UKCAF website

"Doug Cross is an Amazing Biologist!"

(PanPac International, Singapore.
Textbook on biology, for Chinese schoolchildren.)

What this Blog is about

I've been writing this web site on water fluoridation for the past ten years, and it's time to take a wider look at what's happening to the stranage world of 'science'. To be blunt, a large part of it is downright corrupt and a travesty of what science is really about. So I'll be writing about new experiences, as well as some of the more extreme things that are going on in the miserably narrow world of so-called 'fluoride science'.

I'm having fun, so I hope that you'll see the amusing side of what comes out of this expansion of interest.

24th September 2016

Maintaining a web site is not an easy task, regardless of what the sellers of the latest gee-whiz web creation programs tell you. On average I reckon a new entry, with a reasonable amount of content, takes around half a day to compose as text. Then it has to be transferred to columns on the web page, balanced for length, live links and photos inserted where appropriate, and general tidying things up.

Typos are a real headache in my prog, because it doesn't have a spell checker - just how retro can these expensive progs actually get? So for any that remain here, I apologise right now, and I'll correct them when I've got time for such a non-urgent task!

Keep your hands off my web site content.

And while I'm on the subject of web page content, I get really irritated by lazy webmasters who steal content from other sites (mine included) just to inflate their own. If I spend hours writing the stuff, and then some oik takes a couple of minutes to steal it and stuff his own site with it, that's theft, that is.

If they like my stuff so much, then they should ask for permission to reproduce some of it (NOT ALL OF IT), show where they got it, and put it up with a clearly visible live link to my site. Anyone wishing to cite my stuff that they find on someone else's web site needs to be able to get bqck to the original source, not some other site containing some personally selected extracts out of context.

And will someone PLEASE tell those webmasters who are maniacally obsessed with grabbing all and any of the unlimited masses of dreadful videos, of execrable quality and excruciatingly tedious length and invariably featuring utterly boring Men in Suits and the White Coat Brigade, to please STOP DOING THIS? Such sites actually receive fewer hits than less frantically busy vidio-infested sites, so don't moan that you haven't been warned! (End of rant!)

The software update scam.

Then, once I've got my new content sorted, there are secondary pages to prepare, older articles to prune, modify, or even delete. And if I make the entry page too long, my web authoring program develops a 'Run-time error' (whatever that is), and crashes, so repeated saving - every minute if possible - is essential.

And I'm damned if I'm going to pay out for each 'improved and updated' version of the software that is claimed to have been rewritten to eliminate some bugs carelessly (or perhaps deliberately?) left embedded in the program. My old Version 8 of Website X5 still works fine, but its file system is incompatible with Version 9's through to (currently) Version 13's. So my brand new copy of Version 10 lies infuriatingly unusable and unused, and I just have to tolerated the bugs in Version 8 and work around them!

The invasion of the "Could you just" Brigade

And then, just as I've got things sorted, I get asked if I would just write a quick commentary ('quick' - you're joking, right?) on the latest proposal to fluoridate some God-forsaken town in darkest Worcestershire or wherever. Or maybe I could just review some recent publication by the public health idiot swarm.

Well I'm damned if I'm going to read and analyse supposedly erudite papers whose authors appear to be unfamiliar with scientific standards and are manifestly also numerically illiterate.

People seem to forget that other people have real lives to cope with - mowing the unreasonably large and vigorous lawn, shopping for food, answering emails - you know how it goes. Life is for living, not beavering away for others who are too lethargic to get off their backsides and do something constructive for themslves occasionally.

And I'm getting a little short-tempered at the stupidity of it all. The scientific literature on fluoridation - both for and against, is vast, of highly variable quality, infested with the presumption that correlation means causation, and the strange belief that computerised statistics programs are both infallible and magically capable of turning incoming garbage into outgoing pearls of wisdom.

Experts? Damn them all!

Look, here's one example of how sloppy the arguments can get. In the league tables of 'some we win/some we loose', wild claims are made about how may towns and cities give up fluoridation compared with how many new ones adopt it. Looks great - but it's yet more simpleton science!

Just think about population growth rates for a moment. The US population is 323million, and the growth rate is 0.7%. That means that in every year amongst each 1000 people, 7 more are born than die. Now assume that 70% of the entire US population live in fluoridated water areas.

Eevery year over 2 million more citizens are supplied with fluoridated water, even without any actual increase in the number of fluoridated communities. But in all the arguments for and against fluoridation, and how the battle against it is being won, has anyone ever told you that?

So when you listen to these debates, just keep that in mind whenever anyone starts to throw numbers around to impress the innumerate in their audiences. The bottom line is that any apparent gains for the antifluoridation argument have to be reduced by that amount before the debates even start!

And don't mention law!

And if that isn't bad enough, our scientifically-minded friends and their scientifically illiterate dental opponent both shuffle away and hide from anything resembling legal debate. Presumably they feel that such an unstructured and complex field is not worth the effort of mastering?

Well, fifteen years ago I decided to make the effort, because that was the only way to go, and can assure you that it definitely is worthwhile!

They've missed the boat, of course. It's the one area in which the solution to the lunacy of fluoridation actually lies. And it's the one area in which ordinary folk can understand the reasons, if those discussing the issues make a sensible effort to avoid all that jargon they like to hide behind.

When the people are being taken for a ride, deprived of their absolute and inalienable right to decide for themselves what medical acts they will permit on themselves and their kids, those with the knowledge and opportunity to tell the people the facts have a public duty to do so, using language and argument in ways that the people understand.

Remember that magic new catchphrase 'It's mass medication, stupid!'? It's a very simple matter of ethics, but hey!, our experts say, we're already specialists: we don't need to learn any new skills, master some arcane new subjects like ethics and law.

We're professionals, we are - we've got our Brownie Badges to prove that we're real dental experts, scientists, whatever. We can handle it, no need to bring up that legal thing again.

Ahhh - get real! I rest my case!

A cozy little niche - Do Not Disturb!

So here's the deal. I shall cut down on updates on the weird world of water fluoridation. I will happily ignore the tediously repetetive reporting of this town here adopting its splendid new water poisoning scheme, or that town there thowing the whole disgusting thing out again, at least for the present.

I'll no longer comment on the latest attempt to link fluoride with yet another human disease (perferably a terminal one), nor lay out the latest examples of statistical fraud for all to see.

Let's face it, do the contestants in this farce really WANT to end these exciting confrontations to end? What would they do if they didn't have fluoride to play with?

I'll leave the arguments to those who haven't yet realised that the lunatics really ARE running the assylum, and there's no way on God's little Earth that they're going to convince the dental public health extremists that they are the ones who should really be safely lodged in a more secure establishment.

Widening my horizons.

Instead, I'm going to do my own thing, looking for those curious little anomalies that invite me to turn stones over, to see what's lurking beneath. Over the past year or so I've published a number of articles on such little puzzles in peer-reviewed Journals. Gosh - some have even been on or about fluoridation!

The most significant - for those still interested in this wretched topic - is my recent analysis of the ethical basis of public health interventions and a description of the strategy by which all fluoridation campaigns around the world for the past half century and more have been managed.

What, you think that you've seen at that old stuff before, then? OK - so do you know how many 'useful idiots' it takes to fluoridate a township? Read my article and find out!!

Not long ago I published a paper on the difference between that article on fluoridation in Nanotechnology Perceptions and Wikipedia's show-case article on the same topic. This influential and grossly biassed Wiki page is regarded by the owners as an example of the highest standard entry.

Yet far fom being The Last Word on fluoridation, it has been subject to some pretty savage editing recently. reflecting the rising public awareness of, and irritation at, the extent to which pro-fluoride propaganda has been allowed to dominate the Wiki article - so far!

In June I expanded my recent comments on the Zika junk science fiasco in Brazil on this web site by writing a paper published in the British Medical Journal, only two days after submission. This has just been vindicated by the latest case study on Zika in Colombia, where thousands of Zika-infected women have not produced a single microcephalic infant. The original CDC/WHO crap science is getting a bashing, which can't be a bad thing.

And just for fun, I looked at the way that Google has set loose its self-improving (i.e., uncontrolled) algorithms that trawl web sites for scientific claims that do not conform with the supposed official scientific 'consensuses'. If they find such vile opinion, they mark the web site down as 'unreliable', aefully shooing potential visitors into safer channels.

I guess Wiki's cunning algorithms will have severe indigestion over this site, then - but we mavericks are the irritating pests who eventually overturn the old errors and replace them with new understanding, so that's OK by me!