>> ^Aemaeth:
Funny thing is that this video would be way more popular if a little old lady didn't take the fall. No one likes to see bad stuff happen to grandma.


Well, actually, this is one of the most popular videos I've ever sifted. I guess you everybody likes seeing poor old grandma go to prison. You sick bastards.

look at how absurd this is.

its a slick road... and the chain magically explodes off the logs.

By the way, they don't use chains, they use straps.

Simple be aware of what you are doing, stay calm, stay at least 4 to 6 seconds behind every car on the road.

Stay out of blind spots.

>> ^fizziks:
I agree that the joke was poorly crafted and could have been phrased in a way that didn't open Maher to misinterpretation, but the truth behind his message is more important in my view: Palin is a gimmick VP pick.


Not actually true. It might seem like it from a quick survey of her biographical details on paper, but she's actually been under serious consideration for the VP spot for months. I remember having a discussion with some well-informed Republicans who were crossing their fingers for Palin's nomination.

While her tenure as Alaskan governor has been short, she's actually managed something very impressive in such a short time: keeping her basic campaign promises. She ran on a clean government ticket, and she's worked hard to excise corruption from the Alaskan government, even up to firing entire boards and replacing them with new members. Electability does not seem to be the whole concern. Nomination of Palin seems to indicate a good faith dedication to cleaning up the corruption of the last eight years.

Which is not to say that she doesn't help his electability. She's very much a maverick with her own ideas about the way to do things, which works very well with McCain's reputation up until the last few years. She's extremely anti-abortion, which helps him shore up the religious conservative vote. I'm sure Hillary supporters are a major concern as well, but they can't be the main one. Once her sentiments regarding abortion are more widely disseminated, she'll cause McCain to lose a significant portion of their votes.

This is not to say I'm endorsing her, of course. A suspicious independent like myself has much to dislike about her. She has a government-from-the-top attitude, which can only translate to further support for legislation like the Patriot Act. Her position on abortion, again, causes real concern. If she becomes President, she'll almost certainly have many of the same blind spots as Bush the Younger.

She's an inspired choice from McCain's perspective, but I don't believe she's the best choice for America.

So vote for Obama. 'Cause he sucks less than McCain.

I was homeschooled for two years. The only reason is because I was being bullied so much at school it was leaving physical scars and affecting my schoolwork. (I was pretty much socially unaware of my situation so if I had emotional scaring I was unaware.) When we moved back to Minnesota I was 14 and decided to start Public School again. I was prepared to have kids spit on me and find blind spots around the school for them to hit me and steal my lunch or whatever.
I was pretty shocked at how many of the kids in my class greeted me and were pretty nice about it too. It turned out to be good for me an my social development. (Though dealing with lots of adults while being homeschooled helped me mature most.)
The thing is Public Education in the U.S. is terrible. The teachers are underpaid, the federal requirements hold back the potential of most kids, and there is no way to provide kids with the versatility of the learning experence they desperately need.
Homeschooling, excels where Public Schooling fails. Besides the social aspect, which I feel can be compensated by parents who actively enroll their kids in public services and community events, Public School really doesn't have much to offer as an advantage. (Besides the fact that my taxes are paying for it.)

Swampgirl, Good for you! There are too many stereotypes about homeschooling. In fact I think it takes more effort on the part of the child and the parent to homeschool, but nothing worthwhile is ever easy.

Fluoridation is UNETHICAL because:

1) It violates the individual's right to informed consent to medication.
2) The municipality cannot control the dose of the patient.
3) The municipality cannot track each individual's response.
4) It ignores the fact that some people are more vulnerable to fluoride's toxic effects than others. Some people will suffer while others may benefit.
5) It violates the Nuremberg code for human experimentation.

Fluoridation is UNNECESSARY because:

1) Children can have perfectly good teeth without being exposed to fluoride.
2) The promoters (CDC, 1999, 2001) admit that the benefits are topical not systemic, so fluoridated toothpaste, which is universally available, is a more rational approach to delivering fluoride to the target organ (teeth) while minimizing exposure to the rest of the body.
3) The vast majority of western Europe has rejected water fluoridation, but has been equally successful as the US, if not more so, in tackling tooth decay.
4) If fluoride was necessary for strong teeth one would expect to find it in breast milk, but the level there is 0.01 ppm , which is 100 times LESS than in fluoridated tap water (IOM, 1997).
5) Children in non-fluoridated communities are already getting the so-called "optimal" doses from other sources (Heller et al, 1997). In fact, many are already being over-exposed to fluoride.

Fluoridation is INEFFECTIVE because:

1) Major dental researchers concede that fluoride's benefits are topical not systemic (Fejerskov 1981; Carlos 1983; CDC 1999, 2001; Limeback 1999; Locker 1999; Featherstone 2000).
2) Major dental researchers also concede that fluoride is ineffective at preventing pit and fissure tooth decay, which is 85% of the tooth decay experienced by children (JADA 1984; Gray 1987; White 1993; Pinkham 1999).
3) Several studies indicate that dental decay is coming down just as fast, if not faster, in non-fluoridated industrialized countries as fluoridated ones (Diesendorf, 1986; Colquhoun, 1994; World Health Organization, Online).
4) The largest survey conducted in the US showed only a minute difference in tooth decay between children who had lived all their lives in fluoridated compared to non-fluoridated communities. The difference was not clinically significant nor shown to be statistically significant (Brunelle & Carlos, 1990).
5) The worst tooth decay in the United States occurs in the poor neighborhoods of our largest cities, the vast majority of which have been fluoridated for decades.
6) When fluoridation has been halted in communities in Finland, former East Germany, Cuba and Canada, tooth decay did not go up but continued to go down (Maupome et al, 2001; Kunzel and Fischer, 1997, 2000; Kunzel et al, 2000 and Seppa et al, 2000).

Fluoridation is UNSAFE because:

1) It accumulates in our bones and makes them more brittle and prone to fracture. The weight of evidence from animal studies, clinical studies and epidemiological studies on this is overwhelming. Lifetime exposure to fluoride will contribute to higher rates of hip fracture in the elderly.
2) It accumulates in our pineal gland, possibly lowering the production of melatonin a very important regulatory hormone (Luke, 1997, 2001).
3) It damages the enamel (dental fluorosis) of a high percentage of children. Between 30 and 50% of children have dental fluorosis on at least two teeth in optimally fluoridated communities (Heller et al, 1997 and McDonagh et al, 2000).
4) There are serious, but yet unproven, concerns about a connection between fluoridation and osteosarcoma in young men (Cohn, 1992), as well as fluoridation and the current epidemics of both arthritis and hypothyroidism.
5) In animal studies fluoride at 1 ppm in drinking water increases the uptake of aluminum into the brain (Varner et al, 1998).
6) Counties with 3 ppm or more of fluoride in their water have lower fertility rates (Freni, 1994).
7) In human studies the fluoridating agents most commonly used in the US not only increase the uptake of lead into children's blood (Masters and Coplan, 1999, 2000) but are also associated with an increase in violent behavior.
The margin of safety between the so-called therapeutic benefit of reducing dental decay and many of these end points is either nonexistent or precariously low.

Fluoridation is INEQUITABLE, because:

1) It will go to all households, and the poor cannot afford to avoid it, if they want to, because they will not be able to purchase bottled water or expensive removal equipment.
2) The poor are more likely to suffer poor nutrition which is known to make children more vulnerable to fluoride's toxic effects (Massler & Schour 1952; Marier & Rose 1977; ATSDR 1993; Teotia et al, 1998).
3) Very rarely, if ever, do governments offer to pay the costs of those who are unfortunate enough to get dental fluorosis severe enough to require expensive treatment.

Fluoridation is INEFFICIENT and NOT COST-EFFECTIVE because:

1) Only a small fraction of the water fluoridated actually reaches the target. Most of it ends up being used to wash the dishes, to flush the toilet or to water our lawns and gardens.
2) It would be totally cost-prohibitive to use pharmaceutical grade sodium fluoride (the substance which has been tested) as a fluoridating agent for the public water supply. Water fluoridation is artificially cheap because, unknown to most people, the fluoridating agent is an unpurified hazardous waste product from the phosphate fertilizer industry.
3) If it was deemed appropriate to swallow fluoride (even though its major benefits are topical not systemic) a safer and more cost-effective approach would be to provide fluoridated bottle water in supermarkets free of charge. This approach would allow both the quality and the dose to be controlled. Moreover, it would not force it on people who don't want it.

Fluoridation is UNSCIENTIFICALLY PROMOTED. For example:

1) In 1950, the US Public Health Service enthusiastically endorsed fluoridation before one single trial had been completed.
2) Even though we are getting many more sources of fluoride today than we were in 1945, the so called "optimal concentration" of 1 ppm has remained unchanged.
3) The US Public health Service has never felt obliged to monitor the fluoride levels in our bones even though they have known for years that 50% of the fluoride we swallow each day accumulates there.
4) Officials that promote fluoridation never check to see what the levels of dental fluorosis are in the communities before they fluoridate, even though they know that this level indicates whether children are being overdosed or not.
5) No US agency has yet to respond to Luke's finding that fluoride accumulates in the human pineal gland, even though her finding was published in 1994 (abstract), 1997 (Ph. D. thesis), 1998 (paper presented at conference of the International Society for Fluoride Research), and 2001 (published in Caries Research).
6) The CDC's 1999, 2001 reports advocating fluoridation were both six years out of date in the research they cited on health concerns.

Fluoridation is UNDEFENDABLE IN OPEN PUBLIC DEBATE.

The proponents of water fluoridation refuse to defend this practice in open debate because they know that they would lose that debate. A vast majority of the health officials around the US and in other countries who promote water fluoridation do so based upon someone else's advice and not based upon a first hand familiarity with the scientific literature. This second hand information produces second rate confidence when they are challenged to defend their position. Their position has more to do with faith than it does with reason.
Those who pull the strings of these public health 'puppets', do know the issues, and are cynically playing for time and hoping that they can continue to fool people with the recitation of a long list of "authorities" which support fluoridation instead of engaging the key issues. As Brian Martin made clear in his book Scientific Knowledge in Controversy: The Social Dynamics of the Fluoridation Debate (1991), the promotion of fluoridation is based upon the exercise of political power not on rational analysis. The question to answer, therefore, is: "Why is the US Public Health Service choosing to exercise its power in this way?"
Motivations - especially those which have operated over several generations of decision makers - are always difficult to ascertain. However, whether intended or not, fluoridation has served to distract us from several key issues. It has distracted us from:
a) The failure of one of the richest countries in the world to provide decent dental care for poor people.
b) The failure of 80% of American dentists to treat children on Medicaid.
c) The failure of the public health community to fight the huge over consumption of sugary foods by our nation's children, even to the point of turning a blind eye to the wholesale introduction of soft drink machines into our schools. Their attitude seems to be if fluoride can stop dental decay why bother controlling sugar intake.
d) The failure to adequately address the health and ecological effects of fluoride pollution from large industry. Despite the damage which fluoride pollution has caused, and is still causing, few environmentalists have ever conceived of fluoride as a 'pollutant.'
e) The failure of the US EPA to develop a Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) for fluoride in water which can be scientifically defended.
f) The fact that more and more organofluorine compounds are being introduced into commerce in the form of plastics, pharmaceuticals and pesticides. Despite the fact that some of these compounds pose just as much a threat to our health and environment as their chlorinated and brominated counterparts (i.e. they are highly persistent and fat soluble and many accumulate in the food chains and our body fat), those organizations and agencies which have acted to limit the wide-scale dissemination of these other halogenated products, seem to have a blind spot for the dangers posed by organofluorine compounds.
So while fluoridation is neither effective nor safe, it continues to provide a convenient cover for many of the interests which stand to profit from the public being misinformed about fluoride.

Unfortunately, because government officials have put so much of their credibility on the line defending fluoridation, it will be very difficult for them to speak honestly and openly about the issue. As with the case of mercury amalgams, it is difficult for institutions such as the American Dental Association to concede health risks because of the liabilities waiting in the wings if they were to do so.

As promised, here is the transcript, to the best of my transcripting abilities. I've shrunk the text size to keep it from being any more gigantic than it has to be. Copy and paste it if it's too small to read.

It's interesting when people speak of areas of evolution for which we have no explanations. All the fundamental concepts of the evolutionary process are understood at least at some fundamental level. Now, are there gaps? Not gaps in the sense that people think. People, now, speak of gaps, for example, in the record. You know... we don't have fossils from before the Camrbian Explosion, but so what? The record is complete; it's not complete by means of fossils. You see in Darwin's time the only way to reconstruct evolutionary history was by studying fossils, by comparative anatomy, comparative embryology, biogeography. It was 150 years ago; science has advanced tremendously. We can now reconstruct evolutionary history with much more powerful methods; the methods of molecular biology, by looking at DNA, by looking at proteins and with these methods we have reconstructed the record completely. We can go back to the organisms, a group of organisms, called LUCA ('L' 'U' 'C' 'A') for the Last Universal Common Ancestor. We can find the common ancestors of all animals, common ancestors of all plants, of all fungi, of all bacteria. We can find the... we can reconstruct the histories of the common ancestors of plants and animals and fungi and bacteria going back to the very beginning. We don't know all the details, because who wants to know all the details? If you are studying the Rocky Mountains, you don't want to have, necessarily, a map where every st.. every tree and every rock is there. If you want to know the details of a particular area within the Rocky Mountains you can go there and study as much as you want and find every little rock, every little leaf, every little tree, every little plant there. The same with evolution. We can now look at any area of evolutionary history and we can understand it with as much detail as we wish. The methods of molecular biology are so powerful, are so quantitative, and also so redundant, we can study anything we want with as much detail as we want. Now there another way in which the people who propose.. propound intelligent design speak of as... about, um... you know, gaps in the record. How did the eye come about? Well we understand now at the genetic level [unintelligible], we actually understand that at almost every other level, they make the unwarranted and erroneous assumption that if something is complex, and every part depends on every other part, that it could not have come about by evolution. It's like a watch. It does not help to have one little piece, or the other piece, or the other piece. You have to have them all or you don't have a watch, but that's not so with organisms. So we have in mollusks today, these are snails and clams and so.. and squids, we have an example.. an example of eyes which go from the simplest to the most complex. I'm going to speak about eyes because the eye is one example they use, unless you have everything, unless you have the cornea and the lense and the retina and the... and the optical nerve, having one part of this alone doesn't help. Well in mollusks, and in some mollusks called limpids, they have something that you can call eyes. They're just a few pigmented cells linked to single neurons, nerve cells, which carry the information to the primitive brain of these creatures. Just a few pigmented cells. Then we have mollusks which have more pigmented cells and some of them forming a kind of cup which allows to detect the direction of the light. Then we have what are called pinhole eyes which are this cup, still a little more extreme and a little more sensitive-to-light cells, and more nerve cells, and then you have... we have animals, still speaking about mollusks, which have just simple refractive lense as well as the sensitive... light-sensitive cells which eventually in advanced organisms they advanced to the... gave rise to the retina. And you go all the way to octopus and squids which have an eye very much like ours: has cornea, has a lense, has a retina, has muscles to move it, has a.. a optic nerve. Curiously enough the eye of the squid is better than ours in that we have a substantial imperfection that they don't have. For historical reason, that's for evolutionary history of how the human eye came about, the neurons that register the signals in the retina are inside the eye. So for those signals to go to the brain, these nerve cells get collected in the optic nerve, the optic nerve has to cross the retina so we have a blind spot. Now squids and octopuses have the nerve cells connected to what is the retina from the outside. So they collect into what is the optic nerve and they send the signal to the brain without having any blindspot. Well the... the point I am making is that there are complex organs and functions that we may not know in detail, but any time we investigate one of those we discover the details. And it's again, I'm going to put it bluntly, blasphemous to try to think of a God who is there waiting for something from time to time to come and intervene: "now I'm going to make an eye". Primitive organisms don't have eyes so God waited a few thousand million years - 2 and a half, 3 thousand million years - in order to have organisms with eyes, then later on did this and that. This is what the theologans in the old times called the "God of the gaps". Heresy, trying to justify God to account for things we don't know. You know, fill in the gaps. For things we don't know and aren't knowlegable by scientific research... we have science, we should do scientific research. We should not be putting this God as an engineer that is trying to fix little things from time to time. What sort of vision of God is that? Moreover there is another problem and it is that the implication of intelligent design is that God is a very, very bad engineer. Think of the example that I was telling you a moment ago, of the human eye. I mean, an engineer that could have designed an eye with the optic nerve having to cross the retina would be fired. You better do it the octopus way. An engineer that would have designed the human jaw would be fired. Our jaw is not big enough for all our teeth, so we have to pull the... the... the wisdom teeth and very often have to straighten the others and the orthodontists make a very good living straightening the teeth because we have too many teeth, too large for our jaw. An engineer that would have designed the jaw that is not big for the teeth would be fired. God making these trivial, obvious mistake in a universe of design. Well their God does these things, certainly not mine. I don't want to have to worship a God that did this... um, not smart enough to do as well as a human engineer.

Now, I've had an entire Chevrolet Suburban hidden in my blind spot before, but how do you not see a TRAIN?
And several of those hits are right in the driver's door - though almost none of them appear to be that serious, I still hope none of these were fatality accidents.

Bit of a blind spot in a very inconvenient location. heh.