27:

  Here's a link to a story written by a fellow, who just happens to be a journalist, who recently was investigated and interrogated by two FBI agents in Atlanta because somebody reported that he was reading a story entitled Weapons of Mass Stupidity, while standing in a coffee shop line: //atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2003-07-17/rant.html. Here's a link to the article that got this guy in trouble, merely because he was reading it in a public place: //charlotte.creativeloafing.com/newsstand/2003-06-04/news_cover.html.

  Interrogated. By the FBI. For reading. In Public. Think about that for a moment. EJS

• Bob Hope dies. The NYT obituary causes a minor kafuffle by being attributed to a man who died nearly 3 years before. (I mean, we all know they write these things in advance, to avoid doing a flurry of research under pressure and the risk of getting something wrong that goes with. But the fact is usually better hidden.)
• Matt Drudge knows about the SS interrogation of Michael Ramirez, editorial cartoonist for LA Times, about 12 hr before it actually happens. WNYC
• Poindexter says he'll quit his Pentagon position, after the scandal about DARPA's idea for futures trading in terrorism and assassination. The administration is basically saying that people who normally trade in hog bellies and wheat are better able to determine what will happen at some future time in the Middle East than the CIA, NSA or military intelligence sources. It kind of puts a crimp in the whole concept of the Office of Homeland Security, doesn't it? Why don't we just replace Tom Ridge with a room full of future traders, if we are going to base the security of the United States on programs like this one? It would certainly be cheaper and less disruptive. SCO
• Ion Iliescu, fmr president of Romania, reminds us that the holocaust was not limited to Jewish victims. Israel pitches tantrum, demands clarification. MSNBC
• Israel expels Palestinians wedded to Israelis. …denounced by human rights organizations as racist, undemocratic and discriminatory. I · Y!
• Are computerized voting machines a wide-open back door to massive voting fraud? The discussion has moved from the Internet to CNN, to UK newspapers, and the pages of The New York Times. People are cautiously beginning to connect the dots… OEN
• Robert Zöllick assures India W will hinder states in their effort to retain their IT jobs. The Indian government and businesses have won a major assurance from the Bush Administration on the issue of outsourcing. A senior US official has said Washington is against any attempt by state governments to legislate a ban on outsourcing on the lines of what is being considered in New Jersey and other states. TOI

August

• 1: Wolfowitz admits Iraq had naught to do with 9/11 nor al Qaeda. [LS, ICH citing DL]
• 5: Hotel bombing in Djakarta.
• Arnold announces candidacy for CA gov. (Something's smelly about it. He was in on Ken Lay's 2001 power shenanigans which is what got Davis in (invalid) trouble in the first place. CD · FP)
• 8: Memphis federal jury acquits Vernice Kuglin of failure to pay income tax. Since 1995 she has asked the IRS to specify the law requiring her to pay; she has never gotten an answer. [GML, citing Memphis Commercial Appeal and case #03-CR-20111]

  W'm Sampson (Nova Scotian held under Saudi death sentence, US suspected of having info that'd exonerate him) released. [ATV]

  NYT finally notices the Wagons of Mass Destruction Hydrogen. Curious how the BS biolab theory is in a whitepaper but the hydrogen liklihood is classified. NYT

• Gregg Whiteside summarily fired for having a private opinion. He declines to fight the issue because of family burdens. LF citing VV (That's the real reason Shrubites are so keen on family, it's a means of power, a kind of hostage situation. The idea has been used in reverse:

  The Turkish Janissaries were the better-known military arm of a larger body—the Kapi Kullari, or Slave Institution—which filled every civil post from palace cook to Grand Vizier. Made up of Christian children taken from their parents and brought up and exhaustively trained by the Ottoman Turks for official functions in what may have been the most complete educational system ever devised, they were legally slaves of the Sultan, converted to Islam, forbidden to have families, or own property. Free of these distractions, it was supposed they would be able to devote themselves singlemindedly to the state and its sovereign, on whom they were entirely dependent for pay and the necessities of life. The Sultan thus acquired a body not only of first-class administrators, but of strong supporters of his absolutism. Although the system worked to excellent effect, it did not save the Ottoman Empire from slow degeneration… [Tuchman March of Folly 1983 p384]

  While it may be distasteful to read of Xians so treated, I contend it's better than locking them up in little cages in Guantánamo. Another reason Shrubites need families is to have a surplus of little soldiers.
• Whistleblower Nelda Rogers reveals CIA/DoD plan to plant WMD and strip certain Iraqi assets before and during the war; wrecked by friendly fire causing a string of mysterious illness and death in US troops. [EAW citing IW, I citing Al Martin, possibly AMR, AMR] [also GWV citing nonspecifically TPH, LSL] (Others blame inoculants for the illnesses. UPI It's speculated this botch is the underlay to the confusion about whether the US had taken the airport of not.)
• UN c't'ee tells Israel to stop building that fence. NCA Another accuses Israel of multiple violations of int'nat'l law. VoA (Watch the US not bomb * out of Israel for defying UN.)
• New lines of ruthless dictator dolls. KBT · AU · eB

• In an August letter, the NRC assured members of Congress that Entergy had developed a strong defensive strategy and capability for [Indian Point] and passed with flying colors a so-called force-on-force test, a mock assault.

  In turns out, however, that the NRC gave Entergy officials months of advance warning about the test and then, as the Indian Point team cribbed for the exam, dumbed down the assault to ensure that they would pass.

  Most assessments by the CIA and other intelligence agencies suggest that an assault on a nuclear plant would require a squad-sized force of between 12 and 14 attackers, who would assault the plant by night, armed with explosives, machine guns with armor-penetrating bullets, and rocket-propelled grenades.

  This isn't the attack that was repelled by the Entergy security team. Instead, Entergy's men battled off a squad of 4 mock terrorists, armed only with hunting rifles, who assaulted the plant in broad daylight. Moreover, the attacking squad weren't former Delta Force operatives trained in terrorist tactics, but security officers from a nearby nuclear plant who assault the plant from only one point after crossing open fields in plain view of Indian Point's security guards.

  Just to make sure that there were no surprises, the Entergy security team, which consisted largely of guards hired only for the test, was warned that a mock attack would take place sometime within the next hour. Even under these rigged conditions, Entergy barely passed the security test. CP

• FBI kites a theory that UA93 was deliberately crashed in a field by the hijackers. G I suppose the hijackers deliberately dropped chunks of the craft 10 km away, too.
• There are more homeless in Manhattan now than during the Great Depression. CBS
• US troops panic in power outage and mow down Iraqi family in their car, 100 days after W bustered Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people…All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq. Doctors said the father and his two daughters would have survived if they had received treatment quicker. Instead, they bled to death because the Americans refused to allow anyone to take them to hospital. I

• Conservative columnist William Safire emphasizes that military attack was the safest approach in an uncertain situation. When weighing the murky evidence of an aggressive tyranny's weapons, he declaims, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair were obliged to take no chances. The burden on proof was on Saddam. By his contempt, he invited invasion; by its response, the coalition established the credibility of its resolve. The fundamental problem with the preceding uncertainty argument is that it was simply not the pre-war position of the Bush administration, which explicitly claimed that it possessed proof positive that Iraq possessed WMDs that threatened the United States. Never did U.S. officials acknowledge that their evidence was murky, or anything short of rock solid. And the idea that the onus is on the nation about to be attacked to prove its innocence, not on the aggressor to prove the threat, violates all legal standards for making war. Moreover, the argument implies that the United States, rather than the United Nations itself, has the right to militarily enforce UN resolutions, a right that the United States would not concede to any other country. Imagine the horrified reaction of Washington if any country tried to enforce UN resolutions affecting Israel. TW

• Johns Hopkins' story about the Diebold machines is looking less like a diversion: now it's the Diebold Election Systems machines are so flawed that they could easily be manipulated. X And Diebold machines are used in half of Canada's provinces. CP About all-digital voting in general:

  We have to ask ourselves whether we trust technology alone to provide a reliable, honest vote count without a backup.

  Election administrators like Lamone will play the disabled card, casting opponents of electronic systems as enemies of the physically challenged. The National Federation of the Blind gave Diebold a ringing endorsement—at the same time it's suing Baltimore County to implement a touch-screen system.

  But here's a question: Suppose all buildings were required to have elevators to accommodate the handicapped. And suppose, to save money, the government changed the building code to eliminate stairways because everyone could use the same elevators. What happens in a fire?

  Is it better to establish a voting system with a paper backup and then devise special terminals for the blind? Or a system that works OK for everybody—when it works—at the price of eliminating the best way to solve disputes when it doesn't? SS

  Even if the machine is loaded with an honest and correct program, there is no way an elector can satisfy himself that it is so. Nor is there any way he can be certain the particular machine is operating correctly—eg no flawed components—even though its design may be perfectly correct.
• US-UK-Russia cooperatively bust a plot to smuggle shoulder-launch missiles into the US. The moneymen were NYC diamond-district Jews, incl Yehuda Abraham, 75, of Queens. NYD The Brit nabbed, Hemad Lekhani, did not contact any Islamic terrorist groups. ABCalthough CNN claims he had dealt with al Qaeda in the past. NYP The later spin is that Abraham didn't know what kind of deal he was greasing. CD Only one of them gets bail—Abraham. LF

• A study [Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition] funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity.

  As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction…

  The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance. G

• 11:
• 12:
• 13:
• Now US troops have begun dying in their sleep. JR (Anything not to admit to combat casualties.)
• RCMP arrest 19 with eerie 9/11 parallels. R (To me it smells of an attempt to bring Canada into line w/US ambitions.)
• 14: Tremendjus power failure; most of Ontario, MI, NY, etc out of electricity. Terrorism not suspected, although Bloomberg kinda implied it was all Canada's fault. Gee Mikey, if we're that unreliable you better get your power someplace else. ('N' leave us some.) From what's said on ATV, my guess is cascade failure rooted in a NYC substation fire. (Later: the substation fire appears to have been just extra smoke out of a generating station whose pollution-control was out of power.* Now they're talking about lightning in NW NY. Sounds awful like the '65 and '77 blackouts.) Everything blamed from Winduhs worms, lightning in northern NY, nuke-plant fire in PA CTV (I'm surprised how little linkage with Québec Hydro there appears to have been) and a dim bulb in the Whitehouse. GP (Like me, Palast suspects failure to build excess capacity due to deregulation.) Skolnick suggests it's a bid to hinder the Saudis moving their money from Citibank to Québec & Ontario, mentioning a news item that IRS Manhattan was put on backup power just before the outage. JR (Problem: Québec was untouched.) Stock value of British National Grid Transco, which owns the NY system, slips. One revelation due to the blackout is a near-meltdown in a First Energy nuclear plant in northwest OH, about a year ago. TS First Energy apparently has a long history of putting effort into political influence which perhaps would've been better spent on its hardware. C
  *It's one of the ironies about generating stations that they can't power themselves. This is an especial irony in nuclear plants, which can't operate safely w/o grid or backup power. Some may not be able to shut down w/o power. And not only are the backup systems at many nuclear plants, eg Fermi, inoperable, the emergency sirens often don't work in a blackout. CP
• Another blackout of sorts, a gasoline shortage, is happening in AZ; but it doesn't seem to be making the news. Supposedly a pipeline broke on Jul 30 and has been shut down since Aug 8. The line is owned by Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, Richard Kinder being Ken Lay's predecessor at Enron and a Pioneer member of W's energy circle. [WRH readers citing KM, AZC, SC, TPJ, MJ]
• 15: It comes out on CNN that some sort of electricity legislation was stuck in Congress…and is now likely to come unstuck thanks to the blackout. Ain't that conveenient. (Gov. Bob Taft…hopes the crisis will prompt passage of energy legislation that has been stalled in Congress. )
• 16: Curious commentary on CNN this morning: apparently, Iraqis, who've been in a blackout about six months thanx to the Mercans, don't have a lot of sympathy for the Mercans blacked out t'other day. The nerve!
• Michael Rivero starts a grand crusade against virus/worm writers, with no share for Microsoft's record of producing crud (by their own occasional admission). He has with arguments like If a thief grabs your wallet, do you dither about whether a different wallet would've held him off longer, or go after the thief? and If someone steals the wheels off your car, do you blame the carmaker? I've sent him counter arguments that If paid someone to put good locks on your house, were burgled, and found that there were actually no locks installed, was not the locksmith a thief as well? and If your car had been built so that the fuel injectors could be disabled via the cell phone, and there was no way to prevent it except remove the cell phone, would you not be miffed at the manufacturer? Rivero, like Billy Gates, seems to have forgotten that some industries, like automakers, recall and repair defective products. Why should M$ be exempt from that? RIvero has even argued that position in the past, but seems to have abandoned it and doesn't want to explain why.

  To be sure: I do not defend virus/worm writers and crackers as good guys. I am not exempting them of fault. I am just trying to point out that Microsoft so-called operating systems have next to zero security features. They cannot even protect themselves from their authorised users.

  Latest analogy: When you turn on the water, and it comes out brown, you call the municipal water company. Why then should consumers not hold…Microsoft…and their ISP accountable… Is someone breaking open the pipes to pour in the brown stuff? That's the difference. But I say, Microsoft installed a connection between the sewer and the water main. And you can count yourself lucky if there's a stopcock.

• Israeli-run Amdocs poised to take over Visa billing. H
• US demanded Taylor quit Liberia before they'd do any peacekeeping there…and Taylor called their bluff. RC
• Kaputey scientists all over the US are criticising voting machines. David Dill of Stanford U It's not just Diebold. It's all of these machines. I don't think computer technology is ready for paperless electronic voting. But bureaucrats think they know more about kaputeys than Stanford. HR
• 17: Brad Kiesling, US diplomat who quit over OIL, describes W as a very weak man led down the garden path by Rummy. [N24 citing Greece To Vima]
• Someone claiming to be al Qaeda also claims responsibility for the blackout. Someone completely unaware Canada and the US aren't seeing eye-to-eye on this war for oil. (Or someone trying to scare Canada into joining up, now who would that be? Apparently the message did not give specifics on how it was done.) TL
• Hotel housing the UN HQ in Baghdad blown up during UN news conference, killing the envoy. BBC (This does not smell like Iraqi resistance, who denies and condemns the bombing and would have dozens other more important places to which to apply such a bomb. It does smell like a kackhanded attempt to get the UN onside against the Iraqis. It is interesting that it appears no US journos were present. TVNL And Chalabi claimed a warning nearly a week before specifically said that a large-scale act would take place…against a soft target, such as Iraqi political parties or other parties, including the U.N.—neither the coalition nor its troops would be targeted. IO · M But, if it was a US bomb, it may have done W more damage than good. A · P And the US has no motive for the bomb in Jerusalem. Which leaves only Zionists as the likely bombers. The Israeli ambassador tries to pin it on Syria. B)
• It comes out in the Kelly-death inquiry that Blair was told his dossiers indicated no immediate threat from Saddam if any threat at all, and so orders were given to rewrite them until they did, facts be hanged. G · N

  For the most part, American media [are] doing a lousy job of following the British investigation of how Blair and his aides spun the case for war with Iraq. From a journalistic standard, that's bizarre because the story of official deceit in Britain is also the story of official deceit in the United States. N

  What's really pathetic is that it was possible to know before the invasion that Bush and Blair were lying… Of course Blair's circle is trying to claim their prewar 45 minutes claims should not be construed to mean they said imminent threat. (Then they try to say the real time was only 20 minutes!! M)

  [Clare Short:] There is an unfortunate tendency among some commentators to seek to narrow the issue to a blame game between the BBC and 10 Downing Street. This has led to comment to the effect that Dr Kelly was the unfortunate victim of a battle between two mighty institutions, accompanied by a campaign of vilification against Andrew Gilligan and the Today programme. It is important to remain constantly aware of the vested interests at play: the Murdoch empire and other rightwing media operations would like to weaken and break the BBC so that British broadcasting might be reduced to the sort of commercially dominated, biased news reporting that controls the US airwaves. It is extremely unfortunate that a Labour government has been willing to drive forward this campaign against the BBC. G

  Tony Blair was personally responsible for the decision to subject Dr David Kelly to the public grilling his family have blamed for his death…a damning declassified government document has revealed that it was he, and not defence minister Geoff Hoon, who ordered the move. S
• 18: US asks WTO to force EU to lift GM bans. G
• Tampa police abandon the face-recognition computers after they fail, over two years, to recognise anyone on the wanted lists. ABC (This failure was, of course, predicted probabilistically from the change of problem domain.)
• 
  
• 20: David M. Tapper dies in Afghanistan of wounds received in action. He was one of Lynch's rescuers. AC

  Regular gasoline is going for $3.14/gal in some Phoenix AZ stations. Queues verge on riots. LN In TX, people are complaining the prices are $1.55! HC

  Israel promises the Rachel Corrie Peace Center will fall the way of its namesake. I

  M$ worms disable railway signals in MD. CSX (It doesn't appear the signals were run by or on M$ products, but that the network used by the signalling system was overloaded by the worms' attempts to spread. And it appears the signalling system was sanely designed, and failed safe—stopped the trains.)

• A potent symbol of this cynical detachment is provided by George W. Bush's month-long vacation, during which his only forays among the unwashed masses have been to whack his little white balls around a golf course—and to host a "down-home" barbecue to shake down rich donors for another run at the White House…Meanwhile, the temperature in Iraq is 30 degrees hotter than it is in Crawford, Texas, and 20 degrees hotter than what killed 3,000 French people and hundreds of other Europeans.

  Iraq is, in fact, so hot that official meteorological data has been blocked from the media by the Department of Defense, presumably so that Americans won't know that our troops are the human equivalent of down-home barbecue. What the DoD has also tried to keep a lid on, though foreign news services haven't been so easily bullied as the embedded American press, is that our troops are operating in this inferno without adequate water supplies, sanitation, shelter or barbecue—actually, any type of food. SC

• 21: W attends fundraiser at Chileis Center, U of Portland OR. Stormtroopers hold off the protestors.
• 22 (15?): Franken Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: a fair and balanced look at the right Fox sues to block the book, claiming it infringes unfavourably on their trademarked allegation fair and balanced. A judge dismisses the suit as without merit. The print run is expanded. WXII
• 22: Teleconference of R. Doug Lewis, head of Election Center; Diebold; ES&S; Sequoia; Hart Intercivic; other voting-machine companies; and the ES division of ITAA. David Allen, publisher of Black Box Voting, got to witness it by dialling the number on the invitation and using the passcode provided by a sympathic insider. The gist of the meeting was, voting-machine vendors have one week to come up with k$200 (total) for a PR campaign to polish up their image. It was also mentioned that military industry like Lockheed, Accenture, and Northrop Grumman were behind the Help America Vote Act. VoteHere seems to be positioning to have its software a mandated part of all voting machines; VoteHere is headed by Adm Bill Owens (SAIC vicechair, member of Defense Policy Board) and Robert Gates (GHWB's DCIA, head of George Bush Biz School). (VoteHere also employed Avi Rubin, coauthor of the recent Johns Hopkins report against Diebold. X!) All agreed the meeting must hit the media. BBV

  Average price in Phoenix AZ for self-serve regular gasoline, $2.14. The average price in the US is $1.75, a penny short of the previous record set in March. (It's blamed on the blackout, which makes a small bit of sense, and a broken pipeline, which makes none.) USAT

• Egyptian group sues all Jews for restoration of the goods taken in the exodus, citing the Torah. [If the stuff was merely borrowed, then it's time to give it back. If the stuff was stolen, well, there's a Commandment against that. We reckon it was about 210 Mg of pure gold; at 5% interest over 5758 years, that's 2.14×10¹³⁰g. Twenty-one vigintilliard tonnes, more or less.] [JR citing CW] (It takes 10⁹⁷ Suns to equal this mass. There are only 3.2×10²² stars in the universe, present guesstimate. EL)
• New Head Inquisitor (or a minion) tries to deny the Roman church persecuted Galileo, using a newly-refound letter sent by the Commissioner of the Holy Office to Cardinal Francesco Barberini in 1633, expressed the Pope's concern that the trial of the scientist accused of heresy be concluded quickly as his health was poor. I (I doubt the letter is one of the forgeries for which the RC is infamous (see Vicars of Christ)—it simply is not dramatic enough to bother forging. What's described just suggests get the trial over with before he goes out of reach like Copernicus.)
• The EPA has just admitted that they lied for all this time about the air around the fmr WTC being okay. NYND
• The Texan oil billionaire Jean Paul Getty was at the heart of a conspiracy to provide support to Hitler's Germany early in the Second World War, according to newly released intelligence documents. T (This is real revisionism; reïnterpreting history given new information. The important stuff is often buried in documents that are not accessible for some time after the event. I believe Revisionism has something of a bad rep because the real powers don't like their illusions being blasted, so they've had the mass media teach the sheep to sneer.)
• 23: Newsweek poll finds more Americans want W out than in; 44% for him, 49% against. N
• Blair claims to the Hutton inquiry he'd've quit if the dossier had been dodgy. BBC (He's saying this in the fact of tengible evidence. If my watch and Phony Tony agreed about what time it was, I'd get a new watch. And a lot of people feel about the same. R)
• 25: Gertrude M. Jones dies. Her obituary will ask that memorial donations be given to any organization that seeks the removal of President Bush from office. Unfortunately, some of the donations go to Wesley Clark. ND
• 28: Something pencil-sized zips through an M1 Abrams' weak spot and takes out enough to immobilise it. Army's having a dangoltime figuring out exactly what something. AT (Yee. That gunner had a narrow miss. Either the Iraqis have some tricky weapons too, or there's some US weapon the Army knows naught about.)
• The US troops killed in Iraq post OIL now exceeds those killed in OIL. Condi and Rummy resort to telling the Wereeolf tales about postwar Germany. S (It's entirely true that Germany was not immediately prosperous. What's unmentioned is the Morganthau starvation plan.)
• Nearly 6 years late, a British inquiry into the death of Dodi al Fayad is announced. M (Blair's casting about for a distraction.)
• [1996]: Amnesty Int'nat'l calls on US to ban use and export of REACT belts, a new remote-controlled device for regulating behaviour via 50kV to the kidneys. It's already in use by US Bureau of Prisons, US Marshals' Service, over 100 counties, and 16 States. GL · AI (Time and again life takes all the wrong lessons of old Star Trek episodes.)
• [1998 July]: Defendant Ronald Hawkins once too often interrupts LA judge Joan Comparet-Cassani at a sentencing hearing, and is zapped by his REACT belt. PT

September

• Possible large Earth-collider found; ETA 11 a, probability 1/909000. (Watch our luck, it'll come down in Yellowstone.)
• Lord will I be glad when "Canadian Idle" is over. I just wonder what phluph distraction is going to take its place…
• Public outrage reaches a degree that Total Information Awareness must be broken up and hidden in other intel programs. [/. citing Y!]
• 7: W gives a big speech. His poll numbers drop even further: 45% rate him good, 54% bad; 40% reëlect, 52% time for someone else; same proportions on whether the country is going the right way or the wrong way. NM
• 8: Himmler: Criticising der Führer encourages Berlin's enemies and hinders his war on terrorism. R (That's what it should say.)

  Michael Meacher, UK MP for 33 years, fmr Blair environment minister, says the US stood down on 9/11. Bush pally Farish says it'd be a monstrously insulting claim from someone serious or credible. US media frantically ignore the whole thing. WSWS (I wonder if this was the spark for Rumsfeld's nonsense?)

  RIAA launches over 200 lawsuits against Internet music pirates. The news stories all claim the piracy has cut into the profits of the music industry to the point of causing job loss. (The exorbitant price of CDs, the dead economy, and the crap content have nothing to do with it.)

• 9: Paid for by the committee that thinks you're stupid enough to re-elect this guy. TT
• 10: US rounds up 81, nearly all, male residents of Iraqi village Habbariyah, then burgles the village. Only two—tribal chief Sheik Meta'ab al-Hathal, 66; and Hawas Sahn Ibrahim, 81—are released within a month. Y! · G [LF quoting I]
• 11:

  Two years on and what's going on—The war on terrorism has become a farce. The world is full of more hate, more injustice, more fear, more paranoia, more discrimination, more drugs and more terror than before this war started. World leaders have taken lying to a completely new level and are putting on a theater of the absurd—conducting wars based on speculation and stolen student projects…we don't even know what terrorism means or why someone's a terrorist one day and a noble recipient of the Peace Prize the next. We don't know why one person blowing up a bomb to kill 4 people is a terrorist, yet someone dropping bombs from way up in the air isn't. We haven't yet understood that it is impossible to wage war against an abstract noun. UKN

• Nine or ten of the US' native Iraqi cops get shot up by US forces. This does the US' already delicate public standing in Iraq no good. X
• British intel sources confirm that David Kay's report is delayed and may never even be published. P (Read: he didn't find enough WMD in Iraq even to try to spin. PS: looks like they realised saying nothing was suspicious so in the end they try to spin a single vial of possible wrinkle and muscle-spasm medicine as good reason to conquer Iraq.)
• Minnesota spent so much on TVs for classrooms that it can't afford flags for the children to worship (as req'd by law at least once a week)—so they're televising a flag for the purpose. It's very expensive to outfit a school like this with flags and flag holders. (But we gotta have teevys.) B
• CA recall gets delayed until the result-manufacturing machinery is replaced. (Takin' bets on Diebold?)

• I wish I could say it was something really, really serious that made me put down the remote control and back away from the TV. But no—it was the recent silly and totally irrelevant Tucker Carlson/Brittany Spears tabloid circus act which CNN regurgitated nonstop for two days as if it had any bearing whatsoever on anything at all and who gives a shit whether that vacuous, gum-chewing twit trusts the president or if maybe she just happened to remember what CNN did to the Dixie Chicks…?

  Carlson: Do you trust the president?

  Spears: (smack, crack)…Do I trust the president? (chew, blink, grin, smack, smack)—Yeah. I do. We need to trust everything he says and just be faithful…

  That's it, CNN. I give up. I'm outta here. ICH · AOL

  Meanwhile, Christiane Amanpour admits CNN, intimidated by the Bush regime, didn't tell the whole truth during the Iraq invasion, USAT

• 12: Ellen Mariani files suit under RICO Act against W, Dick, Ashcroft, Rummy, Tenet, Mineta (DoT), Peterson (CFR), Rice, Herbie, Feinberg, and others unnamed. Counsel of record, Philip Berg. N
• 14: Cheney admits, on Meet the Press, We never had any evidence that [Saddam] had acquired a nuclear weapon.

  WTO ministerial meeting in Cancun grinds to halt and dissolves over irresolvable rich/poor differences on things like farm subsidies. AN

• Straw claims he begged Blair at the last minute to drop the war. S (Truth? Or Straw trying to save his rear?)
• US and UK beginning to argue over the fact Britain had demonstrably more to do with the 9/11 attack than Iraq. G
• 16: Rummy admits there's no connection between Iraq and 9/11. HT
• 17: Shrubya admits there's no evidence linking Iraq to 9/11. [SC citing Chicago Tribune]

  I lose my last illusion about fluoridation. I knew the stuff had a lot of serious ill effects, but at least it reduced tooth decay—it may rot your brain but at least you'll have a nice smile in the nuthouse, if you get lucky and miss out on fluorosis (about 1 in 3 have lost that gamble). (Even Houston TX judiciary found this to be somewhat strange logic. FSU)
  But fluoridation turns out not to decrease tooth decay, but have either no effect or increase it. F

  • Carstens I. L., Louw A. J., Kruger E. Dental status of rural school children in a sub-optimal fluoride area Dent Assoc S Afr 50(9):405-11 1995 (It can be concluded that the results even at a sub-optimal fluoride level show a high similarity to the dental status of children in rural fluoride rich areas. Defluoridation of the Fraserburg municipal drinking water therefore becomes imperative…)
  • Yiamouyiannis J A Water Fluoridation & Tooth Decay: Results from the 1986-1987 National Survey of US Schoolchildren Fluoride v23 #2 p55-67 (Apr 1990) (No statistically significant differences were found in the decay rates of permanent teeth or the percentages of decay-free children in the [fluorided, nonfluorided, and partially-fluorided] areas. Actually, my read is that a significant increase in tooth decay is found with fluoridation; this wouldn't be the first time an abstract has been less than accurate. the executive summary (the only part likely to be read by important people) starts by praising the dental benefits of fluoridation, and then fails to present the results clearly. F)
  • Imai Y Study of the relationship between fluorine ions in drinking water and dental caries in Japan Koku Eisei Gakkai Zasshi 22(2):144-96 1972 (shows 7% more decay at 1ppm among 22,000 students in Japan)
  • Steelink C, Letter, Chemical and Engineering News 27 July 1992 pp 2-3 (When we plotted the incidence of tooth decay versus fluoride content in a child's neighborhood drinking water, a positive correlation was revealed. In other words, the more fluoride a child drank, the more cavities appeared in the teeth 26,000 children in/around Tucson AZ)
  • Teotia SPS, Teotia M. Dental caries: a disorder of high fluoride and low dietary calcium interactions Fluoride 27 59-66 1994 (400,000 Indian children over 30 years; more tooth decay the more fluoride they got)
  • Künzel W, Fischer T Caries prevalence after cessation of water fluoridation in La Salud, Cuba Caries Res 34:20-25 2000 (In 1997, following the cessation of drinking water fluoridation, in contrast to an expected rise in caries prevalence, DMFT and DMFS values remained at a low level for the 6-to 9-year-olds and appeared to decrease for the 10/11-year-olds…In the 12/13, there was a significant decrease, while the percentage of caries-free children of this age group had increased from 4.8% (1973) and 33.3%(1982) up to 55.2%.)
  • Machoy-Mokrzynska A Fluorine in toxicology, medicine and environment protection Report on the 9th Polish Fluorine Symposium June 2, 1999, Szczecic, Poland Fluoride 32(4):248-250 1999 (Dental caries rates in 12-year-old children were 15% greater in a fluoridated area of Wroclaw than in a low-fluoride area)
  • Colquhoun J. Fluorides and the decline in tooth decay in New Zealand Fluoride 26 125-134 1993 (Tooth decay was in decline ''before'' the introduction of fluoridation. Just like smallpox and vaccine!)
  • Colquhoun J. Disfiguring dental fluorosis in Auckland, New Zealand Fluoride 17 234-242 1984 (higher incidence of fluorosis among Auckland's fluoridated children—and teeth with fluorosis have more decay)
  • Cutress TW, Suckling GW, Pearce EIF, Ball ME. Defects in tooth enamel in children in fluoridated and non-fluoridated water areas of the Auckland Region New Zealand Dental Journal 81 12-19 1985 (commissioned to refute above, confirmed it)
  • Hardy Limeback found that States with the most people on fluoridated water also had the greatest tooth deficit. [S101, failing to cite the article, d@mnit]
  • Ontario Ministry of Health, summarising the science: current studies of the effectiveness of water fluoridation have design weaknesses and methodological flaws. Although the balance of evidence suggests that rates of dental decay are lower in fluoridated than non-fluoridated communities[, t]he magnitude of the effect is not large in absolute terms, is often not statistically significant and may not be of clinical significance. In fact, the effect tends to be more pronounced in the deciduous dentition—the baby teeth.
  • A 2003 study showed that fluoridated milk is not more effective at preventing tooth decay than milk alone. [S101 citing Caries Research]
  • Nor are these new idears: In April 1947, a research team headed by Dean Conrad Elvehjem put out a release claiming that, in a series of experiments at the University, 1 ppm fluorine had absolutely no effect on rats and that additions of raw, whole milk produced more positive results than fluorine in preventing decay. [S101 citing McNeil Fight for Fluoridation]
  I try to point this out on Wikipedia but it's not neutral, even though it's apparently perfectly acceptable to chant the orthodoxy. And was acceptable to claim most of the developed world fluoridates although less then 2% of western Europe suffers it, because several governments have banned it as being too dangerous even if it had a benefit (fortunately that is now gone). I get whines such as everything is bad in large amounts and that's precisely the f*king point—fluoridation gives one way too much. There is some evidence fluoride is effective against tooth decay with tolerable side effects when applied topically under medical supervision at the appropriate time of life. But there is a growing mountain of evidence that unregulated, lifetime, systemic application provided by fluoridation is not good for you—and that the science to the contrary, that chronic consumption of a compound that is cumulative, carcingenic, mutagenic, teratogenic, immunosuppressive, damaging to the brain and to the teeth at the so-called optimal fluoridation concentrations is a good idea, is riddled with error and/or fraud.
  And some, apparently—North Americans, mostly—have no capacity to see the obvious. They can't even ask why there might be controversy—even given that compos mentis persons are being medicated against their will, which is half of what we're supposed to hate about the Nazis; it's immoral even if the medicine is more beneficial than harmful.
  North American courts have pretty much ruled that noöne's being forced to take the medicine where alternatives like bottled water are available. (But read the labels—some bottled water has 3× the so-called optimal concentration. one of the best-selling bottled waters in health-food stores is Trinity Springs with a natural fluoride content of 3.6 mg/L S101) what about those who can't afford bottled water, like the same poor who were to be the great alleged benefactors in the first place? (Additionally, fluoridated water should not be used to prepare infant cereals and infant formulas, forcing parents, who can afford it, to buy bottled water to avoid their fluoridated tap water—leaving the poor at a disadvantage, yet again. [S101 citing NIH]) Besides, the poor tend to have poor nutrition, which exacerbates fluorosis. F
  The best question I ever saw raised about fluoridation was: Why is fluoride added to water in the name of health for the poor, but vitamin C is not added to water in the name of health for the poor, or indeed for any reason, anywhere (so far as I know)?
  
• Nine Israelis arrested in Ottawa as suspected spies. All are in their 20s and were apparently selling art in Ottawa. The arrests follow similar takedowns of Israelis in Toronto and Calgary over the past few weeks. Ottawa Sun yanks the story. C · IW (Don't Suns belong to Izzy Asper?)
• US puts all of Iraq, except its natural resources, up for sale.
• Blair's Iraq Survey Group haven't found any WMD either. Although it must be pointed out that they don't even seem to be trying. I
• US getting so desperate in Afghanistan it's bringing bits of the Taliban back. AT
• According to Republicans, only Democrats wage war on false pretenses. Rep. Curt Weldon R PA: If Senator Kennedy wants to talk about fraud, he ought to talk about Chapaquitic or he ought to talk about what he and President Clinton told us in 1999 when they told us to bomb innocent Serbs, we'd find 100 thousand mass graves. Those mass graves were never found. They lied to the American people to justify the aerial bombardment campaign. MSNBC (Emphasis added. Oooo, how veddy innerestink. An official admitting, if not an official admission, that that was a lie too.)
• Shimon Peres says Arafat deserved the Nobel peace prize and had publicly recognised Israel. R (The latter is something most Zionists deny.)
• We at the law office of Day R. Williams express our sympathies to anybody who believes the US government's version of any major event.
• My neighbour has an expression about clutching himself and jumping up and down when under some distress…this must be an example of it. Jack Straw saying the war was justified even without WMD evidence. Saying that not invading in defiance of the UN would have weakened the UN. CNN (Clutching at Straws. Get it? no? feh.)

• Remember Tom Hanks' movie Big, when the kid, by an accident of fate, finds himself turned into an adult, playing grown-up roles he is not developmentally ready for? This is George [Bush]. I don't mean this maliciously or satirically; I really mean it. I think developmentally speaking George is a big kid. Lots of people are. The difference is they don't have the means to bomb human beings into pink mist, obliterate the infrastructures of countries, and poison the world with coal and pesticides and carbon dioxide and depleted uranium and napalm, as they play grown up. JR

  She forgot fluorine and aspartame.
• Ginormous protest in London. BBC
• So let's see…We (Canada) have got Israeli art students running around just like the US had in 2001. I, S · A We supposedly have terrorists looking crosswise at nuclear plants, but since Israelis are by definition not terrorists—despite their habit of using Canadian passports for assassinations and things that look an awful lot like terrorism—we arrest a bunch of Muslims instead. DT What're we being setup for?
• Whiskey of Mass Destruction—US spying on distillery in Bruichladdich via its webcams. It would only take a nudge for it to be making chemical weapons, the US sez. Ya, they're gonna make chemweaps with the webcams turned on. Now: If you point out the US is doing evils, and here's their own docs for it, you're a kook 'cause why would they do evil in plain sight? Well…the US government believes others will do evil in plain sight! (On the other hand the US gov't are kooks.)
• Mad Maggie now sez Whack Iraq was a mistake. M
• Read these stories, and see if you can figure out who said no to whom. TI · BBC
• NPD (neonazis) ructions a 9/11 skeptics meeting. GFP And a good chunk of the NPD works for German intel. T
• As part of the G$87 reconstruction of Iraq, the US, unable to replace the regular fire-fighting equipment destroyed in the war, has given brand-new shirts to the fire department, emblazoned (in English of course) Baghdad Fire Department. The shirts are made of nylon. Which when exposed to fire, melts and adheres to the skin. [Rivero citing N citing ABC]
• Wife of dissenting fmr ambassador revealed as CIA agent by Whitehouse in order to give the media a lesser scandal to play with than Dubya lied to start a war.
• The number of cars in the US now exceeds the number of drivers (1.9 and 1.75 per houshold, resp) G
• Since the FBI has been unable to pin the anthrax attacks on a politically-acceptable suspect like Mooselimbs or Stephen Hatfill, they're trying to downspin the severity of the crime. No harm was intended. NYP
• 19: Take Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul Bremer who issued Order 39 (September 19), which declares that 100 percent ownership of Iraqi banks, mines and factories is allowed to be foreign-owned and 100 percent of profits from these Iraqi institutions is allowed to be moved out of the country. Where do Iraqis fit in? Is it any surprise they feel cheated and robbed? UNO
• 22: Margie Schoedinger (Schödinger?) found dead of gunshot to the head; coroner (Republican) rules it a suicide. She had filed a suit aginst W in December alleging he'd drugged and raped her on or about 2000 Oct 26 in Sugarland; the suit was about to go to court. VN [LF, TCN citing London New Nation Dec 8]
• 23: We have proof that Hillary Clinton was the 20th hijacker but the liberal media refuse to report the story! TT
• 29: FAIR action alert on Powell's repetition of the Iraq kicked out the inspectors in '98 lie. FAIR

  Bertha Champagne found crushed by her own car, supposedly left in gear. She was a maid for Marvin Bush. BK

• 30: Buck at 33-mo low against yen despite Japan's T¥9 of support for dollar. FT Buck at record low against euro despite Japan's support. FT This-all despite US pleas via G7 for currency flexibility. Figures from Japan this week revealed that the Japanese bought around G$40…This means that the Japanese almost singlehandedly funded the US current account deficit—which averages around G$46 a month. FT (The US has hemorrhaged G$1½ a day for…years?)