Voting machines for sale on eBay and craigslist

The demise of touch-screen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses: Warehouses stacked with thousands of carefully wrapped voting machines that have been shelved because of doubts about vanishing votes and vulnerability to hackers.

What to do with this high-tech junkyard is a multimillion-dollar question. One manufacturer offered $1 a piece to take back its ATM-like machines. Some states are offering the devices for sale on eBay and craigslist. Others hope to sell their inventories to Third-World countries or salvage them for scrap.

A few more are holding out hope that the machines, some of which were purchased for as much as $5,000, could one day be resurrected.

"We store them very, very carefully in the hopes that someone, someday may decide that we can use them again," said San Diego County Registrar Deborah Seiler, whose jurisdiction spent $25 million on the devices.

~ Read on... ~

Fluoride and the calcification of the pineal gland

The wheels of science grind very slowly. Finally, the first half of the work that was the subject of Jennifer Luke's Ph.D. thesis; presentation in Bellingham, Washington (ISFR conference) in 1998 and a videotaped interview I had with her (see www.fluoridealert.org/videos.htm), has been published in Caries Research.

In my view this work is of enormous importance and could be (or should be) the scientific straw that breaks the camel's back of fluoridation.

When Luke found out that the pineal gland - a little gland in the center of the brain, responsible for a very large range of regulating activities (it produces serotonin and melatonin) - was also a calcifying tissue, like the teeth and the bones, she hypothesized it would concentrate fluoride to very high levels. The gland is not protected by the blood brain barrier and has a very high perfusion rate of blood, second only to the kidney.

Luke had 11 cadavers analyzed in the UK. As she predicted she found astronomically high levels of fluoride in the calcium hydroxy apatite crystals produced by the gland. The average was 9000 ppm and went as high as 21,000 in one case. These levels are at, or higher, than fluoride levels in the bones of people suffering from skeletal fluorosis. It is these findings which have just been published.

It is the ramifications of these findings which have yet to be published. In the second half of her work she treated animals (Mongolian gerbils) with fluoride at a crack pineal gland research unit at the University of Surrey, UK (so there is no question about the quality of this work). She found that melatonin production (as measured by the concentration of a melatonin metabolite in the urine) was lower in the animals treated with high fluoride levels compared with those treated with low levels.

~ more... ~