Full Circle

"They stupided so hard they smarted."

Oy

Cheese, baby girl. It's for the cheese.

White

American

Cheese

On your cheeseburger

It seems more and more obvious that we're not gonna make it.

Entering A Dark Time

Two cities stopped adding fluoride to water. Science reveals what happened

Calgary, Canada, and Juneau, Alaska, show how ending fluoridation can affect health

Warren Loeppky has been a pediatric dentist in the Canadian city of Calgary for 20 years. Over the last decade, he says, tooth decay in children he’s seen has become more common, more aggressive and more severe. Many of his young patients have so much damage that he has to work with them under general anesthesia.

“It’s always sad seeing a young child in pain,” Loeppky says. “Dental decay is very preventable. It breaks your heart to see these young kids that aren’t able to eat.”

Loeppky notes that many factors can contribute to tooth decay in children, including their diet and genetics. Still, he believes part of the problem is linked to a decision made in the halls of local government: In 2011, Calgary stopped adding fluoride to its drinking water.

“This decision of city councilors was surprising to the general public, but shocking and alarming to dentists, to pediatricians, to anesthesiologists and others in the health care field, who knew what it would mean,” says Juliet Guichon, a legal and ethics scholar at the University of Calgary who formed a group that advocated for adding fluoride back to drinking water in the city.

Several studies have shown that fluoride is a safe and effective way to prevent tooth decay. It recruits other minerals, such as calcium and phosphate, to strengthen tooth enamel and fend off acid made by bacteria. Oral health can also affect a person’s overall health.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that communities across the country add 0.7 milligrams of fluoride for every liter of water. It’s up to state and local governments to decide if they want to follow that recommendation. In 2022, the CDC reported that 63 percent of Americans received fluoridated water.

But that practice now is coming under new scrutiny. In March, Utah became the first state to ban fluoridation; many local governments across the country are also debating the issue. And on April 7, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told news reporters that he planned to tell the CDC to stop its recommendation.

Adding fluoride to water has been contested in the United States since the practice became widespread in the mid-20th century. Opponents have historically voiced health concerns, including about tooth staining and disproven worries that fluoridated water could cause bone cancer, as well as claims that fluoridation amounts to mass medication and violates individual freedoms. More recently, people have pointed to research showing an association between fluoride and lowered IQ in children. But those findings, which have been heavily criticized, looked at fluoride concentrations much higher than those found in most Americans’ drinking water.

What happened in Calgary, as well as in Juneau, Alaska, which stopped water fluoridation in 2007, may be a cautionary tale for other municipalities. Science News spoke with researchers and other experts in both cities to understand what can happen when local governments opt to stop adding fluoride to drinking water.

Looking into the mouths of second-graders in Calgary

Lindsay McLaren says she never anticipated becoming a self-described fluoridation researcher. As a quantitative social scientist at the University of Calgary, she studies how public policies can affect the health of a population. She hadn’t given much thought to fluoridation until 2011, when the Calgary City Council decided to remove fluoride from the city’s water.

The move prompted McLaren to design a study looking at how the dental health of the city’s children fared once fluoride was removed. She recruited dental hygienists to go to schools and inspect the mouths of second-grade students. Some went to schools in Calgary and others went to schools in Edmonton, a similar city in the same province that still fluoridated its water.

In Calgary, the team surveyed 2,649 second-graders around seven years after fluoridation ended, meaning they had likely never been exposed to fluoride in their drinking water. Of those, 65 percent had tooth decay. In Edmonton, 55 percent of surveyed children had tooth decay. While those percentages may seem close, they mark a statistically significant difference that McLaren calls “quite large” on the population level.

“Compared to Edmonton kids, Calgary kids were now considerably worse as far as dental health goes,” McLaren says. Other factors, including diet and socioeconomic status, did not explain the differences between children in Edmonton and Calgary, she says.

In 2024, another study found a higher rate of tooth decay-related treatments for which a child was placed under general anesthesia in Calgary than in Edmonton. From 2018 to 2019, 32 out of every 10,000 children in Calgary were put under general anesthesia to treat tooth decay, compared with 17 for every 10,000 children in Edmonton.

The findings didn’t surprise local dentists, says Bruce Yaholnitsky, a periodontist in Calgary. “This is just obvious to us. But you need to have proper science to prove, in some cases, the obvious.”

Analyzing Medicaid claims in Juneau

Years before Calgary’s city council opted to remove fluoride from its water, members of the local government in Juneau made a similar decision.

Jennifer Meyer says she first became interested in studying the effects of lack of fluoridation in Juneau after moving there in 2015. At the time, she had two young children; a third was born in Juneau. She was surprised at how much dental work, including fillings, she noticed among many other preschool and elementary school children.

“I thought ‘Wow, what’s going on here?’ Because I could see a lot of the decay and the repairs,” Meyer says.

Juneau had stopped adding fluoride to its drinking water in 2007 after asking a six-member commission to review the evidence around fluoridation. A copy of the commission’s report obtained from Meyer, a public health researcher at the University of Alaska Anchorage, shows that two commission members opposed to fluoridation made claims about the health effects that Meyer says are “false” and “not grounded in quality investigations.”

The commission’s chair criticized anti-fluoride positions, at one point writing that part of the literature was based on “junk science.” But he ultimately recommended that the city stop fluoridation, claiming that the evidence about its safety at low concentrations was inconclusive. With the commission’s members split at 3–3, the Juneau Assembly voted to end fluoridation.

Meyer and her colleagues analyzed Medicaid dental claims records made before and after the city stopped fluoridation. They found that the average number of procedures to treat tooth decay rose in children under age 6, from 1.5 treatments per child in 2003 to 2.5 treatments per child in 2012.

The cost of these treatments in children under 6 years old, when adjusted for inflation, jumped by an average of $303 dollars per child from 2003 to 2012.

Meyer says that increased Medicaid costs for dental treatments ultimately end up being paid by taxpayers.

“When politicians decide to withhold a safe and effective public health intervention like fluoridation, they are imposing a hidden health care tax on everyone in their state or community,” Meyer says.

Continued calls to end fluoridation

Today, many opponents to fluoride in water cite a controversial systematic review released last year by the National Toxicology Program, which is nestled in HHS and evaluates the health effects of substances. That August 2024 review concluded with “moderate confidence” that water with more than 1.5 mg of fluoride per liter was associated with lowered IQ in children.

But that dose is more than double the CDC’s recommended amount. And the review authors couldn’t determine if low fluoride concentrations like those found in treated drinking water in the United States had a negative effect on children’s IQ. In addition, merely finding an association does not prove that higher levels of fluoride caused lowered IQ, the NTP notes on its website.

More broadly, Meyer says, “ending fluoridation … based on weak or misrepresented evidence is not a precaution, it’s negligence.”

Juneau remains without fluoridated water. In Calgary, though, residents voted in 2021 to bring it back. With 62 percent of voters opting to reintroduce fluoride, the margin was higher than it was in the 1989 vote that brought fluoride to Calgary in the first place. Guichon says McLaren’s study, combined with “determined advocacy,” helped bring the electorate to the polls.

“More people voted to reinstate fluoride than voted for the mayor. So that’s a success,” Meyer says. “But in America, we are entering a dark time.”

Science News

FAFO - Big Big FAFO

Do not normalize kids dying of measles.

That monstrous disease was deemed eradicated 25 years ago because we listened to the professionals, and we stuck with the program for 35 years.

But thanks to a small group of criminally irresponsible conspiracy freaks, a large bunch of ignorant Dunning-Kruger specimens have brought it roaring back, putting us on the brink of another thoroughly preventable public health catastrophe.

Not sorry not sorry, and fake lord forgive me - but I hate these fuckin' people.

Colorado reports new case of measles, in a baby from Denver

The infant recently traveled with family to Mexico. The case is not believed to be connected to a previous measles infection reported in Pueblo

Colorado reported its second case of measles in eight days on Monday, this time in an infant from Denver.

The baby had recently traveled with family to the Mexican state of Chihuahua, which is experiencing an outbreak of measles, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said in a news release.

The infection is not believed to be connected to a case of measles reported last week in an adult in Pueblo — other than that person had also recently traveled to Chihuahua. Colorado has so far not identified any subsequent infections in the state arising from the Pueblo case. The person has recovered from the infection.

Children typically do not receive their first dose of measles vaccine until they turn 1, and the Denver baby who was infected was unvaccinated.

Colorado officials did not release any information on how the baby is doing.

The infant appears to have been taken to the Denver Health emergency room on Sunday. CDPHE is asking anyone who was at the ER on that day between the hours of 10:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. to monitor for symptoms for 21 days after exposure — that’s until April 27 — and to consider avoiding public gatherings during that time.

Measles symptoms typically begin around one to three weeks after exposure and look like a common cold: fever, cough, runny nose and/or red eyes. The recognizable rash usually doesn’t occur until a few days later, starting on the face before spreading to the rest of the body.

In bad cases, measles can cause pneumonia or swelling of the brain. It can damage the immune system — causing something called “immune amnesia” which can make it harder for the body to fight other infections — and it can also be fatal.

Two children have now died in the ongoing measles outbreak in Texas, and the death of an adult in New Mexico is also being investigated. The U.S. has seen more than 600 cases of measles this year, most connected to the Texas outbreak. Mexican officials have also reported that the outbreak in Chihuahua is linked to the Texas cases.

On Stupid

Two days ago, I went in for the COVID booster I should've gotten 3 months ago, and as the nurse was entering my info into the records system, she noticed I was behind on other vaccinations as well.

So I got 5 jabs all at once. COVID, flu, pneumonia, tentanus (every ten years - I didn't know that), and pertussis.

Pertussis. Whooping cough. We're having to inoculate old people against whooping cough now because dumbass anti-vaxxers are convinced there's something wrong with the vaccines, so they're refusing to get the shot for their kids.

Sometimes, I just hate people.

(I felt like shit most of the day yesterday, but I seem to be in fine fettle today, thank you very much)

Anyway, here's a new guy talking about how Stupid can be more destructive than Evil.

Dunning Kruger is confirmed.

Hey, Butker

... yo mama - biotch.

The Test

It's pretty appalling to keep finding out that so many Americans know so little about our history or our government.

The citizenship test has some of the easiest questions ever - stuff I was taught in grade school - starting like in 3rd or 4th grade.

Nobody's asking you to present a full dissertation on the details of our little experiment in democratic self-government, but holy crap, people, c'mon - ya gotta know some of this to be at least kind of effective in the whole democracy thing.

Democracy is not something we have

unless it's something we do.

And we have to know something about it

to make the damned thing work.

Check yourself:

The next time you hear somebody shit-talk immigrants for not knowing enough about USAmerica Inc, ask them a few of those questions.

Today's Eternal Sadness

A "good guy with a gun" killed a "bad guy with a gun", after the bad guy killed 3 people with his gun at a shopping mall in Indiana, and "conservatives" are cheering because killing somebody with a gun is wrong, and so a guy with a gun had to be killed by a guy with a gun to show how wrong it is to go around killing people with guns - and that's good because of how bad it is.

I guess there could be some kind of fucked up karmic pseudo-logic to it, but in the end, another 4 Americans are dead because of our stoopid Culture Of Gun Violence, and some of these fuckin' idiots are calling it a win.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander

A bystander’s decision to shoot a man who opened fire at an Indiana mall was a rare occurrence of someone stepping in to try to prevent multiple casualties before police could arrive.

Police on Monday praised the quick actions of 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken, an armed shopper who killed 20-year-old Jonathan Sapirman after Sapirman killed three people and wounded two others at a mall in the Indianapolis suburb of Greenwood.

“Many more people would have died last night if not for a responsible armed citizen,” police Chief Jim Ison said Monday, repeatedly calling Dicken a “good Samaritan” and his response “heroic.”

It isn’t common for mass shootings to be stopped in such fashion. From 2000 to 2021, fewer than 3% of 433 active attacks in the U.S. ended with a civilian firing back, according to the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. The researchers define the attacks as one or more people targeting multiple people.

It was far more common for police or bystanders to subdue the attacker or for police to kill the person, according to the center’s national data, which were recently cited by The New York Times.

In a quarter of the shootings, the attacker stopped by leaving the area, similar to what happened during the July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois, where seven people were killed.

“There’s been this statement: ‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’ That’s factually inaccurate because of the word ‘only,’” said Adam Lankford, a criminal justice expert at the University of Alabama who has written books and research papers about mass shootings.

Nonetheless, gun-rights advocates, including the National Rifle Association, used that phrase on social media to draw attention to what happened in Indiana.

Since July 1, Indiana has allowed anyone 18 or older to carry a handgun in public, though private property owners can prohibit firearms. The Greenwood mall has a ban on weapons, according to its conduct code.

Gun Owners of America hopes the mall reconsiders, saying gun-free zones create a false sense of security.

The Greenwood Park Mall, which is owned by Simon Property Group, didn’t reply to a request for comment but released a statement commending first responders and the “heroic actions of the good Samaritan who stopped the suspect.”

Lankford believes it would be a mistake to think armed civilians can be relied upon to regularly stop mass shootings.

“While it’s certainly a good thing in this mall shooting that someone was able to stop it before it went any further, let’s not think we can substitute that outcome in all past and future incidents,” Lankford said. “If everyone’s carrying a firearm, the risk that something bad happens just gets much larger.”

There have been other examples of armed people defending large groups. In May, a woman fatally shot a man in Charleston, West Virginia, after he fired an AR-15-style rifle into a crowd at an outdoor party. She was praised by police, not charged.

In 2017, Devin Patrick Kelley crashed his car and killed himself after bystanders, including one who was armed, chased him after he massacred 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

Overheard

Asked about preventing gun violence,

Herschel Walker proposed:

“...a department that can

look at young men

that's looking at women

that's looking at social media”.

Yeah - now there's a guy we need

in the greatest deliberative body

in the world

An Observation

 

Those Hyper-Patriotic Americans who hate foreigners and immigrants are the same people who hate large numbers of Americans too.

Yeehaw

Ain't that America.

Today's Reddit

Modern Dad Manual: When you hear the siren, get everybody into the basement, or the center of the house, and then stand in front of the window so you can maybe go viral with a video of the tornado ripping you to shreds with flying glass.

Oops

So we thought the main story would be the eventuality of a spike in Delta infections, and while that's still probably the case, here's a shitty little bonus for us.

KIRO Seattle:

Child sex-trafficking sting at 2021 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally nets 9 arrests

STURGIS, S.D. — A weeklong sex-trafficking sting executed at the 81st annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally netted nine arrests, each with some connection to children.

Eight of the nine men arrested, who range in age from 22 to 54, are South Dakota residents charged with attempted enticement of a minor using the internet, a charge which carries a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison upon conviction, the Argus Leader reported.

The ninth man, a New York resident, is charged with attempted commercial sex trafficking of a minor, which carries a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison upon conviction, the newspaper reported.

The South Dakota U.S. Attorney’s Office confirmed the arrests in a Tuesday news release.

According to the Rapid City Journal, the joint sex operation involved the South Dakota Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce, the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation, U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, Pennington County Sheriff’s Office and the Rapid City Police Department.

Specifically, law enforcement placed multiple advertisements on online websites and mobile applications to communicate with online predators. Skout, MeetMe and Whisper, as well as the website fetlife.com, were among the platforms targeted, the Journal reported.

The men arrested include:

• Alec Walker Daniel, 22, Rapid City, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
• Alexander Wayne Basaldu, 35, Rapid City, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
• Jesse James Young, 36, Rapid City, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
• Joshua Robert Lehmann, 34, Rapid City, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
• Christopher Thomas Dahl, 28, Wolcott, New York: Attempted commercial sex trafficking of a minor.
• Stephen Gregory Fontenot, 39, Black Hawk, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
• Anthony James Kemp, 54, Spearfish, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
• James Dean Hanapel, 20, Ellsworth AFB: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
• Clayton John Paulson, 36, Spearfish, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.

The 2021 rally attracted more than 525,000 attendees, substantially fewer than the record-setting 2015 crowd of more than 747,000, but nearly 14% more than the roughly 462,000 who rode in for the 2020 event, KOTA-TV reported.

And the hardest part for me is resisting the urge to profile these fuckin' slugs as the usual "conservative" MAGA Incel suspects who talk shit while doing almost exactly what they accuse other people of doing.

A Blast From The Past

Smart guy Carl Sagan via Brian Williams at MSNBC

Close Call

A. Keep your fucking dog under control

B. Try to understand that once you pull the trigger, some really bad things can happen

BTW, they teach you all that shit in boy scouts FFS.

Dogs and less-than-good dog-owners, guns, kids, and the knee-jerk reactions of over-protective parents.

What could possibly go wrong?

It would be bad for me to say something like "Whew - dodged a bullet that time, eh?" - cuz that kid certainly didn't - so I won't say that.

Glad that kid's OK.

Not The Onion

Today in Stoopid Rube Tricks

Detroit Free Press:

Whitmer kidnap suspect wants out of jail. He's diabetic, and fears COVID-19

After three weeks in jail, one of the suspects charged with plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is asking the judge to reconsider her decision to keep him locked up:

He's worried about getting the COVID-19 virus.

Kaleb Franks of Waterford, a recovering heroin addict who says he has turned his life around after doing time for cocaine and home invasion, has diabetes and high cholesterol, takes insulin daily and fears contracting COVID-19 in jail, his lawyer argued in court documents filed this week.

The filing shed more light on the life of the 26-year-old defendant known as 'Red Hot,' who maintains that he can be trusted not to flee and that he is not a threat to society, despite the judge concluding on Oct. 13 that "he remains a danger to the community."

Are You Smarter

...than anybody? Anybody at all?

And then, Ted Cruz jumped in.

Today's Tweet

DumFux with guns.

Yesterday was the 334th day in 2019, and marked the 397th mass shooting.

We really are the stoopid country.

Dipshits with guns... pic.twitter.com/d21RE2ECND
via RexChapman

— Tomthunkit™ (@TomthunkitsMind) December 1, 2019

The View From Out There

An irrelevant freak show

Where The Fuck Are We?

Colbert's question - Have we come to the point where colluding with a foreign power in an attempt to effect the outcome of our elections is a Left vs Right thing?

It's of some import to remember that while 45*'s approvals are in the mid- to high 30s overall, for people self-identifying as Republican, that approval number is still in the mid- to high 80s.

We can cheer and feel hopeful as more "rock-ribbed establishment" Repubs bail on the party and squawk about it, but 45*'s core constituency (as low-life and bottom-of-the-barrel as we know them to be) will likely stay with him for as long as they see him as the guy who went up there to Washington and showed all them buttheads a thing or two.

Because: The point of the exercise for an awful lot of "conservatives" is simply to make liberals mad enough to cry. There's almost literally nothing else to it for some of these mooks.

Corollary: If their guy does something that makes you mad or scared or whatever, then you're a liberal, and nothing you say matters because nothing you say can be the truth because you're a liberal, and liberals are always wrong, and we win again. All this winning!

But the real kicker is that we can't go on trying to see any of this thru our filter of the Presumption of Regularity.

45*'s hardcore supporters aren't really the ones who put him there, but they're convinced they did exactly that, so they're the ones who have to be convinced he has to go. And we can't sway people who are Fact-Hostile to the point where they've become immune to reason. We have to fight the mechanisms that propagate that hostility - and I don't know how to do that.

"Turbo-Fucked" is a pretty apt descriptor for what we are right now.