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Today's Keith

Covering a wide swath.

A New Thing

(From a Facebook post)

Slate Auto is shaking up the electric vehicle market with its radical new offering: the Slate Truck, a $20,000 American-made EV that strips away modern car luxuries to focus on affordability and simplicity.

Slated for release in 2026, the minimalist two-seater features no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen, with body panels made of durable, unpainted plastic.

Embracing a "digital detox" ethos, it invites owners to customize their trucks with DIY vinyl wraps and add-on kits, while skipping the costly complexities that usually plague auto manufacturing. By eliminating major production hurdles like paint shops and offering one model, one color, and one trim, Slate aims for financial sustainability few EV startups have achieved.

Despite its bare-bones approach, the Slate Truck isn't skimping on safety or potential upgrades. It targets a 5-Star crash rating and offers bolt-on expansion kits, extended battery packs, and user-friendly maintenance backed by "Slate University." Investors, including reportedly Jeff Bezos, have shown interest in Slate's radically simplified model, which challenges a bloated auto industry increasingly reliant on tech-heavy, high-cost vehicles. The big question now: Are consumers ready to embrace a back-to-basics, fully customizable EV as a new standard in personal transportation?

100 Days Of Shit

What Trump has been doing.

From Indivisible - Littleton CO

• Withdrew from World Health Organization

• Stopped objecting to health misinformation on social media platforms

• Halted public communications from HHS, CDC & NIH

• Scrubbed abortion information from government sites

• Suspended job-related travel by HHS employees

• Revoked limits on ICE and Border Patrol enforcement in hospitals

• Cancelled monthly HHS call with nationwide pathology authorities to review health threats

• Appointed contrarians Robert Kennedy, Mehmet Oz, Jay Bhattacharya to HHS, CMS, NIH

• Reinstated global gag rule on abortion referrals

• Rescinded Biden price reductions on Medicare and Medicaid prescription drugs

• Curtailed prosecutions for blocking access to abortion clinics

• Stopped disbursing HIV drugs overseas

• Crashed Medicaid payment portals in all 50 states

• Dismantled USAID affecting programs to supply HIV and malaria drugs

• Froze government grants on healthcare

• Cut ACA enrollment period from 90 days to 45 days

• Cut funding for ACA navigators by 90%

• Rescinded increased subsidies for low-income ACA enrollees in Medicaid

• Took down thousands of informational webpages from CDC, FDA and other agencies

• Fired FDA employees who reviewed food safety and medical devices

• Fired thousands of scientists, doctors and public health officials from CDC, NIH, FDA

• Fired border station health inspectors

• Disbanded Medicare and Medicaid health equity panel

• Endorsed Congressional Republican proposal to reduce Medicaid federal subsidy share

• Granted DOGE access to Medicare and Medicaid payment and contracting records

• Postponed CDC vaccine panel meeting on recommendations for meningitis, flu, RSV

• Barred future public comments on new HHS rules

• Placed hundreds of federal buildings for sale including HHS and Medicare headquarters

• Extended buyout offers to federal health agency employees

• Placed burdensome requirements on low-income ACA enrollments

• Convened closed-door White House health commission conference

• CDC commissioned study of vaccine-autism link

• Proposed allowing bird flu to spread through farm population

• Cut $34 million from budget for food testing

• Terminated support for Gavi organization that supplies vaccines to developing nations

• Cancelled $12 billion grants to states for infectious disease, mental health and addiction

• DOGE terminated 10% of USDA’s plant and seed gene bank staff scientists

• Forced resignation of FDA’s head of vaccine safety and effectiveness

• Reduced HHS workforce by 25%

• Froze funding for Title X family planning services

• Dropped Medicare/Medicaid coverage for weight loss drugs

• Shut down CDC’s premier laboratory for studying sexually transmitted diseases

• RFK Jr. declared FDA employees “sock puppet” of pharmaceutical industry

• Imposed tariff on international drug supply chains

• Proposed to cut NIH budget in half and reduce 27 agency health centers to eight

• Eliminated early hearing detection program for newborns

• Took down COVID-19 informational websites and replaced with conspiracy theory sites

• Cancelled $40 million in EPA research grants to universities

• Cut or reduced hundreds of millions in funding for autism research from multiple agencies

• Briefly proposed national autism registry

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

Amy Siskind

New for me today: ADP hiring report says 62,000 non-farm pay check jobs were added in April.

How that stacks up against what Trump's DOL has to say in a few days, we'll just have to see.

note: We need 120-130,000 new jobs every month to keep the ball rolling.

Could be interesting. I think we all know Trump isn't exactly above tinkering with the numbers, so if Labor reports a nice high (ie: made up) number, I hope the Dems are smart enough to play it against the usual Republican refrain: "Who ya gonna believe - private enterprise or da gubmint?"

Meanwhile,

This remains unconfirmed:

But how can we be sure it's not legit?

Leopards vs Faces

You're always 4 or 5 really bad months away from living in a refrigerator box down by the river.

You're never 4 or 5 really great months away from becoming a billionaire.

Salvation and deliverance - if there really are such things - are not to be found in idolizing the people who are actively exploiting your very existence.

The "elites" are not the teachers and the nurses, or the college professors or the virologists.

The elites are the guys who can pay millions to a PR firm to keep you in thrall - to make sure you always believe your toast is buttered on the side they tell you it's buttered on - that the land of milk and honey is just over this next hill.