Sandra Finley

2012-04-16 Mercury: New study. On a full-cost basis amalgam is significantly more costly than composite.

 Mercury poisoning, dental amalgams. See also Vaccinations.  No Responses »
Apr 162012
 

For Michael Bender to Present

Today’s report is focused on the costs and impacts of dental mercury release to the environment.  The dental economic study was conducted by consultant Concorde East/West out of Brussels who has done indepth research for the US EPA, UNEP, and the European Commission, among others.

The main report findings indicate that when  the costs to society are factored in, the report calculates that amalgam costs at least $41 more than a mercury-free alternate composite filling material.

Dental amalgam, by weight, is comprised of 50% and EPA estimates that amalgam is the largest source of mercury to municipal wastewater, contributing 50%.  While EPA has stated that it will be proposing a rule in 2010 to control dental clinics, they have yet to do so.  Amalgam is one
of the largest sources of mercury reservoir, with the study estimating over 500 tons of mercury walking around in American’s mouths today.

The report’s methodology:   The study identifies release dental mercury pathways to air, water and land and conducts a mass balance analysis of mercury flows from dental offices to the environment.   It uses ADA data on numbers of fillings, types of fillings, costs and trends in the US.  It also uses USEPA (and international) publications on waste pathways, quantities of dental mercury waste and releases following different pathways and trends.

The study then utilizes US and international published data and estimates of the cost of end-of-pipe control of mercury releases and estimates of the value of societal and environmental benefits of eliminating dental related mercury emissions.  In order to get a handle on the full cost of using amalgam, the study develops two scenarios:

  1. The first scenario calculates the additional cost required (to reduce by 90% – using end-of-pipe techniques – the amount of dental mercury now being released to the environment. Since this scenario does not consider the environmental and other benefits of such a reduction as well, it may be seen as an extremely conservative estimate of the “external” cost of dealing with dental mercury releases.
  2. The second scenario quantifies the benefits for society and the environment that would result from a phase-out of mercury use in dentistry,
    including such benefits as reduced (indirect) health costs, reduced environmental impacts, additional jobs created, etc. This may be seen as a
    somewhat less conservative estimate of the “external” costs of using amalgam, but of course the result depends heavily on the scope of health and environmental impacts included in the calculation.

It’s important to note that this study includes only broadly accepted health and environmental impacts of mercury releases.

Main FIndings:   Based on ADA data, the report estimates that some 32 tons of dental mercury were used in the US in 2009 – about twice that of recent reporting by the amalgam manufacturers to the Interstate Mercury Reduction Clearinghouse, as they are required to do so every three years by state laws.

While some of the 32 tons of releases are controlled, society pays for the uncontrolled releases of mercury from amalgam use through additional pollution control costs, the loss of common publicly-owned resources, and the health effects associated with mercury contamination. For example, according to EPA, dental mercury contaminates fish, which in turn presents a neurological exposure risk especially to pregnant women and children, with impacts on cognitive thinking, memory, attention, language, and fine motor and visual spatial skills.

The basic commercial cost of an “equivalent” mercury amalgam filling in the rear teeth in the US is $144 compared to $188 for an “equivalent” composite filling. However, even when using conservative assumptions, the report shows that when the real cost to society and the environment is accounted for, amalgam turns out to be significantly more costly than composite as a filling material, by at least $41 and up to $87 more per filling.

In summary, the environmental concerns and indirect health risks, not to mention the still debated direct health effects from amalgams, all support the need for an amalgam phase-out. Yet now another clear reason has been provided: on a full-cost basis amalgam is also significantly more costly than composite.

2012-04-15 Figure me out. Figure you out. Salvation is coming. With help from Hannah Arendt.

 Culture and Ethics, Health, Peace or Violence  2 Responses »
Apr 152012
 

“Uncompromising Photos” is only one in a long series of revelations that make you ask, “What in hell has happened to our humanity?”

– – – – –  – – — –  — – – – – – – – –

My old mantra:  in order to bring a disintegrating system back to health,

  • Address the root cause.
  • The intervention has to be “timely”.
  • If you remove a symptom but not the cause, the system will continue to disintegrate.
  • When descent reaches the tipping point, the resources for recovery are too depleted.  The system collapses.  The collapse accelerates as things fall in upon themselves.

On that cheery note, it’s time to step back from “the battles” to assess the situation.

There is a multitude of citizen actions to bring about correction – do they address cause?

Cause is not easy to figure out.

And it is only one of the steps toward salvation!

Hannah Arendt dug up roots of the disintegration of European humanity in Nazi / fascist Europe.

I felt compelled to type up excerpts from her writing after receiving “Uncompromising Photos Expose Juvenile Detention in America”.  Both are posted at http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=5019.  I read, I under-lined, I typed the words, I re-read them and I get turned on all over again!  Hannah Arendt is insightful.  I love her!

We have to see through the jumble of events and discern what is happening today.  “Uncompromising Photos” is only one in a long series of revelations that make you ask, “What in hell has happened to our humanity?”.

the political crises of the twentieth century (the Nazis, etc.) can be viewed in terms of a breakdown in morality

We are experiencing a breakdown in morality in North America today.  Arendt’s observation:  the danger in morality is that it changes.  It is not a secure and stable guide for us.

Salvation does not lie in morality.   We had better understand where it does lie;  at this point there is no time to make mistakes!  I am not anxious to do a repeat of Nazi Europe.

” . . . the ability to think, which Eichmann lacked, is the precondition of judging, and that the refusal as well as the inability to judge … invite evil to enter and infect the world.

..the strictly moral power of judgment . .  she wrote that judging “may indeed prevent catastrophes . . . (Arendt uses the example of the Danish people in Nazi Europe. See http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=5019 )

 

ROOT CAUSE: It seems to me that morality in decline is a SYMPTOM then, of our failure to stand up and say, “This is wrong”.  AND FURTHER  “These actions of this specific person are at fault.”

I love this about Arendt.  She goes on to address the WHY WE DON’T carry through on the public statement.  Which brings me to the theme “Figure me out.  Figure you out.”  And if we don’t there will be no salvation from the deterioration that is happening around us.

Her judgment of the pope raised the further question of why we avoid our responsibility to judge the failure of a particular man . . to act; and why, rather than exercise judgment, we prefer to throw out two thousand years of Christianity and discharge the very idea of humanity.

I’m signing off!  before I repeat everything that is already posted at http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=5019

Some of the next emails will apply the lessons learned from Hannah Arendt.

Cheers!

Sandra

 

= = = = = = = =

Email from Sandra Finley

Saskatoon

306-373-8078

Hannah Arendt’s teachings and Uncompromising Photos Expose Juvenile Detention in America

 Culture and Ethics, Peace or Violence  No Responses »
Apr 142012
 

This photographer has a magnificent heart.

I’d like to think that there was a day in my lifetime when fewer children in North America would have been treated thus.  There’s a good graph to show juvenile incarceration rates.  The U.S. is off the charts.  I wonder how we’re doing in Canada where the Prime Minister loves prisons.

WHY the deterioration in moral behaviour?   How is it understood?   It’s a subject that intrigued Hannah Arendt.  It would serve us well to think about it.  See excerpts below.  First, the pictures and reflections of the photographer.

http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/04/photog-hopes-to-effect-policy-with-survey-of-juvenile-lock-ups/

From Hannah Arendt, “Responsibility and Judgment“,  Introduction by Jerome Kohn:

p.  ix, x,   “Students demonstrating against the war… faculty special meeting… should the police be called…Arguments pro and contra … ambled toward a positive resolution. (Arendt) turned on (her friend) sharply “For God’s sake, they are students, not criminals.”   … no further mention of the police … those eight words ended the discussion.  . .. judgment of a particular situation . .  which the many words of argumentation had obscured.

“No one was more aware than Arendt that the political crises of the twentieth century … can be viewed in terms of a breakdown in morality (war 1914, Russia and Germany annihilation of entire classes and races of people, dropping of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, cold war, the capacity to destroy the world with nuclear weapons, then Korea and Viet Nam, on and on) .  That there had been such a collapse was obvious.  But the controversial, challenging, and difficult heart of what Arendt came to see was that the moral breakdown was not due to the ignorance or wickedness or men who failed to recognize moral “truths,” but rather to the inadequacy of moral “truths” as standards to judge what men had become capable of doing.   . . . The tradition of moral thought had been broken, not by philosophical ideas but by the political facts of the twentieth century and could not be put back together again.

think for oneself.   Tocqueville’s insight that when in times of crisis or genuine turning points “the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.”  At such moments (and to her the present was such a moment), she found the mind’s obscurity to be the clearest indication of the need to consider anew the meaning of human responsibility and the power of human judgment.

p. xv  “… To Arendt the banality of evil was not a theory or doctrine but signified the factual nature of the evil perpetrated by one thoughtless human being – by someone who never thought about what he was doing,  . . . The whole course of the trial bore out and confirmed this.  The brute fact of the banality of evil surprised and shocked her because .. “it contradicts our theories concerning evil,” pointing to something that though it is “true” is not in the least “plausible”.  In Eichmann Arendt had not dreamed up, or imagined, or even thought through the concept of the banality of evil.  It was, she said, “thought-defying”.

“. . . represent Arendt’s struggle to understand the significance of Eichmann’s inability to think.  . . .  an ordinary, normal man, a “buffoon,” and as such an altogether unlikely perpetrator of evil.  Arendt..was struck by the fact that Eichmann’s banality, his total lack of spontaneity, made him neither a “monster” nor a “demon” but nevertheless an agent of the most extreme evil.

P. xvii  “. . . the phenomenal reality of conscience may be discovered where it has seldom been sought, in the exercise of the faculty of judgment. . .

… Arendt’s effort to understand anew the meaning of morality as the knowledge of the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil.  It was Friedrich Nietzsche … who suggested that morality and ethics are no more than what they denote:  customs and habits.  In her native land (Germany) Arendt saw what she and many others had taken for granted, a seemingly sound and secure moral structure, collapse under Nazi rule, in the most extreme instance by reversing the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill” to “Thou shalt kill”; and then after the end of WW2 she saw another reversal in which the former structure was reinvoked.  But then how sound and secure could it be?

p. xxix  ” the ability to think, which Eichmann lacked, is the precondition of judging, and that the refusal as well as the inability to judge, to imagine before your eyes the others whom your judgment represents and to whom it responds, invite evil to enter and infect the world. . . .

One might say that the ability to respond by judging impartially – considering and treating with consideration as many different points of view as possible – the fitness or unfitness of particular phenomena to appear in the world seamlessly joining politics and morality in the realm of action.

..the strictly moral power of judgment . . . she wrote that judging “may indeed prevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments when the chips are down”

P. xxxvi  “. .  The pope had not denounced Hitler’s destruction . .  Her judgment of the pope raised the further question of why we avoid our responsibility to judge the failure of a particular man . . to act; and why, rather than exercise judgment, we prefer to throw out two thousand years of Christianity and discharge the very idea of humanity.  . . .

NOW TO ARENDT’S WORDS.  (She died in 1975.)

” . . the idea that when the chips were down diversity must be sacrificed .. to the nation, now has begun to crumble under the pressure of the threatening transformation of all government – the government of the United States not excluded – into bureaucracies, the rule of neither law nor men but of anonymous offices of computers whose entirely depersonalized domination may turn out to be a greater threat to freedom and to that minimum of civility, without which no communal life is conceivable, than the most outrageous arbitrariness of past tyrannies has ever been.  But these dangers of sheer bigness coupled with technocracy whose dominance threatens indeed all forms of government with extinction, with “withering away” – at first still an ideological well-intended pipe dream whose nightmarish properties could be detected only by critical examination – were not yet on the agenda of day-to-day politics …”  (INSERT:  thirty some years later, I think it is on the agenda, at least for some of us!)

p. 6:  ” .. the Danes were the only ones who dared speak out.  (to the Nazis)  The result was that under the pressure of public opinion, and threatened neither by armed resistance nor by guerrilla tactics, the German officials in the country changed their minds; they were no longer reliable, they were overpowered by what they had most disdained, mere words, spoken freely and publicly.  This had happened nowhere else.

p. 9:  ” .. Philosophy is a solitary business, and it seems only natural that the need for it arises in times of transition when men no longer rely on the stability of the world and their role in it …

This falling of dusk, the darkening of the public scene did not take place in silence .. never was the public scene to filled with public announcements, usually quite optimistic . . . (from all quarters, left, right and centre)  all of which together had the net effect of desubstantializing every issue they touched, in addition to confusing utterly the minds of their audiences.  This almost automatic rejection of everything public was very widespread in the Europe of the twenties . . .  the roaring twenties ..almost total oblivion of the disintegration of all political institutions that preceded the great catastrophes of the thirties.   . .. this antipublic climate of the times . .

p. 10:  “.. There existed after WW1 a curious social structure . . . could best be described as an international “society of celebrities”…

p. 19:  “.. when many people, without having been manipulated, begin to talk nonsense, and if intelligent people are among them, there is usually more involved than just nonsense.  There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging that has nothing whatever to do with the biblical “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” and if this fear speaks in terms of “casting the first stone,” it takes this word in vain.  For behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done.  The moment moral issues are raised, even in passing, he who raises them will be confronted with this frightful lack of self-confidence and hence of pride, and also with a kind of mock-modesty that in saying, Who am I to judge? actually means We’re all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone.  Hence the huge outcry the moment anyone fixes specific blame on some particular person instead of blaming  . .  in short some mysterious necessity that works behind the backs of men . . . there is general agreement that such judgment of the person is vulgar, lacks sophistication, and should not be permitted to interfere with the interpretation of History.

p. 21:  “…What I wish to point out, … us how deep-seated the fear of passing judgment, of naming names, and of fixing blame – especially upon people in power and high position, dead or alive – must be  .. .  rather throw all of mankind out of the window .. in order to save one man in high position …”

p. 22:  “.. nobody paid much attention to moral questions . .  we were brought up under the assumption ..moral conduct is a matter of course. .. every once in a while we were confronted with moral weakness, with lack of steadfastness or loyalty, with this curious, almost automatic yielding under pressure, especially of public opinion, which is so symptomatic of the educated strata of certain societies, but we had no idea how serious such things were and least of all where they could lead.  We did not know much about the nature of these phenomena, and I am afraid we cared even less. …

P. 24:  “..we were outraged, but not morally disturbed, by the bestial behaviour ..  The new regime posed to us then nothing more than a very complex political problem, one aspect of which was the intrusion of criminality into the public realm. … All of this was terrible and dangerous, but it posed no moral problems.  . . . this very early eagerness not to miss the train of History . . honest overnight change of opinion that befell a great majority of public figures in all walks of life .. .an incredible ease with which lifelong friendships were broken and discarded.  In brief, what disturbed us was the behaviour not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about.  … they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it.  Without taking into account the almost universal breakdown, not of personal responsibility, but of personal judgment in the early stages of the Nazi regime, it is impossible to understand what actually happened.  It is true that many of these people were quickly disenchanted  . . . Still, I think this early moral disintegration in German society, hardly perceptible to the outsider, was like a .. dress rehearsal for its total breakdown, which was to occur during the war years.

P. 25:  ” …We had to learn everything from scratch, . . . There stand on the other side of the fence, all those who were fully qualified in matters of morality and held them in the highest esteem (clergy e.g.).  These people proved not only to be incapable of learning anything; but worse, yielding easily to temptation, they most convincingly demonstrated .. how inadequate these had become, how little, they had been ..intended to be applied to conditions as they actually arose. …

P. 28:  ” (Hamlet)  The time is out of joint:  O cursed spite  That ever I was born to set it right!

To set the time aright means to renew the world …

P. 29:  “.. There is no such thing as collective guilt or collective innocence;  guilt and innocence make sense only if applied to individuals.”    (“if all are guilty, none are” quagmire. We are individually responsible.)

P. 31: “In every bureaucratic system the shifting of responsibilities is a matter of daily routine, and if one wishes to define bureaucracy in terms of political science, that is, as a form of government – the rule of offices, as contrasted to the rule of men, of one man, or of the few, or of the many – bureaucracy unhappily is the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership.  But in the courtroom, these definitions are of no avail.  For to the answer: “Not I but the system did it in which I was a cog,” the court immediately raises the next question:  “And why did you become a cog or continue to be a cog under such circumstances?”. . .

(more to come.)

 

 

“

2012-04-22 Americans mobilized to stop drone warfare, violation of International Law

 Drones (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles / UAVs)  No Responses »
Apr 132012
 
http://upstatedroneaction.org/index.html
The Upstate NY Coalition to
Ground the Drones & End the Wars

Stop Drone War Crimes   At Hancock Airfield, Syracuse NY, April 22nd
Join us for a weekend of resistance to US war making April 21-22

Say No to the Global War Zone!
    The use of the reaper drone is in direct violation of International Laws and the US Constitution

  • Extrajudicial Killing
  • Violation of Due Process
  • Wars of Aggression
  • Violation of National Sovereignty
  • The Killing of Innocent Civilians
  • Crimes Against Peace

These actions are violations of the United Nations Charter, which the US was a Charter Signatory in 1945, and the Kellog Briand Pact, signed by the US in 1928 and archived in Washington DC.  We are bound by Article 2, Secion 6 of our Constitution, which states:

“All Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

Drone firing Hellfire Missile

Sponsored by:   Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars,   UNAC (United National Antiwar Coalition),   Fellowship of Reconciliation,   World Can’t Wait,   NYSDAP (New York State Direct Action for Peace),   The Upstate Anti-War Network,   The Syracuse Peace Council,   Broome County Peace Action,   Ithaca Catholic Worker,   Peace Now Ithaca,   Slocum House,   Rochester Against War,   Interfaith Peace Network of WNY,   Peace Education Fund of WNY,   Western New York Peace Center,   Veterans for Peace #128,   Voices for Creative Nonviolence,   Colonel Ann Wright,   Bethlehem  Neighbors for Peace from Albany,   Occupy Buffalo,   2012 Know Drones National Tour,   St Joseph Catholic Worker/Rochester

2012-04-12 (Charge #2) Bush & Associates, Kuala Lumpur

 George Bush war criminal  No Responses »
Apr 122012
 

Tribunal to Hear Second War Crime Charge Against Bush & Associates

RELATED:

CHARGE #1:

  • 2011-11-28 Legal  Weight of Bush & Blair Guilty decision, by Princeton University Professor (Al Jazeera)
  • 2011-11-23 Bush and Blair found guilty of war crimes for Iraq attack

CHARGE #2:  (the text of the charge is below)

  • 2012-05-11 Historic judgment: (Charge #2)  Bush & Associates found Guilty of torture, Kuala Lumpur.

– – – – – – – – – – – –  – – – – – – – – – — –  – –

KUALA LUMPUR, 12 April 2012  (mathaba)

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal will be hearing the second charge of Crime of Torture and War Crimes against former U.S. President George W. Bush and his associates namely Richard Cheney, former U.S. Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld, former Defence Secretary, Alberto Gonzales, then Counsel to President Bush, David Addington, then General Counsel to the Vice-President, William Haynes II, then General Counsel to Secretary of Defense, Jay Bybee, then Assistant Attorney General, and John Choon Yoo, former Deputy Assistant Attorney-General.

The charge reads as follows:

The Accused persons had committed the Crime of Torture and War Crimes, in that:

The Accused persons had willfully participated in the formulation of executive orders and directives to exclude the applicability of all international conventions and laws, namely the Convention against Torture 1984, Geneva Convention III 1949, Universal Declaration of Human  Rights and the United Nations Charter in relation to the war launched by the U.S. and others in Afghanistan (in 2001) and in Iraq (in March 2003); Additionally, and/or on the basis and in furtherance thereof, the  Accused persons authorised, or connived in, the commission of acts of torture and cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment against victims in violation of international law, treaties and conventions including the Convention against Torture 1984 and the Geneva Conventions, including Geneva Convention III 1949.
The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes

Commission (KLWCC) following the due process of the law is bringing this  charge against the accused. In 2009, the Commission, having received complaints from torture victims from Guantanamo and Iraq, proceeded to conduct a painstaking and an in-depth investigation for close to two years. Two charges on war crimes were drawn and filed against the accused persons.

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal had heard the first charge in November 2011 against the two accused, former U.S. President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Anthony L. Blair who were after a 4-day trial found guilty of Crimes Against Peace.

These two former heads of state violated the United Nations Charter and  international law when they planned, prepared and invaded the sovereign  state Iraq on 19 March 2003 without just cause.

At the first hearing in November 2011, the Tribunal had permitted the prosecution’s application to hear only the first charge. The second charge will now be  heard at the second Tribunal hearing from 7 – 12 May 2012.

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal is constituted of eminent persons with legal qualifications. The judges of the Tribunal, which is headed by retired Malaysian Federal Court judge Tan Sri Dato Lamin bin Haji Mohd Yunus, who also served as an ad litem judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Republic of Yugoslavia, include other notable names such as Mr Alfred Lambremont Webre, a Yale graduate, who authored several books on politics, Tunku Sofiah Jewa, practising lawyer  and author of numerous publications on International Law, Prof Salleh Buang, former Federal Counsel in the Attorney-General Chambers and retired Court of Appeal judge Datuk Mohd Sa’ari Yusof.

Point to note is that victims of torture will also be called give evidence before the Tribunal. The cries of these victims have thus far gone unheeded by the international community. The fundamental human right to be heard has been denied to them.  These witnesses will testify on the torture they had endured during their incarceration. The accused will have a right to cross-examine them as in any open court hearing.

The Tribunal will adjudicate and evaluate the evidence presented as in any court of law. The judges of the Tribunal must be satisfied that the charges are proven beyond reasonable doubt and deliver a reasoned judgement.

In the event the tribunal convicts any of the accused, the only sanction is that the name of the guilty person will be  entered in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals and publicised worldwide. The tribunal is a tribunal of conscience and a peoples’ initiative.

The prosecution for the trial will be lead by Prof Gurdial Singh Nijar, prominent law professor and author of several law publications and Prof Francis Boyle, leading American professor, practitioner and advocate of international law, and assisted by a team of lawyers.

The trial will be a public hearing held in an open court on 7-12 May 2012 at the premises of the Kuala Lumpur Foundation to  Criminalise War (KLFCW) at 88, Jalan Perdana, Kuala Lumpur. The hearing  is open to members of the public.

CONTACT

The Commission can be reached via Mathaba News Agency at mathaba  AT  gmail.com and  should include ” KLWCC Commission Request ” in the subject line.

FURTHER UPDATES

2012-04-09 Tony Judt’s Last Act: Sounding the Alarm (from The Tyee)

 Corporatocracy or Democracy or Administrative State or WHAT?  2 Responses »
Apr 112012
 

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2012/04/09/Tony-Judt-Last-Act/

By Crawford Kilian,   TheTyee.ca

  • Thinking the Twentieth Century
  • Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder
  • Penguin Press (2012)

    • In 2008, historian Tony Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In 2010, aged 62, he died of it.

    In between, however, he achieved the seemingly impossible: he wrote three important books. The Memory Chalet is a kind of autobiography. Ill Fares the Land is a meditation on the successes and failures of social democracy. Thinking the Twentieth Century is a conversation with another historian, Timothy Snyder, on how intellectuals and history shaped one another — including Judt himself. While he scarcely mentions Canada, Judt’s insights explain much of what has gone wrong with us.

    Through most of his terminal illness, Judt was paralyzed. As his wife Jennifer Homans described in an article after his death, he was depressed and fearful, humiliated by his need for help with everything. Yet he managed to compose these books in his head, often during sleepless nights, and then to dictate them and edit the transcripts. By the end, his voice had to be amplified to be audible at all.

    Homans describes how Snyder would come by every week for a two-hour conversation, which Judt conducted “without preparation and without notes.” Snyder would draft these into chapters, which Judt and his assistant would revise.

    You would expect a book written under these conditions to be patchy and disjointed. It’s not. Instead it’s like overhearing two people taking part in a brilliant dialogue, with Snyder raising provocative questions and Judt answering with magisterial clarity. You might not agree with everything they say, but you’d hesitate to argue until you’d dedicated at least as much time as they to mastering the facts.

    The book’s chapters focus on particular aspects of Judt’s life and scholarship, but each chapter opens up into wide-ranging conversation. We never know quite what Snyder will say, or how Judt will respond.

    For example, after they have been discussing various socialist and Marxist intellectuals, Snyder asks: “Why do we so readily neglect the fascist intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s?”

    The fascist attitude

    Judt replies: “When we spoke of the Marxists we could begin with concepts. The fascists don’t really have concepts. They have attitudes. They have distinctive responses to war, depression and backwardness. But they don’t start out with a set of ideas that they then apply to the world.” After summarizing the views and abilities of such thinkers, he offers an odd consolation: After the Second World War, “fascism lost its purchase…. the one thing that fascists do supremely well — transforming angry minorities into large groups and large groups into crowds — is now extraordinarily hard to accomplish.”

    Such insights lead to brilliant accounts of the French Popular Front, the Spanish Civil War, and the Moscow show trials — which most people considered real trials for real crimes.

    Judt observes that our parents and grandparents couldn’t understand why Stalin, surrounded by enemies, destroyed the officer corps of the Red Army. They couldn’t understand why the Nazis, fighting for their own survival, wasted resources on exterminating the Jews.

    Then comes another insight: “Those who got the twentieth century right… had to be able to imagine a world for which there was no precedent. … To be able to think the twentieth century in this way was extraordinarily difficult for contemporaries. For the same reason, many people reassured themselves that the Holocaust could not be happening, simply because it made no sense. … This application to human behavior of a perfectly reasonable moral and political calculus, self-evident to men raised in the nineteenth century, simply did not work in the twentieth.”

    In the 21st century we face a similar problem: We simply don’t understand our democratic governments’ behaviour. Whether it’s the EU driving some of its members into bankruptcy, or a decade of pointless war in Afghanistan, or the U.S. having convulsions about health insurance, no one seems to be acting rationally. Tony Judt has ideas worth considering about this political dementia:

    “If you look at the history of nations that maximized the virtues that we associated with democracy,” he says, “you notice that what came first was constitutionality, rule of law, and the separation of powers. Democracy almost always came last.”

    The implications of that statement are shocking: Among other things, we were fools to go into Afghanistan to impose democracy on a country lacking the institutions that would keep democracy alive. “Democracy,” he says, “is not the solution to the problem of unfree societies.”

    ‘Democracies corrode quite fast’

    But Judt has more to say: “Mass democracy in an age of mass media means that, on the one hand, you can reveal very quickly that Bush stole the election, but on the other hand, much of the population doesn’t care.  … Democracy has been the best short-term defense against undemocratic alternatives, but it is not a defense against its own genetic shortcomings. The Greeks knew that democracy is not likely to fall to the charms of totalitarianism, authoritarianism, or oligarchy; it’s much more likely to fall to a corrupted version of itself.

    “Democracies corrode quite fast; they corrode linguistically, or rhetorically, if you like — that’s the Orwellian point about language. They corrode because most people don’t care very much about them.”

    We say we can’t understand why voter turnout keeps dropping, why election campaigns are sabotaged by attack ads and robocalls, why Conservatives stick to their talking points when they’re obvious lies. When most people don’t care very much about democracy, their rulers can do anything.

    The first thing such rulers do is to erode the very institutions that protect democracy: Parliament itself, responsible government, an apolitical civil service, fair elections, and an independent judiciary. Reasoned debate corrodes into talking points, repeated endlessly like Orwell’s “doubleplusgood duckspeak.” Apathetic citizens tune out; dedicated citizens don’t understand what’s happening.

    Tony Judt doesn’t offer much consolation: “The tendency of mass democracy to produce mediocre politicians is what worries me. The vast majority of the politicians of the free societies of the world today are substandard. … Politics is not a place where people of autonomy of spirit and breadth of vision tend to go.”

    ‘You’re being lied to’

    So if we do care very much about democracy, what can we do? Judt says to Snyder: “The unpleasant truth is normally, in most places, that you’re being lied to. And the role of the intellectual is to get the truth out. Get the truth out and then explain why it just is the truth. The role of the investigative journalist is to get the truth out; the role of the intellectual is to explain what’s gone wrong when the truth has not been got out.”

    Judt doesn’t think his own book will have much impact: It will reach at best a quarter-million readers, most of whom will already agree with it. So it’s not likely to repair the corrosion of democracy. “We are engaging in an intellectual exercise that will not have world-shattering consequences and we are doing it in spite of that. … And yet, it’s the best that we could hope for.”

    Regardless of his sales, Tony Judt is more influential than he thought. In dozens of ways he explains what happened in the 20th century, and why. The failure of democracy in countries without protective institutions was that century’s scourge. Now we face a century in which those institutions are under attack in democratic countries. If we can think the 21st century, we can recognize what is at stake and fight to protect it — especially here in Canada.

    2012-04-10 FDA Warns: Don’t Use This on Your Skin But You Can Put It in Your Mouth in Higher Doses

     Mercury poisoning, dental amalgams. See also Vaccinations.  No Responses »
    Apr 102012
     

    By Dr. Mercola

    Has the FDA officially gone mad?
    The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced that mercury poisoning has been linked to skin products i.
    The products in question are  primarily skin  lighteners and anti-aging treatments, most of which are manufactured overseas  and sold illegally in the United States.
    “Exposure to mercury can have  serious health consequences,” says Charles Lee, M.D., a senior medical advisor  at FDA.
    “It can damage the kidneys and the nervous  system, and interfere with the development of the brain in unborn children and  very young children.”
    …  “You don’t have to use the  product yourself to be affected, says FDA toxicologist Mike Bolger, Ph.D.
    “People—particularly children—can get mercury in their  bodies from breathing in mercury vapors if a member of the household uses a  skin cream containing mercury.”
    Infants and small children can ingest mercury if they touch  their parents who have used these products, get cream on their hands and then  put their hands and fingers into their mouth, which they are prone to do, adds  Bolger.”
    This is a remarkable admission from  an agency that repeatedly has refused to acknowledge the dangers inherent with  dental amalgams, which contain about 50 percent mercury—not silver, as the name  “silver fillings” might have you believe.

    What Can Be More Dangerous than Implanting a Neurotoxin in Your Mouth?

    The American Dental Association  (ADA) at one time owned the patent for mercury fillings. Both the ADA and FDA  have fraudulently been using the term “silver fillings” for decades. This is  why so few people realize they’re actually walking around with, in some cases,  sizeable amounts of mercury in their teeth! An estimated 75 percent of Americans  are ignorant about that fact that half of each amalgam filling is mercury, and  this is clearly the result of the ADA’s tactical move to popularize the term  “silver fillings.”
    The FDA even removed the following statement  from its website: “Dental amalgams contain mercury, which may have  neurotoxic effects on the nervous systems of developing children and  fetuses.”
    According  to Charlie Brown, national counsel,  Consumers for Dental Choice:
    “To conceal the mercury from America’s parents  and consumers, the American Dental Association promoted amalgam as “silver  fillings.”  The term is a gigantic fraud;  amalgam has twice as much mercury as silver.   In Spanish amalgam is similarly promoted fraudulenty, as “amalgama plata”.  The  ADA’s partner in perpetuating this cover-up is the U.S. Food and Drug  Administration, who cleverly, but deceitfully, says they are called “silver”  because of the color. . The FDA knows better. ”  Gold fillings are called gold because of  their material, not color.  Under the  dictionary definition of “silver,” the primary meaning if the material, with  money second, silverware third, and the color fourth or fifth.  That our nation’s consumer protection agency  on devices unabashedly takes the side of the promoter of a consumer fraud is  profoundly troubling.
    If the presence of mercury in skin  cream warrants this kind of prominent action from the FDA, why does the agency  refuse to address concerns about placing 1-2 grams of dental amalgam, half of  which is mercury, into the mouths of children and pregnant women?  A decade ago state Medicaid programs promised  to pay for any material, but Connecticut recently decided that low-income  families must now choose between mercury fillings and no fillings.  For children with disabilities in  Philadelphia, for prisoners in California, for Native Americans on  reservations, it is is ths same dismal choice: mercury in the mouth, or no  dental care…

    Dental Amalgam = Continuous Exposure to Mercury

    It’s  important to realize that once you get an amalgam filling, you’re continually  exposed to mercury. Every time you chew, the filling releases mercury vapor into your mouth that deposits and  accumulates in your tissues over time.  Mercury  vapors readily pass through cell membranes, across your blood-brain barrier and  into your central nervous system, where it causes psychological, neurological,  and immunological problems. Children and fetuses, whose brains are still  developing, are most at risk, but really anyone can be impacted.
    A  1999 report from the Agency of Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a  division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, suggested  dental amalgams may account for as much as 75 percent of a person’s daily  mercury exposure. And the World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that  between 3-17 micrograms of mercury are released into the body each day by  chewing, compared to only 2-5 micrograms from fish and all other environmental  sources combined. An editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine also stated that dental amalgams were “possibly the chief source of exposure [to mercury] of a large segment of the U.S. population ii“.

    Why is the FDA and ADA Protecting the Use of Mercury in Dentistry?

    The 2008 Obama/Biden Plan for a  Healthy America stressed preventive approaches to disease, including the  reduction of toxins. Chief among these toxins was mercury. In their final  report on dental amalgam, Future Use of  Materials for Dental Restorationiii, the  World  Health Organization (WHO) also took a firm stance againstthe use of mercury in dentistry. In it,  WHO states that amalgam “has been associated with general health  concerns” and releases a “significant amount of mercury” into  the environment. It also notes that alternatives to amalgam are readily  available.
    Still, nothing has been done so far  to eliminate one of the primary  sources of exposure in the US, namely dental amalgams.
    Other countries are faring much  better. Many are already protecting vulnerable populations, especially  children, from exposure to amalgam. For example:
    • The 47 nations of the Council of  Europe passed a resolution calling on the nations to start “restricting or  prohibiting the use of amalgams as dental fillings,” explaining that  “amalgams are the prime source of exposure to mercury for developed  countries, also affecting embryos, fetuses (through the placenta) and children  (through breastfeeding).
    • Australia’s National Health &  Medical Research Council (NHMRC) says amalgam should be avoided in pregnant  women, nursing mothers, children, and people with kidney disease.
    • Health Canada directed its dentists  to stop using amalgam in children, pregnant women, and people with impaired  kidney function – way back in 1996.
    • Germany’s federal court has ruled  that dentists who use mercury fillings can face legal liability.
    After an ongoing and vigorous  campaign to educate Americans on the dangers of dental amalgams, it looked  promising when Jeff Shuren, Director of FDA’s Center for Devices, finally promised an announcement on the amalgam rule by end  of 2011.  But, his promise fell flat. With just minutes to go before the  end of the work year, the agency declared it would not issue a statement about  mercury fillings  When pressed by the  trade press, FDA added that it has  no  plans and no timetable – and may never do anything…
    (INSERT  Sandra speaking:  Click on the link at the top of this page for the full article.  There is a video in it.)
    Is it possible that the stated safety of mercury fillings  just a big lie to protect the massive liability the ADA, dentists,  and mercury filling manufacturers would be exposed to if the FDA would admit  mercury fillings actually cause harm?
    Is this absolute proof the FDA is willing to accept harm to  patients to protect corporate interests?
    The mission of the FDA is to protect  consumers and patients, but it’s extremely difficult to believe in the case of  mercury… Sure, the agency tries to show it cares by coming down hard on a few  little guys—rogue skin cream companies that don’t have well-paid lobbyists on  The Hill. But when faced with powerful corporate interests, the FDA does  nothing.

    The Revolving Doors Between the FDA and Various Industries…

    FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg  could perhaps shed some light on the issue. She participated in the rule making  even though she’s a former director and board member of Henry Schein,  the largest provider of professional dental products.
    According to Charlie Brown:
    “In order to be appointed  Commissioner, Margaret Hamburg  was  required to sign, and did sign, a contract promising not to work on any matter  affecting Schein Inc. while holding its stock or stock option.  While  still holding Schein stock option, she worked on the amalgam rule.  Specifically, she insisted on a staff meeting with her on July 1, 2009, to  shape the pending amalgam rule; this meeting plainly violated her written  promise.  Records of the 7/1/09 meeting were heavily redacted before being  turned over to me.
    I wrote the Commissioner three  times to ask her to get out of the rule-making  process; my letters were ignored until a minor media hubbub occurredt.   Hamburg perhaps disqualified herself at that point – or perhaps not, because  she never filed a disqualification letter, and FDA refuses to say the date she  stopped working on the amalgam rule.  In any case, she continued to  correspond secretly with Schein’s general counsel (on her private email  account) through the entire rule-making process.  Immediately after the  rule was announced,  Schein’s general  counsel said the company is “indebted to you”; the following week  Schein’s CEO praised the FDA Commissioner for  providing “insights” to Schein  board  members — fully five months after she took office.”
    In short, it would appear FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg never  really stopped working for Henry Schein Inc…

    “No Comment”…

    Jim Dickinson, editor of FDA  Webview, wrote an insightful editorial concerning  FDA’s intransigence  in his March 8 post, titled 180  Degrees: FDA’s 2 Faces on Mercury Risksiv.

    “When  you’re daubing on mercury skin creams and cosmetics, FDA wants you to know how  toxic the mercury vapor coming from them can be not only to you but everyone  near you, especially infants and children. But when your dentist is jamming  mercury amalgam into your teeth, and contrary to increasing evidence to the  contrary, FDA on its Web site wants you know that it “has reviewed the best available scientific evidence to determine  whether the low levels of mercury vapor associated with dental amalgam fillings  are a cause for concern. Based on this evidence, FDA considers dental amalgam  fillings safe for adults and children ages 6 and above.”
    …  Asked to explain the apparent contradiction in the agency’s position on mercury  safety, and specifically asked if there were dosage exposure differences  between the two kinds of mercury products, FDA ducked the issue. Press officer  for cosmetics, Siobhan DeLancey replied: “I don’t handle the dental side, but I  am copying Michelle Bolek, who handles dental amalgam issues.”
    Bolek  passed it to Morgan Liscinski, who five hours later answered: “We have no  further comment regarding the issue of dental amalgam.”
    The  obvious difference between the two FDA postures could be that in the unapproved  imported creams and cosmetics case, no powerful industry that has clout at HHS  could be offended by hostile FDA action, while in the dental amalgam case,  powerful interests (e.g. the pro-mercury 156,000-member American Dental  Association and commissioner Margaret Hamburg’s former investment interest,  leading amalgam distributor Henry Schein, Inc.) probably do have clout at HHS  and could well be offended by FDA action against amalgam.”

    Zsuzsanna Holland, mercury fillings, suit against Dental Assoc., B.C.

     Mercury poisoning, dental amalgams. See also Vaccinations.  13 Responses »
    Apr 102012
     

    April 30, 2012   Zsuzsanna Holland writes:

    Thank-you to Sandra and friends for your interest in my lawsuit regarding dental amalgam mercury poisoning.

    My case, Williams Lake matter 09-16471, is ongoing for a second time in the courts against the American, Canadian and British Columbian Dental Associations and for the first time against the BC College of Dental Surgeons and BC College of Physician and Surgeons.  (I lost the first dental amalgam case on a technicality.)

    During a hearing to dismiss last winter the defendant colleges were dismissed, now on appeal.  We are still awaiting the court’s decision regarding the dental associations.   The 10-day jury trial set for June 18, 2012 has to be adjourned due to the delayed ruling and the appeal.

    My second dental amalgam suit is based on a claim in statute; namely the Business Practices Consumer Protection Act and the Health Care Cost Recovery Act here in BC which gives me right to sue. This suit is unique in that it is not a class action but does contain a compensatory component for relief with respect to research and education as well as aiding the recovery of other dental amalgam mercury poisoned victims. This case is also unique in that BC, I believe, is the last place in North America where a civil trial may still be conducted by jury.

    I do appreciate any support for my case as it will impact many others if we succeed.

    If anyone would like a copy of the Notice of Civil Claim in this case, I will gladly provided it to them.

    Thank-you again for your interest and I do hope to update you and your viewers as this case progresses.

    God bless,

    Zsuzsanna

    = = = = = = = = = ==  == =  == = = =

    http://phdservices.typepad.com/blog/2009/12/canadian-supreme-court-rejects-appeal-on-mercury-fillings.html

    Canadian Supreme Court rejects appeal on mercury fillings

    A B.C. mother has lost her personal battle against the use of mercury in dental fillings. The Supreme Court of Canada has refused to hear an appeal from Zsuzsanna Holland.

    Acting without a lawyer, Holland hoped the high court would hear her claim that she and her children were harmed by mercury use by dentists.

    Holland represented herself during her lengthy battle through B.C.’s lower courts, arguing unsuccessfully that 17 mercury-based fillings poisoned her and her children after she had dental work in 1982.

    The B.C. Court of Appeal unanimously rejected her case.

    Canada’s highest court has now refused to intervene, dismissing the appeal with costs awarded to the numerous parties named in the civil case,  including the province, the provincial environment minister, his ministry and B.C.’s environmental management branch.

    cited  DrBicuspid 11Dec09

    = = = = =  == =  = == = =

    2.    http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/Jdb-txt/SC/08/15/2008BCSC1582.htm More on the mercury fillings case.

    = = = = = = =  = = = = =

    3.   http://www.bcjustice.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6959:no-contact-with-zsuzsanna-holland-law-society-of-british-columbia-v-bryfogle-application-for-contempt-order-law-society-alleges-that-mr-bryfogle-knowingly-and-intentionally-violated-an-order-of-mr-justice-groberman-engaged-in-the-practice-of-law&catid=596:quarrels-2012&Itemid=1574

    Holland v. HMTQ et al

    [15]         On July 25, 2007, Ms. Holland filed a statement of claim in the above action against the Provincial government and various bodies associated with the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of the Environment, the Federal government, the Federal Minister of Health, Health Canada, the American Dental Association, the Canadian Dental Association and the BC Dental Association. This action concerns, among other allegations, an assertion that Ms. Holland suffered from mercury poisoning due to certain dental work (the “Mercury Action”).

    [16]         It does not appear that Mr. Bryfogle swore any affidavits in support of Ms. Holland’s Mercury Action. Instead, Ms. Holland signed all of her own pleadings and submissions. The affidavits filed in support of Ms. Holland’s various applications were all signed by Ms. Holland. These affidavits and submissions contained many legal concepts borrowed from American statutes and case authorities. For example, Ms. Holland refers to the RICO statutes, spoliation (which concerns destruction of evidence or suppression of evidence), American case law on the right of commercial free speech, mercury poisoning, government negligence, and negligent advertising. Ms. Holland testified that she wrote these submissions and drafted these affidavits without assistance from Mr. Bryfogle. At most she borrowed his precedents and had access to a detailed index of his American and Canadian law library. She denied that Mr. Bryfogle carried out any research on her behalf. However, Mr. Bryfogle admitted to providing Ms. Holland with more assistance than she acknowledged. In Mr. Bryfogle’s affidavit dated January 29, 2010, filed in the Law Society’s contempt application, he admits to the following assistance regarding Ms. Holland’s Mercury Action:

    6.         I assisted Ms. Holland by typing her briefs, documents and letters, letting her use my templates, doing legal research. … Respondent kept Ms. Holland’s files and schedule.

    [17]         While Mr. Bryfogle attempted to modify this statement during cross-examination on the affidavits filed in the Law Society’s application, I found his explanation to lack credibility. In my view, Mr. Bryfogle’s evidence amounted to a transparent attempt to ensure his version of the events was the same as that provided by Ms. Holland in her evidence. I note that Ms. Holland’s evidence was also an attempt to repudiate the admissions made in the affidavits she filed in support of Mr. Bryfogle’s defence to the Law Society’s application.

    [18]         The briefs and affidavits filed by Ms. Holland in the Mercury Action are formatted in a manner identical to Mr. Bryfogle’s affidavits. Ms. Holland’s affidavits and briefs also contain the same type of language used by Mr. Bryfogle and the same legal concepts. Many of his colourful phrases such as “the legal priesthood”, “affidavitted”, and “proffered” are also found in Ms. Holland’s filed materials.

    [19]         Mr. Bryfogle did not notify the Law Society of his involvement in the Mercury Action.

     

     

    Shallow waters, song by Ta’Kaiya Blaney “. . . If we do nothing it will all be gone.”

     Sustainability  No Responses »
    Apr 092012
     

    From: Maggie Paquet

    This girl wrote this song when she was 9 years old; is 11 now. She is from the Sliammon First Nation, over near Powell River

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkjIkuC_eWM

    “. . .  If we do nothing it will all be gone.”

     

    –   A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.     Edward R. Murrow

    –   The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.    Rachel Carson (c) 1954     www.rachelcarson.org

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