This is pretty awesome: Cindy Lake, the Acting Chair of the Clark County Republican Party (Clark County encompasses 3/4 of Nevada’s population), is a an anti-fluoride nut.
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Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.
Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.
Republicans in disarray!
Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.
I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.
They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.
White supremacy is terrorism.
If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.
If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.
Their freedom requires your slavery.
I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.
Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.
Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.
It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.
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Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.
Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.
Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.
Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.
A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.
Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll
Let’s not be the monsters we hate.
Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.
… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact
You are here: Home / Open Threads / A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids
Enhanced Voting Techniques
General Ripper agrees. Now if we could only bomb the sekret Muslims of Kenya to stop it.
Thoughtcrime
Because it never gets old:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KvgtEnABY
Valdivia
I know, I am not up to date on these crazy conspiracies, but what is fluoride supposed to do to us? Brain wash us? Little spy cells in our genes?
FlipYrWhig
Is she one of the Ron Paul cadres who have been taking over the Republicans’ local party offices?
beltane
I wonder if she has a mouth full of rotten teeth.
Valdivia
@FlipYrWhig:
she seems to be given her retweeting of his pronouncements.
cckids
God. This is where I live. Most people are not this stupid, but the ones who are are so loud.
I think, over time, the heat starts to destroy your critical thinking functions.
Janus Daniels
Makes more sense than most Republicans; just seems odd because the fluoride fear fashion faded.
Nicole
Judging from the number of small-town folk I see interviewed on the teevee who lack a full set of teeth and spout right-wing propaganda, I can only assume that Ms. Lake has confused correlation with causation.
shortstop
@Valdivia: This one has long gray whiskers. Birchers flogged it in the 1960s, it was parodied in Dr. Strangelove, etc., etc. I believe the prevailing theory is that it somehow (details are never provided) makes us more submissive to whatever power wants to control us. You’d think that our stronger teeth would allow us to bite back against our would-be oppressors, though.
beltane
@Nicole: Or maybe RealAmericans like to brush their teeth with Mountain Dew.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@cckids:
I thought it was being a Republican that did that. Or is it a chicken or the egg thing?
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@beltane:
No, no, no, you got it all turned around.
We like to brush our teeth with CAKE FROSTING, and then RINSE with Mountain Dew.
Punchy
Anyone wanna gimmie the skinny on the flouride–thyroid supposed connection? Never heard this one before.
japa21
@shortstop: Yep, at that time it was a communist plot to take over America. Today the UN’s Agenda 21 is probably the villain.
Steve
When I was in high school in the 80s we had fluoride as a debate topic and it became clear there simply wasn’t any kind of scientific argument against it. However, I’ve heard more recently that there actually are some health concerns about fluoridation based upon newer science (normal health stuff, not the government brainwashing crap). I don’t know if there’s any truth to this or if it’s of a piece with the vaccine-autism stuff, but I figured I’d ask.
JGabriel
@Valdivia:
Fluoridation helps keeps our teeth from rotting — and, consequently, keeps dental bacteria from getting into the bloodstream and eating our brains*. Thus, Conservatives & Tea Partiers hate fluoridation because neurological decay is essential to increasing their ranks.
(*Not intended to be a factual statement.)
.
General Stuck
To this day, I credit fluoridation for my unyielding lifelong devotion to Led Zeppelin.
Mino
Those Soci(a)lisssssssssssssssst in Europe don’t like fluoride, either.
Valdivia
@shortstop:
Thank you for that because I had no idea. I always found the Dr Strangelove scene hilarious but didn’t know it referenced real out in the world wingnuts of yesteryear. The stuff that these people get totally paranoid about never ceases to amaze me.
trollhattan
I pays good money for a device that removes the flouride from my Crest. Na-gah-happen on my watch!
Froley
Fluoridation as mind control, that’s ridiculous. Everyone knows they use chemtrails.
Anoniminous
These people are idiots.
shortstop
@Valdivia: We all enjoy classic conspiracy theories. Their endearing simplicity makes a refreshing break from the sometimes head-spinningly convoluted batshittery being constructed today.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@cckids: I’ll have to look to see if it already exists, but your comment about others gave me another t-shirt idea: “I wouldn’t care that you’re stupid if you weren’t so proud of it.”
JGabriel
@Froley:
Fox News is the fluoride of the masses.
,
MikeJ
I wonder if they hate iodized salt too.
Valdivia
@JGabriel:
Oh I get it, it makes us Zombies! ;)
@shortstop:
lol, the good old days before Glen Beck needed a blackboard to explain how the world had been taken over by Alinsky.
beltane
@MikeJ: That might explain why Rush Limbaugh looks like a giant goiter.
David Fud
@Valdivia: An expert in water recently talked about how high levels of fluoride will turn your teeth black. I think he mentioned other health problems, but overdosing on fluoride is apparently an obvious problem when it happens, not some sort of subtle and insidious communist mind control substance.
Raven
When we went on R&R they made us get flouride treatments at Cam Rahn Bay. It obviously scrambled my brains. Wasn’t the Cambodian Red!
beltane
@David Fud: It’s also a little known fact that an overdose of water, particularly when inhaled, can be lethal.
Donut
@shortstop:
I, for one, welcome our Fluoridated Overlords.
JGabriel
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David Fud:
Well, of course. Fluoride is a poison in higher amounts — so are potassium and sodium. But fluoride is also a necessary, or at least useful, nutrient in trace amounts.
.
RossinDetroit
@JGabriel:
I know you were joking about brain rot, but oral bacteria are commonly found in coronary arterial plaque. You know, the stuff that gives you fatal heart attacks? There seems to be an association between oral hygiene and heart disease.
Fluoride doesn’t actually kill bacteria, though. Just makes the enamel more resistant to cavities.
ETA: maybe these fluoride denouncers have more fillings in their teeth and have been listening to too much right wing AM radio through them.
FlipYrWhig
@Valdivia: I’m not sure it’s supposed to actually do anything to us per se, but rather that it’s evidence that The Government puts stuff into our bodies for what it says is our own good, without our consenting to it or even necessarily realizing it. Ergo, by Slippery Slope logic, once we get accustomed to (literally) swallowing what The Government tells us to, they’ll be able to manipulate us as they see fit.
kuvasz
These people are fucking nuts and ought to be stepped on. No prisoners.
RossinDetroit
Dentists are concerned about seeing a rise in cavities because so many people drink bottled water instead of fluoridated municipal water. Fluoride and aggressive dental hygiene pushed by the dental profession are credited with reducing cavities and tooth extractions. Dentists basically advocated themselves out of a lucrative business and it’s said that this is why so many now do cosmetic dentistry.
Valdivia
@FlipYrWhig:
I see, precursor to the broccoli mandate.
@David Fud:
I wonder why these people think trace amounts are meant to do something evil to us.
RossinDetroit
Dentists are concerned about seeing a rise in cavities because so many people drink bottled water instead of fluoridated municipal water. Fluoride and aggressive dental hygiene pushed by the dental profession are credited with reducing cavities and tooth extractions. Dentists basically advocated themselves out of a lucrative business and it’s said that this is why so many now do cosmetic dentistry.
jonno
I moved to Oregon (no fluoridation of the water supply) from California (fluoridated water) and found a new dentist. He asked where I was from and when I said CA he said “a-ha! Your teeth are in such good shape you must’ve had fluoride as a kid, the birchers around here won’t let us do it!” He’s a good guy.
The locals do have some gnarly grills which are also a comment on crap healthcare — at the very least, can’t we have universal dentistry?!
DFS
Yeah, fluoridation paranoia is making a bit of a comeback these days along the crunchy granola/raw milk/vaccines-cause-autism axis. Funny how these things never quite manage to go awy.
cckids
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): That one is a winner.
quannlace
And in other news of personal delusion. I’ve been enjoying reading, over at Daily Kos, comments Scott Brown made yesterday about his “”secret meetings with kings and queens and prime ministers and business leaders and military leaders”
What, no princess’s? Cause it seems like Brown thinks he’s either in a Pixar/Disney cartoon. Or a conspiracy flick starring Ben Affleck.
His spokesman, of course, followed up with , ‘he misspoke.’ Misspoke. Can we please retire this word from the political landscape, permanently?
Misspoke is a slip of the tongue, not an entire statement. It should be ridiculed everytime it’s envoked.
RossinDetroit
Sorry for the FYWP double post. WP hates me.
Where’d I put that tinfoil hat?
El Cid
This was from a million years ago, in the primitive days of October 2011.
You can hardly blame such people for wondering what it was which made them so stupid.
Zaftig Amazon
@Punchy: Re: the fluoride/thyroid connection.
Prior to 1960 in the United States, and 1970 in Europe, fluoride was the treatment of choice for overactive thyroid (hyperthyroidism). If you have a large number of (normal thyroid) people exposed to a hyperthyroid medication, one logical outcome is that over time rates of low thyroid function (hypothyroidism) skyrocket, which is what has happened in the United States.
Since hypothyroidism slows down your metabolism, it also causes you to gain weight, no matter how much you exercise. Since I have hypothyroidism, I too am agin’ adding fluoride to the general water supply. There are other ways to apply fluoride. Also, fluoride in the water supply is no substitute for good dental care.
Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean that people aren’t out to get you.
El Cid
@quannlace: I misspoke, when I said I had received two Academy Award nominations I meant to describe my preferences in frozen entree purchases. I regret if anyone may have misinterpreted my comments, but any of us could get a few words mixed up when we’re facing the pressure of a conversation to a stranger on the airplane next to you.
StringonaStick
I’m a dental hygienist, so I can address this one. Fluoridation of water is considered one of the top 10 public health improvements of the 20th century, and one that benefits people without regard to social or economic status if it is in the water.
Fluoride is an element, like oxygen or nitrogen. Your teeth are made out of calcium and phosphorus mostly, with a few other things and a tiny bit of protein. All elements & molecules have a certain level of electroactivity (or “attractivity”); this basically means how strongly attractive they are at the atomic level.
Teeth are made mainly of crystalline calcium phosphate, and as your body is forming them, if there is fluoride in your food or water, then some of the ‘spots’ in the crystalline matrix will have a fluoride ion park in that spot. Fluoride has a stronger level of electroactivity, so it will tend to shove aside some calcium ions so it can take that spot in the crystal. This is a two-edged sword; the fact that it is more strongly bound when it is incorporated into the crystal matrix means that it is less likely to get removed by acid (which is what tooth decay is – dissolving tooth material with acid); this is how fluoride helps make teeth more resistant to decay. The downside of this higher level of electroactivity is that if there is too much fluoride in someone’s diet, then so many fluoride ions will get built into the teeth as they are forming that the resulting crystalline structure has problems such as dark brown ‘stains’ that are part of the tooth’s crystalline structure and can’t be removed. Because this can only happen when a tooth is being formed, exposure to excessive fluoride while a child or in utero can cause this. It takes a huge amount of fluoride for this to happen though; I’ve only seen any dark staining in people who grew up drinking well water that by chance happened to have a huge amount of fluoride in the water (most well water does not have this problem, but that is a subject for a geologist, which is what I was before I became an RDH).
As an adult, fluoride is in your toothpaste because our acidic and sugary diets mean our teeth are under nearly constant attact by acids, and these acids dissolve ions out of the tooth’s crystalline matrix. Acid foods cause decay, and sugar causes decay because certain oral bacteria metabolize sugar and release acid. Your body has minerals in your saliva just so it can (1) try to buffer the pH level and get things back to a non-tooth destroying pH as fast as possible, and (2) so it can have minerals available to fill in those acid-made ‘holes’ in the matrix when the pH rises again. If you have fluoride around because you use toothpaste with it or it is in your water, the fluoride is more strongly attracted to that ‘hole’ in the crystal matrix than calcium is, so some of the ‘holes’ will get filled by fluoride ions. This is how fluoride toothpaste use as an adult helps keep you from getting cavities; cavities are just acid-formed holes that got so big that the crystalline matrix structure was lost and thus unable to be repaired. This whole deal is going on constantly.
Fluoride has the additional benefit of making certain bacteria unhappy. Bacteria are in general very picky about their lifestyle requirements, so change something about their environment and you can really decrease their ability to reproduce. You have 400 to 500 kinds of critters living in your mouth, but only 2 are mainly responsible for causing decay, the rest are either benign or up to something other than decaying teeth. The populations of the ones that cause decay tend to get whacked back quite nicely by fluoride.
russ
get the gov’t out of my mouth!
Now! Vagina? That’s a whole other deal.
StringonaStick
@RossinDetroit: Actually, if you talk to dentists who have been in practice about 20 years or so, they’ll tell you that they saw a huge decline in cavities in most younger folks until about 10 years ago. It coincides with the increase in soft drink consumption, and the popularity of ‘energy’ drinks is making it even worse. Many of the latter contain even more sugar, and they tend to be consumed without any water and one sip at a time. I am starting to see a lot of decay between the front teeth, especially in young males of the obsessive video-gaming age.
StringonaStick
@Zaftig Amazon: Sorry, I can’t agree with you on the no fluoride in the water. The standard amount is 0.8 to 1.2 ppm; hardly anything. For this tiny bit, we get poor kids who have zero access to dental care being protected from getting cavities because their teeth formed with fluoride in the crystal matrix. All it took to do that was just that bit in the water supply. The problems you are referring to are in the hundreds to thousands of ppm, not something as low as less than 2 ppm.
If you don’t water with fluoride in it, then drink bottled water, but don’t advocate for taking away one of the few things that actually helps poor people have better dental health. If it isn’t in the water then we’d have to give kids fluoride pills, and that isn’t as easy to do consistently; a tiny bit at a time in every drink of water is best.
I do at least one charity dental event a year, and it is heartbreaking to see little kids with a mouth full of rotten teeth, or adults so poor that they can’t afford fillings so they go with the cheapest option: just pulling the tooth.
Valdivia
@StringonaStick:
thank you this was very informative.
GxB
[email protected] covered it well, but I already typed this muther up so Imma gonna post it anyhoo.
I’ll give the conspiracy nuts this – fluorine in its pure form is highly reactive and probably the nastiest non-radioactive element. It killed several early chemists including its discoverer. And even in its salt form, fluoride, it is possible to poison yourself, esp. with Rx strength paste or supplements. So there is a kernel of truth to their idiocy.
Its reactivity is why it’s so useful however as it bonds to tooth enamel and makes it far less reactive to acids. Since Twinkies and Coke are one of most Americans major food groups, it literally is take your poison here, your teeth don’t stand a chance. Furthermore fluoridation has been ongoing for decades and, like vaccinations, the good FAR outweighs the bad. (I’ll save my vitriol for Jenny McCarthy for another time…)
As for all their government conspiracy hoo-ha, that’s just rampant in the desert SW. Ironic considering if it weren’t for big government projects, the feckers couldn’t live there. I know, I know, these loons can’t get even basic math so explaining it is so much pissing in the wind…
Zaftig Amazon
@StringonaStick: I’m not disputing that fluoride isn’t good for teeth, but why does it have to be delivered in the water supply? If we had universal dentistry, as civilized countries do, a direct application of fluoride in the dentist’s office should also work. Causing another chronic disease by prophylactic treatment of the entire population is not progress. For me, it’s very discouraging to have a weight problem which no amount of exercise can alleviate. My teeth may be great, but I’ll be stuck with knee replacements before it’s all over.
portlander
What makes one an anti-fluoride nut?
The belief that municipal water systems should not be fluoridated?
The belief that the fluoridation of the water supply was pushed by the corporations who had supplies of silicofluorides (or hexafluorosilicic acid) as a byproduct of industrial processes and wanted to sell it instead of pay for its proper disposal?
The belief that fluoridation is a plot by (insert villain here) to brainwash the masses?
If it includes the first 2 then I guess I’m an anti-fluoride nut, just like all of those crazy people in Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoridation_by_country#Europe
shortstop
@Valdivia: What she said, String.
JGabriel
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quannlace:
Excerpt from The Un-Expurgated Princess Diaries:
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FlipYrWhig
@Zaftig Amazon:
Yeah, good luck with that.
Linda Featheringill
Fluoride occurs in the water naturally in parts of West Texas. Lubbock is an excellent example. Apparently, the natural content is rather high and the city probably removes some of it nowadays. Back in the stone ages, people who grew up in that area often had yellow-to-brown teeth. I don’t remember seeing any black teeth, though.
Valdivia
@JGabriel:
OMG, you win the day with that.
Mnemosyne
@Zaftig Amazon:
If there was some kind of correlation between places that have fluoridated water and places with higher rates of obesity, your fear might make sense, but I don’t think there’s any such correlation. In fact, the places in the US with higher rates of obesity (like in the South) tend to not fluoridate their water.
I’m sorry, but I think you’re seeing a link that’s just not there.
Mnemosyne
@portlander:
Homeopathy is widely accepted in Europe. The origin of our current anti-vaccine paranoia was a study done in England.
Sorry, but Europeans aren’t any less susceptible to quack medicine and hysteria than we are.
Valdivia
@Mnemosyne:
I totally agree! They just don’t think the evil communists are behind their conspiracy theories :)
Jay in Oregon
@Froley:
Are you kidding? It’s HAARP and additives in the air we breathe and the water we drink.
http://youtu.be/_c6HsiixFS8
WAKE UP SHEEPLE!
Obligatory XKCD link since it’s too awesome not to share: http://xkcd.com/1013/
Valdivia
@Jay in Oregon:
That was too funny. I loved her mention of our air supply. Someone actually funnels air to our cities?
Also, too. Air Supply.
cckids
@JGabriel:
Also a good t-shirt idea.
GxB
@General Stuck:
Ahh bet its from Zep III’s “Fluoridation Day”
“All I need from yoooouu – is all your thoughts…
All you gotta give to meeee – is all your thoughts….”
Martin
@The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik: Rinse with Brawndo. It’s got electrolytes.
Martin
@StringonaStick: I have a simple rule – don’t drink sugar. Well, unless there’s a lot of alcohol going along with it.
El Cid
@portlander:
That simply was not a major motivation for the public health campaigns behind water fluoridation. Its origins lay in the same sort of burst of government-supported public health campaigns (including advocating screen doors in the South and various vaccinations) after US dentists encountered communities with water supplies naturally high in fluoride compounds.
The guy who began these studies pursued the relationship between mottling of teeth, various environmental chemicals, and tooth decay (caries) for about 30 years before it had anything to do with an ALCOA chemist who was indeed ask to check for the fluoride content of water in an ALCOA town.
Here’s the 1939 study (PDF) typically dismissed by those who see water fluoridation as a way to get rid of toxic wastes as a couple of hired flacks — but McKay had been at it since 1900 and there really were hundreds of locations around the country tested and like you tend to find in local natural water supplies various concentrations of minerals and chemicals including fluoride were present and resulted in tooth mottling (fluorosis) and cavity prevention even where no related industrial process was to be found.
It wasn’t ALCOA which put the fluoride into the water in the Colorodo areas studied — it was there naturally in minerals dissolved in runoff. The challenge there was to get it out, to stop the browning and mottling of teeth, because access to clean and properly filtered drinking water in the early 20th Century was well known as a massive public health challenge.
When something like this is truly no more than an industrial propaganda / subsidy / toxic-sludge-is-good-for-you campaign, it’s not hidden in history, it’s not a delicate trail, the science tends to be obvious bunk and there really is a strong lobbying effort by corporations.
There aren’t billions flowing from ALCOA etc to the ADA to prop them up with tobacco-style junk science about fluoride. Sure, there are any number of legitimate ways to debate the best and safest public policies about ensuring dental health (particularly among children), and even if fluoridation is locally chosen as a better option, all sorts of ‘how’ and ‘how much’ etc. questions remain. (Some places fluoridate salt instead of water. I.e., Jamaica.)
Like most fluorine compounds, hexafluorosilicic acid is actually very useful in a variety of industrial chemical reactions, and usually these would be more profitable ways to use it than to fluoridate water.
What’s talked about as if it’s some obvious economic argument of industrialist motivation to cheapen out on waste disposal is a terrible, weak, ill-supported argument making little to no sense.
My god, think about it — if it’s a harmful chemical, and you’re an industrialist looking to get rid of it for cheap, and to, say, avoid getting prosecuted or sued or even just regulated for the health effects of your byproduct on local communities, how is it making it better to then put it in the water so that a natural experiment on its harmfulness will be carried out upon tens or hundreds of millions of people?
Good lord, I can barely imagine the Robber Barons stupid enough to fall for this proposed waste-management scheme. And we’re talking about some evil, evil mother f***ers in that category. The kind who have no truck with letting poisons into water or shooting troublemakers or working with various forces to overthrow goverments and slaughter thousands or tens of thousands of poor locals for profit.
Water fluoridation isn’t the only way to keep cavity formation low — many countries (much of Europe) do well without it because their children will receive regular dental care including in schools. Of course, plenty of places in Europe do have water fluoridation.
But water fluoridation is cheap and easy, and the prospective alternatives (changes in diet, cheap or free and regularly available dental care, so on) are no more than fantasies for the U.S. at this stage.
Here, if you can’t afford to take your kids to the dentist very often, well, too fuckin’ bad, right?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
To paraphrase General Ripper; fluoride in the water makes a man impotent. And an important man mine as well bend over when the Communist come around to rape Lady Liberty.
The anti-fluoridation thing never really died, I recall the local paranoids ranting about it in the ’80s.
EDIT: Now they add fluoride to the water with chemtrails.
El Cid
@Mnemosyne:
A completely sham, falsified, and lied-about study, at that.
Monala
@Zaftig Amazon: Many nations with universal health care don’t have universal dentistry. The problem is bigger than in just the U.S.
******
I’ve seen the anti-fluoride thing more on the left than the right. That may be because I travel in more leftish circles, but it’s not an exclusive righty thing, just like anti-vax isn’t either.
And it has affected me. After my daughter’s birth, I switched to natural household, health and beauty products. For the most part, I am much more satisfied with the results than when I used more mainstream commercial products. The one exception is toothpaste. I used a natural, no-fluoride toothpaste for about 3 months, and got the first cavity of my life, at the age of 40+. So I switched back.
the Conster
Not opposed to flouride in the water, but flouride contributes to the calcification of the pineal gland – the gland that secretes melatonin and controls the onset of puberty, and is considered to be the third eye. No one thinks about the pineal gland because it works so subtly, but it’s an endocrine workhorse that may actually hold the key to our evolution into a more consciously aware and spiritually awake species. Just FYI.
JGabriel
@Valdivia, @cckids: Danke, danke.
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Zaftig Amazon
@Mnemosyne: There is more than you think. First of all, rates of hypothyroidism were extremely low prior to the widespread introduction of fluoride in the water. Now middle-aged women are routinely tested for it.
Since obesity is caused by a number of other factors besides hypothyroidism, a blanket comparison is not valid.
There may be a link between hypothyroidism (high TSH levels) and the actual increasing rates of thyroid cancer (versus increases due to early detection). This is just speculation; there are several possible culprits, including increased CAT scans.
Mnemosyne
@Zaftig Amazon:
So do you have statistics showing that hypothyroidism is more prevalent where water is fluoridated? As several of us have pointed out, many places in the US do not fluoridate.
In fact, your best bet would probably be to show that hypothyroidism has historically been more prevalent in places that have naturally fluoridated water (ie Colorado, West Texas, etc.). If not, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of there there.
Given the current evidence of the nasty side effects of phlalates on the endocrine system (which includes the thyroid) that are coming to light now, I think fluoridation is an unlikely culprit, at least in comparison to toxins that are far more prevalent in far higher concentrations like phthalates.
SiubhanDuinne
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
If it doesn’t exist, it should!
MattR
@SiubhanDuinne: Saw a bumper sticker today that said. “Fine. I evolved. You didn’t.”
(EDIT: It’s available as more than just a bumper sticker)
SiubhanDuinne
@MattR: @MattR:
Awe to the fucking some.
eohippus
@MikeJ: In re iodized salt, I knew (tangentially) a pair of authentic old birchers; real holdovers they were, too. Pope John Paul wasn’t Catholic enough for them, they were strict pre-Vatican II adherents of the Latin mass. Anyway, I once heard them say that only sea salt was ‘real’ salt, because only it had sodium in it. So, yeah, they were stupid. What were you saying?
LB
@David Fud: Brown. But it needs to be a lot of fluoride, much more than usually added to water. Fluoride in high doses is also acutely toxic. But again these doses are way higher than what is in fluoridated water.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: And doesn’t Teflon show up in everyone’s body now?
Epicurus
I was just handed a copy of Ms. Lake’s briefing papers, and they read, in part, that “They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” I can only infer that she means the Obama administration. Thank the FSM there are such vigilant citizens standing guard for our freedom and liberty.
andy
@The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik: Apparently not far off the mark in the south lands, considering their apparent choice of drinking vessels…
Steeplejack
@StringonaStick:
So you’re saying it is a communist plot, then. Got it.
Doug Woodard
General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk… ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children’s ice cream.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: [very nervous] Lord, Jack.
General Jack D. Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: I… no, no. I don’t, Jack.
General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works. Today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
Doug Woodard
@Epicurus: Love it!
cpinva
psssssssssssssssst! if you put an aluminum foil cover (with pinholes) on top of your tube of toothpaste, it keeps the flouride from getting on your brush.
pass it on.
StringonaStick
I’d gladly address all the comments of the anti-fluouriders who’ve written here, but El Cid covered it beautifully and I have a seminar to go to all weekend. I’ll try to get some comments in when I get back from it, if anyone is still interested. What I intend to cover is (1) why just doing an occassional fluoride treatment on kids is not nearly as effective as in the water supply, and (2) just exactly how much is needed to cause the progessive level of staining that people are talking about here. Check back if you are interested, if not, then have a nice weekend!
maus
@Steve:
Nope! I’d suggest avoiding your Paleo-friends’ facebook links.