DD watched The Green Hornet when young. Bafflingly, I remember liking it. Could it have been the saving grace of the theme music?
In advance of the new movie, SyFY rolled out old Green Hornet episodes last night. I tuned in. Couldn’t be any worse than Ghost Hunters, pro wrestling or Caprica, right? (Caprica’s only distinguishing characteristic seemed to be its creator’s stealthy desire to bring brown and black fedoras back into fashion.)
Reassessment.
The Green Hornet featured leaden pacing, intelligence-insulting dialog and lots more excellence like chase scenes shot in fake darkness, often flanked by unnecessarily dim lighting in others.
Even the theme music I had remembered fondly was a bit poverty-stricken.
Here’s an episode, excerpted on YouTube. It’s called “The Frog Is a Deadly Weapon” and it goes downhill from there.
It’s distinguished by the fact that nothing happens in the first ten minutes, except for somebody being pulled into water by two frogmen. And it was only a thirty minute show. (Wait for some absorbing office talk about going to get a ‘burger at the “Cotillion Room.”)
A businessman asks Britt Reid, the Green Hornet, if he knew a man who has been found dead.
Reid: “Yes.”
Most episodes weren’t worth waiting through for any Bruce Lee fight scenes.
Jump on the grenades, if you dare.
However, one thing jumps out. Despite the old Green Hornet’s threadbare and unintentionally comical nature it was played drop-dead serious.
No idea what this means for the new Seth Rogen feature.
It is hard, though, to imagine Seth Rogen, no matter how much weight he’s lost, pulling off a character like Britt Reid — no matter how poor the original was — after seeing the former as the hefty mall cop in Observe & Report, except as a joke. The guy can’t do even a poor man’s urbane.
But if you’ve kept apace of US events the idea of China seriously challenging the US militarily is laughable. The country’s aim is to be able to muss our hair just enough to trouble a theoretical defense of Taiwan.
China has no blue water navy that would last more than a couple days against the USN. It’s military is not battle-hardened. It’s air force would enjoy a short exciting life. And once all of its air defense has been destroyed by showers of cruise missiles, its industrial base in the eastern part of the country could be worked over good by a strategic bombing campaign. (Oh, they’ll use mighty cyberwarriors to strike back! That would be so scary.)
One has a hard time imagining most Chinese would even want to go up against the US military, considering how well things have been going elsewhere.
Why mess up a good thing?
It’s only thought for computer games, fiction, perhaps good for a Tom Clancy or Dale Brown novel.
The news value of it is diversionary, a distraction from real major problems.
Beijing can’t match our globe-spanning regional combatant command structure; possesses no foreign military bases, compared to our several hundred; and presents almost no capacity for projecting — and far more importantly, for sustaining — its forces beyond its immediate home waters …
The author notes that for the most part, there is no “plausible” avenue to war with China.
After all the analysis I’d only add that not only does China not have all the things said, militarily, but also that there’s no reason to suspect that what it does have would even work very well.
For reasons which have been abundantly discussed here.
We’re essentially asked to believe that an industrial base that’s good at making really lots of not very good things — just good enough for us beggars to wear and use, even though threadbare — automatically snaps to attention and makes great advanced military hardware.
Recall that the people selling the news about foreign military hardware — well, their paychecks depend upon you actually believing them. And that worked so well with the news about the old Soviet Union.
Lads, would you buy this on a nice black or white T-shirt?
Deindustrialization and the beggaring of the US middle class is the major security problem. It has led to obvious political instability in the US, among many other things.
China, while not the root cause, is only the enabling instrument. It was not, after all, China that compelled all US toilet seat manufacturers to fire their workforces and end domestic production.
Thought exercise: Consider the value and the morality of having a combined armed force good for crushing the Chinese military, or that of any other nation, in a couple weeks of busy work, if the middle class it’s ostensibly defending no longer has anything.
DD thought Jared Loughner’s massacre would present Ted Nugent with a bit of a problem.
Arizona’s gun laws are obviously the most lax in the country. And other armed civilians were at the massacre. There is no opportunity for Nugent to rant about civilians not being able to carry arms sufficient for personal defense.
And there is no way to make a rational argument defending the right of civilians to have thirty round magazines for their handguns.
So Nugent doesn’t get into his usual thing about the soullessness of those who would restrict gun rights. Even though no gun rights have been restricted by the Obama administration.
Nugent’s advice this time out: Be prepared for evil.
Never before has the need for a higher level of awareness and a warrior mindset been more important … Be prepared to stop evil in its tracks and live. There is no other choice.
That’s his message.
Stop evil in its tracks. I think we can agree that’s a good thing to aspire to.
Many would also probably agree that when a Jared Loughner comes to the public event there’s very little even the most alert and warrior-minded among the populace can do until people have suddenly been riddled with gunfire.
Since the massacre has also brought a discussion about violent language forward it should be noted Nugent’s new column contains none of it.
This is in start contrast to Nugent’s usual shtick. His value to his publishers lies only in his regular use of incivility and violent rhetoric. And when Nugent leaves it out of his writings he suddenly has nothing to say.
If you’re a regular DD reader you’ll know how unusual this is for the man.
I’ve made the point that Nugent is the perfect example of the mainstreaming of really unpleasant and mean-spirited extremism, the kind of which was unacceptable in public discourse many years ago.
State wildlife officers have completed an investigation into whether rocker Ted Nugent was eligible to hunt in South Dakota when he shot pheasants on a private preserve near Hot Springs in October.
But they are not saying what they found or what might happen next.
Nugent’s legal status came into question after the Rapid City Journal covered his hunting trip in October. It was later revealed that some of Nugent’s hunting privileges in California had been suspended for an earlier big-game violation there. South Dakota is part of a coalition of 35 states, including California, that honors each other’s license suspensions.
“Nugent was in the area at the time as a featured speaker at a Second Amendment rally sponsored by Citizens for Liberty, a Rapid City area tea party affiliate,” reported the local newspaper.
Last week I mentioned once again that doing census work allowed one to see the truly radical poverty in Pasadena.
This in connection with Ted Nugent’s voicing of the usual far right cant that poor people are so because they are unproductive and lazy. It is an argument that seeks to reset any discussion on poverty and inequality by equating it with flaws in character.
Canvasing the downtown apartment complexes and housing developments off Colorado showed the wealthy and the very poor in Pasadena living side by side.
Here, as in many other places I would imagine, it is easy to overlook the bottom. In Pasadena much of it is hidden away in apartment complexes in fairly nice neighborhoods. Or stowed out of sight and mind in what look like nice big houses from the Forties and Fifties.
A step inside, however, always showed owners had subdivided these into tiny claustrophobic rooms, turning them into flophouses for the servant class.
None of this happened overnight. It is a consequence of the economic system that’s been in place in the United States over at least the last decade. In Pasadena, inequality and poverty collide with some of the highest rents and property values in the country.
The wealthy — the haves — had radically pushed up the value of land in Pasadena as part of the conversion of the city to as a go-to place (think Old Town on weeknights and weekends) in southern California and the expansion of the mansion district around the Rose Bowl. During the last five years, princely condo projects were started and completed along Colorado and Lake — actually almost everywhere — in bids to attract the young and upper middle class.
The Oakwood properties I canvased furnished temporary housing to a upper and upper middle corporate servant class. For lack of a better classification I thought of them as a fancy-pants type of migrant worker.
Many did not respond to their census questionnaires because they viewed themselves as temporary residents. For example, they spent most of their days flying here and there across the country. Think George Clooney in “Up In the Air.”
If one questioned a neighbor in an effort to gain information about their address, for instance, a common response was that such people were not home much because of ‘travel.’
Or the corporate migrant worker could be one who had been sent to southern California to do some semi-long term function by their masters.
And what they considered to be their permanent home — and place where the rest of the family lived — was elsewhere.
In any case, the census was required to categorize these addresses. And we had different line descriptions for varieties of temporary residence and procedures for enumerating their inhabitants.
These were the people who had not been hit quite as hard by the Great Recession. They appeared to still be working while those in the local service class hunkering in the dingier complexes or the flophouses that had once been fine Pasadena middle class homes had been really taking it in the shorts for some time.
“That’s one of the interesting facts now available from the recent release of 2006 data by the US Census Bureau.”
An interesting fact? Radical inequality is an “interesting fact”? [Shakes head.]
Keep in mind this was from 2007, a consequence of 2006 data. In fairness, things may still have seemed almost peachy. The Great Recession had not yet arrived.
I worked the 2010 Decennial census. And things aren’t better as a result of the Great Recession. In fact, they are much worse.
The weekly newspaper broke out some statistics from 2006:
In Pasadena, the richest one-fifth of Pasadena households — those with incomes over $123,641 — has over half (54.2 percent) of the income earned by city residents. The wealthiest 5 percent — those with household incomes above $255,106 — have over one-quarter (25.1 percent) of the income. Pasadena has a higher concentration of income among the richest five percent than the United States and California (both 22.1 percent) and Los Angeles County (23.6 percent).
In contrast, the poorest one-fifth of Pasadena households — those with incomes below $21,277 — combined have only 2.8 percent of residents’ income. Those in the next poorest one-fifth — those with household incomes between $21,277 and $46,375 — bring home only 7.6 percent of Pasadena’s incomes.
If we looked at wealth (stocks, bonds and other holdings) instead of income, the concentration at the top of the economic pyramid would be even more skewed.
Rising inequality and a skewed economy that only benefits the very wealthy leads to inefficiency and unpleasant death spirals. In Pasadena it’s obvious to everyone that the working people who provide the finery in the city’s restaurants, nice hotels and play places cannot afford to live here.
As a consequence they must either drive in from some much cheaper place of urban squalor or try to carve out a place to sleep with a bunch of roommates. Or rent a big closet-sized room rented out for still way too much in one of the previously referred to flophouses.
Reported the PWeekly:
Gentrification may be good for a handful of developers, but it isn’t good for most residents or for the city’s business climate. As the new census data suggest, Pasadena housing costs are skyrocketing beyond what most working families — including schoolteachers, nurses and nurses’ aides, bus drivers, security guards, secretaries, janitors, child care providers, retail clerks, computer programmers, lab assistants and others — can afford.
Rising rents and home prices are undermining our city’s economic, social and civic fabric. Our public schools are losing children. Many religious congregations are losing members. Youth soccer and baseball leagues, and other community initiatives, are losing volunteers.
Keep in mind, again, it’s census data from 2006.
Rising rents and home prices did undermine the city’s economic fabric and this has been compounded by the Great Recession. As a consequence lots of small businesses failed in Pasadena. And there is now no shortage of empty office space, rooms or housing. By example, one ritzy condo complex on Lake near the OneWest Bank has been conspicuously empty for the last two years.
If one has been at all observant over the last couple of years when walking or driving the city’s streets, one saw the evidence in cratered businesses, must-sell-everything signs, and turnover in store-fronts.
Paradoxically, prices still remain too high. Which has led to the phenomenon of owners who are care-taking, waiting around for things to tick upward again.
Previously, on the census in Pasadena — here. (Also see the tab at right.)
There is some irony in the fact that only an English news agency — not a local American one — was interested in a first-hand story from it.
Lamentable articles in the New York Times have outlined Republican and Wall Street efforts to attack state unions as root causes of our economic troubles. It seems to do no good to say that unions have been under public attack for a long time and that they’ve been crippled by US business interests.
Those with the money rely on scapegoating and resentment to fuel sentiment against them. The mental equation appealing to baser emotion is simple one: Because those in the private sector have had it very hard, then the middle class union workers left — mostly in state and federal government — need punishing as well.
There have been other ways to describe it, Nitzschean Ressentiment, being one: “[Because] (I or we) have suffered, it is appropriate and good that even more suffer.”
This is pure scapegoating, rationalized as austerity and belt tightening. The President helped fuel it last year when he fecklessly announced federal employee wage freezing after election losses.
“Obama flunks economics with pointless wage freeze,” reads the headline at FiireDogLake, for example.
Pine View Farm quotes from the Guardian, a UK newspaper, where the reporting columnist comments on the tactic:
At the Guardian, Paul Harris comments on the anti-worker frenzy, pointing out the dipsy-doodle to distract persons from the real culprits:
What is perverse about this trend is just how vastly it misunderstands what went wrong with the American economy. No one is denying that this is a time for belt-tightening. Or that some unions have problems. Or that some union contracts look over-generous in austerity America. But the fundamental truth remains: powerful and reckless unions did not cause the Great Recession by rampant speculation. Nor did an out-of-control labour movement cause or burst the housing bubble. It was not union bosses who packaged up complex derivatives to sell in their millions and thus wrecked the economy and put millions out of work. Nor was it union bosses who awarded (and continue to award) themselves salaries worth hundreds of millions of dollars for doing nothing of social value. Neither was it the union movement that was bailed out by the taxpayer and then refused to change its habits.
All that was the work of the finance industry.
One of the New York Times articles obliquely mentioned at the top of the column ran on the 4th.
It revealed the urge and strategy used to whack state union workers across the nation. In California, for example, it has been much the same. Jerry Brown seems poised to not only fire workers but to further cripple the survivors because of the state’s budget mess which has been boiling over for what now seems like an eternity.
Some union leaders say that proposals like right-to-work laws, which have little effect on state budgets, show that Republicans are using budget woes as a pretext to undercut unions.
“They’re throwing the kitchen sink at us,??? said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “We’re seeing people use the budget crisis to make every attempt to roll back workers’ voices and any ability of workers to join collectively in any way whatsoever.???
A group composed of Republican state lawmakers and corporate executives, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is quietly spreading these proposals from state to state, sending e-mails about the latest efforts as well as suggested legislative language.
One of the leaders is John Kasich, Ohio’s new governor.
From the Times article, here’s Kasich employing the language of the scapegoater:
Of all the new governors, John Kasich, Republican of Ohio, appears to be planning the most comprehensive assault against unions. He is proposing to take away the right of 14,000 state-financed child care and home care workers to unionize. He also wants to ban strikes by teachers, much the way some states bar strikes by the police and firefighters.
“If they want to strike, they should be fired,??? Mr. Kasich said in a speech. “They’ve got good jobs, they’ve got high pay, they get good benefits, a great retirement. What are they striking for????
Early in 2010, the Times also ran a story discussing the fact that state and federal government workers now make up the most union members in the country, surpassing the private sector. It was not because of some evil intrinsic to government workers. The numbers refllected only that the US private sector had been steadily destroying US manufacturing jobs in the great de-industrialization, a trend accelerated by the mass layoffs brought on by the Great Recession.
Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, voiced dismay that government employees now represented a majority of union members.
“It’s a very bad sign,??? he said. “We’ve been banged around some, but when you see what’s been happening to the industrial base of this country, to the steelworkers, to the autoworkers, they’re been hammered much more.???
After rising the two previous years, overall union membership fell by 771,000 in 2009, to 15.3 million, largely because employment declined over all. But the rate of private-sector unionization fell because two sectors where unions are especially strong — manufacturing and construction — suffered especially large job losses. Construction lost more than 900,000 jobs last year, falling to 5.9 million, while 1.3 million factory jobs were lost, declining to 11.6 million.
Kasich had previously kept his face in the public on Fox News. His Wiki bio informs:
In 2001, Kasich took a job as managing director of the Columbus investment banking division of Lehman Brothers. He remained at the company until its collapse in September 2008. During 2008, Lehman Brothers paid Kasich $587,175 in salary, bonuses, and other benefits. Over $400,000 of that bonus is credited to Kasich using his political connections to facilitate investment of $480 Million from the state pension fund with Lehman Brothers.
In a better world, Kasich would still be on Fox News, the regular friendly puppet of Bill O’Reilly. But we don’t live in such a place.
In his book, Class, Paul Fussell had a few things to say about scapegoating and how it is tied to bitterness in the working class. And how easily it turns people on each other. Or perhaps I’m reading too much into it. The book, after all, was written many years ago.
However, I’ve mentioned it from time to time on this domain. And it seems appropriate to close from something back in 2008 on the old blog.
Class war, Fussell noted, was never far from the surface in the United States.
Now it has erupted. But we’re still losing because Wall Street and the Republican Party are adept at turning people’s loathing at the wrong targets.
“Inflation, unemployment, a static economy” have set into stone conditions in which “the mass of Americans now find themselves” moving down. “There used to be room at the top,” [Fussell concluded]. Now there’s plenty of room at the bottom, vicinities near which many of us will become acquainted with, sooner than later.
One of the recurring topics here is obviously my obsession with deindustrialization and the pipedream that this country will regain greatness through a DIY economy. In other words, when all Americans adapt to making something unique and which can’t be underpriced or replaced by an overseas good or service — something which will sell in the plutonomy.
The idea that a country the size of the United States could be rebuilt to be a pro racing car crankshaft/chocolate-covered truffle/$180 harmonica maker and regain any type of mojo is a stupefying one.
The entire labor force cannot be adapted to it. Individuals — everywhere, not just in the US — are not particularly suited to splintering into very small units of innovation providing consumer goods for the global wealthy. That’s just humanity.
As if the cost of living in the United States is the same as it is where labor is much cheaper. Or that, in some way, because it is expensive here relative to elsewhere, that a vast segment of the populace not capable of relocating to a global cheap labor zone deserves whatever bad fate befalls it.
Two recent items from the “artisanal services are the future” economy meme.
First, a letter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 4:
Barb O’Brien may not know it, but she is in the vanguard of an exciting new employment trend, which can be called either ‘artisanal services’ or ‘catering to the rich,’ depending on your point of view.
Ms. O’Brien, who owns Kirkwood’s Silver Garden, was featured in an article by Aisha Sultan in Tuesday’s Post-Dispatch.
Ms. O’Brien puts up holiday decorations for people with more money than time. For a few hundred bucks, she’ll come to your house, make it look splendid for the holidays, and then come back in January to put all the stuff away.
That puts her squarely in the middle of a trend described by economist Andrew Caplin of New York University in last Sunday’s New York Times: artisanal services. In an era of growing income inequality, he said, clever people will figure out new ways to serve the wealthy.
This trend is not actually new – the wealthy have always had butlers, maids, landscapers and the like. The trick is to figure out a new service that wealthy people don’t yet know they need. England’s Queen Elizabeth II, for example, has a guy who plays the bagpipes under her bedroom window every morning.
Hey, it’s a living.
And, prior, from a Sunday edition of the New York Times on how to fix the economy (note — most of the reprints around the web on artisanal services all point back to Caplin and this source):
How about a cheap technology that our mortal minds can’t currently fathom?
A decade ago, who could have imagined that more than a million people would pay $1 for a portable phone video game in which you slash watermelons with a Japanese sword? Who, in other words, could have envisioned the Fruit Ninja app?
”That’s a pretty wispy hope,” said Gar Alperovitz, a professor at the University of Maryland.
……..
Perhaps we are entering the era of the self-starter. Prof. Andrew Caplin of New York University thinks so. He begins with the premise that in the coming global economy some people will succeed and others will not, and income inequality will grow. While it’s noble to focus on how to spread wealth around, he says that it might be wiser to think of ways the poor and middle class could cater to the economy’s biggest winners.
”Unfortunately, there will be income inequality,” he says, ”but enough people will make money that those who don’t would do well, in as much as they understand the needs of that group.”
He says he expects a rise in what he calls ”artisanal services,” like cooks, nutritionists, small-scale farmers. He sees services emerging that aid the wealthy at the intersection of health and genetic science. He imagines a rise in technology services, too — experts who keep clients current about technology which can advance their interests in business, in the media, on search engines and so on.
Professor Caplin worries that this concept might be caricatured as ”cater to the rich.”
But he suggested that this country could use a lot more non-judgmental thinking about the future of the United States economy.
If it weren’t for dependent wusses that the Democratic Party creates and coddles, the party would be extinct …
We’ve all heard about the jobs Americans are not willing to do. Wusses …
Food stamps are for wusses, and the master wussy Democrats have seen to it. It’s easier to be a lazy lump …
Parents should turn off the television, computer games, video games and cell phones. These things make Americans, especially our kids, soft, uninspired, anti-social wusses …
Every kid in America should have at least 10 chores every day …
[Wusses] need to be weeded out and excommunicated. America needs hard-charging warriors, not weak wusses.
In the years since [a] cyberassault, Estonia has distinguished itself once again: Now it is a model for how a country might defend itself during a cyberwar. The responsibility would fall to a force of programmers, computer scientists and software engineers who make up a Cyber Defense League, a volunteer organization that in wartime would function under a unified military command.
Haw. Indeed. It’s the Watchmen.
The nature of computer security, nationally and globally, is distributed.
Consortia of private sector workers, government people and academics administer it. Sometimes there’s collaboration. Sometimes not.
Over the years — in the US and other western nations — government agencies, some working cooperatively, some not so much, have stood up to handle cybersecurity.
In this they have been infrequently joined, often informally in one way or another, by various entities within the computer security industry, although such cooperation has been hit or miss.
All that work is paid for, not volunteer. Although the people involved often do work beyond the call of duty which goes with the very spirit of volunteer-ism.
Frequently the same business looks like herding cats. You can’t change the nature of it. It’s the way people work and goes to the heart, for example, of the differences between hacker culture, the private sector, and government. The milieu’s vary. That’s immutable.
There are many other factors not addressed. Only two are, (1), that the US government doesn’t control domestic or international ISPs. And, (2), that it has, from time to time, specifically developed national cybersecurity strategies with the direct involvement of the private sector computer security industry.
So the idea that Estonia is doing something unique, in this matter, is fairly laughable.
There’s nothing at all wrong with the idea of collaborative security work between experts. It’s certainly not new.
Where one gets into trouble — and how the question was presented to me — was in the idea of employing a presumably patriotic volunteer cyber-army.
So any volunteer cyberarmy, depending upon where you stand internationally — because of the dynamic of general security hackers — can either be a random menace or a good thing.
“A volunteer cyber-army is about the worst idea one can think up,” said George Smith, senior fellow with GlobalSecurity.org.
“History shows us that ‘volunteer cyber-warriors’ — garden variety hackers — are always around. A volunteer cyber-army attacked WikiLeaks. Volunteer cyber-armies retaliated against various U.S. businesses … You see the problems. You’re just legitimizing and green-flagging often random cyberspace vandalism and bullying in the hopes that it will work out in your favor. That’s atrocious. And really stupid.”
And he’s pretty shallow on the issue, just repeating the same wishful thinking crap we’ve heard for close to two decades about computer security and how the private sector industry and government ought to have tighter collaboration.
Presumably like Estonia’s grand new volunteer cyber-army.
“That’s a very sensible approach, and I only wish we had the same kind of relationship with our [Information Technology] sector that they obviously have with theirs,” he told NPR.
“When top cybersecurity experts are willing if necessary to put themselves under a single paramilitary command, a country’s computer networks can be defended more efficiently,” asserts National Public Radio, with absolutely nothing to back the claim up.
“The [volunteer cyberarmy] unit is but one division of Estonia’s Total Defense League, an all-volunteer paramilitary force dedicated to maintaining the country’s security and preserving its independence,” reported NPR.
And who are the top cyber-security experts? That’s rhetorical.
I added some more insult at the end. It’s at Security News Daily here.
The homeland security business lawyer wishes we were more like Estonia? Ludicrous.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke sketched a more optimistic outlook for the economy, but said a $600 billion bond-buying program is needed because it will take up to five more years to bring unemployment back to healthy levels.
Bernanke told the Senate Budget Committee that there’s increasing evidence that a “self-sustaining” recovery is taking hold. He said he expects stronger economic growth because consumers and businesses will boost spending this year.
Bernanke spoke one hour after the government released a disappointing employment report. Employers added only 103,000 jobs in December. The unemployment rate fell to 9.4 percent partly because people gave up looking for jobs.
And, from the same wire, with only a different title:
But the job growth fell short of expectations based on a strengthening economy. And the drop in unemployment was partly because people stopped looking for work.
Private employers added a net total of 113,000 jobs last month and the government shed 10,000 jobs, the Labor Department said Friday.
“The labor market ended last year with a bit of a thud,” [opined some fellow from Moody’s]. “But I think things will get much better this year.”
Why would people stop looking for work?
Roseanne Barr on CNN this week: “There are no jobs.”
But there are, apparently at Goldman and other financial institutions, if you’re the right god’s work-doing superman, one who can answer interview questions of dubious nature. Presumably chosen to winnow out only the best and brightest, according to a weekly Yahoo news feature on job-seeking and the best tactics in bowing and scraping:
If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and trapped in a blender, how would you get out? — Goldman Sachs
Why do you think only a small portion of the population makes over $150,000? (Reportedly from New York Life)
How are M&Ms made? (Reportedly from USBank)
The article (no link) — which can be looked up in Google — avers that interview questions could just be troll bait from an Internet poll.
“A foreign substance is introduced into the precious bodily fluids, without the knowledge of the individual and certainly without any free choice. That’s the way the commies work…??? — Jack Ripper
Decades after Strangelove, the character of Jack D. Ripper is finally vindicated. Sort of and not quite.
There has been too much of a good thing, reports AP.
Fluoride levels in water have crept up causing fluoridosis — or spotting of teeth — in children.
Fluoride in drinking water — credited with dramatically cutting cavities and tooth decay — may now be too much of a good thing. Getting too much of it causes spots on some kids’ teeth.
A reported increase in the spotting problem is one reason the federal government will announce Friday it plans to lower the recommended levels for fluoride in water supplies — the first such change in nearly 50 years.
About 2 out of 5 adolescents have tooth streaking or spottiness because of too much fluoride …
“Fluoridation has been fought for decades by people who worried about its effects, including conspiracy theorists who feared it was a plot to make people submissive to government power,” adds the story.
“Jack, when did you first develop this, er, theory about fluoridation?” — Group Captain Lionel Mandrake
“Have you ever loved a woman, Mandrake? Physically loved her?
“There’s a feeling of loss, a profound sense of emptiness. Luckily, however, I was able to interpret the signs correctly. It was a loss of essence. But I can assure you it has not recurred, Group Captain. Women sense my power, and they seek me out. I do not avoid women, Group Captain. But I deny them my life essence.” — Jack Ripper
“Mandrake chewed thoughtfully on his mustache … He did not know what to say to the General,” reads Peter George’s novelization of the movie.
