The opera world is celebrating the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Richard Wagner (born May 22, 1813) with 15 productions of his four-opera music drama Des Ring der Nibelungen (Ring of the Nibelung) in 2013—10 in Europe, 2 in the UK, 2 in the U.S., and 1 in Australia. Putting on this many productions of The Ring in one year testifies to the growing appreciation of the artistic genius of its composer.

The Ring was first done in 1876 in Bayreuth. Since then 212 Ring cycles have been performed there. The first Ring in the U.S. was performed in 1889 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The Met has now done 113 complete Ring cycles in its 130-ye

ar history. Third in the world is Seattle Opera, with 41 Ring cycles in its 50-year history under two general  directors, Glynn Ross (18, beginning in 1975) and, for the last 30 years, Speight Jenkins. He has put on 23 cycles, performed first in a postmodern production and now a naturalistic “green” Ring. (People from all 50 states and 22 countries attended the three Seattle Opera cycles this year.)

Wagner’s Ring is a story about gods, dwarfs, and giants; a dragon; and several humans, including a young Siegfried, billed as the hero of the piece. It has murders and incest and magic, where a dwarf turns himself into a giant snake and then into a tiny toad. One need not know anything about The Ring to become absorbed in the story and moved by it when attending a good production that has captions of the libretto displayed above the stage (supertitles). As Stephen Wadsworth, director of the Seattle Opera Ring points out, “It’s a fantastic story, a story that resembles a complex modern novel more than a dusty old Norse epic.”

The Ring’s tale comes from Norse mythology, in large part from 13^th century Icelandic texts (Poetic and Prose Eddas and Völsunga Saga). Myths reveal the basic truths about human nature. They are a symbolic distillation of human experience, and The Ring is especially important to us today for what it tells us about the pursuit of power.

The two principal components of power in The Ring are an all-powerful ring made of gold and a magical metallic veil the ring’s possessor is empowered to make called the tarnhelm. The tarnhelm can render its wearer invisible and able to watch unobserved everything that is happening. The tarnhelm in myth presages what we now must confront living in the U.S. Surveillance State with its all-seeing National Security Agency (NSA). Apropos the allegorical tarnhelm, power brokers like to call the NSA “No Such Agency.”

The four operas that make up the Ring, which Wagner calls music dramas, are Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), Die Walküre (The Valkyries), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). They are performed on successive nights, usually over a six-day period.

(Without breaks The Ring is 14 to 17 hours long, depending on the conductor—Karl Böhm conducts the four operas in 13 hours, 42 minutes [1967, Bayreuth]; Daniel Barenboim, 14 hr 42 min [2013, BBC Proms concert performance]; Wilhelm Furtwängler, 15 hr 02 min [1953, live studio recording for RAI]; James Levine, 15 hr 41 min [1989-90, Met]; and Reginald Goodall, 16 hr 52 min [1973-1977, English National Opera]. The score is written for 120 instruments, including 6 harps, some of them newly invented, like the Wagner tuba and contrabass trombone, and for 33 solo voices, including a large chorus of vassals and handmaidens in one of the acts. It has 800 pages of dialogue and stage instructions.)

Das Rheingold focuses on acquiring power. It starts with Alberich, a dwarf, flirting with mermaids (Rhinemaidens) in the Rhine River (in the river). He spots gold and learns that one can make an all-powerful ring from it by forswearing love. Unable to score with the mermaids, Alberich takes the gold, renounces love, and forges the ring. Relishing the power it gives him, Alberich enslaves his fellow dwarfs, the Nibelungs and forces them to keep digging for more gold—until Wotan (with help) tricks Alberich and seizes the ring. Wotan, the supreme god, uses the ring to pay for his new palace (Valhalla), giving it reluctantly to the two construction workers who built it, the giants Fasolt and Fafner. Alberich places a curse on the ring, swearing death to all who possess it. Right away, as per the curse, Fafner kills his brother Fasolt, keeping the ring (and the tarnhelm and the gold) for himself.

Die Walküre is about incestual love and a sword. With the tarnhelm Fafner has turned himself into a dragon, to better protect him and the gold. Forming a plan to recoup the ring, Wotan leaves a sword named Nothung embedded in a tree for his human son Siegmund. Since he is an independent person and not bound by any agreement with the giants, Wotan figures Siegmund can legitimately kill Fafner and get the ring back for him. But Wotan’s wife Fricka convinces him that he must squash this plan and let Siegmund be killed as punishment for sleeping with his sister, Sieglinde. Wotan gives instructions to his warrior goddess daughter Brünnhilde not to protect Siegmund, but she comes to his defense, to no avail. Wotan shatters Siegmund’s sword, and Sieglinde’s husband kills him. When Wotan is not looking Brünnhilde whisks Sieglinde away to safety knowing that she carries Siegmund’s child. Punishing her, Wotan strips away Brünnhilde’s immortality and places her in a lasting sleep on a high mountain rock ringed by fire—to be awakened only by the bravest of men.

Siegfried, in the opera Siegfried, is the one who does that. He also accomplishes what his father Siegmund had failed to do and kills Fafner the dragon. Left an orphan when his mother dies in childbirth, Mime, Alberich’s brother, rears Siegfried in the forest without any human contact. Mime sees Siegfried as the means to acquire the ring and its power for himself. Goaded by Mime to learn fear, Siegfried reforges the sword (Nothung) required to kill Fafner. Deed done, he happens to taste the dragon’s blood on his finger, which allows him to understand the language of songbirds. Clueless about the ring, the bird tells Siegfried to retrieve it and the tarnhelm. The bird (sung by a coloratura soprano—The Ring’s only one) then directs him to the rock where Brünnhilde sleeps. Still fearless, Siegfried braves the encircling fire, finds Brünnhilde, and removes her Valkyrie’s shield, discovering to his surprise that she is a woman, the first one he has ever seen. Now feeling fear, he awakens her; and Brünnhilde becomes his bride. (The saying “The opera isn’t over until the fat lady sings” comes from Siegfried, where Brünnhilde awakens and starts singing with 29 minutes left to go in this 5-hour opera, including intermissions—except that most Brünnhildes today are, fortunately, trimmer.)

Götterdämmerung begins with Siegfried giving the ring to Brünnhilde before he sets out on new adventures. Traveling down the Rhine he meets the Gibichung family: Gunther, head of the clan; Gutrune, his sister; and Hagen, their half-brother, who happens to be Alberich’s son. Gunther and Hagen slyly place Siegfried under the spell of a drug-induced memory loss. Forgetting Brünnhilde, he falls for Gutrune and becomes betrothed to her. He goes back to Brünnhilde on the rock wearing the tarnhelm disguised as Gunther, forcibly takes the ring, and claims her for his new “blood brother” Gunther. Siegfried’s unwitting betrayal of Brünnhilde leads to his death.  Hagen, knowing the ring’s power and told by Brünnhilde how to do it, fatally stabs an unsuspecting Siegfried in the back, the only vulnerable part of his body. After a stirring funeral march Siegfried’s dead arm rises up ominously when Hagen attempts to take the ring. He shrinks back and Brünnhilde steps in and removes the ring. Then, with Alberich watching, she hands the ring over to the Rhinemaidens as Siegfried’s body and the world burn, ending the reign of the gods.

Richard Wagner was born in a Germany that was then a confederation of sovereign states, in an age when Fredrick the Great, King of Prussia would say, “I speak French to my courtiers, Latin to my confessor, and German to my horse.” At age 26, Wagner went to Paris, the operatic capital of the world, to make his name. He failed and 2½ years later returned to Germany bitter.  He started writing the libretto for Des Ring der Nibelungen back in Dresden in 1848, shortly before he was forced to flee to avoid arrest and possible execution for participating in the Dresden uprising of 1849. Wagner finished the libretto living in exile in Zurich and worked on the music for The Ring over a 20-year period, also composing Tristan and Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg during that time. He completed The Ring in 1874.

(Like many of his contemporaries Wagner was an anti-Semite. But he was a notorious one, publishing a 20-page article, later republished as a pamphlet, Judaism in Music, where he attacked the Jewish composers Mendelssohn, by name, and Meyerbeer, unnamed, who he identified as the world’s leading opera composer living in Paris. He branded Jews in general as “repellent.” Wagner nevertheless had Jewish friends and had the son of a rabbi, Hermann Levi, conduct the world premiere of his dearest work Parsifal. As a result, writes his biographer Martin Gregor-Dellin, “[Wagner] alienated friendly critics, forfeited the trust of his friends, and incurred the implacable resentment of posterity.” Nevertheless, a true work of art stands separate from the artist who created it, on its own. As D. H. Lawrence puts it, “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”)

One of the most striking cases of the pursuit of power in human history is Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). Hitler loved Wagner’s operas and considered him to be the cultural hero of the fascist Third Reich. The first opera he saw at age 12 was Lohengrin; and Frederic Spotts, in his Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, figures that Hitler attended close to 100 performances of Die Meistersinger. But he didn’t particularly like Götterdämmerung, with how it ends, and Parsifal. (The last musical event Hitler attended, in 1940, was a performance of Götterdämmerung, and after Stalingrad all he wanted to hear were the light operas of Franz Lehär. He told Goebbles that after the war he would see to it either that religion was banished from Parsifal or that Parsifal was banished from the stage.)

David Bowie calls Hitler “the first modern rock star.” Like Fafner turning himself into a dragon, at staged events Hitler (with practice) would don a demonic persona, employing as Frederic Spotts describes it, a “hypnotic sort of theatrical fanaticism.” He would captivate people, leaving them spellbound. And like Alberich controlling his Nibelung horde, his carefully choreographed mass rallies, as Spotts puts it, “were a microcosm of Hitler’s ideal world: a people reduced to unthinking automatons subject to the control not of the state, not even the party but to him personally and that unto death.” Not heeding the mythic message of The Ring, like Wotan brooding in Valhalla as the world burns Hitler hid in his bunker as his 1,000-year Reich collapsed in flames around him. (One room of the bunker, explored after his suicide, was found to be filled with illustrated books on opera house architecture.)

Wagner started out as a socialist and in his thirties in Dresden was a left-wing revolutionist. From this perspective The Ring has been interpreted as a political allegory critiquing capitalism, George Bernard Shaw espoused this view (in 1898) in The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung’s Ring—where Wotan and the gods are the aristocracy; Alberich, a capitalist; the Nibelungs, under Alberich’s thumb, the proletariat; the giants are peasants; and Siegfried is a model for the free socialist “New Man.”

For the 2013 Bayreuth Ring celebrating Wagner’s bicentennial, directed by Frank Castorf, the set for Siegfried sports Mount Rushmore-like sculpted heads of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, with scaffolds around them. Its designer, Aleksandar Denic, explains: “These men changed the world. Each person can decide whether it was for better or for worse. The scaffolds could mean that the heads are being destroyed or repaired. Most of all, they show that someone is still working on the project.” One may be sure that a carved head of Hitler will never be displayed on the Bayreuth stage. Instead, this production features two communist pursuers of power, Stalin and Mao, who each killed and starved to death millions more people than even Hitler did.

The Ring is not a fascist, or a socialist, or a communist work—understanding that fascism, socialism, and communism are three strains of the same species of collectivist political animal. These breeds are motivated foremost by their desire for power, acquired by whatever means necessary. For such people the end—to obtain measureless power to control others and rule one’s country and ultimately the world—justifies the means employed—murder, enslavement, gulags, and forced psychiatric hospitalization of dissidents.  The Ring warns against seeking power. It teaches instead that the pursuit of power is incompatible with a life of true feeling, that wielding power destroys the capacity for love and poisons people who seek it.

Wotan comes to realize that the price of pursuing and maintaining power is too high. This message is as important today in the 21^st century as ever. Political power corrupts both a person’s morals and judgment. As James Madison observed, “It will not be denied that power is of an encroaching nature.” And Eric Hoffer (in 1954) writes, “Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man’s spirit than when we win his heart.”

Wagner was 41 years old when a friend suggested that he read a book by the (German) philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). The book was The World as Will and Representation. Wagner read it, over and over, initially four times, and it changed his life.

Wagner’s discovery of Schopenhauer inspired him to compose the operas Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal, which address the philosopher’s intuitive insight into the innermost nature of things—Tristan on human sexuality and Parsifal on compassion. Schopenhauer was the first philosopher to posit a philosophical significance to sex and the orgasmic sense of oneness sexual partners can experience. He accorded a similar significance to the sense of oneness that can engulf a person feeling compassion. He injected Hindu and Buddhist beliefs into Western philosophy, the first philosopher to do this. And as Schopenhauer sees it, music reigns supreme. It speaks to the inner nature of things. Along with sex, compassion, and mystical experiences, music especially enables us to sense intuitively the striving, pulsating, undifferentiated nature of the rock-bottom reality of things as they are in themselves, a reality that lies outside the content of experience and is inaccessible to human knowledge. (Following Kant, Schopenhauer termed the world that we perceive and measure the vorstellung and the real world of things as they are in themselves that underlies the perceived world, the Ville, or Will in English, which Kant termed the Noumenon.)

Schopenhauer freed Wagner from his stated adherence to the equality of text and music, as espoused in his 1850-51 treatise Opera and Drama. Leaving the libretto for The Ring unchanged (except for the ending, which he kept revising), Wagner instead focused on the music, freeing it from a one-to-one correspondence with the text. What started out as a political allegory became what he intended it to be, a total work of art—a Gesamtkunstwerk. In his autobiography Mein Leben (My Life), Wagner says this about Schopenhauer: “He has come to me in my solitude like a gift from heaven.”

Socialists don’t like Schopenhauer. He had a low opinion of G.W.F. Hegel, the godfather of socialism, and dialectical change—a process of historical evolution where the group has primacy over the individual and the state over the group. Following Hegel, Karl Marx formulated his concept of dialectical materialism with its labor theory of value. The state is the highest order of humanity, closest to the “Absolute Spirit/Idea” in the dialectical process; and individuals owe their obedience and subservience to it. But as history has shown, this is a recipe for political absolutism and ultimate power. Schopenhauer takes this view of the matter: “It is easy to see the ignorance and triviality of those philosophers who, in pompous phrases, represent the state as the supreme goal and greatest achievement of mankind, thereby achieving the apotheosis of philistinism.”

Schopenhauer is the antidote to Hegel and his collectivist offspring. (See my article “The Philosophical Basis of the Conflict between Liberty and Statism,” available online HERE.)

Wagner read Schopenhauer’s last published work, Parerga and Paralipomena  (Greek for “Appendices and Omissions”), a collection of philosophical reflections that contain his essay “Wisdom of Life” (available online HERE). Steeped in this philosopher’s writings, Wagner’s political views changed. As the philosopher and Wagner scholar Bryan Magee sees it: “His significant movement was not from left to right but from politics to metaphysics.” If anything, Wagner became, an anti-state anarchist—a philosophic one, not the bomb-throwing kind. (Some critics, like Wagner specialist Barry Millington, downplay Schopenhauer’s influence on Wagner, marginalizing him as a pessimist and a misogynist. A better appraisal of Schopenhauer, however, would be to portray him as a realist, rather than a pessimist, as his “Wisdom of Life” attests.)

Wagner’s Ring lends itself to a classical liberal interpretation better than a socialist one. Wotan encroaches on Alberich and steals his property, the ring and tarnhelm—and the gold from the Rhine that the nymphs had been guarding. But Wotan does honor his agreement with Fasolt and Fafner and gives them the ring (and tarnhelm and gold hoard) in payment for their building his palace. As Richard Maybury so clearly explains, two fundamental laws govern human affairs, which makes civilization possible: 1) Do all you have agreed to do; and 2) Do not encroach on other persons or their property. There are three basic political conditions: liberty, tyranny, and chaos. All political systems are a variation or combination of these three states. Citizens in a society that follows these laws possess liberty; and with liberty come privacy, private property, free markets, entrepreneurs, and general prosperity. Tyranny and/or chaos occur in societies that flout these two rules. They end up like the mythical one in The Ring. (See Maybury’s 9-minute talk “Why Does Power Corrupt?” on YouTube, his book Whatever Happened to Justice? and website www.chaostan.com.)

The first law, Do all you have agreed to do is carved (in so many words) in runes on Wotan’s spear. He regrets having to obey that law and hand over the all-powerful ring to the giants. Wotan wants it back. Nevertheless, he finally decides to renounce the will to power and let Alberich have his ring (after all he was the one that made it).

Some individuals, like Wotan, Alberich, Mime, and Hagen in The Ring, are driven to gain the power to control others and rule their lives. Most such people, we now know, are sociopaths. Siegfried and Brünnhilde do not covet the ring, except as a token of their love, and eschew its power. In examining the choices and decisions people make, Schopenhauer found that human behavior is directed by three principal motives: self-interest, the most common one; compassion; and malice. Self-interest drives all living things. Malice appears to be confined to our conscious species and fortunately is not common. Compassion has two cardinal virtues: loving kindness and natural justice. And from a philosophical and moral standpoint, compassion is the key motive. Brünnhilde is the true hero of the work with the forgiveness and compassion she shows for Siegfried and the world’s state of things.

On a metaphysical level The Ring tells us that the unloving and corrupting pursuit of power is antithetical to the innermost essence of things. Wagner embraces a Schopenhauerian and Buddhist view of the matter, where the ultimate reality is that there are no separate souls, for in the end we are all one. In The Ring the power-driven world of gods, giants, and dwarfs comes to a fiery finish, ignited by Siegfried’s funeral pyre. Brünnhilde impounds the ring that gives its bearer measureless power to rule the world and places it in safe-keeping with the nymphs of the Rhine, out of reach from the grasp of individuals who seek such power. As people stand by watching and watch the corrupt one burn, the world is reborn. The Ring ends musically, without words, in a major key (D-flat major) expressing Brünnhilde’s compassion and suggesting that perhaps the next time it will be better.

Photos above:

1—In the Seattle Ring, Wotan pondering the prize he has just seized.

2—In the first scene of Seattlle’s Rheingold, Alberich, while unsuccessfully cavorting with Rhinemaidens in the river, notices the gold.

3—The 2013 Bayreuth Ring sporting the Mount Rushmore-like carved heads of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

Ring-Related Recommendations:

Videos:

The 1991-92 Kupfer/Barenboim Bayreuth Der Ring Des Nibelungen. A 4-disc Blue-ray version of this (complete) Ring is now available for $57.44! (An 11-disc DVD version of it is also available for $58.25.) Of the three classic Ring videos, the 1979-80 “sociopolitical” Chéreau/Boulez Bayreuth Ring ($120 on Amazon, DVD only),  the 1989-90 “traditional” Schenk/Levine Met Ring ($80, DVD only), and the Kupfer/Barenboim Ring, Kupfer’s “psychological” Ring with Daniel Barenboim conducting is the best of the three—and the cheapest. Barenboim is a fine conductor (and Furtwängler disciple). He is arguably the best modern-day conductor for this work.

Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl. This film on Hitler’s 1934 rally at Nuremberg is the ultimate visual depiction of power, in a remastered, high-resolution edition.

CDs:

Magic Fire, Broken Vows, and Passionate Love: Speight Jenkins’ Guide to Wagner’s Ring. An engaging introduction to this work by the General Director of Seattle Opera, with musical excerpts from the 1952 Keilberth Bayreuth Ring. A 4-CD set. This is a great way to start with The Ring.

Furtwängler’s 1950 La Scala Ring Cycle – Box Set – by Pristine Classical. Andrew Rose’s XR remastering of the cycle for Pristine Audio, in 2013 (€162.00 – $215.90). Many Wagnerians, myself included, say that this is the best Ring Cycle ever recorded, despite its less-than-perfect sound. Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954) gets into the fabric of this work in deeper and more revelatory way than any other conductor. And Kirsten Flagstad as Brünnhilde is a force of nature. Surprisingly, the Fonit Cetra LP recording of this cycle is more muddy and indistinct and (a striking admission for an analogue person like me) pales in comparison to this Pristine Classical CD set of the cycle. This is the only 1950 Furtwängler La Scala Ring to get, on the www.pristineclassical.com website (it is not available on Amazon).

One hopes that at some point BBC will release CDs and/or a FLAC download of Barenboim’s widely heralded concert performance of the Wagner Ring at the 2013 BBC Proms Classical Music Festival. (It might be possible to obtain now a RAR-file download of the broadcast of this Ring as a member of the Google group SymphonyShare.)

Books:

Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century by Martin Gregor-Dellin. The best one-volume biography of Wagner published on the hundredth anniversary of his death (1983).

Wagner: His Life and Music by Stephen Johnson (2007, 256 pages with 2 CDs). This former Chief Music Critic for The Scotsman and commentator for BBC Radio 3 has written an engaging, concise biography of Wagner with musical examples on 2 CDs that come with the book. Highly recommended.

Wagner’s Ring: Turning the Sky Round by M. Owen Lee (1989, 120 pages). Five relatively short essays on The Ring presented by Father Owen Lee at intermissions of performances of the cycle. You will find yourself captivated by this beautifully phrased and insightful account of The Ring operas.

English National Opera Guides on the Wagner Ring: ENO Guide 35—Das Rheingold/The Rhinegold; Guide 21—The Valkyrie (Die Walküre); 28—Siegfried; and ENO Guide 31—Twilight of the Gods (Die Götterdämmerung). Each Guide contains the text of the opera translated by Andrew Porter, musical notations of the key musical motifs—also known as leitmotifs (short melodic phrases associated with specific characters, emotions, situations, and elements)—in the work, and interesting articles on the various operas. These guides are useful to have when listening to CDs of The Ring.

The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee and published in the UK as Wagner and Philosophy (2001, 416 pages). A “lucid, clear summary of Wagner’s philosophical views,” as one customer reviewer on Amazon.com aptly puts it. A great read.

Heart in Hand  — My book on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (and his influence on Wagner), the films of Woody Allen, and on my life as a heart surgeon. See especially Chapter 5, “The Metaphysics of Music,” available online HERE (28 pages); Chapter 3, “The Philosophical, Moral, and Medical Importance of Compassion,” HERE (24 pages); and Chapter 2, “The Significance of Sex,” available HERE (25 pages). Living in Seattle for the last 40 years and attending many of the Seattle Opera Ring cycles fueled my interest in Wagner and Schopenhauer.

Benjamin’s Ring: The Story of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung for Young Readers by Roz Goldfarb (104 pages with illustrations, $11.65 on Amazon). I bought this book for my 10-year-old grandson and found it to be a fun read for old readers (like me) as well. It begins: “Once upon a time and a long time ago, high up in the clouds lived a family of gods. At that time the world was divided into three separate parts: the gods, who lived above; the mortals who lived on the earth; and those who lived under the ground were called the Nibelung.”

Websites:

www.wagneropera.net  A nice site on Richard Wagner and his operas, with information on the Bayreuth Festival, Wagner performers, and among other things, recommendations on Wagner DVDs and CDs and books about him and his operas.

www.wagnerheim.com  A more than 1000-page, scene-by-scene analysis of Wagner’s Ring, where 178 musical motifs are identified by musical notation and audibly (with MP3 files) and pinpointed where they appear throughout the libretto—the fruit of a life-time’s study of The Ring by Wagnerian Paul Heise.

This blog written
by one of our Contributing Writer and Pilot. This is in reference
to the September 28th blog “Hell no, I won’t go”
and some of the viewer comments left for him on the September 30th
blog.

THE INDIGNITY
OF SECURITY

In the 9 years
since 9-11 there have been exactly 0 incidents of hijackings or
terror attacks by individuals boarding domestic aircraft
in this country (not an international flight originating from another
country). When coupled with the facts that there are over 30,000
commercial departures per day with an average passenger load per
flight easily exceeding 25, then this most recent mathematical history
teaches us:

That the
odds of being subject to a terrorist attack on a domestic (US) commercial
airliner today are greater than 22 BILLION, 173 MILLION, 750 THOUSAND
to 1 (22,173,750,000)! Woefully lower than getting hit by lightening,
attacked by a shark and a refund from the IRS; all at the same time!

And I’m
the one full of hot air for trying to bring reason to all
this security-hyped nonsense? I’m the paranoid one for
trying to raise your awareness to the pragmatic inevitability that
short of full-blown x-rays and dogs up your butt you can’t
stop every attack? No, unfortunately my mathematically-challenged
and ‘Threat-Level’ terrified brethren, I’m just one
of the few (with a set) standing up. Not standing up because I’m
embarrassed by my body mind you. Not standing up because I’m
in a hurry either, because if I were I certainly wouldn’t be
wasting my time standing in the TSA ‘Rope & Grope’
line. No, I’m merely standing up for what makes sense.

And electronic
strip-searches and indiscriminate fondling by our new ‘Brown-Shirts’
(Hitler Youth) brings nothing advantageous to the security issue
and does everything to worsen it. Why? Because the borders of this
country are so wide-open that no terrorist need bother with the
TSA and all its anal-ness? Any half-wit al Qaeda that can manage
to walk across the border (like ever one else) with a Stinger or
RPG can just waltz up to any major airport, take aim and bring down
you narrow-minded exhibitionists any day of the week! Yet here you
are 9 years after September 11th none the wiser, or richer for that
matter; continually reaching into your dwindling bag of liberties
(and Dignity) and dolling out more and more for imagined security.

And obviously
most of you don’t realize just how poorly our airline industry
is doing these days; let alone how things really work. Do you think
the major’s got together and demanded that the Air Marshalls
move from First Class to Coach for nothing? I mean, what with a
whopping 1000 or so total Marshalls extrapolated over the entire
air-carrier network, what does a few (very few) First Class seats
translate into anyway? And yes, getting hit in the bottom line does
tend to get the big-boys (i.e. Delta, American, etc.) to do for
us what this ever-bloating government that you all don’t seem
to mind bending over for, would never do.

And no, I don’t
think psychiatry is appropriate here. Perhaps brain surgery to remove
your heads out of your collective asses would be more appropriate;
because it appears that most of you haven’t figured out that
all this FBS is just for show. And that government just wants more
ways to flagellate you all; which apparently you’re not getting
enough of yet.

So my advice
for all you flaccid ones out there who take issue with people for
standing up against such wasteful invasions of privacy is, buy plenty
of KY Jelly. Because thanks to you holes of little resistance, this
unrestrained government’s patoodling is just going to get harder,
longer and more frequent!

Reprinted
with permission from AirlineNightmare.com.

November
9, 2010

These are the supplements that I take, along with their doses and a brief explanation of each one’s benefits:

The Top Ten:

• Vitamin D3 — 5,000 IU/day

  Called the "master key to optimum health," vitamin D controls the expression of more than 1,000 genes throughout the body, notably in the immune system, in endothelial cells lining blood vessels, pancreatic beta cells, and brain neurons. Genes that vitamin D express prevent influenza and treat tuberculosis, strengthen muscles, prevent common cancers (and possibly suppress metastasizes), and prevent autoimmune diseases. Vitamin D also expresses genes that blunt the immune system—mediated inflammatory response that propagates atherosclerosis and congestive heart failure. For most people the dose needed to reach an optimal vitamin D blood level (25-hydroxyvitamin D) of 50 ng/ml is 5,000 IU/day, ten times the government’s recommended dietary allowance (RDA). People with cancer, chronic illness, and neurodegenerative diseases should take sufficient vitamin D to attain a level of 80 ng/ml (which requires 8,000—10,000 IU/day). See my article "Vitamin D in a New Light."

• Iodine — 12.5 mg/day (two drops of 5% Lugol’s solution or one Iodoral tablet)

  Iodine taken in doses 100 times the RDA (100—150 micrograms/day) has important extrathyroidal benefits. These include its role as an antioxidant, in preventing and treating fibrocystic disease of the breast, and in preventing and treating cancer. In the right dose, iodine helps keep the immune system healthy, and it provides antiseptic mucosal defense in the mouth, stomach, and vagina. People who take iodine in milligram doses say that they feel healthier, have a sense of well being and increased energy. See my article "Iodine for Health."

• Selenium — 200 mcg/day, as selenomethionine

  Bound to cysteine in place of sulfur and called the "21st amino acid," selenocysteine is the active site in some 35 proteins. Glutathione peroxidase, which contains four selenium atoms, plays a major role in free radical defense. Plasma selenoprotein P protects endothelial cells against damage, and epithelial selenoprotein protects prostratic secretory cells from developing carcinoma. People deficient in selenium have an increased risk of cancer. Selenium prevents cancer through a variety of mechanisms, which include antioxidant protection, enhanced immune surveillance, suppression of angiogenesis, regulation of cell proliferation, enhancement of apoptosis (cell death), and inhibition of tumor cell invasion. See my article on selenium titled "The Moon Goddess’ Role in Human Health."

• Vitamin K2 — 90 mcg/day, as menaquinone-7

  Vitamin K comes in two basic forms, K1 and K2. K1 is a cofactor for blood coagulation. K2 activates osteocalcin, a protein secreted by osteoblasts that plays a role bone mineralization and calcium ion hemostasis. Calcium deposits in the walls of blood vessels play an active role in the formation of atherosclerosis. K2 activates a protein called matrix Gla (carboxyglutamic acid) protein. It carboxylates the glutamate residues in matrix Gla protein, which enables it to bind and remove calcium from blood vessels and thus prevent the formation of atherosclerotic calcific plaques. Vitamins D and K2 work together in this regard because vitamin D expresses the gene that makes matrix Gla protein. Menaquinone-7, the natural form of vitamin K2, is better than synthetic menaquinone-4, the more widely marketed form of vitamin K2.

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Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com

Donald Miller Archives

The CDC’s 15-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) makes recommendations each year on who should be vaccinated. Ten years ago, for the 1999—2000 season, the committee recommended that people over age 65 and children with medical conditions have a flu shot. Seventy-four million people were vaccinated. Next season (2000—01) the committee lowered the age for universal vaccination from 65 to 50 years old, adding 41 million people to the list. For the 2002—03 season, the ACIP added healthy children 6 months to 23 months old, and for 2004—05, children up to 5 years old. For the 2008—09 season the committee has advised that healthy children 6 months to 18 years old have a flu shot each year. Its recommendations for influenza vaccination now covers 256 million Americans — 84 percent of the U.S. population. Only healthy people ages 19—49 not involved in some aspect of health care remain exempt. Pharmaceutical companies have made 146 million influenza vaccines for the U.S. market this flu season.

Almost all the ACIP members who make these recommendations have financial ties to the vaccine industry. The CDC therefore must grant each member a conflict-of-interest waiver.

The CDC mounts a well-orchestrated campaign each season to generate interest and demand for flu shots. Along with posters for the public, flyers, and health care provider materials, it encourages doctors to "recommend/urge flu shots." Medical groups, nonmedical organizations (like the YMCA), and the media trumpet CDC-released messages on influenza, notably: "Flu kills 36,000 per year," "This could be a bad/serious flu year," and "Flu vaccine is the best defense against flu." The government promotes National Vaccination Week, which this year is December 8—14. This year, however, rather than uniformly following the government’s "Seven-Step Recipe" for generating demand for flu shots, the mainstream media has questioned their benefits.

The New York Times had an article in the September 2, 2008 issue titled "Doubts Grow Over Flu Vaccine in Elderly," which says, "The influenza vaccine, which has been strongly recommended for people over 65 for more than four decades, is losing its reputation as an effective way to ward off the virus in the elderly. A growing number of immunologists and epidemiologists say the vaccine probably does not work very well for people over 70, the group that accounts for three-fourths of all flu deaths." The article refers to a study done by the Group Health Center for Health Studies in Seattle on 3,500 people, age 65—94, to determine if flu vaccines are effective in protecting older people against developing pneumonia (Lancet 2008;372:398—405).

The National Vital Statistics Reports compiled by the CDC show that only 1,138 deaths a year occur due to influenza alone (257 in 2001, 727 in 2002, 1,792 in 2003, 1,100 in 2004, and 1,812 in 2005). Bacterial pneumonia causes some 60,000 deaths each year, mainly in the winter, when surveillance data show increased prevalence of the flu virus. Using a mathematical (Poisson) regression model, officials estimate that the flu virus triggers some of the winter-time deaths from pneumonia, along with deaths in people with cardiovascular disease and other chronic illnesses. More than 34,000 of those "36,000" flu deaths are what officials estimate are "influenza-associated" pneumonic and cardiovascular deaths.

The Group Health study reported in the New York Times and other newspapers around the country found that flu shots do not protect elderly people against developing pneumonia. Pneumonia occurs with equal frequency in people over age 65 with or without a flu shot. Earlier studies, biased by the "healthy user effect," over-estimated the vaccine’s effect on pneumonia because they did not adjust for the presence and severity of other diseases in unvaccinated people. As the Group Health authors point out, "The study found that people who were healthy and conscientious about staying well were the most likely to get an annual flu shot. Those who are frail may have trouble bathing or dressing on their own and are less likely to get to their doctor’s office or a clinic to receive the vaccine. They are also more likely to be closer to death." Other investigators question that there is a mortality benefit with influenza vaccination. Vaccination coverage among the elderly increased from 15% in 1980 to 65% now, but there has been no decrease in deaths from influenza and pneumonia (Am J Respir Crit Care Med 2008;178:527—33). As one vaccine researcher puts it, "I think the evidence base [for mortality benefits from flu shots] we have leaned on is not valid" (Lancet Infect Dis 2007;7:658—66).

There is also a lack of evidence that young children benefit from flu shots. A systematic review of 51 studies involving 260,000 children age 6 to 23 months found no evidence that the flu vaccine is any more effective than a placebo (Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2006;1:CD004879).

Randomized controlled trials are the most reliable way to determine the efficacy — and safety — of a given treatment. No randomized trials show that flu shots reduce mortality from influenza or flu-related pneumonia. Some do show that the flu vaccine is somewhat effective in preventing influenza. In one widely quoted study, 1838 volunteers age 60 and over were randomized to receive a flu shot or placebo (a shot of saline). The flu shot reduced the relative risk of contracting (serologically confirmed, clinical) influenza by a seemingly impressive 50%. The incidence of influenza in the unvaccinated people in this study was 3%. In the vaccinated group it was 2% (JAMA 1994;272:1661—5). Flu shots reduced the absolute risk of contracting influenza by a meager 1% (not 50%, as the "relative risk" portrays it). In actuality, for every 100 people that have a flu shot only one will benefit from it — this, in medical parlance, is the "number needed to treat" (NNT) in order to achieve any benefit from the treatment. A flu shot provides no benefit for the other 99 people — 2 of them will get influenza anyway — and all 100 risk being harmed by the vaccine.

Another randomized trial by Zaman and coworkers published recently (NEJM 2008;359: published online September 17, in print October 9) found that the incidence of influenza in infants whose mothers had a flu shot during their pregnancy was 4% (6/159). The incidence of flu in infants whose mothers did not have a flu shot was 10% (16/157). In this study (done in Bangladesh and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, and others) flu shots reduced the relative risk of influenza illness in infants by a seemingly impressive 63%. But only 6 out of 100 infants benefited from the shot. The other 94 received no benefit — 4 got influenza anyway — and all are at risk from being harmed by the vaccine, particularly from the mercury, aluminum, and formaldehyde in it.

After officials select the three strains of flu virus that they think are most likely to be circulating during the next winter season (they picked the wrong ones last year), vaccine makers grow the viruses in fertilized chicken eggs, with 500,000 eggs per day (each examined by hand) for up to eight months. Formaldehyde is used to inactivate the virus. It is a known cancer-causing agent. Aluminum is added to promote an antibody response. It is a neurotoxin that may play a role in Alzheimer’s disease. Other additives and adjuvants in the flu vaccine include Triton X-100 (a detergent), Polysorbate 80, carbolic acid, ethylene glycol (antifreeze), gelatin, and various antibiotics — neomycin, streptomycin, and gentamicin — that can cause allergic reactions in some people.

Two-thirds of the vaccines made for the 2008—09 flu season, 100 million of them, contain full-dose thimerosal, an organomercury compound, which is 49% mercury by weight. (An unidentified number of the other 50 million vaccines contain either "no" or "trace" amounts of thimerosal.) It is used to disinfect the vaccine. Each one of these 100 million flu shots contain 25 micrograms of mercury, a mercury content that is 50,000 part per billion, 250 times more than the Environmental Protection Agency’s safety limit. Mercury is a neurotoxin, which has a toxicity level 1,000 times that of lead.

There is some evidence that flu shots cause Alzheimer’s disease. This most likely is a result of combining mercury with aluminum and formaldehyde, which renders them much more toxic together through a synergistic effect than each would be alone. One investigator has reported that people who received the flu vaccine each year for 3 to 5 years had a ten-fold greater chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease than people who did not have any flu shots (Int J Clin Invest 2005;1:1—4). (The brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease display three pathologic hallmarks: neurofibillary tangles, amyloid plaques, and phosphorylation of tau protein. Brain cells grown in test tubes develop these changes when exposed to nanomolar doses of mercury, doses similar to the amount of mercury a person gets from a flu shot.)

Mercury in vaccines has also been implicated as a cause of autism. Vaccine makers have now removed thimerosal from all childhood vaccines, except flu shots. For more on this subject see my article "Mercury on the Mind," with its recommended reading list, and Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy by David Kirby.

Three serious, acknowledged adverse reactions to the flu vaccine are joint inflammation and arthritis, anaphylactic shock (and other life-threatening allergic reactions), and Guillain-Barré syndrome. Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is a paralytic autoimmune disease that fells people several weeks after their flu shot. One woman with post-vaccination GBS writes:

"I had a flu shot in November, and by December I became weak and continued to get weaker until I collapsed and was taken to the hospital… I was helpless, totally paralyzed with Guillain-Barré syndrome… I was in ICU for three weeks and then transferred to a rehabilitation center. Three months later I was released to come home because I could ambulate approximately 100 feet with a walker. I continued rehabilitation as an outpatient for the next three months until I could walk with hand crutches. Today, I need a cane. I was not forewarned of any possible hazard when they gave me the flu shot."

Another:

"I have a friend, now in a wheelchair, who took the flu shot, got Guillain-Barré and now cannot walk."

Another woman, diagnosed with GBS after a flu shot, spent 16 months in the hospital paralyzed on a ventilator and life support. After several subsequent multi-month hospitalizations she writes:

"On my last visit to my neurologist I was able to walk about 6 feet holding his hand, not much but it took years to be able to do that. I scratch my head when I hear them promoting flu shots… Most people that I come into contact with — in the hospital and out (nurses, doctors, and regular people) — after hearing my story, feel that it is better to chance the flu and not get the shot." (These statements are in Vaccine Safety Manual for Concerned Families and Health Practitioners: Guide to Immunizations Risks and Protection by Neil Miller [no relation], pages 84—86.)

The package inserts that come with the flu vaccine note that GBS is a potential complication. There are 1 to 2 cases of GBS per 1 million vaccinated persons. (There were 10 times that many cases of GBS in 1976 with the flu vaccine used that year). Taking a flu shot is essentially the same as buying a lottery ticket for acquiring Guillain-Barré syndrome.

Seventy percent of doctors do not get a flu shot.

Flu virus exists in people year-round, and new strains seed a population during the "off-season." In the northern and southern temperate zones, flu epidemics occur in the cold part of the year, October—March and April—September respectively. Flu epidemics occur in the tropics during the rainy season.

Explanations for why flu epidemics occur in the winter when it is cold — people being indoors in close contact, drier air dehydrating mucus and preventing the body from expelling virus particles, the virus lingering longer on exposed surfaces, like doorknobs, with colder temperatures — do not explain why flu epidemics occur in the tropics.

Something that can explain why flu epidemics also occur both in warm and cold climates is this: During a flu epidemic, wherever it may be, the atmosphere blocks ultraviolet B (UVB) radiation from the Sun. In the temperate zones above latitude 35 degrees North and South, the sun is at a low enough angle in the winter that the ozone layer in the atmosphere absorbs and blocks the short-wavelength (280—315 nanometers) UVB rays. In the tropics during the wet season, thick rain clouds block UVB rays.

Skin contains a cholesterol derivative, 7-dehydrocholesterol. UVB radiation on skin breaks open one of the carbon rings in this molecule to form vitamin D. The activated form of vitamin D (1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D) attaches to receptors on genes that control their expression, which turn protein production on or off. Vitamin D regulates the expression of more than 1,000 genes throughout the body. They include ones in macrophages, cells in the immune system that, among other things, attack and destroy viruses. Vitamin D switches on genes in macrophages that make antimicrobial peptides, antibiotics the body produces. Like antibiotics, these peptides attack and destroy bacteria; but unlike antibiotics, they also attack and destroy viruses.

Vitamin D also expresses genes that stop macrophages from overreacting to an infection and releasing too many inflammatory agents — cytokines — that can damage infected tissue. Vitamin D, for example, down regulates genes that produce interleukin-2 and interferon gamma, two cytokines that prime macrophages and cytotoxic T cells to attack the body’s tissues. In the 1918—19 Spanish flu pandemic that killed 500,000 Americans, young healthy adults would wake up in the morning feeling well, start drowning in their own inflammation as the day wore on, and be dead by midnight, as happened to my 22-year-old grandmother and my wife’s 24-year-old grandmother. Autopsies showed complete destruction of the epithelial cells lining the respiratory tract resulting, researchers now know, from a macrophage-induced severe inflammatory reaction to the virus. In a terribly misguided way, these victims’ own immune system attacked and killed them, not the virus, something in future pandemics vitamin D, in appropriate doses, can prevent.

A creditable hypothesis that explains the seasonal nature of flu is that influenza is a vitamin D deficiency disease. Cannell and colleagues offer this hypothesis in "Epidemic Influenza and Vitamin D" (Epidemiol Infect 2006;134:1129—40). They quote Hippocrates (circa 400 B.C.), who said, "Whoever wishes to investigate medicine properly should proceed thus: in the first place to consider the seasons of the year." Vitamin D levels in the blood fall to their lowest point during flu seasons. Unable to be protected by the body’s own antibiotics (antimicrobial peptides) that this gene-expresser engineers, a person with a low vitamin D blood level is more vulnerable to contracting colds, influenza, and other respiratory infections (e.g., respiratory syncytial virus).

Studies show that children with rickets, a vitamin D-deficient skeletal disorder, suffer from frequent respiratory infections; and children exposed to sunlight are less likely to get a cold. Given vitamin D’s wide-ranging effects on gene expression, other studies, for example, show that people diagnosed with cancer in the summer have an improved survival compared with those diagnosed in the winter (Int J Cancer 2006;119:1530—36).

A growing body of evidence indicates that rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults (both a softening of bones due to defective bone mineralization) are just the tip of a vitamin D-deficiency iceberg. Tuberculosis and various autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, and type I diabetes have a causal association with low vitamin D blood levels. Vitamin D deficiency plays a causal role in hypertension, coronary artery disease, congestive heart failure, peripheral vascular disease, and stroke. It is also a risk factor for metabolic syndrome and type II diabetes, chronic fatigue, seasonal affective disorder, depression, cataracts, infertility, and osteoporosis. At the bottom of the vitamin D iceberg lies cancer. There is good evidence that vitamin D deficiency is a causal factor in some 15 different common cancers. (NEJM 2007;357:266—81.)

The increased number of deaths that occur in winter, largely from pneumonia and cardiovascular diseases, are much more likely due to vitamin D deficiency than to an increased prevalence of serologically-positive influenza virus (which also results from vitamin D deficiency).

Experts reckon that an optimum blood level of vitamin D (25-hydroxyvitamin D) is 50—99 ng/ml. (Children need a blood level >8 ng/ml to prevent rickets. It takes a concentration >20 to maintain parathyroid hormone levels in a normal range. A level >34 is needed for peak intestinal calcium absorption. And in elderly people neuromuscular performance steadily improves as vitamin D blood levels rise to 50 ng/ml.) The government’s recommended daily allowance (RDA) for vitamin D is 400 IU (international units) a day, an amount sufficient to prevent rickets and osteomalacia but not vitamin D’s other gene-regulating benefits. To achieve all of vitamin D’s benefits one has to take an amount ten times the government’s RDA — 4,000 to 5,000 IU a day.

A light-skinned person will synthesize 20,000 IU of vitamin D in 20 minutes sunbathing on a tropical beach, at which point vitamin D synthesis shuts down for the day (it takes a dark-skinned person 6 to 10 times longer to make this amount). Human breast milk does not contain vitamin D, since, from an evolutionary standpoint, our African ancestors’ infants, reared near the equator, could readily synthesize this gene regulator from sunlight in their skin. Food contains very little vitamin D. (The highest concentrations are in wild salmon, mackerel, sardines, and cod liver oil.) Federal regulations now require that some foods, like milk, be fortified with vitamin D. But one would have to drink 200 glasses of milk to obtain the amount of vitamin D a light-skinned person can make in 20 minutes sunbathing.

The majority of Americans are vitamin D deficient, with a 25-hydroxy D blood level <20 ng/ml, or insufficient, with a level of 20—<30 ng/ml. Cheap vitamin D supplements (D3, not D2) provide the only way most of us can maintain a year-round vitamin D blood levels greater than 50 ng/ml. That requires taking 4—5,000 IU of vitamin D a day (50,000 IU every ten days or 150,000 IU a month).

Taking vitamin D in these doses is safe, far safer than a flu shot with all the bad chemicals it contains. Concerns about vitamin D toxicity are overblown. One can take a 10,000 IU vitamin D supplement on a daily basis without any adverse effects. In healthy persons, long-term consumption of more than 40,000 IU a day is necessary to cause an elevation in the blood calcium level (hypercalcemia), the first manifestation of vitamin D toxicity (Am J Clin Nutr 2006;84:694—97). Check your vitamin D (25-hydroxy D) blood level. People with granulomatous diseases like sarcoidosis should also check their blood level of 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D, the active form.

Can a shot (or tablets) of vitamin D prevent influenza better than a flu shot? There is good reason to believe that it can.

Doctors in India and Canada give people a once-yearly injection of 600,000 IU of vitamin D (MJA 2005;183:10—12). That would be better, and safer, than having a flu shot. Daily, weekly, or monthly vitamin D tablets work just as well. For more on this subject see my article "Vitamin D in a New Light" and visit Dr. Cannell’s Vitamin D Council website.

Investigators have completed one double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial that shows vitamin D prevents colds and influenza significantly better (P <0.002) than a placebo pill (Epidemiol Infection 2007;135:1095—6). A large multi-center randomized trial conducted over multiple flu seasons comparing vitamin D to a flu shot can show conclusively which is better, and safer. But given the financial stakes underpinning flu shots, and unpatentable vitamin D, who will fund it?

In the meantime, considering what is most likely to be the outcome of such a trial, if it is ever conducted, I recommend that you avoid flu shots and take vitamin D instead.

Notes

Influenza virus Flu viruses are classified into types A, B, and C. Type A viruses cause most influenza epidemics. They exist, replicate, and mutate in swine and horses; seals, dolphins, and whales; migratory water birds, geese and ducks; domestic birds chicken and turkeys; and humans. Type B and C viruses exist only in humans and only type B causes (relatively mild) infections. Influenza A viruses are further categorized into subtypes on the basis of two surface antigens (proteins): hemaglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). There are 15 different H and 9 different N antigens. The 1918—19 Spanish flu pandemic was caused by an H1NI Type A virus. Subtypes of influenza viruses are further classified by the names of cities, states or countries, along with the year they were discovered. For the 2008—09 (northern temperate zone) season, officials predict and have directed vaccines to be made against A/Brisbane/59/2007 (H1N1), A/Brisbane/10/2007 (H3N2), and B/Florida/4/2006. In an unusual departure, they are all different from the previous season, which missed the strains that caused influenza that season. What doctors diagnose as "influenza" is often an influenza-like illness caused by a respiratory virus other than the flu. Serologic tests are necessary to prove that one’s respiratory illness is actually caused by the flu virus.

Other things to do to prevent the flu Avoid sugar. It suppresses immunity. Avoid Omega-6 vegetable oils (corn, safflower, sunflower, peanut, canola, and soybean oil). Americans consume 50 times more of these oils than are necessary for good health. In this amount they are powerful immune suppressants. Take a well-balanced multivitamin/mineral capsule on a daily basis. Eat garlic. Manage stress. Exercise. Get enough rest. And wash your hands. Viruses spread most often from touching contaminated objects, like doorknobs, phones, shared computer keyboards, and shaking hands.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com

Donald Miller Archives

DIGG THIS

Six paradigms in the biomedical and climate sciences have become established orthodoxies. Some of them, like HIV/AIDS and the lipid hypothesis of coronary artery disease have achieved the status of dogma. Nevertheless, skeptics have raised valid questions about them. With the real cause, truth, or more probable hypothesis for the disease or phenomenon in question added, along with selected references, they are:

Cholesterol and saturated fats cause coronary artery disease (the lipid hypothesis)

Coronary atherosclerosis is an inflammatory response to arterial injury. Things that can injure the inner lining (endothelium) of coronary arteries include chronic stress, smoking, and a lack of physical exercise.

Injurious nutritional causes include excessive consumption of sugar (and white flour), Omega-6 polyunsaturated vegetable oils (which promote inflammation), and any amount of trans fatty acids. Cholesterol and saturated fats are innocent.

Nutrient deficiencies that predispose to vessel injury include insufficient intake of Omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins (particularly B6, B12, C and E), amino acids (particularly arginine and L-carnitine), minerals (selenium, magnesium, iodine, copper), and other free radical-quenching antioxidants (alpha lipoic acid and coenzyme Q10) and flavonoids (plant phenols).

Increased iron and homocysteine blood levels and microbial infection (Chlamydia pneumoniae) play a causative role in atherosclerosis. Impaired nitric oxide release, and depletion, also plays a role (nitric oxide relaxes blood vessels and blocks the release of inflammatory cytokines).

Uffe Ravnskov. The Cholesterol Myths: Exposing the fallacy that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease (2000), 304 pages, 350 references.

Anthony Colpo. The Great Cholesterol Con: Why everything you’ve been told about cholesterol, diet and heart disease is wrong! (2006), 348 pages, 1,400 references.

Mary Enig and Sally Fallon. The Oiling of America. Nexus Magazine, Dec 1998—Jan 1999 and Feb—Mar 1999 issues. (Also posted on the Weston A. Price Foundation website.)

Genetic mutations cause cancer

The real cause is aneuploidy, an abnormal number and/or structure of chromosomes, in concert with replicative telomere (the caps on the ends of chromosomes) erosion and epigenetic maturation arrest of tissue stem cells (due to methylation of DNA).

Peter Duesberg. Chromosomal Chaos and Cancer. Scientific American, May 2007, pg 53—59.

Reinhard Stindl. Defining the steps that lead to cancer: Replicative telomere erosion, aneuploidy and an epigenetic maturation arrest of tissue stem cells. Medical Hypotheses (2008), doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2008.01.010 (in press, corrected proof available online February 27, 2008).

Harvey Bialy. Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS: A Scientific Life & Times of Peter H. Duesberg (2004).

See my article, "A Modern-Day Copernicus: Peter H. Duesberg" (2006).

Human activity is causing global warming through increased CO2 emissions

Variations in solar intensity and the sun’s magnetic effect on celestial cosmic rays cause global warming (and cooling), not CO2 emissions, natural or human-generated.

Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder. The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change (2007), 256 pages. You can be sure Al Gore won’t read this book.

Fred Singer and Dennis Avery. Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years (2007), 276 pages. He won’t read this one either.

Willie Soon and Sally Baliunas. Lessons and limits of climate history: Was the 20th century climate unusual? George C. Marshall Institute, April 17, 2003.

See my articles,

"Solar and Celestial Causes of Global Warming" (2007).

"Toro! Toro! Michael Crichton" (2005).

"Finding Truth in Phoenix" (2003).

HIV causes AIDS

The real cause: Lifestyle (receptive anal intercourse), heavy duty recreational drugs (cocaine, heroin, nitrite inhalants, and amphetamines), anti-viral chemotherapy, and nutrition. In the West, 98 percent of AIDS cases occur in gay men and IV drug users.

Henry Bauer. The Origin, Persistence, and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory (2007). Dr. Bauer is a professor emeritus of chemistry and science studies and former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Tech. This is perhaps the best single reference to date questioning the HIV/AIDS theory.

Duesberg P, Koehnlein C, Rasnick D. The chemical bases of the various AIDS epidemics: Recreational drugs, anti-viral chemotherapy and malnutrition. Journal of Bioscience 2003;28:383—412.

See my articles,

"A Modern-Day Copernicus: Peter H. Duesberg" (2006)

"Finding Truth in Phoenix" (2003)

The linear no-threshold hypothesis

This hypothesis says that the damaging effects of toxins are dose-dependent in a linear fashion down to zero. Even a tiny amount of a toxin, such as radiation or cigarette smoke, will harm some people. The real truth is: Low doses of a toxin can be beneficial, based on the phenomenon of hormesis — "a dose response phenomenon whereby a substance that in a high dose inhibits, or is toxic to, a biological process will, in a much smaller dose, stimulate (or protect) that same process." Radiation in small doses stimulates immune system defenses, prevents oxidative DNA damage, and prevents and suppresses cancer.

Scott BR, Sanders CL, Mitchel RE, Boreham DR. CT scans may reduce rather than increase the risk of cancer. Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. 2008;13(1,Spring):9—11.

Ed Hiserodt. Underexposed: What if radiation is actually good for you? (2005).

Calabrese DJ. Historical blunders: How toxicology got the dose-response relationship half right. Cellular and Molecular Biology 2005;51:643—654.

See my article, "Afraid of Radiation? Low Doses are good for you" (2004).

The membrane-pump theory of cell physiology

This theory says that cells are aqueous solutions enclosed by a cell membrane, which contains energy-consuming ion pumps.

A competing, revolutionary, and perhaps more accurate hypothesis for the structure of cells is the Association-Induction hypothesis. Gerald Pollack and Gilbert Ling posit in this hypothesis that the three main components of a living cell — proteins, water, and potassium ions — are structured together in a gel-like matrix, where the cell’s water is organized into layers alongside proteins. Cell function does not depend on the integrity of the cell membrane, and membrane "pumps" and "channels" are not what they seem.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a product of this view of cell physiology.

Gerald Pollack. Cells, gels and the engines of life. (2001).

Gilbert Ling. Life at the cell and below-cell level: The hidden history of a fundamental revolution in biology. (2001).

Scientists who question these paradigms are denied grants by peer review study panels. The reviewers enforce these state-sanctioned orthodoxies by rejecting applications for funding research that challenges them. I review this subject in The Government Grant System: Inhibitor of Truth and Innovation?, published in the Journal of Information Ethics 2007;16(1, Spring 2007):59—69 (and posted on LewRockwell.com).

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com

Donald Miller Archives

There are thirteen
vitamins humans need for growth and development and to maintain
good health. The human body cannot make these essential bio-molecules.
They must be supplied in the diet or by bacteria in the intestine,
except for vitamin D. Skin makes vitamin D when exposed to ultraviolet
B (UVB) radiation from the sun. A light-skinned person will synthesize
20,000 IU (international units) of vitamin D in 20 minutes
sunbathing on a Caribbean beach.

Vitamin D is
also unique in another way. It is the only vitamin that is a hormone,
a type of steroid hormone known as a secosteroid, with three
carbon rings.

Steroid hormones
such as cortisone, estrogen, and testosterone have four carbon rings.
Ultraviolet B radiation in sunlight breaks open one of the rings
in a steroid alcohol present in the skin, 7-dehydrocholesterol,
to form vitamin D (cholecalciferol). The liver changes this molecule
into its circulating form, 25-hydroxyvitamin D (calcidiol,
25[OH]D), the "vitamin D" blood tests measure. Cells throughout
the body absorb 25-hydroxyvitamin D and change it into 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin
D (calcitriol), the active form of vitamin D that attaches directly
to receptors on the DNA of genes in the cell's nucleus.

The vitamin
D hormone system controls the expression of more than 200 genes
and the proteins they produce. In addition to its well-known role
in calcium metabolism, vitamin D activates genes that control cell
growth and programmed cell death (apoptosis), express mediators
that regulate the immune system, and release neurotransmitters (e.g.,
serotonin) that influence one's mental state.

Severe deficiencies
of some vitamins cause vitamin-specific diseases, such as beriberi
(from a lack of vitamin B1, thiamine), pellagra (B3, niacin), pernicious
anemia (B12), and scurvy, (vitamin C). A deficiency in iodine produces
a goiter, mental retardation, and, when severe, cretinism.

Rickets, a
softening and bending of bones in children, first described in 1651,
is another nutritionally-specific disease. It reached epidemic proportions
following the industrial revolution, which began in the 1750s. In
the 19th century, before the importance of exposing children
to sunlight was recognized, the majority of children that lived
in cities with sunless, narrow alleyways and pollution developed
rickets. An autopsy study done in Boston in the late 1800s showed
that more than 80 percent of children had rickets.

Early in the
20th century an investigator found that cod liver oil
could prevent rickets in puppies. The nutritional factor in the
oil that promotes skeletal calcium deposition was named "vitamin
D," alphabetically after already-named vitamins A, B, and C.
Rickets was thought to be another vitamin-deficiency disease, and
the curative agent, a steroid hormone, was mislabeled a "vitamin."

Now, a century
later, a wealth of evidence suggests that rickets, its most florid
manifestation, is the tip of a vitamin D insufficiency/deficiency
iceberg. A lack of Vitamin D can also trigger infections (influenza
and tuberculosis), autoimmune diseases (multiple sclerosis, Type
1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and inflammatory bowel disease),
cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Practitioners of conventional
medicine (i.e., most MDs) are just beginning to appreciate the true
impact of vitamin D deficiency. In 1990, medical journals published
less than 20 reviews and editorials on vitamin D. Last year they
published more than 300 reviews and editorials on this vitamin/hormone.
This year, on July 19, 2007, even the New England Journal of
Medicine, the bellwether of pharmaceutically-oriented conventional
medicine in the U.S., published a review on vitamin D that addresses
its role in autoimmune diseases, infections, cardiovascular disease,
and cancer (N Engl J Med 2007;357:266–281).

Up until 1980,
doctors thought that vitamin D was only involved in calcium, phosphorus,
and bone metabolism. Then two investigators proposed
that vitamin D and sunlight could reduce the risk of colon cancer.
A growing body of evidence indicates that they were right and that
vitamin D can prevent a whole host of cancers – colon, breast,
lung, pancreatic, ovarian, and prostate cancer among them. Colon
cancer rates are 4 to 6 times higher in North America and Europe,
where solar radiation is less intense, particularly during the winter
months, compared to the incidence of colon cancer near the equator.
People with low blood levels of vitamin D and those who live at
higher latitudes are at increased risk for acquiring various kinds
of cancer. Many epidemiological, cohort, and case control studies
prove, at least on a more likely than not basis, that vitamin D
supplements and adequate exposure to sunlight play an important
role in cancer prevention (Am J Public Health 2006;96:252–261).

There is now
strong scientific evidence that vitamin D does indeed reduce the
risk of cancer. Evidence from a well-conducted, randomized, placebo-controlled,
double-blind trial proves beyond a reasonable doubt that this is
the case, at least with regard to breast cancer. A Creighton University
study has shown that women over the age of 55 who took a 1,100 IU/day
vitamin D supplement, with calcium, and were followed for 4 years
had a highly statistically significant (P <0.005) 75%
reduction in breast cancer (diagnosed after the first 12 months)
compared with women who took a placebo (Am J Clin Nutr 2007;85:1568–1591).

Some
of the genes vitamin D activates make proteins that halt cancer
by inducing apoptosis (programmed cell death), which destroys aberrant
cells before they become cancerous, like adenoma cells in the colon
and rectum. Others promote cell differentiation and reining
in of out-of-control growth of cancer cells (like prostate
cancer cells). Vitamin D-expressed genes inhibit angiogenesis,
the formation of new blood vessels that malignant tumors need to
grow, as studies on lung
and
breast cancers show. Other genes inhibit metastases, preventing
cancer that arises in one organ from spreading its cells to other
parts of the body, as studied in breast,
and prostate
cancers.

Vitamin D also
expresses genes that curb cardiovascular disease. One gene controls
the renin-angiotensin system, which when overactive causes hypertension
(high blood pressure). Others stifle the immune system-mediated
inflammatory response that propagates atherosclerosis and congestive
heart failure (Curr Opin Lipidol 2007;18:41–46).

Multiple sclerosis
(MS) is a neurologically devastating disease that afflicts people
with low vitamin D levels. Its victims include the cellist Jacqueline
Du Pré, whose first symptom was loss of sensation in her
fingers, and some 500,000 Americans who currently suffer from this
malady. MS is an autoimmune disease, where the body's immune system
attacks and destroys its own cells. With multiple sclerosis, T cells
in the adaptive immune system, Th1 cells (CD4 T helper type 1 cells),
attack the myelin sheath (insulation) of the axons (nerve fibers)
that neurons (brain cells) use to transmit electrical signals. The
Vitamin D hormone system regulates and tones down the potentially
self-destructive actions of Th1 cells. These cells make their own
1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D if there is a sufficient amount of vitamin
D (25-hydroxyvitamin D) circulating in the blood. Researchers have
shown that the risk of MS decreases as the level of vitamin D in
the blood increases (JAMA 2006;296:2832–2838). People
living at higher latitudes have an increased risk of MS and other
autoimmune diseases. Studies show that people who live below latitude
35 (e.g., Atlanta) until the age of 10 reduce the risk of MS by
50% (Toxicology 2002;181–182:71–78 and Eur J
Clin Nutr 2004;58:1095–1109).

In a study
published earlier this year, researchers evaluated 79 pairs of identical
twins where only one twin in each pair had MS, despite having the
same genetic susceptibility. They found that the MS-free twin had
spent more time outdoors in the sun – during hot days, sun
tanning, and at the beach. The authors conclude that sunshine
is protective against MS (Neurology 2007;69:381–388).

New research
suggests that influenza is also a disease triggered by vitamin D
deficiency. Influenza virus exists in the population year-round,
but influenza epidemics are seasonal and occur only in the winter
(in northern latitudes), when vitamin D blood levels are at their
nadir. Vitamin D-expressed genes instruct macrophages, the front-line
defenders in the innate immune system, to make antimicrobial peptides,
which are like antibiotics (Science 2006;311:1770–1773).
These peptides attack and destroy influenza virus particles, and
in human carriers keep it at bay. (Neutrophils and natural killer
cells in the innate immune system and epithelial cells lining the
respiratory tract also synthesize these virucidal peptides.) Other
vitamin D-expressed genes rein in macrophages fighting an infection
to keep them from overreacting and releasing too many inflammatory
agents (cytokines) that can damage infected tissue. In the 1918
Spanish flu pandemic, which killed 50 million people, of which 500,000
were Americans, young healthy adults (as happened to my 22-year-old
grandmother) would wake up in the morning feeling well, start drowning
in their own inflammation as the day wore on, and be dead by midnight.
Autopsies showed complete destruction of the epithelial cells lining
the respiratory tract due, as researchers now know, to a macrophage-induced
overly severe inflammatory reaction to the virus. These flu victims
were attacked and killed by their own immune system, something researchers
have found vitamin D can prevent (Epidemiol Infect 2006;134:1129–1140).

Randomized
clinical trials need to be done to test the vitamin D theory of
influenza. With what we know now, however, perhaps an annual shot
of 600,000 IU of vitamin D (Med J Aust 2005;183:10–12)
would be more effective in preventing influenza than a jab of flu
vaccine.

Our species
evolved in equatorial Africa where the sun, shining directly overhead,
supplies its inhabitants with year-round ultraviolet B photons for
making vitamin D. Our African ancestors absorbed much higher doses
of vitamin D living exposed in that environment compared to the
amount most humans obtain today. A single mutation that occurred
around 50,000 years ago is responsible for the appearance of white
skin in humans. It turns out that a difference in one rung, or base
pair, in the 3 billion-rung DNA ladder that constitutes the human
genome determines the color of one's skin (Science 2005;310:1782–1786).
White skin, with less melanin, synthesizes vitamin D in sunlight
six times faster than dark skin. People possessing this mutation
were able to migrate to higher latitudes, populate Europe, Asia,
and North America, and be able to make enough vitamin D to survive.

The majority
of the world's population now lives above latitude 35 N and is
unable to synthesize vitamin D from sunlight for a period of time
in winter owing to the angle of the sun. At a large solar zenith
angle, ozone in the upper atmosphere will completely block UVB radiation.
In Seattle (47 N) and London (52 N), from October to April UVB
photons are blocked by the atmosphere so one's skin cannot make
vitamin D. (The half-life of circulating vitamin D is approximately
one month.) Making matters worse, even when UVB radiation is available
in sunlight, health authorities, led by the American Academy of
Dermatology, warn people to shield themselves from the sun to avoid
getting skin cancer.

Except for
oily fish like (wild-only) salmon, mackerel, and sardines and cod
liver oil – and also sun-dried mushrooms – very little
vitamin D is naturally present in our food. Milk, orange juice,
butter, and breakfast cereal are fortified with vitamin D, but with
only 100 IU per serving. One would have to drink 200 8-oz. glasses
of milk to obtain as much vitamin D as skin makes fully exposed
to the noonday sun.

The U.S. Food
and Nutrition Board in the Institute of Medicine puts the Recommended
Dietary Allowance (RDA) for vitamin D at 200 IU for children and
adults less than 50 years old, 400 IU for adults age 50–70,
and 800 IU for adults over the age of 70. Most multivitamin preparations
contain 400 IU of vitamin D. These guidelines are directed towards
maintaining bone health and are sufficient to prevent rickets –
but not cancer, cardiovascular disease, multiple sclerosis, or influenza.
Without evidence to support it, the board arbitrarily set the safe
upper limit for vitamin D consumption at 2,000 IU/day.

Vitamin D (25-hydroxyvitamin
D) blood levels, the barometer for vitamin D status, are measured
in nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml) or nanomoles per liter (nmol/l),
where ng/ml = 0.4 nmol/l. Children and adults need a vitamin D blood
level >8 ng/ml to prevent rickets and osteomalacia (demineralization
and softening of bones) respectively. It takes a concentration >20
ng/ml to keep parathyroid hormone levels in a normal range. A level
>34 ng/ml is required to ensure peak intestinal calcium
absorption. Finally, neuromuscular performance steadily improves
in elderly people as vitamin D levels rise up to 50 ng/ml.
Accordingly, a vitamin D blood level <8 ng/ml is regarded as
severely deficient; 8–19, deficient; and 20–29,
insufficient, i.e., too low for good health. A level >30
ng/ml is sufficient, but experts now consider 50–99
ng/ml to be the optimal level of vitamin D. Levels 100–150
ng/ml are excessive and >150 ng/ml, potentially toxic.

A majority
of Americans have insufficient or deficient vitamin D blood levels.
In veterans undergoing heart surgery at the Seattle VA hospital,
I found that 78% had a low vitamin D level: 12% were insufficient;
56%, deficient; and 10% were severely deficient.

In order to
enjoy optimal health, we should maintain a vitamin D blood level
of ≥50–99 ng/ml. Without sun exposure, to reach a level
of 50 ng/ml requires taking a 5,000 IU/day vitamin D supplement.
There are two kinds of vitamin D supplements: vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol),
the kind our skin makes, and vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol), a synthetic
variant made by irradiating plants. Vitamin D2 is only 10–30%
as effective in raising 25-hydroxyvitamin D blood levels compared
to vitamin D3, leading the authors of a recent study conclude, "Vitamin
D2 should not be regarded as a nutrient suitable for supplementation
or fortification" (Am J Clin Nutr 2006;84:694–697).

Concerns about
vitamin D toxicity are overblown, along with those about sun exposure.
As one researcher in the field puts it, "Worrying about vitamin
D toxicity is like worrying about drowning when you're dying of
thirst." The LD50 of vitamin D in dogs (the dose that will
kill half the animals) is 3,520,000 IU/kilogram. One can take a
10,000 IU vitamin D supplement every day, month after month safely,
with no evidence of adverse effect. (Am J Clin Nutr 1999;69:842–856).
A person must consume 50,000 IU a day for several months before
hypercalcemia (an elevated calcium level in the blood, which is
the initial manifestation of vitamin D toxicity) might occur. Vitamin
D in a physiologic dose (5,000 IU/day) prevents the build up of
calcium in blood vessels. (Circulation 1997;96:1755–1760).
If one takes 10,000 IU of vitamin D a day and spends a lot of time
in the sun, it would be prudent to check vitamin D blood level to
ensure that it does not exceed 100 ng/ml.

Sensible sun
exposure should be encouraged, not maligned. If one avoids sunburn,
the sun's health-giving benefits far outweigh its detrimental effects.
A large body of evidence indicates that sunlight does not cause
the most lethal form of skin cancer, malignant melanoma. A U.S.
Navy study found that melanoma occurred more frequently in sailors
who worked indoors all the time. Those who worked outdoors had the
lowest incidence of melanoma. Also, most melanomas appear on parts
of the body that are seldom exposed to sunlight (Arch Environ
Health 1990;45:261–267). Sun exposure is associated with
increased survival from melanoma (J Natl Cancer Inst 2005;97:195–199).
Another study showed that people who had longer lifetime exposure
to the sun without burning were less likely to get melanomas than
those with less exposure (J Invest Dermatol 2003;120:1087–1093.)

The rise in
skin cancers over the last 25 years parallels the rise in use of
sunscreen lotions, which block vitamin D-producing UVB radiation
but not cancer-causing ultraviolet A radiation (UVA). (Newer sunscreen
lotions also block out UVA.) Each year there are 8,000 deaths from
melanoma and 1,500 deaths from nonmelanoma (squamous and basal cell)
skin cancer. Surgical excision of nonmelanoma skin cancers cures
them, except in rare cases where the growth has been allowed to
linger for a long time and metastasize. Dr. John Cannell, Executive
Director of the Vitamin D Council, makes this point: 1,500 deaths
occur each year from non-melanoma skin cancer, but 1,500
deaths occur each day from other cancers that vitamin D in
optimal doses might well prevent. (The Vitamin D Council website
is an excellent source of information on vitamin D.)

The U.S. government
and its citizens currently spend $2,000 billion dollars ($2 trillion)
on "health care," i.e., sickness care, each year. The
cost of taking a 5,000 IU supplement of vitamin D every day for
a year is $22.00. The cost for 300 million Americans taking this
supplement would be $6.6 billion dollars. The number and variety
of diseases that vitamin D at this dose could prevent, starting
with a 50 percent reduction in cancer, is mind-boggling. If everyone
took 5,000 IU/day of vitamin D, the U.S. "health care"
industry would shrink. It would no longer account for 16 percent
of the gross domestic product.

Health
food stores typically do not sell vitamin D3 in 5,000 IU tablets,
but they are readily available online. BIO-TECH
Pharmacal produces both 5,000 and 50,000 IU tablets of Vitamin
D3, which online sites sell. Some people prefer to take one 50,000
IU tablet a week (equivalent to 7,100 IU a day) and a three-day
course of 150,000 IU vitamin D at the first sign of a cold.

Two sites that
sell both "D3-5" (5,000 IU) and "D3-50"
(50,000 IU) are here
and here.

September
10, 2007

Donald
Miller
(send him mail)
is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University
of Washington in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors
for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety
of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com

The
Best of Donald Miller

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Out of the 92 elements that exist in nature, 25 make up the human body. The largest one is iodine (atomic weight 126.9), followed by molybdenum (95.9). Selenium (78.96) is third.

Selenium was discovered in 1817 and named after Selene, the Greek Goddess of the Moon. This element is a member of the Group 16 (VIA) family of elements in the periodic table, along with oxygen, its sister sulfur, and the metalloid elements tellurium and polonium. Soil contains selenium in minute and variable amounts. In the U.S., soil selenium concentration ranges from <.05 to >50 parts per million (ppm). In the Pacific Northwest, Great Lakes region, Northeast, and Florida, where the soil comes from volcanic or washed coastal deposits, soil selenium concentration is low (<.05 ppm). In the Midwest, with its soil derived from cretaceous shales, soil selenium concentrations are 40 to 200 times higher (2 to 10 ppm), and in some areas, greater than 50 ppm. The concentration of selenium in the earth’s crust is less than that of gold.

Plants take up selenium from the soil and propagate it through the food chain. Brazil nuts, in particular, like selenium. One unshelled Brazil nut (one you have to crack open yourself) contains an average of 100 micrograms (mcg) of selenium per nut. (Already shelled Brazil nuts have 12 to 25 mcg of selenium per nut.) Phytoplankton, the "plants of the sea," extract and concentrate the even more minute amounts of selenium in ocean water and provide this needed element to fish. Selenium was identified as an essential trace element for mammals in 1957, and investigators now have determined that the cells of all organisms, bacterial, animal, and non-animal, need selenium.

Two amino acids, among the 20 that the body uses to make proteins, contain sulfur — methionine and cysteine. Selenium has similar chemistry and replaces the sulfur atom in these amino acids. Selenocysteine, selenium bound to cysteine, a "21st" amino acid, is the active site in some 35 proteins. Several are enzymes. Glutathione peroxidase, with four selenium atoms, is a powerful antioxidant (it reduces hydrogen peroxide to water and oxygen and lipid hydroperoxides to alcohol). Iodothyronine deiodinase converts the thyroid hormone T4 (thyroxine) into its active form T3 (triiodothyronine). Since this enzyme requires selenium to function properly a deficiency of selenium can cause hypothyroidism. Thioredoxin reductase regenerates antioxidant systems and regulates gene expression. All living things contain this selenium-dependent enzyme (Protein Sci 2003;12:372—378).

The proteins that selenium seed have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and immune enhancing properties that altogether foster a long, healthy life, akin to what Selene sought for Endymion (if in sleep) in Greek mythology. Selenium blood levels tend to fall as people age. In one study, investigators followed 1,300 people age 60—71 years for 9 years and found that those with the greatest decrease in blood selenium had the highest likelihood of cognitive decline. The same study showed that people with a low selenium blood level also had a shorter life span.

Cancer cuts short many lives. One in three Americans will have some kind of cancer during their lifetime. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that in 2004 (the most recent data available) cancer was the cause of death in 550,000 Americans, many of them in the prime of life.

A growing body of evidence indicates that selenium can prevent cancer. Studies show that low selenium blood levels are associated with an increased risk of cancer. One done in Finland showed that people with low selenium bloods levels are much more likely to develop lung cancer, especially if they smoke, than smokers and nonsmokers with high selenium levels. Another one, the Harvard Health Professionals Cohort study in 34,000 men, found that men with the lowest selenium levels had three times the likelihood of developing advanced prostate cancer compared with those who had the highest levels. These and other epidemiological, cohort, and case control studies suggest that selenium plays a role in cancer prevention. Now, however, there is strong scientific evidence that selenium does indeed reduce the risk of cancer. Evidence from a well-conducted randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial proves beyond a reasonable doubt that this is the case.

The Nutritional Prevention of Cancer (NPC) trial recruited 1300 patients with nonmelanoma skin cancer who were randomized to receive 200 mcg of selenium a day or a placebo for a mean 4 years. Selenium decreased the overall incidence of all cancers by 35% and cancer mortality by 50%. Prostrate cancer decreased by 63%; colorectal cancer, by 58%; and the incidence of lung cancer decreased by 46%. All of these decreases in cancer incidence and mortality are statistically significant (JAMA 1996; 276:1957—1963). Seven other clinical trials on the effects of selenium supplementation on the incidence of cancer, done in China (5), India (1), and Italy (1) with varying degrees of randomization, support the NPC findings (Brit J Nutr 2004;91:11—28).

Antioxidant protection and enhanced immune surveillance are two mechanisms researchers have proposed to account for selenium’s anticancer effect. Others include enhancement of apoptosis (programmed cell death), regulation of cell proliferation, suppression of angiogenesis (growth of blood vessels supplying nutrients to the cancer), and inhibition of tumor cell invasion. Studies on cells in tissue cultures and in small animals indicate that two metabolites of selenium, hydrogen selenide and methylselenol, play a central role in cancer prevention and suppression (Zeng. J Nutr Biochem 2007; Epub ahead of print June 27). In order for enough of these metabolites to form and exert their anticancer effects, "supranutritional" doses of selenium have to be given. An equivalent dose for humans is 200—400 mcg/day of selenium.

In 2000, the U.S. Food and Nutrition Board (in the Institute of Medicine) revised the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for selenium, setting it at 55 mcg per day (it had been 70 mcg/day for men and 55 mcg/day for women). This is the "nutritional" dose, said to be adequate for 98 percent of the population. It is based on two studies that show this amount of selenium supports the maximal expression of glutathione peroxidase, which is regarded as fully discharging the nutritional effects of this element. A supranutritional dose is one that is 5 to 10 times higher than the RDA and not toxic. The government-funded experts who set the RDA for selenium did not take into account the NPC trial results, reported in 1996, four years earlier, that shows that a dose four times higher (200 mcg) has an anticancer effect.

The U.S. Food and Nutrition Board set the tolerable upper intake level (UL) for selenium at 400 mcg/day. Chinese authorities place the UL, which they term "no adverse effect level," at 819 mcg/day and the "low adverse effect level" at 1540 mcg/day. China is unique in having areas where the soil selenium level is severely deficient and other areas where the levels are toxic. The first indication of selenium toxicity is "garlic breath" and dry skin. Then the fingernails develop white patches, become brittle, and fall off. In studying the health effect of various levels of dietary selenium intakes in China, investigators found that hair and nail loss occurs when selenium intake reaches 4,990 mcg/day (J Trace Elem Electrolytes Health Dis 1994;8:159—165). These findings indicate that consuming 200—400 mcg of selenium a day to keep cancers from occurring will be well tolerated, without side effects, on top of one’s dietary intake of selenium, which in the U.S. ranges from 60—110 mcg/day (in Europe it is 11—67 mcg/day).

A recently published study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which does not like supplements, warns that selenium u201Cmayu201D increase the risk for type 2 diabetes. This study is badly flawed. One of its major defects, among others, is that the investigators did not do any blood tests for diabetes at the start of the trial (where subjects were randomized to take selenium or a placebo) and relied simply on what the study subjects told them. Only 4% said that they had diabetes, whereas the true prevalence of diabetes in people their age, >60 years old, is 16.0% in men and 14.4% in women; and undiagnosed diabetes is present in an additional 7.9% of men and 4.2% women (Diabetes Care 2006;29(6):1263—1268). This study is not credible and is no cause for alarm. People with diabetes can take selenium without being concerned that it might make their diabetes worse.

The Moon Goddess’ element has other beneficial effects on human health. The heart does not function well without selenium. People in the Keshan province of China, where selenium content in the soil is very low, develop a severe form of heart failure, a dilated cardiomyopathy known as Keshan’s disease. Selenium supplements reverse it. Heart failure can occur after weight loss (bariatric) surgery due to selenium deficiency resulting from malabsorption, which resolves when selenium is administered intravenously (J Trace Elements Med Biol 2004;18:81—88). And researchers have shown that selenium helps the heart recover after it is temporarily deprived of oxygen, something surgeons do in performing heart surgery.

Selenium may help prevent coronary artery disease (atherosclerosis). It is biologically plausible because oxidation of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) is an initiating event in the inflammatory process that produces atherosclerotic coronary plaques, and the antioxidant selenium enzymes glutathione perioxidase and thioredoxin reductase can prevent LDL from becoming oxidized. This postulation awaits study.

Selenium stimulates the immune system and has been shown to be effective in treating sepsis (blood stream infection). Studies show that it increases the number of T cells circulating through the body, both CD4 helper T cells and CD8 cytotoxic (killer) T cells. Even given a good dietary intake (120—134 mcg/day), selenium supplementation still has considerable immunoenhancing effects. At Harborview Medical Center, the noted trauma and burn center at the University of Washington, patients in the intensive care unit receive 400 mcg/day of selenium intravenously for 2 days and then 400 mcg/day by mouth (or through a feeding tube) for the next 5 days (along with 1,000 mg of vitamin C and 1,500 IU of vitamin E).

Selenium also affects male fertility. It is required for synthesis of testosterone and to keep sperm structurally intact. Experts in animal husbandry recognize that selenium is essential for successful reproduction. In the U.S., soil scientists reckon that selenium deficiency is a major problem for livestock and wildlife in at least 37 states.

The Goddess of the Moon looks fondly at life on Earth; and she provides an element, rarer than gold, to sustain it. We cancer-prone humans need more selenium than most of us get in our diet. An additional 200 mcg/day of selenium, as selenomethionine or in an inorganic form, is well tolerated and has no side effects. It will help us enjoy optimal health, and live a long life cancer-free and mentally intact.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com

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Flush with success in creating an atom bomb, the U.S. federal government decided it should start funding nonmilitary scientific research. A government report titled "Science, the Endless Frontier" provides the justification for doing this. It makes the case that "science is the responsibility of government because new scientific knowledge vitally affects our health, our jobs, and our national security" (Bush, 1945). Accordingly, the government established a Research Grants Office in January, 1946 to award grants for research in the biomedical and physical sciences. It received 800 grant applications that year. The Research Grants Office is now known as the Center for Scientific Review (CSR), and it processes applications submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In 2005 CSR received 80,000 grant applications.

The System

Investigators seeking an NIH grant submit a 25-page Research Plan that begins with an abstract placed in a half-page box on the form. The Specific Aims of the project, preferably two to four, come next (recommended length, 1 page). The applicant must show that these objectives are attainable within a stated time frame. As one NIH center (the National Cancer Institute) advises in its online Guide for Grant Applications, "A small, focused project is generally better received than a diffuse, multifaceted project." The other components of the Research Plan are Background and Significance (3 pages); Preliminary Studies the applicant has done (6-8 pages); Research Design and Methods (about 15 pages); and, if applicable, Human Subjects and Vertebrate Animals considerations. The investigator must also submit a detailed budget for the project on a separate form.

The Center for Scientific Review "triages" applications it receives. A cursory appraisal eliminates one-third of the applications from any further consideration, and it selects the remaining two-thirds for competitive peer review. CSR sends each application to a Study Section it deems best suited to evaluate it. Peers in Molecular Oncogenesis, Cognitive Neuroscience, Cell Structure and Function, Hematopoiesis, HIV/AIDS Vaccine, and 167 other Study Sections review grant applications. Each Study Section has 12-24 members who are recognized experts in that particular field. Members meet three times a year to review 25-100 grants at each meeting. Two members read an application and then discuss it with the other section members who collectively give it a priority score and percentile ranking (relative to the priority scores they assign to other applications). An advisory council then makes funding decisions on the basis of the Study Section’s findings, "taking into consideration the [specific NIH] institute or center’s scientific goals and public health needs" (Scarpa, 2006). CSR’s slogan is "Advancing Health through Peer Review."

With a budget of $28 billion, the director of NIH reports that it currently funds 22 percent of all the grant applications it reviews (Zerhouni, 2006). Among these, multi-year R01 grants are the mainstay of research by medical school faculties. And in 2005, the NIH funded only one in eleven (9.1%) of the unsolicited R01 research grant applications it reviewed (Mandel and Vesell, 2006). In 1998 the NIH funded 31 percent of its grant applications, and since 2003 grant appropriations have lagged behind inflation (Zerhouni, 2006). The National Science Foundation awards $6 Billion in grants each year. This independent federal agency funds 28 percent of the 40,000 annual grant proposals it receives.

Twenty-six federal granting agencies now manage 1,000 grant programs. Even clinical trials of drugs, vaccines, and devices, where industry may profit from the outcome, have come under the purview of government. Zarin and colleagues (2005) reviewed ClinicalTrials.gov records and found that the federal government currently funds 9,796 (51%) of the 19,355 interventional trials being conducted. Industry sponsors 4,734 (24%); and universities, foundations, and other organizations, 4,825 (25%).

Under the current system scientists are expected to spend time drafting, writing, and refining unsolicited R01 grant applications, despite a less than one in ten chance of success.

Ethics of Writing Grant Proposals

Ethics in science and society "describe appropriate behavior according to contemporary standards" (Friedman, 1996). Two standards that scientists follow for writing grant proposals are: 1) Keep it safe and survive, and 2) Don’t lie if you don’t have to.

Pollack (2005) addresses the first ethic, noting that the paramount motivational factor for scientists today is the competition to survive. A scientist’s most pressing need, which supersedes the scientific pursuit of truth, is to get her grant funded — to pay her salary and that of her staff, to pay department bills, and to obtain academic promotion. The safest way to generate grants is to avoid any dissent from orthodoxy. Grant-review Study Sections whose members’ expertise and status are tied to the prevailing view do not welcome any challenge to it. A scientist who writes a grant proposal that dissents from the ruling paradigm will be left without a grant. Speaking for his fellow scientists Pollack writes, "We have evolved into a culture of obedient sycophants, bowing politely to the high priests of orthodoxy."

Applicants following the ethic of "keep it safe and survive" propose research that will please the reader-peers and avoid projects that might displease them. An NIH pamphlet on grant applications reinforces such behavior by stating, "The author of a project proposal must learn all he can about those who will read his proposal and keep those readers constantly in mind when he writes." (Ling, 2004a).

With regard to the second ethic, Albert Szent-Györgyi said, "I always tried to live up to Leo Szilard’s commandment, u2018don’t lie if you don’t have to.’ I had to. I filled up pages with words and plans I know I would not follow. When I go home from my laboratory in the late afternoon, I often do not know what I am going to do the next day. I expect to think that up during the night. How could I tell them what I would do a year hence?" (Moss, 1988, p.217). This long-time cancer researcher, discoverer of vitamin C, and Nobel laureate was unable, despite multiple attempts, to obtain a government grant.

Friedman (1996) describes a variant of this ethic where an investigator applies for a grant to do a study that he has already completed. With this grant awarded and money in hand he publishes the study and uses the funds on a different project. The misrepresentation enables the investigator to remain one project ahead of his funding. Apparently enough seasoned investigators do this that the academic community views the practice as sound "grantsmanship."

Apollonian Research

When the peer review grant system was established in 1946 people assumed that scientific progress occurs in an evolutionary incremental and cumulative fashion. Having a panel of experts judge the worth of each research proposal seeking funds seemed then to be the best way to allocate federal tax dollars for research. This system assumes that a majority of specialists in a given field will know where truth lies and how best to get there and find it (Ling, 2004b). But as Hall (1954) and Kuhn (1962) later showed, periodic upheavals and revolutions in science disrupt an otherwise steady growth of scientific knowledge. Long-cherished ideas are replaced wholesale by new ones that lead science in a different direction.

The grant system fosters an Apollonian approach to research. The investigator does not question the foundation concepts of biomedical and physical scientific knowledge. He sticks to the widely held belief that the trunks and limbs of the trees of knowledge, in, for example, cell physiology and on AIDS, are solid. The Apollonian researcher focuses on the peripheral branches and twigs and develops established lines of knowledge to perfection. He sees clearly what course his research should take and writes grants that his peers are willing to fund. Forced by the existing grant system to follow such an approach, Pollack (2005) argues that scientists have defaulted into becoming a culture of believers without rethinking the fundamentals.

Intuitive geniuses, like Thomas Edison, Louis Pasteur, Ernest Rutherford, and Albert Einstein, take a Dionysian, transformational approach to science. Their research relies on intuition and "accidental" discoveries. Szent-Györgyi describes intuition as "a sort of subconscious reasoning, only the end result of which becomes conscious." The Dionysian scientist knows the direction he wants to follow into the unknown, but "he has no idea what he is going to find there or how he is going to find it. Defining the unknown or writing down the subconscious is a contradiction in absurdum." And, citing Pasteur, who said, "A discovery is an accident finding a prepared mind," Szent-Györgyi notes that "accidental" discoveries are rarely true accidents (Moss, 1988, pp. 216-217).

Although it is the Dionysian method of research that produces transformative scientific breakthroughs, peers possessing the power to judge grants do not support this kind of research. They abuse the trust and power of government, which does not know science, to advance their own careers and, in some cases, protect their investments in companies that profit from the reigning paradigm. Knowing this government might be more amenable to supporting potentially transformative, Dionysian research.

To make matters worse, this system is replacing other sources of funding that formerly supported Dionysian scientists. Ling (2004b) observes, "Oversupply of scientists, the rising cost of living and of research, the decline of private foundations and scientific niches which these foundations once sustained [has] completed the dismantling of the socio-economic environment which once protected revolutionary scientists and their young followers."

Unassailable Paradigms

Paradigms in the biomedical and climate sciences that have achieved the status of dogma are:

1. Cholesterol and saturated fats cause coronary artery disease.
2. Mutations in genes cause cancer.
3. Human activity is causing global warming through increased CO2 emissions.
4. A virus called HIV (human immunodeficiency) causes AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome).
5. The damaging effects of toxins are dose-dependent in a linear fashion down to zero. Even a tiny amount of a toxin, such as radiation or cigarette smoke, will harm some people.
6. The membrane-pump theory of cell physiology based on the concept that cells are aqueous solutions enclosed by a cell membrane.

Scientists that question these state-sanctioned paradigms are denied grants and silenced (Moran 1998). But valid questions nevertheless have been raised about each of these established orthodoxies.

The idea that cholesterol causes coronary heart disease is now close to being dogma, and investigators that question the lipid hypothesis need not apply for funding. But there is growing evidence that the hypothesis is wrong, as Ravnskov (2000) documents in The Cholesterol Myths.

Aneuploidy (an abnormal number and balance of chromosomes), instead of mutation-produced oncogenes, may well prove to be the true cause of cancer (Bialy, 2004; Duesberg and Rasnick, 2000; Miller, 2006).

The human-caused global-warming paradigm is most likely false (Soon et al., 2001; Editorial, 2006). Two climate astrophysicists, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, present evidence that shows the climate of the 20th century fell within the range experienced during the past 1,000 years. Compared with other centuries, it was not unusual (Soon and Baliunas, 2003). Unable to obtain grants from NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), Soon (personal communication, August 31, 2006) observes that NASA funds programs mainly on social-political reasoning rather than science.

Duesberg (1996), Hodgkinson (2003), Lang (1993-2005), Liversidge (2001/2002), Maggiore (2000), and Miller (2006), among others, have questioned the germ theory of AIDS. All 30 diseases (which includes an asymptomatic low T-cell count) in the syndrome called AIDS existed before HIV was discovered and still occur without antibodies to this virus being present. At a press conference in 1984 government officials announced that a newly discovered retrovirus, HIV, is the probable cause of AIDS, which at that time numbered 12 diseases (Duesberg, 1995, p. 5). Soon thereafter "HIV causes AIDS" achieved paradigm status. But, beginning with Peter Duesberg, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, a growing number of scientists, physicians, investigative journalists, and HIV positive people have concluded that HIV/AIDS is a false paradigm. The NIH awarded Duesberg a long-term Outstanding Investigator Grant and a Fogarty fellowship to spend a year on the NIH campus studying cancer genes, and he was nominated for a Nobel Prize. When Duesberg publicly rejected the HIV/AIDS paradigm the NIH and other funding agencies ceased awarding him grants. Government-appointed peer reviewers have rejected his last 24 grant applications. Peter Duesberg (personal communication, September 20, 2006) writes: When I was the blue-eyed boy finding oncogenes and “deadly” viruses, I was 100% fundable. Since I questioned the HIV-AIDS hypothesis of the NIH’s Dr. Gallo, and then the cancer-oncogene hypothesis of Bishop-Varmus-Weinberg-Vogelstein etc. I became 100% unfundable. I was transformed from a virus- and cancer-chasing Angel to u2018Lucifer’."

Rather than being harmful, as predicted by the linear no threshold hypothesis, low doses of radiation are actually beneficial (Calabrese, 2005; Hiserodt, 2005). Its beneficial effect is based on hormesis, where radiation in small doses stimulates immune system defenses, prevents oxidative DNA damages, and suppresses cancer. The dose must exceed a certain threshold to stop having a simulative and start having an inhibitory effect on the body and become toxic — and in high doses, fatal (Miller, 2004).

Research in cell physiology is based on the concept that the cell, the basic structural unit that makes up all living things, is an aqueous solution of chemicals enclosed within a cell membrane. Drug research adheres to the concept that a drug’s action is mediated by fitting into a specific receptor site on the cell membrane. Ling (2001) and Pollack (2001), however, make a strong case that the membrane paradigm of cell physiology is wrong. They show that cell function does not depend on the integrity of the cell membrane, and membrane pumps and channels are not what they seem. These investigators hypothesize that the three main components of a living cell — proteins, water, and potassium ions — are structured together in a gel-like matrix, where the cell’s water is organized into layers alongside proteins. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a product of this view of cell physiology, known as the association-induction hypothesis, which was first proposed by Gilbert Ling in 1962. For more than 45 years government granting agencies, guided by their "expert" peer-reviewers’ verdicts, have refused to provide funds for this pioneering investigator to pursue research on this hypothesis, even after it brought about the important medical technology of MRI (Ling 2004b). Despite multiple attempts, Gerald Pollack (personal communication, September 13, 2006) also has been unable to obtain government grants to conduct research on this alternative hypothesis of cell physiology.

Peer review enforces state-sanctioned paradigms. Pollack (2005) likens it to a trial where the defendant judges the plaintiff. Grant review panels defending the orthodox view control the grant lifeline and can sentence a challenger to "no grant." Deprived of funds the plaintiff-challenger is forced to shut down her lab and withdraw. Conlan (1976) characterizes the peer-review grant system as an "incestuous u2018buddy system’ that stifles new ideas and scientific breakthroughs."

Science is self-correcting and, in time, errors are eliminated, or so we are taught. But now with a centralized bureaucracy controlling science, perhaps this rhetoric is "just wishful thinking" (Hillman, 1996, p.102). Freedom to dissent is an essential ingredient of societal health. Braben (2004) contends that suppressing challenges to established orthodoxy sets a society on a path to its doom.

Science in Service to the State

Over the last 60 years a new power structure, the state, has taken control of information. It uses federal tax money to fund and control research through the peer-review grant system. It forms mutually advantageous partnerships with industry and the academic community, which do its bidding. The state holds sway over education. And to round out its control of information an increasingly powerful centralized government bureaucracy has persuaded the mainstream media to accept and espouse state-approved ideas. The Western tradition of information ethics dating from ancient Greece to the 20th century, characterized by freedom of speech and inquiry, has been co-opted by government. Knowledge advances by questioning accepted paradigms (Hillman, 1995). The state thwarts this and requires its tax-funded scientists to conform to the official establishment view on such things as global warming and HIV/AIDS.

Government-sponsored scientific research reflects the biases, preferences, and priorities of its leaders (Moran, 1998). The state uses science to further its social and political purposes.

Its actions follow Lang’s First Law of Sociodynamics, where "The power structure does what they want, when they want; then they try to find reasons to justify it. If this does not work, they stonewall it (Lang, 1998, p. 797).

When inconvenient facts challenge paradigms the state promotes, it justifies them by consensus. If polar bear experts (Amstrup et al., 1995) find that the bear population in Alaska is increasing, placing doubt on the government’s stance on climate change, this finding is dismissed as being outside the consensus and ignored. Science magazine supports the prevailing view, stating, "There is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change" that accounts for "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years" (Oreskes, 2004).

In 21st century America, consensus and computer models masquerade as science. They supplant experimental data. As Corcoran (2006) puts it, "Science has been stripped of its basis in experiment, knowledge, reason and the scientific method and made subject to the consensus created by politics and bureaucrats." Reduced to a belief system, a majority of scientists and groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can declare, without having to provide scientific evidence, that they believe humans cause global warming. This alone makes the hypothesis become an established fact and received knowledge (Barnes, 1990). Peer review compounds the problem. It competes with objective evidence as proof of truth.

Computer models purporting to make sense of complex data, particularly with regard to climate change, have replaced the scientific goal of supplanting complicated hypotheses with simpler ones (Pollack, 2005). Researchers offer computer models as evidence for global warming. When unsound assumptions and faulty data render one model unreliable, other improved ones are constructed to justify the state’s desire to promulgate this "truth," which it can use to exert greater control over the economy and technological progress.

AIDS research serves the interest of the state by focusing on HIV as an equal opportunity cause of AIDS. This infectious, egalitarian cause exempts the two primary AIDS risk groups, gay men and intravenous drug users, from any blame in acquiring this disease(s) owing to their behavioral choices. Duesberg, Koehnlein, and Rasnick (2003) hypothesize that AIDS is caused by three other things, singly or in combination, rather than HIV: 1) long-term, heavy-duty recreational drug use — cocaine, amphetamines, heroin, and nitrite inhalants; 2) antiretroviral drugs doctors prescribe to people who are HIV-positive — DNA chain terminators, like AZT, and protease inhibitors; and 3) malnutrition and bad water, which is the cause of “AIDS” in Africa. HIV/AIDS has become a multibillion-dollar enterprise on an international level. Government, industry, and medical vested interests protect the HIV/AIDS paradigm. The government-controlled peer review grant system is a key tool for protecting paradigms like this.

Grant Reform

Bauer (2004) proposes that there be mandatory funding of contrarian research, along with a science court set up to adjudicate technical controversies. In addition, science journalism needs to investigate established orthodoxies more vigorously.

Pollack (2005) proposes several remedies to the competitive peer review grant system. Government should establish forums where the most significant challenge paradigms can compete openly with their orthodox counterparts in civilized debate. Open-minded "generalists" who have no stake in the outcome should adjudicate, like a jury does in law. Pools of money should be set aside to support multiple grants on selected schools of thought. Training grants that encourage curiosity and thinking outside the box should be made available. And the NIH should provide lifetime support for a select cohort of Dionysian scientists.

The peer review grant system stifles innovation and protects reigning paradigms, right or wrong. The 60-year experiment of "Advancing Health through Peer Review," the NIH Center for Scientific Review’s slogan, has failed. It needs to be dismantled. Tax-funded research would be better conducted and more productive if government allocated funds directly to universities and foundations to use as they see fit for advancement of the biomedical and physical sciences.

One alternative to the competitive peer review grant system that the NIH and NSF might consider for funding specific research projects is DARPA, the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. This agency manages and directs selected research for the Department of Defense. At least up until now it has been "an entrepreneurial technical organization unfettered by tradition or conventional thinking" within one of the world’s most entrenched bureaucracies (Van Atta et al., 2003). Eighty project managers, who each handles $10-50 million, are given free reign to foster advanced technologies and systems that create "revolutionary" advantages for the U.S. military. Managers, not subject to peer review or top-down management, provide grants to investigators who they think can challenge existing approaches to fighting wars. So long as the state controls funding for research, managers like this might help break the logjam of innovation in the biomedical and physical sciences.

Science under the government grant system has failed and new kinds of funding, with less government control, are sorely needed.

References

Amstrup, S.C., Garner, G.W. & Durner, G.M. (1995). Polar Bears in Alaska. In E.T. La Roe (Ed.), Our Living Resources: A report to the nation on the abundance, distributions, and health of U.S. plants, animals, and ecosystems. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior — National Biological Sciences. Retrieved September, 16, 2006 from http://biology.usgs.gov/s+t/noframe/s034.htm

Barnes, B. (1990). Sociological theories of scientific knowledge. In R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie & M.J.S. Hodge (Eds.), Companion to the history of modern science (60-76). New York: Toutledge.

Bauer, H.H. (2004). Science in the 21st century: Knowledge monopolies and research cartels. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 18, 643-660,

Bialy, H. (2004) Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS: A Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.

Braben, D.W. (2004). Pioneering research: a risk worth taking. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Bush, V. (1945). Science — the endless frontier. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office. Retrieved September 2, 2006, from http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm

Calabrese, D.J. (2005). Historical blunders: How toxicology got the dose-response relationship half right. Cellular and Molecular Biology, 51, 643-654.

Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy. (1995). On being a scientist: Responsible conduct in research (2 nd Ed.). Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Conlan, J. (1976) Testimony of Rep. John Conlan. Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Technology of the House Comm. on Science and Technology, 94th Cong., 2d Sess., National Science Foundation Peer Review 13 (Comm. Print 1976).

Corcoran, T. (2006). Climate consensus and the end of science. National Post (Canada), June, 16. Retrieved September 19, from http://www.sepp.org/Archive/NewSEPP/Consensus-Corcoran.htm

De Coster, K. (2006). Cholesterol, lipitor, and big government: The terror campaign against us all. LewRockwell.com, July 25. Retrieved September 3, 2006, from http://archive.lewrockwell.com/decoster/decoster115.html

Duesberg, Pl, Yiamouyiannis, J. (1995). AIDS: The good news is HIV doesn’t cause it. The bad news is "recreational drugs" and medical treatments like AZT do. Delaware, Ohio: Health Action Press.

Duesberg, P. (1996). Inventing the AIDS virus. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.

Duesberg, P. & Rasnick, D. (2000). Aneuploidy, the somatic mutation that makes cancer a species of its own. Cell Motility and the Cytoskeleton 47,81-107.

Duesberg, P., Koehnlein, C., & Rasnick D. (2003). The chemical bases of the various AIDS epidemics: recreational drugs, anti-viral chemotherapy and malnutrition. Journal of Bioscience, 28, 383—412. Retrieve September 19, 2006 from http://www.ias.ac.in/jbiosci/jun2003/383.htm

Editorial (2006). Hockey Stick Hokum. Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2006. (p. A12). Retrieved September 25, 2006, from http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/News/07142006_1990.htm

Friedman, P.J. (1996). An introduction to research ethics. Science and Engineering Ethics 2, 443-456.

Hall, R. (1954). The Scientific Revolution 1500-1800. London: Longmans, Green and Co.

Hillman H. (1995). Parafraud in biology. Science and Engineering Ethics 3, 121-136.

Hiserodt, E. (2005). Underexposed: What if radiation is actually good for you? Little Rock, Arkansas: Laissez Faire Books.

Hodgkinson, N. (2003). AIDS: Scientific or viral catastrophe? Journal of Scientific Exploration, 17, 87-120.

Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lang, S. (1993-2005). The Serge Lang memorial HIV/AIDS archive. Retrieved September 13, 2006, from http://www.reviewingaids.org/awiki/index.php/Document:Lang

Lang, S. (1998). Challenges. New York: Springer.

Lindzen, R. (2006). Climate of fear. Wall Street Journal, April 12. Retrieved August 21, 2006, from http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220

Ling, G. (2001). Life at the cell and below-cell level: The hidden history of a fundamental revolution in biology. New York: Pacific Press.

Ling, G. (2004a). An NIH pamphlet. Retrieved September 10, 2006, from http://www.gilbertling.org/lp11a.htm

Ling, G. (2004b). Why science cannot cure cancer and AIDS without your help? Retrieved September 10,2006, from http://www.gilbertling.org

Liversidge, A.F. (2001/2002). The scorn of heretics. Conference on Science and Democracy, Naples, April 20, 2001. Retrieved August 21, 2006, from http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/documents/Liversidge.pdf

Maggiore, C. (2000). What if everything you thought you knew about AIDS was wrong? (4th Rev. Ed.) Studio City, California: American Foundation for AIDS Alternatives.

Mandel, H.G. & Vesell, E.S. (2006). Declines in funding of NIH R01 research grants. Science 313,1387.

Miller, D.W. (2004). Afraid of radiation? Low doses are good for you. LewRockwell.com, April 2. Retrieved August 20, 2006, from http://archive.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller12.html

Miller, D.W. (2006). A Modern-day Copernicus: Peter H. Duesberg. LewRockwell.com, February 23. Retrieved August 20, 2006, from http://archive.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller18.html

Moran, G. (1998). Silencing scientists and scholars in other fields: Power, Paradigm Controls, Peer Review, and Scholarly Communication. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing.

Moss, R. (1988). Free Radical: Albert Szent-Gyorgyi and the Battle Over Vitamin C. New York: Paragon House Publishers. (p. 215).

Oreskes, N. (2004). The scientific consensus on climate change. Science 306, 1686.

Pollack, G.H. (2001). Cells, gels and the engines of life. Seattle: Ebner & Sons.

Pollack, G.H. (2005). Revitalizing science in a risk-averse culture: reflections on the syndrome and prescriptions for its cure. Cellular and Molecular Biology, 51, 815-820.

Ravnskov, U. (2000). The Cholesterol Myths: Exposing the fallacy that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease. Washington, DC: NewTrends Publishing, Inc.

Scarpa, T. (2006). Peer review at NIH. Science, 311, 41.

Schneider, H.G. (1989). The threat to authority in the revolution of chemistry. History of Universities, 8, 137-150.

Soon, W., Baliunas, S.L., Robinson, A.D. & Robinson, Z.W. (2001). Global Warming: A Guide to the Science. The Fraser Institute, November. Retrieved September 14, 2006, from http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/shared/readmore.asp?sNav=pb&id=237

Soon, W. and Baliunas, S.L. (2003). Lessons and limits of climate history: Was the 20th century climate unusual? George C. Marshall Institute, April 17. Retrieved September 14, from http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=136 (pp. 1-32)

Van Atta, R.H., Lippitz, M.J., Lupo, J.C., Mahoney, R. & Nunn, J.H. (2003). Transformation and transition: DARPA’s role in fostering an emerging revolution in military affairs. Volume 1 — Overall assessment. Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analysis. Retrieved August 28, 2006, from http://www.darpa.mil/body/pdf/P-3698_Vol_1_final.pdf

Zarin, D.A., Tse, T. & Ide, N.C. (2005). Trial registration at ClinicalTrials.gov between May and October 2005. New England Journal of Medicine, 353, 2779-87.

Zerhouni, E.A. (2006) NIH at the Crossroads: Myths, realities and strategies for the future. National Institutes of Health, June 9. Retrieved August 21, from http://grants2.nih.gov/grants/award/NIH_at_the_Crossroads.ppt#1

This paper, titled “The Government Grant System: Inhibitor of Truth and Innovation?”, was published in the Spring 2007 issue of the Journal of Information Ethics 2007;16:59-69.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com

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DIGG THIS

Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind, about the fall of the Confederacy, the burning of Atlanta, and the military occupation of the South, has struck a chord with people around the world. It has been translated into about 40 languages (and published in 50 countries), which include Kannada (in India), Arabic (Egypt and Lebanon), Amharic (Ethiopia), and Farsi (Iran).

The book was published in 1936. Despite a three-dollar price tag ($43.50 in today’s dollars), in its first year Gone With the Wind sold 1,383,000 copies. Over the next several years, before World War II began, 24 countries had published translations of the novel.

As with Americans during the Great Depression, Mitchell’s Civil War novel resonated with Europeans who found their lives turned upside down by World War II. People in Nazi-controlled France, Holland, Norway, and Belgium prized the novel highly. Bootlegged copies of Gone With the Wind sold for sixty dollars ($665.80 today). The Nazi occupiers seized them, and people caught with the book in their possession risked being shot1. In her Holocaust memoir, The Net of Dreams: A Family’s Search for a Rightful Place, Julie Salamon writes that her mother had read Gone With the Wind numerous times before she was sent to Auschwitz; and "she would never forget the way the book had helped her [mentally] escape from Lager C [in Auschwitz-2/Birkenau], day after day, as she told the story, in installments, to her bunkmates."

In Ethiopia, Nebiy Mekonnen, an Addis Ababa University student, translated Gone With the Wind into Amharic while in prison. Along with two-thirds of the young men in that country, he was arrested during Mengistu’s Red Terror of 1977—78. A fellow prisoner, arrested at the airport and later executed, had a copy of Gone With the Wind in his personal belongings that the jailers ignored. Over a three-year period this student, who spoke English, translated the novel onto the only source of paper available, the inner linings of 3,000 empty cigarette packs. He read the passages that he translated each day to his cellmates, who when released would smuggle out portions of it disguised as packs of cigarettes. When Nebiy was released from prison in 1985 he managed to track down and retrieve all 3,000 "pages" of his translation and get it published. A censorship committee at first wanted him to remove the word baria, the Amharic word for "slave," because in common parlance it describes Ethiopians from the south; but as Nebiy pointed out, "There is no such thing as Gone With the Wind without mentioning slavery."2

In Vietnam, Gone With the Wind has broken records for readership. The first Vietnamese translation of this novel was published in 1951. Since then there have been 6 other translations published in 12 editions, with 100,000 copies sold. Thi Thanh Le, who grew up in the Mekong River Delta, explores the novel’s "striking vitality" with Vietnamese women in her 2003 PhD thesis (at the University of Massachusetts) titled, u2018Gone With the Wind’ and the Vietnamese Mind. Among other things, she explores the Vietnamese view of "the novel’s concept of womanhood, especially the central female protagonist, Scarlett O’Hara, who dealt with the collapse of the plantation’s system of values and the emergence of a new role for women."

Margaret Mitchell (1900—1949) began writing Gone With the Wind when she was 26 years old. When the book was published ten years later she was overwhelmed with praise and heart-felt thanks from readers and reviewers. In Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, Darden Pyron recounts how wives wrote letters to her sympathizing with Scarlett because "no woman knows the degradation she will stoop to until she needs to defend her home and those she loves," and men broken by the Depression poured out their hearts in understanding for Ashley Wilkes, the novel’s Hamlet-like planter aristocrat. Critics equated Gone With the Wind with Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, to which Mitchell replied (in a letter), "I’ve read review after review saying the same thing and have realized with a sense of growing horror that eventually I’m going to have to read War and Peace."3

The communist regime in the former USSR effectively banned Gone With the Wind. A Russian translation, by Tatiana Kudriavtseva, was finally published in Russia in 2001. In a CNN interview, she says, "The whole thing happened in Russia…We were survivors of the war, like Scarlett, and this novel was ringing a lot of bells for us. We saw the ravages, we saw the fires, we saw the pilloried villages, we saw the poverty and the hunger… Gone With the Wind is considered in Russia as [the] American War and Peace."

The similarities between these two lengthy, panoramic novels are striking.3 They encompass the literary genres of historical novel, family chronicle, and Bildungsroman (tracing the development of people as they change in response to historical necessity). Each addresses the forebodings and repercussions of war; Tolstoy, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. They both canvas the theme of individual fate in the midst of social upheaval. And both novels chronicle the fates of three families, the Rostovs, Bolkonskys, and Kuragins in War and Peace and the O’Haras, Hamiltons, and Wilkeses in Gone With the Wind. A central, unrelated character in each novel interacts with members of these families, Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace and Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind.

Margaret Mitchell, answering questions about her novel, writes, "Despite its length and many details it is basically just a simple yarn of fairly simple people. There’s no fine writing, there’s no philosophizing, there is a minimum of description, there are no grandiose thoughts, there are no hidden meanings, no symbolism, nothing sensational."3 In What Is Art (1886) Tolstoy writes: "There is one indubitable indication separating real art from its counterfeit, namely, the infectiousness of [real] art…[It must] transmit the simplest feelings of common life, but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the entire world." Gone With the Wind fits Tolstoy’s definition of "real art." The title itself bespeaks the novel’s artistic simplicity — four one-syllable words with a poetic lilt that capture its spirit.

In the 71 years since its publication, this novel has attained the status of an epic. The Oxford English Dictionary defines epic as "that species of poetical composition, represented typically by the Iliad and Odyssey, which celebrates in the form of a continuous narrative the achievements of one or more heroic personages of history or tradition… [Epics] have often been regarded as embodying a nation’s conception of its own past history, or of the events in that history which it finds most worthy of remembrance." Like myths, epics tell the essential truths about a given culture, truths about its history, laws, and class structure.

James Cantrell, in How Celtic Culture Invented Southern Literature (2006), describes how Gone With the Wind meets the criteria of an epic, as originally established by Homer in the Iliad and Virgil in the Aeneid. Each culture typically has only one or two true epics in its literature, and Gone With the Wind is a good candidate for being America’s Epic. Like the Iliad and Aeneid, Gone With the Wind addresses a universal theme, that of struggling through adversities created by war. Its characters embody American culture. And the narrative deals with a pivotal event in American history that changed the balance of power between the U.S. Federal government and the States. Two epic-defining criteria that Gone With the Wind does not observe is that it is in prose (not a poem); and the story starts at the beginning, not in medias res — in the middle of things. (In the Iliad, a lot has already happened when the poem begins. Flashbacks introduce the characters, setting, and conflict, along with characters relating past events to each other.)

Mitchell’s prose is earnest and dignified, as befits an epic. It flows smoothly, in an oral poetic tradition, through 1,037 pages (419,218 words). Her style is clear and lucid. Mitchell describes Scarlett, four years into the story after the fall of Atlanta, this way: "Somewhere, on the long road that wound through those four years, the girl with her sachet and dancing slippers, had slipped away, and there was left a woman with sharp green eyes, who counted pennies and turned her hands to many menial tasks, a woman to whom nothing was left from the wreckage, except the indestructible red earth on which she stood." And this is Rhett Butler at the end of the narrative: "He was sunken in his chair, his suit wrinkling untidily against his thickening waist, every line of him proclaiming the ruin of a fine body and the coarsening of a strong face. Drink and dissipation had done their work on the coin-clean profile, and now it was no longer the head of a young pagan prince on newly minted gold, but a decadent, tired Caesar on copper debased by long usage."

In his 1975 introduction to the Anniversary Edition of Gone With the Wind, James Michener (no mean storyteller himself) lauds its "extraordinary readability" and "sentences and paragraphs which positively sing." He writes: "She [the author] is best considered, I think, a unique young woman who before the age of ten loved to tell stories and who at twenty-six began a long and powerful recollection of her home town. That it was destined to become a titanic tale of human passions, loved around the world, was a mystery then and remains one now."

Reader response plays an essential role in determining what work of literature is worthy of being termed Great and an Epic. In American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas (1996), Dario Fernandez-Morera observes: "[Great books] have been considered great not because they have been imposed upon the hapless public by a hegemonic cabal [e.g., English professors and Nobel and Pulitzer Prize committees], but because they have proved to be richer, more complex, and more stimulating sources of thoughtful feeling at different times and in different nations." From political prisoners in Africa to women in Vietnam, people of diverse nationalities and walks of life continue to relish the richness and complexity of Gone With the Wind.

John Wiley, Jr., in "70 Years Later, u2018Scarlett Fever’ Still Raging Around the World," recounts what Margaret Mitchell had to say (in letters) about this phenomenon. She writes, "While many critics in the United States based their criticism upon the love story or the narrative, European critics evaluated it on a different basis. In practically every European country critics wrote at length of the "universal historical significance." Each nation applied to its own past history the story of the Confederate rise and fall and reconstruction. French critics spoke of 1870 [the Franco-Prussian War], Poles of the partitioning of their country, Germany of 1918 and the bitterness which followed, Czechs wrote not only of their troubled past but of their fears of the future, and I had letters from that country just before it went under [Nazi domination], saying that if the people of the South had risen again to freedom the people of Czechoslovakia could do likewise." In another letter written in 1947, two years before she died, Mitchell notes: "Every country [in Europe] has had its recent experience with war and occupation and defeat, and people in each country apply the experiences of the characters of Gone With the Wind to themselves."

These characters, most importantly Scarlett, Rhett Butler, Ashley and Melanie Wilkes, and Mammy, personify the antebellum South. Scarlett’s father is Celtic-Irish and her mother, Anglo-Norman, which represent the two primary cultures in the antebellum South. Celts, from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, were in the majority. Many were hardscrabble "poor whites," and few Celts owned slaves. The Anglo-Normans, from England, like Ashley, were the genteel, slave-owning upper class in this culture. Tara, Scarlett’s plantation, is the name for the capital of ancient Ireland and is the spiritual center of Irish culture. (A statue of St. Patrick now stands on the Hill of Tara, in County Meath, Ireland.)

James Cantrell’s "Celtic-Southern thesis" brings a fresh perspective to this work.4 He maintains that "Gone With the Wind is not merely a novel about fighting and rebuilding from a losing war, nor is it merely a cloying though ultimately heartbreaking love story; it is an epic in which the protagonist ultimately has the tragic perception that her life has been false in cultural terms. The conflict in Gone With the Wind concerns which of the two different cultures should be pre-eminent in the South, a conflict Mitchell embodies in Scarlett’s relationships with her parents and, especially, in her love for Ashley Wilkes." Cantrell contends, "The South’s tragedy, in Mitchell’s vision, is that its Celtic hardheadedness did not prevent it from choosing the pretty illusions of cavalier [Anglo-Norman] gentility, which include a cavalier defense of chattel slavery and the caste system that goes with it. The South, like Scarlett, blinded itself to reality, and thereby lost what was most precious to it."

Mainstream historians, presenting the victors’ version of events, focus on slavery and downplay the economic reasons why the South seceded from the Union. They view Mitchell’s novel as a "moonlight on magnolias" plantation romance that creates a falsely alluring picture of the Old South. James McPherson, in Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War, echoes this sentiment when he writes, "Gone With the Wind glamorized the Old South and romanticized the Confederacy." Academic literary critics dismiss the work as being conventionally written and uneven. And American educators, in today’s political climate, avoid the book.

The slaves in Gone With the Wind, notably Mammy, Uncle Peter, and Prissy, are well drawn people who have individuality and dignity. Mammy is a strong woman who understands people and their personal relationships better than any other character in the novel. Uncle Peter, for want of a (white) male presence, oversees Aunt Pittypat’s home, in a stern but thoughtful manner. Prissy has a sweet, manipulative, and sometimes exasperating teen-age charm. They speak an African-American dialect, which in the text Mitchell spells in a way that anticipates present-day Ebonics.

In Gone With the Wind, Mitchell treats the institution of slavery as a fact of life. Up until the 19th century slavery in human societies was considered to be a normal state of affairs, crossing racial lines. Some free blacks in the South owned African-American slaves, and people of other races when defeated in war have been sold into slavery. (The Bible, in the Old Testament, affirms that slaves are a form of property and that the children of a slave couple are the property of the slaves’ owner [Exodus 21:4]. Abraham and Jacob kept slaves, and the New Testament says nothing against slavery.) Black Africans exported 11,000,000 slaves to the New World, of whom 500,000 (5 percent) came to America. Between 1823 and 1888, every country in the New World that had slaves, such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, freed them peacefully — except Haiti (in 1804) and the United States, who did it through war. The Confederate States of America would have freed their slaves peacefully fairly soon after it became a nation had it not been attacked and destroyed by the Union.

Mitchell does not dwell on Lincoln’s handling of slavery, an issue he skirted until midway through the war. I examine the issue of slavery and Lincoln’s handling of it in A Jeffersonian View of the Civil War (published on LewRockwell.com.)

The film version of Gone With the Wind (1939) presents a falsely romantic picture of the Old South. A prologue (not in the book) scrolling over a bucolic Georgian landscape informs the viewer that "…in this pretty world Gallantry took the last bow… the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Masters and Slaves… no more than a dream remembered." The film skips over Sherman burning Atlanta and the hardships of Reconstruction, devoting the bulk of its footage to Scarlett’s love interests (shorn of children she had in her first two marriages). Ashley professes ardent feelings for Scarlett in the film that are absent in the novel. The film version of Gone With the Wind is a pale and distorted mirror of the book.

Gone With the Wind (the novel) has a timeless quality in how it describes the struggle for survival and freedom in turbulent times. The economic devastation inflicted on the Confederacy in its failed War for Southern Independence in the 19th century could happen again in the United States today with its "War on Terrorism." The U.S. is deeply in debt, and it is getting worse (the Federal budget deficit for March set an all time monthly record of $108.2 Billion — $1.3 Trillion annualized). America’s manufacturing base is contracting (from 54 percent of the world’s industrial output in 1945 to 17 percent today). The Euro continues to rise in value against the U.S. dollar and challenge its status as the post-World War II reserve currency. The U.S. Dollar Index has fallen (once again) close the 80.00 level, the "floor" for this index since the beginning of the fiat currency era in 1973. If this floor does not hold, the dollar could succumb to runaway inflation, bankrupting government entitlement programs. As Gary North puts it in Solvency: Gone With the Wind, "When you think u2018Social Security/Medicare,’ think Confederate Bonds 1866." People in the United States today risk suffering the same kind of privations people in the South experienced during and after the Civil War. Should this happen, Americans will once again treasure Gone With the Wind like they did in the Great Depression, and like people still do in other nations around the world.

Recorded Books has a 50-hour unabridged audio production of Gone With the Wind (on 36 or 28 cassettes) for rental or purchase. Linda Stephens, a Broadway actor with an ear for Southern dialects, is the reader. Listening to her narrate this story is a captivating experience. It is arguably the best way, following the oral tradition of poems, to "read" this prose epic.

References

1. Pierpont, Claudia Roth. "A Critic at Large: A Study in Scarlett." The New Yorker. August 31, 1992, pages 87—103 (see page 101).
2. Huang, Carol. "Tomorrow Is Another Day: An Ethiopian student survives a brutal imprisonment by translating Gone with the Wind into his native Amharic." The American Scholar. 2006, Volume 75 (Autumn, Issue 4), pages 79—88.
3. Schefski, Harold K. "Margaret Mitchell: Gone With the Wind and War and Peace." In Gone with the Wind as Book and Film. Richard Harwell, Editor. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1983.
4. Cantrell, James P. How Celtic Culture Invented Southern Literature Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2006.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com

Donald Miller Archives

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An estimated one billion people watched former Vice President Al Gore receive an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth. In this film about global warming, Gore uses slides from lectures he gives on this subject, personal anecdotes, and footage of collapsing Antarctic ice shelves, receding glaciers, and marooned polar bears to warn us that human-made greenhouse gases are heating the planet to dangerous levels. The principal greenhouse gas that humans make, burning coal, oil, and natural gas for energy, is carbon dioxide (CO2). (In 1750, at the beginning of the Industrial Era, the earth’s atmospheric CO2 concentration was 280 parts per million by volume. In 1960 it had risen to 315 ppmv, and it is now 383 ppmv.)

There is another theory of global warming and cooling that Gore does not address in An Inconvenient Truth. The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory posits that cosmic rays, not humans, cause climate change. The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change (2007) by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder is the first book to be published on this subject. Svensmark proposed this theory in 1996 and supplies the scientific input for the book. Calder, a British science writer, "strung the words together," as he puts it. He does this very well and explains Svensmark’s theory in an engaging and easily understandable way. It will be published in the U.S. March 25 (I obtained my copy from the UK, where it was published last month).

The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory says that cosmic rays make clouds. Exploding stars continually spray the galaxy with cosmic rays, which consist of protons, alpha particles (helium nuclei), electrons, and muons (heavy electrons). The muons in this mix of atomic bullets make low-level (below 8,000 feet) clouds. They do this by knocking electrons off atoms and molecules in the air, and these liberated electrons seed the formation "cloud condensation nuclei." Water vapor in the atmosphere condenses on these specks to form cloud water droplets. The wet clouds thus formed block sunlight and reflect its rays back into space, which has a cooling effect. In 2006, Svensmark and colleagues showed experimentally how it is done, which involves adding sulfuric acid to these condensation nuclei. (Plankton, microscopic plants in the ocean and to a much lesser extent volcanoes and fossil fuels, continually restock the atmosphere with sulfur.)

The sun’s magnetic field encloses its planets in a magnetic solar wind (the heliosphere) that shields us from many of the cosmic rays that exploding stars shoot our way. Sunspots, dark spots made by pools of intense magnetism seen through a telescope, indicate heightened magnetic activity, which deflects more cosmic rays away from Earth. During the 20th century the sun’s magnetic shield more than doubled, and the sun had a lot of sunspots. Fewer cosmic rays reached Earth to make clouds, and global temperatures rose. When the sun’s magnetic activity wanes and sunspots disappear, more cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere to make clouds; and the globe cools. The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory of climate change explains observations made over the last 400 years since the advent of the telescope that correlate sunspots with global warming and cooling.

The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory explains climate change on a geologic time scale. Our solar system in its rotation around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy passes through one of its spiral arms every 135 million years. These arms contain high levels of cosmic rays. Astrophysicist Nir Shaviv and geologist Ján Veizer in "Celestrial Driver of Phanerozoic Climate?" (Geological Society of America Today 2003;13:4-10) and Veizer in "Celestial Climate Driver: A Perspective from Four Billion Years of the Carbon Cycle" (Geoscience Canada 2005;32:13-30) show that the variability in the Earth’s temperature over the past 500 million years correlates well with the intensity of cosmic rays hitting the planet when it passes in and out of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. They found that at one point atmospheric CO2 levels were 18 times higher than they are today, and they were 10 times higher when the planet was an "icehouse" during the Ordovician glacial period (450 million years ago).

During one warm period, 50 million years ago, the weather in the arctic was like that in Florida today. The Arctic Ocean was free of ice year-round and was populated by alligators and turtles. Axel Heiberg Island, in the high Canadian arctic 600 miles from the North Pole, has a well-preserved fossil forest (discovered in 1985), in what once was a semi-tropical swamp. At the other extreme, 2.2 billion years ago, and several times more recently, the planet was covered in ice down to the equator, making it a "Snowball Earth." Planetary factors that have played a role in these climate changes include the position of drifting continents and the evolving composition of the atmosphere.

Other cycles that drive climate change include the Earth’s 100,000-year elliptical orbit around the sun and its 41,000-year axial tilt cycle. (In the most elliptical phase of the Earth’s orbit, the sun’s rays must travel 3 percent farther to reach the planet. The Earth’s axial tilt ranges from 22.1 to 24.5 degrees and is currently at 23 degrees.) And then there is the 1,500-year solar cycle.

S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery describe the 1,500-year solar warming and cooling climate cycle in their book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years (2007). It has 528 references, a glossary, and an index. This well written book is arguably the best book to date on the politics and science of global warming. In addition to presenting evidence for the 1,500-year solar cycle, first proposed by European researchers in 1996, the authors address both the Greenhouse and Solar/Cosmic Ray theories of climate change.

The sun’s role in climate change is due not so much to changes in intensity of its visible and/or invisible rays, or irradiance, but to its magnetic effect on cosmic rays. Changes in the sun’s magnetic activity have a four-fold greater effect on the Earth’s temperature than variations in its irradiance.

Today’s global warming is part of a natural 1,500-year, plus or minus 500-year, solar cycle operating for at least a million years. The Earth’s climate has warmed and cooled nine times in the past 12,000 years, in lock step with the waxing and waning of the sun’s magnetic activity (Science 2001;294[7 December]:2130-2136). Over the last 1,200 years there has been a "Medieval Warming" (900-1300), when Greenland was green; a "Little Ice Age" (1300-1850), when New York harbor froze, and people could walk from Manhattan across the ice to Staten Island a mile away (in 1780); and the current global warming (1850-?). Rather than "global warming," a better term for this phase of the solar cycle is "Modern Warming." Since 1850, temperatures have risen 0.8 degrees C, most rapidly in 1850-1870 and 1920-1940. Temperatures in the 1,500-year solar cycle fluctuate within a 4 degree C range — two degrees above and two degrees below the norm.

The Modern Warming is not confined to this planet. Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, and Triton (Neptune’s largest moon) in the solar system are also warming.

It is not surprising that the former vice president did not address the Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory of Climate Change in An Inconvenient Truth. This "documentary," as the Christian Science Monitor notes, is really a docuganda, propaganda disguised as documentary. It manipulates the audience, with alarming images and a skewed presentation of facts, into believing that humans cause global warming and that "polluting" the atmosphere with carbon dioxide will have catastrophic consequences. Unlike a true documentary, which seeks to inform the audience about a given state of affairs in a balanced and unbiased fashion, in An Inconvenient Truth Gore ignores or misrepresents evidence that refutes the human-caused Greenhouse Theory. Addressing competing theories on global warming in an even-handed way is not his intent.

Christopher Horner, in his recently published book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism (2007), gives a lively account of the data Gore omits that contradict his global warming alarmism, especially with regard to hurricane frequency and severity and the increase in weather-related damages. He also addresses the film’s misrepresentations and some outright falsehoods.

The discredited "hockey stick" graph of the Earth’s temperature over the last 1,000 years is one of them. This widely publicized and cited graph reported by Mann and colleagues in 1998/1999 expunges the Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age from the climate record. By getting rid of these two phases of the most recent solar cycle, they make the temperature for the first 900 years relatively flat and unchanged, with the rise in temperature in the 20th century on the graph made to look like the blade of a hockey stick. This graph so constructed matches that of atmospheric CO2 levels during this time period, which remained unchanged for 900 years until they began their rapid rise in the 20th century. Although now acknowledged by climate scientists to be false, Gore nevertheless makes this hockey stick graph the centerpiece of his "documentary." (Horner’s colleague, Marlo Lewis, has put together an excellent critique of this film on PowerPoint slides, available here.)

Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, in a tightly woven and sober manner, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, with rapier wit, expose the flaws in the human-caused Greenhouse Theory. The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory presented in The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change is more convincing.

At CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory in Geneva, researchers are building the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the $2.4 billion Large Hadron Collider. In the upcoming CLOUD experiment (Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets) led by Jasper Kirby, investigators will generate high-energy particle beams in this accelerator simulating cosmic rays that they will use to validate and better understand the connection between cosmic rays and clouds.

Al Gore tells us in An Inconvenient Truth that he has given this lecture more than 1,000 times around the world. To help solve the climate crisis (his term for global warming), as a "recovering politician," he has gone on a crusade against CO2. Gore and his fellow climate alarmists do not want anything to do with CLOUD and wish it would go away. As Calder recounts in The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, climate scientists wedded to the greenhouse theory were able to block it when Kirby proposed doing this experiment in 2000; but now, in 2007, with CERN’s backing and funding secured, CLOUD will come online in 2010.

A basic rule of investigative journalism and criminal investigation is "Follow the Money," or as Cicero put it, "Cui bono?" (“To whose benefit?,” literally, “[being] good to whom?”).

Al Gore profits handsomely from his climate crisis activities. Validation of the Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory poses a major threat to this source of income. He will not disclose his speaking fees, but he reportedly received $250,000 for a speech that he gave in Saudi Arabia recently, and his average speaking fee for his global warming lectures is said to be $50,000 to $100,000. Gore is also a founding partner and Chairman of Generation Investment Management (GIM), a firm that "manage[s] the assets of institutional investors… as well as those of select high net worth individuals." [Emphasis added.] GIM invests in companies poised to cash in on CO2-caused global warming solutions, such as government subsidized solar and wind alternative-energy ventures and projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe.

The day after he won his Academy Award The Tennessean reported that Gore’s electrical and natural gas bills for his home in Nashville in 2006 were $27,360. This amount of energy, all of it generated from fossil fuels, is more than 20 times than that consumed by the average American household. A spokesperson for Gore pointed out that he buys "carbon offsets" to pay for his large "carbon footprint." Gore invests these offset funds in GIM, the company he chairs; and his apocalyptic climate forecasts (reinforced by those currently being made by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) scare citizens and government leaders around the world and persuade them to invest in alternative energy programs, raising the value of GIM’s privately held shares.

Can an individual who stands to make millions from the CO2 global warming paradigm be trusted to present an unbiased review of this subject and view with an open mind alternative theories of climate change?

Global warming is now a $5 billion industry, which benefits the government and its politicians and bureaucrats, environmental activists, the media, executives and shareholders of "green" industries, and climate scientists. Businesses profit by gaming the regulatory and planned "cap and trade" process rather than have to make money by producing things people want. The ("good news is no news") media shamelessly plays along and profits by frightening people. And we see how the movement’s most prominent activist, former Vice President Al Gore benefits. Climate scientists are awarded $1.7 billion a year in government grants to study climate change, but under the condition that these scientists continue to support the "consensus" or lose their funding. Climate scientist Richard Lindzen, in Climate of Fear, writes : "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis."

The global warming scare enables government to intervene and extend its control over people’s lives. The House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, looking for ways to keep Social Security and Medicare afloat and balance the budget, are investigating proposals for a carbon tax, under the pretext of cutting down on Greenhouse emissions.

Gore barely mentions the Kyoto Protocol in his film and says nothing about what sacrifices people will have to make in order to reduce CO2 emissions. He does say, however, that combating CO2-induced global warming will take a commitment similar to what the country had to make to win World War II. At some point in this climate war the government will ration CO2 and issue "carbon credits" — CO2 ration cards. In World War II Americans had to have the appropriate ration card to purchase gasoline, tires, coffee, sugar, meat, and shoes; a certificate to purchase a stove; and an authorization for vacation travel. At the height of the War on CO2 global governance, which only a socialist state can provide, will be required to rein in CO2 emissions, with international inspectors at one’s doorstep prosecuting and confiscating property of people and industries that make "greedy [CO2-producing] choices," like using an air-conditioner and driving a SUV.

Government leaders, environmental activists, and "select high net worth individuals" (including, of course, Hollywood celebrities) will not be inconvenienced by the strictures on CO2 emissions government imposes. In medieval times the nobility invoked sumptuary laws to limit what it considered to be conspicuous consumption of the bourgeoisie. Carbon offsets in the CO2 war will create a de-facto sumptuary law rendering the elite exempt from the hardships that carbon rationing will cause.

Human emissions of CO2, which account for 3 percent of the CO2 in atmosphere, may not have caused the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 levels. It is a reasonable hypothesis, but it has not been tested. Habibullo Abdussamatov postulates a different cause for the rise in CO2 levels: "Increased solar irradiance warms Earth’s oceans, which then triggers the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So the common view that man’s industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations." Whichever way it has happened plants thrive with rising CO2 levels. Studies show that plants and trees raise their productivity by 30-80 percent when the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is doubled from 300 to 600 ppmv. Orange trees produce twice as many oranges. Satellite observations from 1982 to 1999 show that global vegetation increased more than 6 percent.

The Environmental establishment is able to ignore these benefits, but the Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory of climate change is another matter, particularly when validated by the CLOUD experiment. It is a paradigm shift that will topple the charade of human-caused warming. Vested interests will fight it. Too much money, power, and control are at stake.

Claims of warming due to human production of CO2 are supported only by its association with a recent rise in temperatures and on global climate models, which fail to account for past climate changes and whose future predictions have yet to be verified. Experimental evidence and empirical observations of past global warming and cooling events underpin the Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory of climate change.

One hopes that science will prevail. It is the only way people can prevent the climate alarmists, backed by the media and the state, from carrying out their plan to "save the planet." If not stopped, they will eventually establish global governance; dismantle modern technology; cripple industry; impose carbon rationing with radical reductions in the average American’s standard of living and quality of life; and inflict untold misery, suffering, and death for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com

Donald Miller Archives

People in the U.S. consume an average 240 micrograms (g) of iodine a day. In contrast, people in Japan consume more than 12 milligrams (mg) of iodine a day (12,000 g), a 50-fold greater amount. They eat seaweed, which include brown algae (kelp), red algae (nori sheets, with sushi), and green algae (chlorella). Compared to terrestrial plants, which contain only trace amounts of iodine (0.001 mg/gm), these marine plants have high concentrations of this nutrient (0.5—8.0 mg/gm). When studied in 1964, Japanese seaweed consumption was found to be 4.5 grams (gm) a day and that eaten had a measured iodine concentration of 3.1 mg/gm of seaweed (= 13.8 mg of iodine). According to public health officials, mainland Japanese now consume 14.5 gm of seaweed a day (= 45 mg of iodine, if its iodine content, not measured, remains unchanged). Researchers have determined that residents on the coast of Hokkaido eat a quantity of seaweed sufficient to provide a daily iodine intake of 200 mg a day. Saltwater fish and shellfish contain iodine, but one would have to eat 15—25 pounds of fish to get 12 mg of iodine.

Health comparisons between the two countries are disturbing. The incidence of breast cancer in the U.S. is the highest in the world, and in Japan, until recently, the lowest. Japanese women who emigrate from Japan or adopt a Western style diet have a higher rate of breast cancer compared with those that consume seaweed. Life expectancy in the U.S. is 77.85 years, 48th in 226 countries surveyed. It is 81.25 years in Japan, the highest of all industrialized countries and only slightly behind the five leaders — Andorra, Macau, San Marino, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The infant mortality rate in Japan is the lowest in the world, 3.5 deaths under age one per 1,000 live births, half the infant mortality rate in the United States.

Today 1 in 7 American women (almost 15 percent) will develop breast cancer during their lifetime. Thirty years ago, when iodine consumption was twice as high as it is now (480 g a day) 1 in 20 women developed breast cancer. Iodine was used as a dough conditioner in making bread, and each slice of bread contained 0.14 mg of iodine. In 1980, bread makers started using bromide as a conditioner instead, which competes with iodine for absorption into the thyroid gland and other tissues in the body. Iodine was also more widely used in the dairy industry 30 years ago than it is now.

Now iodized table salt is the chief source of iodine in a Western diet. But 45 percent of American households buy salt without iodine, which grocery stores also sell. And over the last three decades people who do use iodized table salt have decreased their consumption of it by 65 percent. Furthermore, the much higher concentrations of chloride in salt (NaCl) inhibits absorption of its sister halogen iodine (the intestines absorb only 10 percent of the iodine present in iodized table salt). As a result, 15 percent of the U.S. adult female population suffers from moderate to severe iodine deficiency, which health authorities define as a urinary iodine concentration less than 50 g /L. Women with goiters (a visible, noncancerous enlargement of the thyroid gland) owing to iodine deficiency have been found to have a three times greater incidence of breast cancer. A high intake of iodine is associated with a low incidence breast cancer, and a low intake with a high incidence of breast cancer.

Animal studies show that iodine prevents breast cancer, arguing for a causal association in these epidemiological findings. The carcinogens nitrosmethylurea and DMBA cause breast cancer in more than 70 percent of female rats. Those given iodine, especially in its molecular form as I2, have a statistically significant decrease in incidence of cancer. Other evidence adding biologic plausibility to the hypothesis that iodine prevents breast cancer includes the finding that the ductal cells in the breast, the ones most likely to become cancerous, are equipped with an iodine pump (the sodium iodine symporter, the same one that the thyroid gland has) to soak up this element.

Similar findings apply to fibrocystic disease of the breast. The incidence of fibrocystic breast disease in American women was 3 percent in the 1920s. Today, 90 percent of women have this disorder, manifested by epithelial hyperplasia, apocrine gland metaplasia, fluid-filled cysts, and fibrosis. Six million American women with fibrocystic disease have moderate to severe breast pain and tenderness that lasts more than 6 days during the menstrual cycle.

In animal studies, female rats fed an iodine-free diet develop fibrocystic changes in their breasts, and iodine in its elemental form (I2) cures it.

Russian researchers first showed, in 1966, that iodine effectively relieves signs and symptoms of fibrocystic breast disease. Vishniakova and Murav’eva treated 167 women suffering from fibrocystic disease with 50 mg KI during the intermenstrual period and obtained a beneficial healing effect in 71 percent (it is reference 49 here).

Then Ghent and coworkers, in a study published in the Canadian Journal of Surgery in 1993, likewise found that iodine relieves signs and symptoms of fibrocystic breast disease in 70 percent of their patients. This report is a composite of three clinical studies, two case series done in Canada in 696 women treated with various types of iodine, and one in Seattle. The Seattle study, done at the Virginia Mason Clinic, is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of 56 women designed to compare 3—5 mg of elemental iodine (I2) to a placebo (an aqueous mixture of brown vegetable dye with quinine). Investigators followed the women for six months and tracked subjective and objective changes in their fibrocystic disease.

A statistical analysis of the Seattle study (enlarged to include 92 women) was done, which shows that iodine has a highly statistically significant beneficial effect on fibrocystic disease (P < 0.001). Iodine reduced breast tenderness, nodularity, fibrosis, turgidity, and number of macroscysts, the five parameters in a total breast examination score that a physician blinded to what treatment the woman was taking, iodine or placebo, measured. This 36-page report, now available online, was submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1995 seeking its approval to carry out a larger randomized controlled clinical trial on iodine for treating fibrocystic breast disease. It declined to approve the study, telling its lead investigator, Dr. Donald Low, "iodine is a natural substance, not a drug." But the FDA has now decided to approve a similar trial sponsored by Symbollon Pharmaceuticals. This company is enrolling 175 women in a phase III trial, registered on clinicaltrials.gov. (Any women with fibrocystic disease reading this who might be interested in participating in this study should call its sponsor, Jack Kessler, Ph.D., at 508-620-7676, Ext. 201.)

Most physicians and surgeons view iodine from a narrow perspective. It is an antiseptic that disinfects drinking water and prevents surgical wound infections, and the thyroid gland needs it to make thyroid hormones — and that’s it. (When painted on the skin prior to surgery, tincture of iodine kills 90 percent of bacteria present within 90 seconds.) The thyroid gland needs iodine to synthesize thyroxine (T4) and triiodothyronine (T3), hormones that regulate metabolism and steer growth and development. T4 contains four iodine atoms combined with 27 other atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, but owing to its large size accounts for 65 percent of the molecule’s weight. (T3 has three iodine atoms.) The thyroid needs only a trace amount of iodine, 70 g a day, to produce the requisite amount of T4 and T3. For that reason thyroidologists say that iodine is best taken just in microgram amounts. They consider consuming more than 1 to 2 mg of iodine a day to be excessive and potentially harmful.

Expert opinion on iodine is now the purview of thyroidologists. Mainstream physicians and surgeons accept their thyroid-only view of iodine and either ignore or discount studies that show iodine in larger amounts provides extrathyroidal benefits, particularly for women’s breasts. Thus a leading textbook on breast disease, Bland and Copeland’s The Breast: Comprehensive Management of Benign and Malignant Disorders (2003), fails to mention iodine anywhere in its 1,766 pages.

Iodine has an important and little understood history. This relatively scarce element has played a pivotal role in the formation of our planet’s atmosphere and in the evolution of life. For more than two billion years there was no oxygen in the atmosphere until a new kind of bacteria, cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), began producing oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis. Cyanobacteria also developed an affinity for iodine. The most likely reason is that these organisms used iodine as an antioxidant to protect themselves against the free radicals that oxygen breeds (superoxide anion, hydrogen peroxide, and hydroxyl radical). Studying kelp, researchers have shown how iodine does this and have found that kelp will absorb increased amounts of iodine when placed under oxidative stress. Other researchers have shown that iodine increases the antioxidant status of human serum similar to that of vitamin C.

Iodine also induces apoptosis, programmed cell death. This process is essential to growth and development (fingers form in the fetus by apoptosis of the tissue between them) and for destroying cells that represent a threat to the integrity of the organism, like cancer cells and cells infected with viruses. Human lung cancer cells with genes spliced into them that enhance iodine uptake and utilization undergo apoptosis and shrink when given iodine, both when grown in vitro outside the body and implanted in mice. Its anti-cancer function may well prove to be iodine’s most important extrathyroidal benefit.

Iodine has other extrathyroidal functions that require more study. It removes toxic chemicals — fluoride, bromide, lead, aluminum, mercury — and biological toxins, suppresses auto-immunity, strengthens the T-cell adaptive immune system, and protects against abnormal growth of bacteria in the stomach.

In addition to the thyroid and mammary glands, other tissues possess an iodine pump (the sodium/iodine symporter). Stomach mucosa, the salivary glands, and lactating mammary glands can concentrate iodine almost to the same degree as the thyroid gland (40-fold greater than its concentration in blood). Other tissues that have this pump include the ovaries; thymus gland, seat of the adaptive immune system; skin; choroid plexus in the brain, which makes cerebrospinal fluid; and joints, arteries and bone.

Today’s medical establishment is wary of iodine (as they are of most naturally occurring, nonpatentable, nonpharmaceutical agents). Thyroidologists cite the Wolff-Chaikoff effect and warn that TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) blood levels can rise with an iodine intake of a milligram or more. The Wolff-Chaikoff effect, a temporary inhibition of thyroid hormone synthesis that supposedly occurs with increased iodine intake, is of no clinical significance. And an elevated TSH, when it occurs, is "subclinical." This means that no signs or symptoms of hypothyroidism accompany its rise. Some people taking milligram doses of iodine, usually more than 50 mg a day, develop mild swelling of the thyroid gland without symptoms. The vast majority of people, 98 to 99 percent, can take iodine in doses ranging from 10 to 200 mg a day without any clinically adverse affects on thyroid function. The prevalence of thyroid diseases in the 127 million people in Japan who consume high amounts of iodine is not much different than that in the U.S.

Everyone agrees that a lack of iodine in the diet causes a spectrum of disorders that includes, in increasing order of severity, goiter and hypothyroidism, mental retardation, and cretinism (severe mental retardation accompanied by physical deformities). Health authorities in the U.S. and Europe have agreed upon a Reference Daily Intake (RDI), formerly called the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA), for iodine designed to prevent these disorders, which the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates afflicts 30 percent of the world’s population. The RDI for iodine, first proposed in 1980, is 100—150 g/day. Organizations advocating this amount include the American Medical Association, National Institutes of Health’s National Research Council, Institute of Medicine, United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, WHO Expert Committee, and the European Union International Programme on Chemical Safety. These health authorities consider an RDI of 100—150 g/day of iodine sufficient to meet the requirements of nearly all (97—98%) healthy individuals.

This consensus on iodine intake flies in the face of evidence justifying a higher amount. This evidence includes animal studies, in vitro studies on human cancer cell lines, clinical trials of iodine for fibrocystic breast disease, and epidemiological data. An intake of 150 g/day of iodine will prevent goiters and the other recognized iodine deficiency disorders, but not breast disease. Prevention of breast disease requires higher doses of iodine. Indeed, a reasonable hypothesis is that, like goiters and cretinism, fibrocystic disease of the breast and breast cancer are iodine deficiency disorders (also uterine fibroids).

What Albert Guérard writes about new truths applies especially to iodine: "When you seek a new path to truth, you must expect to find it blocked by expert opinion." The reigning truth on iodine is that the thyroid gland is the only organ in the body that requires this micronutrient, and a daily intake considerably more than what the thyroid gland needs is potentially harmful. The new truth is that the rest of the body also needs iodine, in milligram, not microgram amounts. Tell that to a thyroidologist and her response will call to mind this admonition on new truths.

These are the four most common formulations of inorganic (nonradioactive) iodine, as iodide (I-), and with or without molecular iodine (I2): Potassium iodide (KI) tablets, in doses ranging from 0.23 to 130 mg; super saturated potassium iodide (SSKI), 19—50 mg of iodide per drop; Lugol’s solution, 6.3 mg of molecular iodine/iodide per drop; and Iodoral, each tablet containing 12.5 mg iodine/iodide. Both Lugol’s solution and Ioderal are one-third molecular iodine (5%) and two-thirds potassium iodide (10%). Studies done to date indicate that the best iodine supplement is one that includes molecular iodine (I2), which breast tissue prefers.

Iodine was used for a wide variety of ailments after its discovery in 1811 up until the mid-1900s, when thyroidologists warned that "excess" amounts of iodine might adversely affect thyroid function. It is effective in gram amounts for treating various dermatologic conditions, chronic lung disease, fungal infestations, tertiary syphilis, and even arteriosclerosis. The Nobel laureate Dr. Albert Szent Györgi (1893—1986), the physician who discovered vitamin C, writes: "When I was a medical student, iodine in the form of KI was the universal medicine. Nobody knew what it did, but it did something and did something good. We students used to sum up the situation in this little rhyme:

If ye don’t know where, what, and why
Prescribe ye then K and I"

The standard dose of potassium iodide given was 1 gram, which contains 770 mg of iodine.

Regarding KI and other iodine salts (like sodium iodide), the venerated 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1911, states, "Their pharmacological action is as obscure as their effects in certain diseased conditions are consistently brilliant. Our ignorance of their mode of action is cloaked by the term deobstruent, which implies that they possess the power of driving out impurities from the blood and tissues. Most notably is this the case with the poisonous products of syphilis. In its tertiary stage — and also earlier — this disease yields in the most rapid and unmistakable fashion to iodides, so much so that the administration of these salts is at present the best means of determining whether, for instance, a cranial tumor be syphilitic or not."

This 19th and early 20th century medicine continues to be used in gram amounts in the 21st century by dermatologists. They treat inflammatory dermatoses, like nodular vasculitis and pyoderma gangrenosum (shown here), with SSKI, beginning with an iodine dose of 900 mg a day, followed by weekly increases up to 6 grams a day as tolerated. Fungal eruptions, like sporotrichosis, are treated initially in gram amounts with great success. These lesions can disappear within two weeks after treatment with iodine.

For many years physicians used potassium iodide in doses starting at 1.5 to 3 gm and up to more than 10 grams a day, on and off, to treat bronchial asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease with good results and surprisingly few side effects.

There is a case report in the medical literature of a 54-year-old man who, thinking it was iced tea, drank a “home preparation” of SSKI in water that his aunt kept in the refrigerator for her rheumatism. Over a short period of time he consumed 600 ml of this solution, which contained 15 gm of iodide, an amount 100,000 times more than the RDI. He developed swelling of the face, neck, and mouth, had transient cardiac arrhythmias and made an uneventful recovery.

Dr. Guy Abraham, a former professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UCLA, mounted what he calls "The Iodine Project" in 1997 after he read the Ghent paper on iodine for fibrocystic disease. He had his company, Optimox Corp., make Iodoral, the tablet form of Lugol’s solution, and he engaged two family practice physicians, Dr. Jorge Flechas (in 2000) in North Carolina and Dr. David Brownstein (in 2003) in Michigan to carry out clinical studies with it.

The project’s hypothesis is that maintaining whole body sufficiency of iodine requires 12.5 mg a day, an amount similar to what the Japanese consume. The conventional view is that the body contains 25—50 mg of iodine, of which 70—80 percent resides in the thyroid gland. Dr. Abraham concluded that whole body sufficiency exists when a person excretes 90 percent of the iodine ingested. He devised an iodine-loading test where one takes 50 mg and measures the amount excreted in the urine over the next 24 hours. He found that the vast majority of people retain a substantial amount of the 50 mg dose. Many require 50 mg a day for several months before they will excrete 90 percent of it. His studies indicate that, given a sufficient amount, the body will retain much more iodine than originally thought, 1,500 mg, with only 3 percent of that amount held in the thyroid gland.

More than 4,000 patients in this project take iodine in daily doses ranging from 12.5 to 50 mg, and in those with diabetes, up to 100 mg a day. These investigators have found that iodine does indeed reverse fibrocystic disease; their diabetic patients require less insulin; hypothyroid patients, less thyroid medication; symptoms of fibromyalgia resolve, and patients with migraine headaches stop having them. To paraphrase Dr. Szent-Györgi, these investigators aren’t sure how iodine does it, but it does something good.

Thyroid function remains unchanged in 99 percent of patients. Untoward effects of iodine, allergies, swelling of the salivary glands and thyroid, and iodism, occur rarely, in less than 1 percent. Iodine removes the toxic halogens fluoride and bromide from the body. Iodism, an unpleasant brassy taste, runny nose, and acne-like skin lesions, is caused by the bromide that iodine extracts from the tissues. Symptoms subside on a lesser dose of iodine.

As these physicians point out, consuming iodine in milligram doses should, of course, be coupled with a complete nutritional program that includes adequate amounts of selenium, magnesium, and Omega-3 fatty acids. Done this way, an iodine intake 100 times the reference daily intake is "the simplest, safest, most effective and least expensive way to help solve the health care crisis crippling our nation," as the leader of The Iodine Project, Dr. Abraham, puts it.

People who take iodine in these amounts report that they have a greater sense of well-being, increased energy, and a lifting of brain fog. They feel warmer in cold environments, need somewhat less sleep, improved skin complexion, and have more regular bowel movements. These purported health benefits need to be studied more thoroughly, as do those with regard to fibrocystic breast disease and cancer.

Meanwhile, perhaps we should emulate the Japanese and substantially increase our iodine intake, if not with seaweed, then with two drops of Lugol’s Solution (or one Iodoral tablet) a day.

Recommended Reading:

• Miller DW. Iodine in Health and Civil Defense. Presented at the 24th Annual Meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness in Portland, Oregon, August 6, 2006. The text for this talk, with 68 references, can be found here, and the PowerPoint slides I used for it, here.
• Abraham GE. The safe and effective implementation of orthoiodosupplementation in medical practice. The Original Internist 2004;11:17—36. Available online here. This is a good introduction to The Iodine Project. His other research studies are online here.
• Flechas, JD. Orthoiodosupplementation in a primary care practice. The Original Internist 2005;12(2):89—96. Available online here.
• Brownstein D. Clinical experience with inorganic, non-radioactive iodine/iodide. The Original Internist 2005;12(3):105—108. Available online here.
• Derry D. Breast cancer and iodine: How to prevent and how to survive breast cancer. Victoria, B.C.: Trafford Publishing; 2002. The book is a bit disorganized, has references at the end of each chapter not cited in the text, and no index; but it is an eye-opener nonetheless.
• Brownstein D. Iodine: why you need it why you can’t live without it. West Bloomfield, Michigan: Medical Alternatives Press; 2004. Well-written and referenced, with case histories.
• Low DE, Ghent WR, Hill LD. Diatomic iodine treatment for fibrocystic disease: special report of efficacy and safety results. [Submitted to the FDA] 1995:1—38. Available online here. This study makes a strong case for iodine as the preferred treatment for fibrocystic disease.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com

The Best of Donald Miller

Neal Cassady

The Beat Generation launched a movement in the 1940s that has had a telling effect on our culture. This generation of young Americans, seeing the ovens of Auschwitz and what atomic bombs did, sought escape and enlightenment through sex, drugs, modern jazz, and Eastern mysticism

They also wrote books, most notably Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. This year is the 50th anniversary of Howl. The golden anniversary of On the Road will be celebrated next year and that of Naked Lunch, in 2009.

Jack Kerouac

The Beat movement began in 1944 when Kerouac and Ginsberg, at Columbia University, met William Burroughs, a Harvard graduate who was ten years their senior. A fourth person, Neal Cassady, also played a pivotal role in it.

For Kerouac and Ginsberg, Neal Cassady was the inspiration and guiding light of the Beat Generation. They met him in 1946 when he came to New York to visit a friend at Columbia. Neal was raised in the slums of Denver by a "wino hobo" father, his mother having died when he was an infant. He was a live wire — as Kerouac puts it, a sinner but also a kind man who always picked up the worst helpless hitch hikers he could find. In Ginsberg’s Howl, Neal Cassady is "N.C.," the "secret hero of these poems," the celebrated "cocksman and Adonis of Denver" whose ultimate purpose in "ecstatic and insatiate" copulation is to achieve spiritual enlightenment.

Allen Ginsberg

The Beat movement started in New York, but when Cassady settled in San Francisco with his wife Kerouac and Ginsberg went there to see him.

On October 7, 1955 Beat writers in San Francisco held their first poetry reading at the Six Gallery. Announced as "6 Poets at 6 Gallery," it was a signal event in the history of American letters. Ginsberg read Howl, with its famous first line, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked." Kerouac and Cassady were there, urging the poets on and passing around jugs of wine. Describing the event in The Dharma Bums, Kerouac writes, "I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading…that night, which was, among other things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there."

William Burroughs

The New York Times sent Richard Eberhart, an establishment poet who was the Poet in Residence at Dartmouth College when I was a student there, to write a report on this "Renaissance." In an article titled "West Coast Rhythms," published in the The New York Times Book Review September 2, 1956, he noted that with regard to Beat poets, "Ambiguity is despised, irony is considered weakness, the poem as a system of connotations is thrown out in favor of long-line denotative statements. Explicit cognition is enjoined. Rhyme is outlawed. Whitman is the only god worthy of emulation." Hearing Ginsberg read Howl, he writes, "The most remarkable poem of the young group is Howl… a howl against everything in our mechanistic civilization which kills the spirit… It is Biblical in its repetitive grammatical build-up… It lays bare the nerves of suffering and spiritual struggle. Its positive force and energy come from a redemptive quality of love, although it destructively catalogues evils of our time from physical deprivation to madness."

The City Lights Bookstore, run by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was a magnet for Beat writers in San Francisco. Ferlinghetti published Howl in October 1956 in a first printing of 1,000 copies, printed in England. Sold only in San Francisco and New York in a few bookstores, it attracted little notice until a second printing six months later was seized by U.S. Customs, and local police arrested Ferlinghetti and his store manager for publishing and selling obscene material. A highly publicized court trial followed, which found the book not obscene. As Ferlinghetti put it in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, "It is not the poet but what he observes which is revealed as obscene. The great obscene wastes of Howl are the sad wastes of the mechanized world, lost among atom bombs and insane nationalisms." Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a first-rate poet himself, is now 86 years old and remains active.

Relegated to the status of a literary artifact 25 years ago, Howl is now acknowledged to be one of the classic poems of the 20th century. Three new books that address its importance are Jonath Raskin’s American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation (2004); Howl for Now: A Celebration of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Protest Poem, edited by Simon Warner (2005); and The Poem that Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later, edited by Jason Shinder (2006).

The first edition of Howl and Other Poems cost 75 cents. Today a signed, first printing of this pocket-sized, 44-page paperback in fine condition is priced at more than 10,000 times its original cover price ($7,500.00).

Howl is Number 4 in the City Lights’ Pocket Poet Series. Other notable titles in the series are Ferlinghetti’s Pictures of the Gone World (#1); Denise Levertov’s Here and Now (#7); Georgory Corso’s Gasoline (#8); Robert Duncan’s Selected Poems (#10); Ginsberg’s Kaddish and Other Poems (#14) and Reality Sandwiches (#18), which contains "The Green Automobile," a fantasy about Neal Cassady; and Jack Kerouac’s Scattered Poems (#28).

Ginsberg tirelessly promoted his fellow beat writers, as this dedication for Howl shows:

Jack Kerouac, new Buddha of American prose, who spit forth intelligence into eleven books written in half the number of years (1951—1956) — On the Road, Visions of Neal, Dr. Sax, Springtime Mary, The Subterraneans, San Francisco Blues, Some of the Dharma, Book of Dreams, Wake Up, Mexico City Blues, and Visions of Gerard — creating a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature. Several phrases and the title of Howl are taken from him.

William Seward Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, an endless novel which will drive everyone mad.

Neal Cassady, author of The First Third, an autobiography (1949) which enlightened Buddha.

All these books are published in Heaven.

Lucien Carr, recently promoted to Night Bureau Manager of New York United Press. [Lucien Carr asked to have his name removed from the dedication, which Ginsberg did in later printings.]

This heretofore underground movement (1944—1956) entered its public phase, which lasted until the Vietnam War began in 1965.

Neal Cassady is the central character in On the Road. Kerouac writes that he is "tremendously excited with life" and generates "a kind of holy lightning…flashing from his excitement and his visions." Named Dean Moriarty in the novel, Kerouac says he has "got the secret we are all trying to find." He is "the HOLY GOOF" and "a new American Saint." The book ends with, "I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found. I think of Dean Moriarty."

Kerouac employed a writing style he called "spontaneous bop prosody," inspired by the improvisations of bop jazz musicians, notably Charlie Parker. He famously typed On the Road onto a 120-foot long scroll of Japanese tracing paper over a three-week period. But in fact he spent years working on it, beginning with penciled notes in 3 x 5 inch pocket notebooks that he always carried with him. He prepared multiple drafts before typing the scroll, other versions after the scroll that publishers rejected, along with three different manuscripts prior to publication. One-fourth of the Kerouac Archive that the estate sold to the New York Public Library (in 2001), consisting of notebooks, journals, correspondence, manuscripts, etc., is related to On the Road. Two other titles for the book Kerouac considered using were The Hipsters and The Gone One.

Gilbert Milstein wrote a glowing review of the book for The New York Times, calling it "an authentic work of art" and its publication "an historic occasion." Most reviews, however, panned On the Road, including one in The New York Times Book Review the following Sunday. This critic (David Dempsey) deplored the book’s subject matter and claimed that what Kerouac dubbed the "Beat Generation" was only a "sideshow" of "freaks." Kerouac replied, "The critics only noticed the freneticism and overlooked the mild Huckleberry Finn spinebone of the story." He called it a "sad and tender book… about goodhearted kids in pain of soul doing wild things out of desperation."

Milstein, a substitute reviewer for the Times (its regular book critic, Orville Prescott, was on vacation), was right. On the Road arguably has had a greater impact on its readers than any other work of fiction in the 20th century. Booksellers in the UK, polled by Blackwell Online, rank On the Road as one of the 50 Books that have had a significant and lasting impact on the world, along with the Bible, the Koran, and Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex. I read On the Road when it was published, and it had a profound effect on me. It induced me to spend the summer before going to medical school, in 1961, hitchhiking around Europe. I studied art and, saxophone in hand, played with jazz groups in clubs on the Left Bank in Paris and in Munich.

On the Road has been translated into 33 languages. Their dust jackets are interesting. The ones for the Polish and Czech translations, for example, focus on the road itself, the Russian one on the booze, the Chinese one on the women, and the dust jacket for the Finnish translation, on Kerouac’s introspection.

Kerouac’s novels are autobiographies in fictional form, like those by Goethe and German romantic novelists. He called them his "true-story novels." He wrote 14 novels that he viewed as "chapters" of "one vast book," which he named The Duluoz Legend. The Legend confronts death, madness, and God. Its central theme is the loss of life as it is lived, the end result being, as one of my cardiac surgery colleagues puts it, that "No one gets out of this life alive."

The Town and the City serves as the prelude to The Duluoz Legend (like Das Rhinegold does to Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung). In this novel, Kerouac, as Peter Martin, grows up in a working class home in a small mill town, weathers the death of his older brother, becomes a football hero, and goes off to an Ivy League college. At the end of the novel Peter renounces his athletic and educational ambitions and sets out on a "long journey" seeking self-definition and spiritual enlightenment. The publisher sent advance copies of The Town and the City to reviewers with a letter that said, "This is a big, new novel by John Kerouac — a name you have never before heard — one of the most exciting new talents to come to American readers since Thomas Wolfe."

The journey continues in earnest in On the Road. Gregory Stephenson, in The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation (1990), describes Kerouac’s journey this way: "[For Kerouac] the journey is a quest, the road a mode of initiation. The objects of the quest (selfhood, love, God, community) are elusive; they are grails that appear and vanish, are recovered and lost again, but toward whose final possession the quester approaches nearer and nearer."

Visions of Cody, the third novel Kerouac wrote in the series, which was not published in full until after his death, explores in greater detail his relationship with Neal Cassady (here as Cody Pomeray).

The next novel in the series, Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three, is the keystone of The Duluoz Legend. Kerouac’s inspiration for it was the radio program, The Shadow. He intended it to be a sequel to Goethe’s Faust Parts One & Two. The book is about boyhood fantasies, growing up, confronting death, and dealing with pubescence and its attendant sexuality. It addresses the enigma of existence and provides the mythic content for the other novels in the legend. Count Condu in the novel is a vampire. Doctor Sax is modeled on William Burroughs and himself. And there is a monstrous snake. When it was published, in 1959, The New York Times dismissed Doctor Sax as "a largely psychopathic, pretentious and unreadable farrago of childhood fantasy play."

Novels 5—7 in the series, Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, and Tristessa, deal with Kerouac’s love affairs, beginning with Mary Carney, as Maggie Cassidy, his first love. Visions of Gerard, number 8 in the series, is about the life and death of his older brother, who died at the age of nine from rheumatic fever when Jack was four years old.

The Dharma Bums is next. It recounts the Six Gallery poetry reading and Kerouac’s travels through Seattle to Desolation Peak in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State, where he sought solitude manning a fire lookout there. Novels 10 and 11 are Lonesome Traveler, a collection of essays on traveling, and Desolation Angels, which focuses on his summer alone on Desolation Peak.

The last three "chapters" in The Duluoz Legend are Big Sur, Satori in Paris, and Vanity of Duluoz. Big Sur is a chronicle of Kerouac’s six weeks in California after leaving Desolation Peak. It deals with his alcoholism, the battle between the good angels and evil angels for his soul, and his breakdown at Ferlinghetti’s cabin on the Pacific coast. As Gregory Stephenson puts it, alcohol was Kerouac’s "last refuge from and the remedy against the horror and pain of life."

Satori in Paris is a pivotal work in The Duluoz Legend because it recounts Kerouac’s shift from Buddhism back to Christianity, with its emphasis on loving-kindness. In this book, Kerouac travels to France. He writes, "I had come to France and Brittany just to look up this old name of mine which is just about three thousand years old and was never changed in all that time, as who would change a name that simply means House (Ker), in the Field (Ouac)."

Although Kerouac was drunk most of the time in 1965 when he wrote this book, and would die four years later from complications of alcoholism, he nevertheless paid close attention to how the book was being edited, as his correspondence with the publisher shows. With regard to Galley 44, for example, he wrote, "Only important change I want to make, because my recent studies in Ency.Brit.XI Ed [Encyclopdedia Brittanica, Eleventh Edition, 1911], shows that Ker might mean stone or stone fortress, and ouac u2018on the sea.’ So stick this in, and in parentheses, to complete the book." (The published book does not incorporate this addition.)

The 14th and last novel in the series, Vanity of Duluoz is the coda to The Duluoz Legend. Kerouac, the narrator, is off the road, married to the sister of a childhood friend, and, once again, embracing Catholicism, this time with a vision that has transformed him from "desperate doubter to determined believer." Kerouac concludes The Duluoz Legend with this sentence: "Hix calix!… u2018Here’s the chalice,’ and make sure there’s wine in it."

William Burrough’s novel The Naked Lunch was published in 1959 in France, by Olympia Press, in its English language "Travellers Companion Series" (number 76). Grove Press published it in the U.S. in 1962, as Naked Lunch.

On one level, Naked Lunch is a postmodern novel about drug addiction. But it is also, as Allen Ginsberg testified at the book’s obscenity trial in Massachusetts, about addiction on a larger scale, namely, addiction to power, addiction to material goods, and addiction to controlling others. It weathered that trial, the last one held against a book in the United States, and is now considered to be a modern classic.

As with Howl, one can anticipate that books analyzing the literary and cultural significance of Naked Lunch will be published on its 50th anniversary three years from now.

Five years ago the executor of the Kerouac estate sold the scroll for On the Road at auction for $2.43 million. Next year people will be celebrating the book’s 50th anniversary, which will coincide with the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s film version of it.

Western literature began with the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey. Like Odysseus in Homer’s poems, Kerouac in The Duluoz Legend is a restless adventurer that embarks on an epic journey — an Odyssean archetype of the indomitable wanderer in modern guise. On its 100th anniversary, bibliophiles will by then have put On the Road in its proper context as one chapter in The Duluoz Legend, which, in its entirety, will be celebrated as one of the great works of Western literature.

(This article is adapted from a paper titled "On the Collecting Road with Writers of the Beat Generation" that I presented at the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies Annual Symposium on May 13, 2006 in Seattle, Washington.)

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com

Donald Miller Archives

Peter H. Duesberg (b.1936) is a molecular biologist. He is Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Duesberg questions, on a submicroscopic scale, two tenets of biology. One is the germ theory of AIDS. He contends that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. The other is the gene mutation hypothesis of cancer. Duesberg claims that mutations in genes are not the cause of cancer.

Harvey Bialy has written a book about Duesberg titled Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS: A Scientific Life & Times of Peter H. Duesberg (2004). Bialy is founding scientific editor of Nature Biotechnology, a molecular biologist, and a poet. He recounts Duesberg’s rise and fall in the world of mainstream science, beginning with the recognition he and co-worker Peter Vogt received in 1970 for biochemically defining the first retroviral oncogene, found in birds. (An oncogene is a gene, viral derived or not, associated with cancer.) Bialy portrays Duesberg as having "a furious intellect"; an "encyclopedic knowledge of a vast scientific literature, in several languages"; and "tenacity."

In Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (2006), William Vollman praises Copernicus for having the good sense to die shortly after the publication of his paradigm-altering work, thus avoiding the cruel punishment then accorded heretics.

So far, this has been Duesberg’s fate: Admired as a "wunderkind" in the 1970s, the NIH (National Institutes of Health) awarded him a long-term Outstanding Investigator Grant; he was a candidate for the Nobel Prize; the U.S. National Academy of Science, in 1985, invited him to join the academy, a high honor among scientists, especially for one then only 49 years old; and in 1986 he was awarded a Fogarty fellowship to spend a year at the NIH studying cancer genes. But in 1987 Duesberg ran afoul of the establishment. He published a paper in Cancer Research titled "Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality," followed a year later by one in Science, "HIV is Not the Cause of AIDS." Thereafter, Duesberg was subjected to the punishment now accorded modern-day heretics. The NIH ceased giving him grants (the NIH and other federal and state funding sources have rejected his last 21 consecutive research grant applications), colleagues labeled him "irresponsible and pernicious" (David Baltimore) and his work "absolute and total nonsense" (Robert Gallo), and graduate students at Berkeley were advised not to study with Duesberg if they wanted to go on and have a successful career in biology. He was branded a "rebel," a "maverick," an "iconoclast," and by one writer, in an article in Science in 1988 titled "A Rebel Without a Cause of AIDS," a "gadfly." Blocked from receiving grants, he obtained private funds to maintain his laboratory at UC Berkeley, and he now spends part of each year doing research in Germany.

His principle work on HIV/AIDS is Inventing the AIDS Virus, published in 1996. In this book, and in other papers he has written on the subject, Duesberg systematically dismantles, piece by piece, the germ theory of AIDS. This theory/hypothesis has two parts: 1) HIV causes AIDS, and 2) HIV is sexually transmitted.

With regard to sexual transmission, only 1 in 1,000 unprotected sexual contacts transmit HIV. One in 275 U.S. citizens has antibodies to this virus. Therefore, an uninfected person could have up to 275,000 random unprotected sexual contacts without acquiring sexually transmitted HIV. Prostitutes do not get AIDS, unless they are drug addicts; and wives of HIV-positive hemophiliacs do not contract AIDS from their husbands. Proponents of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis ignore these facts. The dire heterosexual AIDS epidemic predicted to occur in the U.S., Canada, and Europe twenty years ago has not happened, and the disease remains confined to the original two main risk groups — gay men (66 percent of all AIDS cases) and intravenous drug users, male and female (32 percent). The other 2 percent are hemophiliacs and babies born to mothers who used intravenous drugs during pregnancy. The easiest way to acquire HIV sexually is through receptive anal intercourse.

Unlike other viruses, which cause diseases such as smallpox, mumps, and herpes, a retrovirus is like a hitchhiker going along for the ride. It enters a cell, mixes its genes up with those the cell possesses and aligns its fate with that of the cell. Retroviral genes make up an estimated 8 percent of the approximately 35,000 genes in the human genome. It is not in the retrovirus’ self-interest to destroy the cell it lives in. Its survival is contingent on the host cell staying healthy. But HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), a retrovirus, supposedly causes AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) by killing the T cell it infects. Without an adequate number of T cells immunodeficiency results, rendering a person susceptible to AIDS. As Duesberg points out, however, two important facts argue against this model: HIV infects, at most, only 1 in 500 T cells. And T cells infected with HIV placed in a test tube (in vitro) grow and thrive. The cells do not die. Instead, they manufacture large quantities of the virus, which providers use to detect antibodies to HIV in their patients’ blood. For these and a dozen other reasons, the germ theory of AIDS is wrong. HIV is a harmless passenger on the AIDS airplane, not its pilot.

Perhaps Duesberg’s final statement on HIV/AIDS will be “The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition,” published in 2003. Rebel he may be, as Science avers, but Duesberg is not without a cause for AIDS. He wrote this paper with Claus Koehnlein and David Rasnick. I heard Dr. Rasnick, also a Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley, present this paper at the 2003 meeting of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. They hypothesize that AIDS is caused by three things, singly or in combination: 1) long-term, heavy-duty recreational drug use — cocaine, amphetamines, heroin, and nitrite inhalants; 2) antiretroviral drugs doctors prescribe to people who are HIV positive — DNA chain terminators, like AZT, and protease inhibitors; and 3) malnutrition and bad water, which is the cause of "AIDS" in Africa.

AIDS appeared in young gay men in the early 1980s following an explosion of recreational drug use that began twenty years earlier in the 1960s. Male homosexuals are the highest users of recreational drugs. AZT, given to people who are HIV-positive, first used in 1987, is another cause of AIDS. As Duesberg and coauthors show in this paper, a chemical (noninfectious) basis for AIDS is supported by a lot of important data. One fact is this, which government spokespersons and the media do not report: HIV-positive people treated with antiretroviral drugs have a four to five times higher annual mortality rate compared to HIV-positive people who refuse treatment with these drugs — 6.6–8.7 percent vs. 1.4 percent. Duesberg writes, "AIDS is stabilized, even cured, if patients stop using recreational drugs or AZT — regardless of the presence of HIV. The drug hypothesis predicts that AIDS is an entirely preventable and in part curable disease."

There are other, larger societal issues that resonate around AIDS. In AIDS: Virus or Drug Induced (1996), Duesberg writes:

The AIDS virus [HIV] also proved to be the politically correct cause of AIDS. No AIDS risk groups [e.g., gay men] could be blamed for being infected by a God-given egalitarian virus. A virus could reach all of us. Nobody would be ostracized since u2018We are all in this together.’ Not so with drugs. The consumption of illicit psychoactive drugs implies individual and social responsibilities that nobody wanted to face… The perceived danger of an AIDS virus decimating the general public also provided the scientific and moral arguments for quick and unreflective action and for the complete dismissal of the competing drug-AIDS hypothesis.

Pope Clement VII encouraged Copernicus to publish his work, and On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres is dedicated to his successor, Pope Paul III. The Catholic Church supported his research, but Martin Luther and other Protestant reformers denounced it. The Holy See accepted Copernicus’ heliocentric system as a hypothesis, one which made determining holy days, Easter in particular, easier. Galileo (1564–1642) subsequently mounted a "Copernicus Crusade" and proclaimed the hypothesis a fact, which the Church to censure him and place him under house arrest, an action it now regrets. It was appropriate, however, to treat Copernicus’ heliocentric system as a hypothesis, which has turned out not to be entirely true. We now know the sun is not stationary but rotates around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy with its planets in tow. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for inventing the polymerase chain reaction, now used to measure HIV "viral load," states in his book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (1998), "Years from now, people will find our acceptance of the HIV theory of AIDS as silly as we find those who excommunicated Galileo."

While Duesberg continues to be vilified for his contrarian view of AIDS, investigators are increasingly willing to consider his equally contrarian view of cancer. Chapter Six of Bialy’s Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS: A Scientific Life & Times of Peter H. Duesberg deals with this subject and is titled "The Phoenix Almost Rises." The media do not report his work on cancer so as not to "legitimize" him. (The New York Times has made no mention of it.) One exception is Scientific American. It published an article in its July 2003 issue titled "Untangling the Roots of Cancer" written by one of its senior writers. The article lists, in a timeline illustration, the 12 most important events in the evolution of cancer theory over the last 100 years. Number 10 in this list, occurring in 1999, is: "Peter Duesberg publishes detailed theory of how aneuploidy may be sufficient to cause cancer itself, even without mutations to any particular sets of genes."

Normal human cells have 46 chromosomes, 23 from each parent. They are euploid (contain the correct number of chromosomes). Aneuploidy means the cell has an abnormal number and balance of chromosomes (strands of DNA consisting of many genes and other elements), either too many or too few. All solid tumor cancer cells have an abnormal number of chromosomes, usually ranging from 60 to 90. Colon cancer cells contain an average of 79 chromosomes. Cells that have an abnormal number of chromosomes can become cancerous by constantly altering their number and composition in succeeding generations of cells until at some point, perhaps decades later, one of these genetically unbalanced cells turns malignant. And since aneuploidy is inherently unstable, cancer cells continually spawn new cells with differing numbers and assortments of chromosomes and therefore a unique genetic makeup (karyotype). This enables the cancer to survive when threatened by chemotherapy and radiation because a subpopulation of its cells becomes genetically resistant to these challenges. The aneuploidy cancer hypothesis better explains why these treatments offer only a remission (while the surviving subpopulation regroups) and not a cure for cancer. This hypothesis shifts the focus to on how to prevent cancer rather than trying to find a cure.

Three important papers Duesberg has written on this subject, with private support, are "How Aneuploidy Affects Metabolic Control and Causes Cancer (1999)," with David Rasnick; "Aneuploidy, the Somatic Mutation that Makes Cancer a Species of Its Own (2000)," with Rasnick; and "Aneuploidy, the Primary Cause of the Multilateral Genomic Instability of Neoplastic and Preneoplastic Cells (2004)," with Alice Fabarius and Ruediger Hehlmann.

Postulating a viral etiology for most cancers, the "War on Cancer" launched by President Nixon in 1971 focused on viruses, with the prospect of a viral anti-cancer vaccine to come. When this line of investigation went nowhere, in the 1980s the virus-centered system of cancer morphed into a virus-centered view of AIDS; and the gene mutation hypothesis superseded viruses as the cause of cancer. Now Duesberg, in Copernican fashion, is replacing the genocentric (gene-centered) model of cancer with aneuploidy. This paradigm shift in understanding cancer, the second most common cause of death in our species, will have far-reaching consequences.

The incidence of cancer in the U.S. has more than doubled over the last century. Newer treatment modalities, such as chemotherapy and radiation, have provided little, if any, benefit in (long-term) survival rates. The aneuploidy-centered system of cancer explains why it has been so difficult to find a cure for cancer, and research dollars would be better invested seeking ways to prevent it. Studies on environmental triggers — carcinogens and nutritional factors — that foster aneuploidy need to be funded and done.

When Duesberg’s work on HIV/AIDS and cancer is finally recognized and accepted, it will cause a revolution in science. Over the last 50 years government-sponsored and industry-sponsored research programs have come to dominate scientific research. A totalitarian system now exists where only scientists that adhere to the prevailing orthodoxy can receive funds to conduct research. Not only will the government not fund studies on alternative hypotheses for AIDS and cancer, but this stricture applies to other areas of inquiry. All research on climate change must conform to the dogma of human-caused global warming, and studies on vaccines dare not criticize their safety or efficacy. No government grants will be awarded to anyone who wants to study radiation hormesis — and question the linear no-threshold hypothesis. Studies published that support the reigning dogma are riddled with conflicts of interest, manipulated statistics, and bias. Once the HIV-AIDS hypothesis is acknowledged to be false, a domino effect will impact other branches of science that government now controls. Academic leaders in the inner circle of the medical-industrial-government complex will be called to account. Industry will likely face lawsuits. And government agencies, particularly the NIH, CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), and FDA (Food and Drug Administration) will have a lot to answer for. Duesberg’s work will do to biology and science in this century what Copernicus did to astronomy and science five centuries ago.

In an interview conducted by the Berkeley Science Review, Peter Duesberg was asked, "If you could live your career again, would you change anything?" His reply: "I would possibly be more diplomatic than I was, when I first discovered the many paradoxes of the virus-AIDS hypothesis and of the now-prevailing gene mutation hypothesis of cancer. But I would not be a scientist who ranks acceptance by the mainstream higher than scientific discovery. Since we all live only once I would rather be respected by the next generation for a lasting scientific contribution, than by the current one for work that is popular now but scientifically flawed."

For the 200,000 healthy, HIV-positive Americans who must take DNA chain terminators based on the belief that HIV causes AIDS, and the one out of every three Americans who will get cancer, one hopes that Peter Duesberg’s work will be recognized and accepted soon. More than 2,000 scientists, medical professionals, authors, and academics have now gone on record doubting the HIV/AID hypothesis. Their comments are catalogued here. People who read Harvey Bialy’s beautifully written book about Duesberg, especially scientists, will come away with a new view of oncogenes, aneuploidy, and AIDS.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com

Donald Miller Archives

No speaker at this symposium will dare question the safety or efficacy of fluoride. That is now a given and has become dogma. But like in 1968 when protests against the Vietnam War were held in the Windy City outside the Democratic National Convention, this week protesters have assembled in Chicago to fight fluoridation.

Fluoridation of community drinking water began in Grand Rapids, Michigan on January 12, 1945. It was the brainchild of two people who worked for Andrew W. Mellon, founder of the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), Drs. H. Trendley Dean and Gerald J. Cox. Mellon was US Treasury Secretary, which made him (at that time, in 1930) head of the Public Health Service (PHS). He had Dean, a researcher at the PHS, study the effects of naturally fluoridated water on teeth. Dean confirmed that fluoride causes mottling (discoloration) of teeth, and he hypothesized that it also prevents cavities. Cox, a researcher at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh, was urged to study the effect of fluoride on tooth-decay in rats. Determining that it had a beneficial effect, he proposed, in late 1939, that the US should fluoridate its public water supply.

Fluorine is a halogen, like chlorine and iodine. It is the smallest and most reactive element in the halogen family (elements with 7 electrons in their outer shell). Fluorine exists in nature attached to other elements as the negatively charged ion fluoride, most notably to hydrogen, calcium, sodium, aluminum, sulfur, and silicon. Sodium fluoride, a by-product of aluminum smelting, initially was used to fluoridate water. Silicofluorides (fluoride combined with silicon), wastes of phosphate fertilizer production, are now used almost exclusively for fluoridation. Fluorine is also present in compounds called organofluorines, where fluorine atoms (not fluoride anions) are tightly bound to carbon. Teflon (poly-tetra-fluoro-ethylene), Gore-Tex, and many drugs, Prozac (fluoxetine), Cipro (ciprofloxacin), and Baycol (cerivastatin) among them, are organofluorines.

Doctors and public health officials did not think sodium fluoride, used commercially as a rat and bug poison, fungicide, and wood preservative, should be put in public water. The Journal of the American Dental Association said (in 1936), "Fluoride at the 1 ppm [part per million] concentration is as toxic as arsenic and lead… There is an increasing volume of evidence of the injurious effects of fluorine, especially the chronic intoxication resulting from the ingestion of minute amounts of fluorine over long periods of time." And the Journal of the American Medical Association" noted (in its September 18, 1943 issue), "Fluorides are general protoplasmic poisons, changing the permeability of the cell membrane by certain enzymes." But, as Joel Griffiths and Chris Bryson reveal in "Fluoride, Teeth, and the Atomic Bomb," and Bryson in his book The Fluoride Deception, officials in the Manhattan Project persuaded health policy makers and medical and dental leaders, in the interests of national security, to do an about-face and join the fluoridation bandwagon.

Vast amounts of fluoride were required to build the atom bomb. Fluoride combines with uranium to form the gas uranium hexafluoride, which, when passed through a semi permeable membrane, separates bomb-grade, fissionable uranium-235 from the much more abundant and stable uranium-238. This done, fluoride is released into the environment as waste. (During the Cold War millions of tons of fluoride were used in the manufacture of bomb-grade uranium and plutonium for nuclear weapons.) Also, large amounts of fluoride were generated in producing aluminum required for warplanes.

With several instances already on record of fluoride causing damage to crops, livestock, and people downwind from industrial plants, government and industry, lead by officials running the Manhattan Project, sought to put a new, friendlier face on fluoride. This would dampen public concerns over fluoride emissions and help forestall potentially crippling litigation. Instead of being seen as the poison it is, people should view fluoride as a nutrient, which gives smiling children shiny teeth, as epitomized in the jingle that calls fluoride "nature’s way to prevent tooth decay."

It worked. Early epidemiological studies showed a 50 to 70 percent reduction in dental cavities in children who drank fluoridated water. These studies, however, were poorly designed. None were blinded, so dentists examining children for caries would know which kind of water they were drinking. Data gathering methods were shoddy. By today’s evidence-based medicine standards these studies do not provide reliable evidence that fluoride does indeed prevent cavities.

Based on these studies and its promotion, municipalities across the country started adding fluoride to their water supply. Within 15 years a majority of Americans were washing their clothes, watering their vegetable gardens, bathing with, and drinking fluoridated water.

On its 60th anniversary proponents still have not proved that the hypothesis fluoride [put in public water] prevents cavities and is perfectly safe is true. The first part of the hypothesis, at least, has biological plausibility. Fluoride prevents cavities by combining with calcium in dental enamel to form fluoroapetite, which increases the resistance of teeth to acid demineralization. And fluoride inactivates bacteria that damage teeth by interfering with their enzymes. But biological plausibility alone is not sufficient to prove efficacy. Epidemiological evidence is required to do that. A debate open to well-informed opponents of fluoridation, if the CDC and ADA ever agreed to hold one, would show that existing epidemiological evidence does not prove that fluoride prevents cavities.

In evidence-based medicine, systematic reviews (meta-analyses) are considered to be the best, most "scientific" evidence. A systematic review of water fluoridation studies, published in the British Medical Journal in 2000, found, as the chair of the Advisory Group that commissioned the review puts it, "The review did not show water fluoridation to be safe. The quality of the research was too poor to establish with confidence whether or not there are potentially important adverse effects in addition to the high levels of [dental] fluorosis." He adds, "The review team was surprised that in spite of the large number of studies carried out over several decades there is a dearth of reliable evidence with which to inform policy." The case for fluoride does not stand up to careful evidence-based scrutiny.

Evidence that "fluoride [put in public water] does not prevent cavities and is not safe" (the null hypothesis) is more convincing. If a court of law held a trial on fluoride’s safety and efficacy, the anti-fluoridationists would win. The judgment in their favor would most likely be beyond a reasonable doubt, or at least on a more likely than not basis. In a courtroom the pro-fluoridationists would not be permitted to employ ad hominem attacks that focus on the character of the opposing witness instead of the evidence, and dogmatic assertions on the safety and efficacy of fluoride would be subject to cross examination.

Proponents of fluoridation will not willingly admit they are wrong. As Tolstoy puts it, "Most men can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, have proudly taught to others, and have woven thread by thread into the fabric of their lives."

There are exceptions. Two prominent leaders of the pro-fluoridation movement willingly admitted publicly (in 1997 and 2000) that they were wrong. One was the late John Colquhoun, DDS, Principal Dental Officer for Auckland, New Zealand and chair of that country’s Fluoridation Promotion Committee. He reviewed New Zealand’s dental statistics in an effort to convince skeptics that fluoridation was beneficial and found that tooth decay rates were the same in fluoridated and nonfluoridated places, which prompted him to re-examine the classic fluoridation studies. He recanted his support for it in "Why I Changed my Mind About Water Fluoridation" (Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 1997;41:29—44). The other is Dr. Hardy Limeback, PhD, DDS, Head of Preventive Dentistry at University of Toronto. His reasons are given in "Why I am Now Officially Opposed to Adding Fluoride to Drinking Water." Another former pro-fluoridationist that is fighting fluoride in Canada, and elsewhere, is Richard G. Foulkes, MD, a health care administrator and former assistant professor in the Department of Health Care and Epidemiology at the University of British Columbia.

Chlorine is added to water to kill bacteria. Chlorination (begun in 1908) has eradicated typhoid fever and cholera, two water-borne diseases that used to kill thousands of Americans each year. Chlorine is a disinfectant. Fluoride is a medication, which the state requires all people to consume because government officials believe it is good for a segment of the population. The putative benefit of this medication is for children age 5 to 12 (when enamel for their permanent teeth is being formed). This age group drinks 0.01 percent of the water people use.

This is how the CDC justifies compulsory fluoridation: "Although other fluoride-containing products are available [e.g., toothpaste], water fluoridation remains the more equitable and cost-effective method of delivering fluoride to all members of most communities, regardless of age, educational attainment, or income level." Fluoridation, therefore, addresses social inequalities and fosters social justice. It provides fluoride to poor families without their having to buy (fluoride) toothpaste and make their children brush their teeth with it. The common good takes priority over individual freedom to choose to not take this medication. This communitarian ethic increasingly governs US public health policy. One of the goals of the government’s Healthy People 2010 initiative (Objective 21-9) is to "increase the proportion of the U.S. population served by community water systems with optimally fluoridated water [the target: 75 percent]."

Murray Rothbard (in an article written in 1992) describes water fluoridation as "ALCOA-socialism," arising from "an alliance of three major forces: ideological social democrats, ambitious technocratic bureaucrats, and Big Businessmen seeking privileges from the state." It is a legacy of war, with its call for aluminum and enriched uranium, and the New Deal.

Fluoridation is an especially destructive type of socialism because fluoride is a poison. It is the 13th most common element and one of the most toxic elements in the earth’s crust. It is an insidious poison that produces serious multisystem effects on a long-term basis.

Fluoride disrupts enzymes (by altering their hydrogen bonds) and prevents them from doing their job of making proteins, collagen in particular, the structural protein for bone and teeth, ligaments, tendons, and muscles. It damages DNA repair enzymes and inhibits the enzyme acetylcholinesterase in the brain, which is involved in transmitting signals along nerve cells. All cells in the body depend on enzymes. Consequently, fluoride can have widespread deleterious effects in multiple organ systems. One researcher has uncovered 113 ailments that fluoride is said to cause.

The first visible sign of fluoride poisoning is dental fluorosis. It begins as small white specks in the enamel that then turn into spots, become confluent, and, in its most severe stage, turn brown. Dental fluorosis of varying degree affects 20 to 80 percent of children who grow up drinking fluoridated water. Moderate to severe changes, with brown mottling, occurs in 3 percent of children. Dental fluorosis is an indicator of fluoride toxicity in other parts of the body. Like in growing teeth, fluoride accumulates in the brain. One manifestation of "brain fluorosis" in children could be this: Researchers (in China) have found that children living in an area where the water has high fluoride content (4.12 ppm) have IQ scores that are 6 to 12 points lower than children living in a low fluoride district (the difference in IQ scores, at p <0.02, is statistically significant).

Fluoride has a particular affinity for calcium and thus for bone; and it poisons bones the same way it does teeth. The average American living in a fluoridated community now ingests 8 mg of fluoride a day. Unlike teeth where the enamel, once formed, remains static, 10 percent of bone tissue is broken down and replaced annually, giving fluoride an opportunity to steadily accumulate year-after-year in bones. People who consume 10—25 mg of fluoride a day over 10 to 20 years, or 2mg/day over 40 years, will develop skeletal fluorosis. The first manifestations of this disease, before there are any changes on x-ray, are joint pains and arthritic symptoms, which are indistinguishable from osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis; muscle weakness; chronic fatigue; and gastrointestinal disorders. In the next stage, osteoporosis develops and bones become more brittle and weak, making them prone to fracture. (The third and final stage, crippling fluorosis, occurs mainly in India where the natural fluoride content of the water is high.)

There is an epidemic of arthritis, osteoporosis, hip fractures, and chronic fatigue syndrome in the United States. Could fluoride be causing this epidemic? It turns out that even people who live in nonfluoridated areas consume a lot of fluoride, on average 4 mg/day. It is in toothpaste; in fruit juices, soda pop, tea, and processed foods; and, unfortunately, in California wines, whose grapes are sprayed with the pesticide cyrolite (sodium aluminum fluoride). American physicians know little or nothing about skeletal fluorosis, and the early, arthritic stages of this disease mimic other bone and joint diseases. It is a hypothesis worth testing.

Studies show that the rates of bone cancer are substantially higher in fluoridated areas, particularly in boys. Other cancers, of the head and neck, GI tract, pancreas, and lungs, have a 10 percent higher incidence. Fluoride affects the thyroid gland and causes hypothyroidism, which is also an increasingly frequent disorder in the US. Other studies show that high levels of fluoride in drinking water are associated with birth defects and early infant mortality.

Fluoride also damages the brain, both directly and indirectly. Rats given fluoridated water at a dose of 4 ppm develop symptoms resembling attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. High concentrations of fluoride accumulate in the pineal gland, which produces serotonin and melatonin. Young girls who drink fluoridated water reach puberty six months earlier than those who drink unfluoridated water, which is thought to be a result of reduced melatonin production. People with Alzheimer’s disease have high levels of aluminum in their brains. Fluoride combines with aluminum in drinking water and takes it through the blood-brain barrier into the brain. Dr. Russell Blaylock, MD, a neurosurgeon, spells out in chilling detail the danger fluoride poses to one’s brain and health in general in his book Health and Nutrition Secrets that can Save Your Life (2002).

Try to avoid fluoride, in all its guises. It is not an element the body needs or requires, even in trace amounts. There are no known naturally occurring compounds of fluorine in the human body.

Live in a nonfluoridated community. If that is not possible, drink distilled water or tap water passed through a filter that can remove fluoride (a third method using an activated alumina absorbent is not practical because of its expense). Regular activated carbon filters do not work because the diameter of a fluoride anion (0.064 nm) is smaller than the pore size of the filter. It requires a reverse osmosis filter. (Living in a fluoridated area, my family uses a table top reverse osmosis filter that we purchased online.) Distilled water has been given a bad rap by some health writers, which is not deserved (see "Blowing the Lid off Distilled Water Myths"). Distillation units are relatively inexpensive.

Fluoride is readily absorbed through the skin (and inhaled). Two-thirds of the fluoride we take into our bodies using fluoridated public water comes from bathing and wearing clothes washed in it. Drinking fluoride-free water in a fluoridated district only reduces fluoride intake by about a third.

One of the greatest public health advances in the 21st century will be removing fluoride from public water supplies. This "important public health measure" is a Potemkin Village — an impressive faade that hides undesirable facts. In this village, the US Surgeon General, the Czar, in this case, tells visiting dignitaries that "Community water fluoridation benefits everyone," and "There is no credible evidence that fluoridation is harmful." This has given fluoride a protected pollutant status for 60 years when the stark fact is that this substance is slowly poisoning us.

In addition to being contaminated with trace amounts of arsenic, beryllium, mercury, and lead, silicofluorides (hexafluorosilicic acid [H2SiF6] and its sodium salt hexafluorosilicate [Na2SiF6]) carry lead through the intestine into the body. These are the compounds that, untested, now are used to fluoridate water. Lead interferes with the neurotransmitter dopamine, which controls impulsive and violent behavior; and studies show that lead pollution is linked to higher rates of violent crime. The average violent crime rate in US counties that have lead pollution is 56 percent higher when their drinking water is fluoridated, as reported in "A Moratorium on Silicofluoride Usage will Save $$Millions (Fluoride 2005;38:1—5). School shootings occur ten times more frequently in fluoridated communities, as Jay Seavey points out in "Water Fluoridation and Crime in America (Fluoride 2005;38:11—22).

Antifluoridationists weaken their case by mistakenly putting florine-carbon organofluorines in the same category as fluoride anions, as Joel Kauffman, a chemist, points out. The fluorine in these compounds is not dangerous (Teflon heated continuously at 500 F does not release any fluoride.) Policy makers will be better able to deal with fluoridation of water alone and ban it when organic (carbon-based) fluorine compounds are removed from consideration.

The day will come when fluoridation of community drinking water will suffer the same fate as blood letting. Used for over a millennium to treat disease, it was abandoned three centuries ago.

Recommended Reading:

• "Water Fluoridation: a Review of Recent Research and Actions," by Joel M. Kauffman, PhD. Published last month in the peer-reviewed Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, this well-considered, succinct, up-to-date review would be Exhibit A in a trial against fluoridation. The author brought to my attention the distinction between inorganic fluoride anion and organically carbon-bound fluorine. (J Am Phys Surg 2005;10:38—44.)
• "Fluoridation of Water," by Bette Hileman. Published in Chemical and Engineering News in 1988, this "Special Report" by an associate editor of the journal examines the fundamental issues and specifics of fluoridation, which scientists, policy makers, and the public must confront. It shows that the fluoride controversy is much more serious than most people at the time, including scientists, realized. This seminal article gives important examples of how data on fluoride’s adverse effects are withheld from the public. (August 1, 1988 C&EN, p. 26—42, with links to the article’s four sidebars and to 39 letters published in C&EN about it, including one from Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.)
• "Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalistic Ploy," by Joel Griffiths. Originally published in Covert Action Quarterly in 1992, this article, with a photo of Capt. Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove saying, "Have you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water?," is another classic on the subject.
• Fluoride: Drinking Ourselves to Death? by Barry Groves (2001) This thoroughly researched and well written book refutes, one by one, answers the British Fluoridation Society told UK dentists to give to (32) questions people might ask them about Fluoride — questions like "Is fluoridated water safe?" and "Is it true that there is enough fluoride in a tube of toothpaste to kill a small child?" (The BFS answer to the toothpaste one is: "Used sensibly, fluoride toothpaste presents no risks to children.")
• "50 Reasons to Oppose Fluoridation" by Paul Connett. There are, indeed, 50 reasons. Written by the Executive Director of the organization that held the protest in Chicago.
• The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson (2004) A good review of this book can be found here. The author has thoroughly researched the subject and obtained previously unreleased documents on the wartime politics behind fluoridation. He pulls down its façade and lays bare this Potemkin Village.
• "A Bibliography of Scientific Literature on Fluoride." A good compilation of references, arranged by subject. It is 55 pages long.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle and a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com, including bioterrorism. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com.

Donald Miller Archives

In State of Fear, a novel about ecoterrorism published on December 7, 2004, Michael Crichton addresses the science of climate change. This book has angered the environmental "politico-legal-media complex" (his term) because it raises doubts about global warming. Like a bull (Toro) in a bullring, proponents of human-caused global warming are charging after him. The New York Times’ reviewer calls State of Fear a "ham-handed" novel that is "half movie treatment, half ideological screed;" and he suggests that "Mr. Crichton" is seeking "to drum up publicity for himself by being provocative and contrarian." Regarding the climate science cited in the book, the reviewer says that it, like the book’s story, is also fiction. The New Yorker comments, "Blondes with lightning burns aside, State of Fear wants, weirdly enough, to be taken seriously." Slate calls him "right-leaning [and] contrarian" and the book a "political and hectoring screed." ("Contrarian" and "screed" are two terms that left liberals like to use to brand people and the articles and books they write that criticize their worldview.)

Americans learn in school and are told on television and in the print media, including in respected magazines like The National Geographic and Scientific American, that global warming threatens the planet. The 20th century is said to have had the greatest rise in temperature of any century over the last thousand years and that 1998 was the warmest year ever recorded. The threat is framed by the New York Times in a report that begins: "Heat-trapping gases from tail-pipes and smokestacks around the world are contributing to profound environmental changes, including sharp retreats of glaciers and sea ice, thawing of permafrost and shifts in the weather, the oceans and the atmosphere."

Authorities warn that the consequences of this human-caused global warming could be catastrophic. They predict that the level of oceans and tidal estuaries will rise 9.5 to 42.5 inches and the average temperature will have increased 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2080.

One of the protagonists in State of Fear, a well-meaning attorney for an environmental philanthropist, defines global warming as "the heating up of the earth from burning fossil fuels." (p. 80). A better definition of global warming, however, which another character in the book gives, is this: "[It] is the theory that increased levels of carbon dioxide and certain other gases are causing an increase in the average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere because of the so-called u2018greenhouse effect.’" (p. 81, italics in the original). The carbon dioxide (CO2) level in the atmosphere at the beginning of the Industrial Era (ca 1750) was 280 ppmv (parts per million by volume); and over the last 50 years CO2 levels have risen from 315 ppmv to 370 ppmv, which is thought to be a result of humans burning coal, oil and natural gas. The mean global temperature increased 0.9° F (0.5° C) over the last century. So, according to the theory of global warming, human activity is causing the Earth to warm.

The novel’s Indiana Jones-like hero, Dr. John Kenner, a professor of Geoenvironmental Engineering on leave from MIT, teaches the other characters in the book (and the reader) climate science while they go about their adventures. On pages 562—563, he gives a clear and concise 400-word summary of our 5-billion-year-old planet’s history that puts climate change into perspective. The Earth, Dr. Kenner tells us, is now on its third atmosphere. The first one contained only helium and hydrogen; but, as the new planet cooled, it was replaced with a second one consisting of steam and CO2. Then, 3 billion years ago, newly evolved bacteria began to consume the CO2 in the atmosphere and replaced it with oxygen and nitrogen — two gases their cells excreted. The first ice on the planet occurred 2 billion years ago when its floating land masses (on tectonic plates) joined and blocked the circulation of ocean currents. And finally, as he puts it, "For the last seven hundred thousand years, our planet has been in a geological ice age, characterized by advancing and retreating glacial ice. No one is entirely sure why, but ice now covers the planet every hundred thousand years, with smaller advances every twenty thousand or so. The last advance was twenty thousand years ago, so we’re due for the next one."

Michael Crichton has studied climatology with the eye and rigor of a well-trained doctor/scientist. Before State of Fear was published I had read a lecture he gave at Caltech, in January 2003, titled "Aliens Cause Global Warming." I was impressed with his grasp of this subject and also with his cogent observations on science in general. In this lecture he warns, as he does in the book, "once you abandon strict adherence to what science tells us… you [can] subvert science to political ends."

Woven into the fabric of a page-turning thriller, State of Fear gives an unbiased assessment of the scientific evidence for global warming. The book also contains a 20-page annotated list of books and journal articles on the subject, an author’s message on climate science, and an appendix titled "Why Politicized Science is Dangerous." His conclusion: There is no human-caused global warming.

He’s right. Most of the rise in temperature in the 20th century occurred before 1940, before CO2 levels started rising. Temperatures fell 0.3° F from 1940 to 1970 while CO2 levels rose, from 310 to 325 ppmv (there is a graph of this on page 86). The temperature of the planet’s upper atmosphere (which the theory of global warming predicts should warm first), as measured by satellites, beginning in 1979, and weather balloons, has remained unchanged over the last 25 years despite a rise in atmospheric CO2 levels to 370 ppmv (p. 99).

Claims trumpeted by the media about how much warmer the planet is now compared with previous decades, centuries, and millennia are equally false. Indirect measurements of temperature, obtained from ice cores, tree rings, corals, ocean sediments, boreholes, and glacier movement, show that there was a Medieval Warm Period, from 800 to 1,300 (there were no thermometers then), when the planet was considerably warmer than it is now. Vineyards flourished in England and cattle grazed in areas of Greenland that today are blanketed by ice more than a mile thick. (The climate was also warmer 6,500 years ago during the Holocene Climate Optimum.)

Policy makers and environmentalists claim that a "consensus of a very large group of scientists" agrees that greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming. In his Caltech lecture, Dr. Crichton says, "I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels… In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results… Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough." He’s right. Furthermore, the proclaimed consensus for global warming is bogus: 1,500 scientists (of whom only 181 work in fields related to climatology) signed a pro-global warming petition in 1997, but 19,000 scientists signed a petition a year later opposing the U.N.’s Kyoto Treaty Against Global Warming. (The petition states, "… The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate….")

Environmental activists view CO2 as a pollutant. If plants could talk, however, they would disagree. Like oxygen is for animals, CO2 is a plant’s lifeblood. CO2 levels 200 million years ago were 5 to 10 times higher than they are now (without mothers driving SUVs). The planet was greener, enabling dinosaurs to thrive. "Contrarians" can say, with good evidence to support it, that burning fossil fuels to raise atmospheric CO2 levels promotes healthy plant growth. Studies show that a 300-ppmv boost in CO2 above current levels (in climate-controlled greenhouses) increases the productivity of plants by 30 to 50 percent, as measured by rate of photosynthesis and biomass production. Orange trees produce twice as many oranges, each containing a 20 percent greater amount of vitamin C. Rather than cause catastrophic global warming, perhaps continued burning of fossil fuels will help forestall the onset of the next ice age.

Why do so many people (including those 1,500 scientists) believe in global warming? One reason, as one of the characters in State of Fear puts it, is that "all reality is media reality." People who get their information from watching television and reading the New York Times do not learn the true facts of the matter. Media reality says there is man-made global warming, which if not constrained will be catastrophic.

For some scientists their views on this subject can affect their livelihood. Government and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) award $2 billion in grants each year for climate research. These organizations expect the scientists they fund to support the idea that global warming is a problem. As Michael Crichton points out (in his Caltech lecture), we now live in an "anything-goes world where science — or non-science — is the hand maiden of questionable public policy… Evidentiary uncertainties are glossed over in the unseemly rush for an overarching policy, and for grants to support the policy by delivering findings that are desired by the patron."

There are two other reasons why people believe in human-caused global warming despite strong evidence against it. Global warming is like a religion. In "Distinguishing Reality from Fantasy, Truth from Propaganda," a lecture given to the Commonwealth Club in September 2003, Michael Crichton identifies environmentalism as "the religion of choice for urban atheists." Gaia, the living planet, is its Mother Goddess. In this religion’s canon, industrial civilization (to paraphrase Merlin Stone, author of When God Was a Woman) is acne on her face. Crichton notes how environmentalism mimics Judeo-Christian beliefs: "There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability." The Kyoto Protocol is it’s articles of faith. What about the fact no change in satellite and balloon-measured temperatures has occurred over the last 25 years despite rising CO2 levels? No problem. Adherents of this religion ignore facts like this and recite their catechism of apocalyptic computer climate models.

Global warming also has ideological underpinnings. "Environmentalism is the last refuge of socialism," as one observer puts it. Although socialism may have failed as an economic model, many believe it can halt man-made global warming and, by this means, reform civilization. Constraining CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, as stipulated in the Kyoto Treaty, will require a kind of global governance that only a socialist state can provide — a totalitarian global bureaucracy with international government inspectors at one’s doorstep that closely regulates, prosecutes, and confiscates property of people and industries that make "greedy [CO2 producing] choices" (like driving SUVs). The apparatchiks of this movement — lawyers, bureaucrats, environmentalists, and media people — use scare tactics as part of a "global warming sales campaign" to promote their agenda and acquire influence. As Professor Norman Hoffman in State of Fear points out, fear is one of the best managers of social control in a state’s armamentarium.

The global warming agenda is pro-state, pro-war (against humanity in general), and anti-market. To meet Kyoto CO2 emission constraints the U.S. would have to reduce the amount of electricity it obtains from burning coal by 50 percent. Since 55 percent of this country’s electricity is supplied by coal (nuclear power and hydropower provide the rest), this would require reducing electricity use by 25 percent, which would cause a corresponding 25 percent drop in GDP. It dropped 10 percent in the Great Depression. Since poverty is a major cause of death, a drop in GDP this severe would be the functional equivalent of a death sentence for millions of Americans. John Kenner in State of Fear says, "Enviros refuse to take into account the possible harm the policies they recommend can cause" (p. 488). David Brown’s answer to that is, "Human suffering is much less important than suffering of the planet" (he is the founder of Friends of the Earth). Because of their hostility to markets and self-directed human activity, environmental activists would rather there be mass starvation (of people in Africa) than have capitalists profit from preventing it by employing such "unnatural" measures as high-yield genetically engineered crops. (I recommend Paul Driessen’s Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death and Robert Bidinotto’s Death by Environmentalism for further reading on this subject, and also my article Advantages of Nuclear Power on why switching to wind and solar power won’t help.)

A real life John Kenner is Harvard professor Willie Soon. Like Dr. Kenner in the book, a professor from nearby MIT, Dr. Soon, tirelessly and without flinching, takes on the global warming establishment. He, in collaboration with fellow professor Sallie Baliunas and others, has identified the true cause of global warming (and cooling). The cause is variability in energy output from the sun. (Modelers take for granted that solar luminescence is constant in their computer climate models.) Sun spots, which reflect changes in solar magnetic field, deflect and modulate galactic cosmic rays — and cosmic rays affect the cloud cover of the earth and thus drive terrestrial climate. When sun spots occur frequently, its effect on cloud cover causes global temperature to rise. When they decrease, or are absent, global temperature falls. (Currently they are more frequent.) After the Medieval Warm Period sun spot activity declined drastically and a Little Ice Age occurred (from 1300 to 1850). Willie Soon examines this in his book, written with Steven Yaskel, The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun-Earth Connection (2003), and in an article, written with Sallie Baliunas, titled "Lessons and Limits of Climate History: Was the 20th Century Climate Unusual?"

Few Americans have ever heard of Willie Soon. (I found out about him several years ago when he gave a lecture at a Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Meeting.) But millions of Americans, and, with it being translated into many languages, people throughout the world will read State of Fear and know its protagonist John Kenner. And through him, and other characters in the book, abetted by its author’s message and bibliography, they will discover the true facts on "global warming," facts which the New York Times and other print and television media choose not to disclose.

As one of the 483 reviewers of the book on Amazon.com writes, "He [Michael Crichton] is making a lot of people look ridiculous. He is Martin Luther, Salman Rushdie, and Andre Sakharov. He is smashing the established order and it will not be tolerated. The liberal inquisitors will do everything in their power to destroy him over this book, if only to attempt to discourage further truth telling by like-minded authors. That is reason enough for you to buy this book."

Toro! Toro! Michael Crichton.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle and a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com, including bioterrorism. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com.

Donald Miller Archives

In the Recommended Childhood Immunization Schedule put out by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), 12 vaccines are given to children before they reach the age of two. Providers inject them against hepatitis B, diphtheria, tetanus (lockjaw), pertussis (whooping cough), polio, pneumococcal infections, Hemophilus influenzae type b infections, measles, mumps, rubella (German measles), chickenpox, and influenza (the flu).

Infectious disease was the leading cause of death in children 100 years ago, with diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever, and pertussis accounting for most them. Today the leading causes of death in children less than five years of age are accidents, genetic abnormalities, developmental disorders, sudden infant death syndrome, and cancer. A basic tenet of modern medicine is that vaccines are the reason. There is growing evidence that this is so, but perhaps not quite in the way conventional medical wisdom would have it.

A 15-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the CDC decides which vaccines should be on the Childhood Immunization Schedule. It calls for one vaccine, against hepatitis B, to be given on the day of birth; 7 vaccines at two months; 6 more (including booster shots) at four months; and as many as 8 vaccines on the six month well-baby visit. Before a child reaches the age of two he or she will have received 32 vaccinations on this schedule, including four doses each of vaccines for Hemophilus influenzae type b infections, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis — all of them given during the first 12 months of life. Seven vaccines injected into a 13 lb. two-month old infant are equivalent to 70 doses in a 130 lb. adult.

The schedule states, "Your child can safely receive all vaccines recommended for a particular age during one visit." Public health officials, however, have not proven that it is indeed safe to inject this many vaccines into infants. What’s more, they cannot explain why, concurrent with an increasing number of vaccinations, there has been an explosion of neurologic and immune system disorders in our nation’s children.

Fifty years ago, when the immunization schedule contained only four vaccines (for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and smallpox), autism was virtually unknown. First discovered in 1943, this most devastating malady in what is now a spectrum of pervasive developmental disorders afflicted less than 1 in 10,000 children. Today, one in every 68 American families has an autistic child. Other, less severe developmental disorders, rarely seen before the vaccine era, have also reached epidemic proportions. Four million American children have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. One in six American children are now classified as "Learning Disabled."

Our children are also experiencing an epidemic of autoimmune disorders — Type I diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and bowel disorders. There has been a 17-fold increase in Type I diabetes, from 1 in 7,100 children in the 1950s to 1 in 400 now. Juvenile rheumatoid arthritis afflicts 300,000 American children. Twenty-five years ago this disease was so rare that public health officials did not keep any statistics on it. There has been a 4-fold increase in asthma, and bowel disorders in children are much more common now than they were 50 years ago.

Health
officials consider a vaccine to be safe if no bad reactions —
like seizures, intestinal obstruction, or anaphylaxis —
occur acutely. The CDC has not done any studies to assess the
long-term effects of its immunization schedule. To do that one
must conduct a randomized controlled trial, the lynchpin of evidence-based
medicine, where one group of children is vaccinated on the
CDC’s schedule and a control group is not vaccinated. Investigators
then follow the two groups for a number of years (not just three
to four weeks, as has been done in vaccine safety studies). Concerns
that vaccinations in infants cause chronic neurologic and immune
system disorders would be put to rest, and their safety certified,
if the number of children who develop these diseases is the same
in both groups. No such studies have been done, so vaccine proponents
cannot say that vaccines are indeed as safe as they think they
are. (One proponent,
interviewed by Dan Rather on 60 Minutes, who has financial ties
to the vaccine industry that he did not disclose, claims that
vaccines "have a better safety record than vitamins."
He neglected to mention that the U.S. government has paid out
more than $1.5 billion in its Vaccine Injury Compensation Program
to families of children who have been injured or killed by vaccines.)

There is a growing body of evidence that implicates vaccines as a causative factor in the deteriorating health of children. The hypothesis that vaccines cause neurologic and immune system disorders is a legitimate one — vaccines given in multiple doses, close together, to very young children following the CDC’s Immunization Schedule. This hypothesis should be tested by a large-scale, long-term randomized controlled trial.

Rather than obediently following the government’s schedule, there is now sufficient evidence, grounded in good science, to justify adopting a more user-friendly vaccination schedule, one which is in the best interests of the individual as opposed to what planners judge best for society as a whole.

New knowledge in neuroimmunology (the study of how the brain’s immune system works) raises serious questions about the wisdom of injecting vaccines in children less than two years of age.

The brain has its own specialized immune system, separate from that of the rest of the body. When a person is vaccinated, its specialized immune cells, the microglia, become activated (the blood-brain barrier notwithstanding). Multiple vaccinations spaced close together over-stimulate the microglia, causing them to release a variety of toxic elements — cytokines, chemokines, excitotoxins, proteases, complement, free radicals — that damage brain cells and their synaptic connections. Researchers call the damage caused by these toxic substances "bystander injury." (Pediatricians and other professional colleagues who question this should read these two reviews by the neurosurgeon Russell L. Blaylock: "Interaction of Cytokines, Excitotoxins, Reactive Nitrogen and Oxygen Species in Autism Spectrum Disorders," in the Journal of the American Nutraceutical Association [JANA 2003;6(4):21—35], with 167 references. And "Chronic Microglial Activation and Excitotoxicity Secondary to Excessive Immune Stimulation: Possible Factors in Gulf War Syndrome and Autism," in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons [JAPS 2004;9(2):46—52], posted online, with 54 references.)

In humans, the most rapid period of brain development begins in the third trimester and continues over the first two years of extra uterine life. (By then brain development is 80 percent complete.) Until randomized controlled trials demonstrate the safety of giving vaccines during this time of life, it would be prudent not to give any vaccinations to children until they are two years old. From a risk-benefit perspective, there is growing evidence that the risk of neurologic and autoimmune diseases from vaccinations outweigh the benefits of avoiding the childhood infections that they prevent. An exception is hepatitis B vaccine for infants whose mothers test positive for this disease.

A user-friendly vaccination schedule prohibits any vaccines that contain thimerosal, which is 50 percent mercury. Flu vaccines contain thimerosal, which is reason enough to avoid them. (See my article "Mercury on the Mind" for more on this subject.)

One should also avoid vaccines that contain live viruses. This includes the combined measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine; chickenpox (varicella) vaccine, and the live-virus polio (Sabin) vaccine. This stricture would not apply to the smallpox vaccine (also a live-virus one), if a terrorist-instigated outbreak of smallpox should occur.

Finally, a user-friendly vaccination schedule requires that vaccinations, after the age of two, be given no more than once every six months, one at a time, in order to allow the immune system sufficient time to recover and stabilize between shots.

Which vaccines should be put on this schedule (among those that do not contain live viruses or thimerosal) is not entirely clear. The top four would be the pertussis (acelluar — aP — not whole cell), diphtheria (D), and tetanus (T) vaccines — given separately (not together, as is usually the case); and the Salk polio vaccine, with an inactivated (dead) virus, one that is cultured in human cells, not monkey kidney cells. Perhaps it should only contain these four vaccines. A good case can be made (for example, see Gary Null’s Vaccines: A Second Opinion) for avoiding the three other newer vaccines on the CDC’s schedule — the hepatitis B, pneumococcal conjugate (PCV7), and Hemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) vaccines.

Your pediatrician will not like this schedule. They are taught in medical school and residency training that childhood immunizations are essential to public health. As one pediatrician puts it, "Achieving adequate and timely vaccination of young children is the single most valuable thing a doctor can do for a patient." They do not question what their professors teach them, nor are they inclined to critically examine studies in Pediatrics and the New England Journal of Medicine that tell them vaccines are safe.

There were 482,000 cases of measles in the U.S in 1962, the year before a vaccine for this disease became available. Now, with all fifty states requiring that children be vaccinated against measles in order to attend school, there were only 56 cases of measles in a population of 290 million people in 2003.

These facts are well known and proudly cited by vaccine proponents. What is less known, and doctors are not taught, is that the death rate for measles declined 97.7 percent during the first 60 years of the 20th century. The mortality rate was 133 deaths per million people in the U.S. in 1900, and had dropped to 0.3 deaths per million by 1960. Measles caused less than 100 deaths a year in the U.S. before there was a vaccine for this disease (in 1963). The same thing happened with diphtheria and pertussis. Mortality rates dropped more than 90 percent in the early 20th century before vaccines for these diseases were introduced. This was due to better nutrition (with rapid delivery of fresh fruit and vegetables to cities and refrigeration), cleaner water, and improved sanitation (removing trash from the streets and better sewage systems), not to vaccines. The World Health Organization promotes mass vaccination, but knowing these facts states, "The best vaccine against common infectious diseases is an adequate diet" — fortified, one might add, with vitamin A.

Since the measles vaccine came into widespread use in this country this disease has virtually disappeared, and it has prevented 100 deaths a year. But now, instead, several thousand normally developing children become autistic after receiving their MMR shot. Termed "regressive autism," it accounts for about 30 percent of the 10,000 to 20,000 children who are diagnosed with autism in this country each year.

To put to rest concerns that MMR vaccination might cause autism (in a small percentage of children), the New England Journal of Medicine, in 2002, published a population-based study from Denmark, where its authors concluded, "This study provides strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism." The NEJM did not disclose that the "Statens Serum Institut," where three of the authors work, is a for-profit vaccine manufacturer, Denmark’s largest, or that four other authors have financial ties to this company. Only one of the eight authors is not associated with this institute, and the CDC employs him. The study compares the prevalence of autism in 440,000 MMR vaccinated and 97,000 unvaccinated children in Denmark born in the 1990s. A statistical slight-of-hand in age adjustment makes the study show no causal effect; but when unmasked and reformatted, the data actually shows a statistically significant association between MMR vaccine and autism (as Carol Stott and her coauthors make clear in "MMR and Autism in Perspective: the Denmark Story," in the Fall 2004 Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, posted online).

Pediatrics and the Journal of the American Medical Association also have published studies like this supporting U.S. vaccine policy, written by authors with similar, undisclosed conflicts of interest. Looking elsewhere, however, one comes across a number of disquieting facts about vaccines. Investigators have found, for example, live measles virus in the cerebral spinal fluid in children who become autistic after MMR vaccination. Antibodies to measles virus are elevated in children with autism but not in normal kids, suggesting that virus-induced autoimmunity may play a causal role. A study published in Neurology this year implicates hepatitis B vaccine as a causative factor in multiple sclerosis.

A communitarian ethic increasingly governs health care in the U.S. It places a greater value on the health of the community, on society as a whole, than on the health of particular individuals. Public health officials have put together a vaccination schedule designed to eliminate infectious diseases to which the population is prey. These officials recognize that these vaccines will harm a small percentage of (genetically susceptible) individuals, but it is for the common good. The communitarian code posits that it is morally acceptable, if necessary, to sacrifice a few for the good of the many. Or as one observer more bluntly puts it, "Individual sheep can be sheared and slaughtered if it is for the welfare of their flock."

In this framework, health care providers become agents of the state charged with injecting vaccines into people that the central planners deem necessary. Physicians who remain true to their Hippocratic Oath and place the interests of their patient above that of the herd are considered to be out of step with the times, if not an anachronism.

Like central planners everywhere, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) promulgates a self-serving, one-size-fits-all vaccine policy. Members of this committee have ties to vaccine makers, such that the CDC must grant them waivers from statutory conflict of interest rules. Even so, and with little evidence to show that it is safe to subject young children to the ACIP’s crowded immunization schedule, states nevertheless dutifully make its vaccine recommendations compulsory.

All 50 states require children to be immunized against measles, diphtheria, Hemophilus influenzae type b, polio, and rubella in order to enroll in day care and/or public school. Forty-nine states also require vaccination against tetanus; 47, against hepatitis B and mumps; and 43 states now require vaccination against chickenpox. In order to shield themselves from any liability for making vaccinations compulsory, all states provide a medical exemption and 47, a religious exemption. Nineteen states allow a philosophical exemption. Some require only a letter from a parent and others, from a physician or church leader. (To see the exemptions allowed in your state, their wording and requirements, click here.) Parents, of course, can refuse vaccination; but if they want to enroll their child in public school they will need to obtain one of these exemptions.

Doctors who conclude that the risks of the government’s immunization schedule outweigh its benefits are placed in a difficult position. If they counsel parents not to have their children follow it, health care plans, which track vaccine compliance as a measure of "quality," will find them wanting. And if their patient should contract and develop complications from the disease the vaccine would have prevented they may find themselves confronting a lawsuit. If a child becomes autistic following a vaccination, however, the doctor is protected from any liability because the government requires it and the child’s parents, if they had chosen to do so, could have obtained an exemption. (Anti-vaccine advocates call developing autism, asthma, and Type I diabetes after vaccinations "vaccination roulette.")

Parents should have the freedom to select whatever vaccination schedule they want their children to follow, especially since health care providers and the government (except via its Vaccine Injury Compensation Program) cannot be held accountable for any adverse outcomes that might occur. But if parents elect to not follow the CDC’s immunization schedule, delaying some vaccinations, refusing others, or avoiding them altogether, then they must accept the risk that their child might contract the disease that the vaccine against it most likely would have prevented.

One consideration, which vaccine proponents do not address, is this: Could contracting childhood diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox play a constructive role in the maturation of a person’s immune system? Or, to put it another way, does removing natural infection from human experience have any adverse consequences?

Our species’ immune system — a one-trillion-cell army that patrols our (100-trillion-cell) body — serves two main purposes. It destroys foreign invaders — viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens. And it destroys aberrant cells in the body that run amuck and cause cancer. Behind the barricades of skin and mucosa, our innate immune system (composed of phagocytes, natural killer cells, and the 20-protein complement system), which all animals have, is the body’s first line of defense. It reacts to invaders lightening fast and indiscriminately, but it is not very good at eliminating viruses and cancerous cells. Vertebrates have evolved a second line of defense — the adaptive immune system. It targets specific viruses and bacteria and has better artillery for eliminating cancerous cells. This system matures during childhood, and it has a cellular (Th1) and humoral (Th2) component (Th = helper T cell).

The viruses that cause measles, mumps, and chickenpox have infected countless generations of humans, akin to a rite of passage for each member of our species. Contracting these diseases strengthens both parts of the adaptive immune system (Th1 and Th2 ). Mothers who have had measles, mumps, and chickenpox transfer antibodies against them to their babies in utero, which protect them during the first year of life from contracting these infections. Vaccinations do not have the same effect on the immune system as naturally acquired diseases do. They stimulate predominantly the Th2 part of this system and not Th1. (Over-stimulation of Th2 causes autoimmune diseases.) The cellular Th1 side thwarts cancer, and if it does not become fully developed in childhood a person can be more prone to have cancer as an adult. Women who had mumps during childhood, for example, are found to be less likely to have ovarian cancer than women who did not have this infection. (This study was published in Cancer.) Could the fact that cancer has become a leading cause of death in children be a result of vaccinations? Only a randomized controlled trial can conclusively answer this question

With rare exception, a well-nourished child who contracts measles will recover smoothly from the infection. Fifty years ago almost all children in the U.S. had measles. And after contracting this disease, one has life-long immunity to it. The protection provided by vaccination is temporary. Adults who contract measles (when the protective effects of the vaccine wears off) are much more likely to have neurological, testicular, and ovarian complications. Likewise, rubella is a benign disease in children, but if a woman acquires it during pregnancy fetal malformations may develop. One can argue, heretical as such an argument may be, that it would be better to let children have measles, at an age when the infection helps the adaptive immune system mature in a balanced Th1/Th2 fashion and complications from this disease are minimal, rather than vaccinate them against this disease (especially considering the risks of vaccination).

Pertussis and Diphtheria are a different matter. These diseases are more virulent. Children who contract whooping cough (pertussis) can be incapacitated for more than a month. Polio can be devastating in susceptible individuals. And no one wants to get tetanus (lockjaw). A user-friendly vaccination schedule would include vaccines against these diseases.

Whatever vaccination schedule one chooses, mothers should breast-feed their child for as long as possible — a year or more. Failing that, add Omega-3 fatty acids, especially DHA (docosahexanoic acid), to the child’s formula.

In summary, this is a vaccination schedule that I would recommend:

1. No vaccinations until a child is two years old.
2. No vaccines that contain thimerosal (mercury).
3. No live virus vaccines (except for smallpox, should it recur).
4. These vaccines, to be given one at a time, every six months, beginning at age 2:
1. Pertussis (acellular, not whole cell)
2. Diphtheria
3. Tetanus
4. Polio (the Salk vaccine, cultured in human cells)

American children are the most highly vaccinated kids in the world. This schedule is an alternative to the one that rules our "vaccine nation" (as the Village Voice terms it). In contrast to the CDC’s immunization schedule, it is user-friendly.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle and a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com, including bioterrorism. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com.

Donald Miller Archives

This heavy metal is highly poisonous. A Dartmouth professor studying the chemical characteristics of an organic form of mercury — dimethyl mercury — spilled two drops of it on her gloved hand. The first sign of mercury poisoning occurred four months later when her speech began to be slurred. This was followed by difficulty walking and loss of vision. She then fell into a coma and died. Another person, attempting to smelt the silver in dental amalgams he obtained (they are 35 percent silver, 50 percent mercury, and 15 percent tin, zinc, and other metals), heated them in a frying pan. The mercury vapor thus generated killed him quickly. The two other family members in the house at the time also died.

Mercury is one proton (neutron and electron) heavier than gold — the atomic number of gold is 79; mercury, 80. It is distributed throughout the earth’s crust. Unlike other metals, mercury, in its elemental state, is liquid (molten) at room temperature. And it releases a steady stream of gaseous mercury atoms that linger in the atmosphere for months (eventually falling back to earth and its oceans in an inorganic form in rain drops). Even when in a solid state, combined with other metals as an alloy, mercury atoms continually escape into the atmosphere. Once added to latex paint, put in teething powder, used in making hats, as a fungicide on seeds, as an antiseptic (Merthiolate), and as a treatment for syphilis (the cure was worse than the disease), human exposure to mercury today comes principally from three sources: dental amalgams, vaccines, and fish.

Elemental mercury when released by a dental amalgam is inhaled and (80 percent of it) absorbed by the lungs and retained in the body. Vaccine makers add thimerosal (which is half ethyl mercury) to vaccines to prevent bacterial contamination. This injected organic form of mercury is readily taken up by brain and heart muscle cells. Fish harbor another organic form of mercury — methyl mercury, which is obtained from plankton that synthesize it from inorganic mercury extracted from the sea.

Currently the two most important sources of mercury exposure for Americans are dental amalgams and vaccinations. The Federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for reasons not explained, have chosen to ignore this fact. These agencies and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) focus exclusively on mercury in seafood, to the extent that the NIH will not fund studies that address mercury in amalgams and vaccines.

In lockstep with the government, the American Dental Association (ADA) claims that amalgams are safe, and the mercury in them poses no problem. The (government-funded) Institute of Medicine (IOM) and various specialty societies, notably the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), and the American Medical Association (AMA), say the same thing about mercury in vaccines. There is growing evidence, however, that mercury in vaccines and amalgams cause both autism and Alzheimer’s disease. The CDC and the FDA and the medical establishment, led by its specialty societies, discount or ignore this evidence — evidence that includes privately funded epidemiological studies; research on how mercury damages brain cells grown in culture; animal studies in rodents, sheep, and primates; and clinical studies in children and adults.

Autism was discovered in 1943, in American children, twelve years after ethyl mercury (thimerosal) was added to the pertussis vaccine. (The disease was not seen in Europe until the 1950s, after thimerosal was added to vaccines used there.) In a typical case, shortly before his 2nd birthday a normally developing, healthy boy stops communicating with others and withdraws into himself. He avoids eye contact and becomes strange and aloof. His vision becomes blurred; and he develops various motor disturbances, such as involuntary jerking of the arms and legs and walking on his toes. In addition to these manifestations, Dr. Sallie Bernard and her colleagues, in a study titled, "Autism: A Unique Type of Mercury Poisoning," describe the speech difficulties, unusual behavior (such as unprovoked crying spells and head banging), various degrees of cognitive impairment, gastrointestinal difficulties, and immune difficulties that these autistic children can have. Mercury is most likely a causative factor in other developmental disorders as well, such as delayed speech and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Investigators have shown that there is a direct relationship between increasing doses of mercury in vaccines and autism. In the 1950s, with an immunization schedule limited to four vaccines (against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and smallpox), 1 in 10,000 children developed this disease. As vaccines for other diseases were added, health care providers began injecting increasingly larger doses of mercury into children. Those born in 1981 were given 135 micrograms of mercury (on average), and one case of autism occurred in every 2,600 children born that year. With the addition of hepatitis B vaccine (injected on the day of birth) and one for Haemophilus influenzae Type b, providers injected 246 micrograms of mercury into children born in 1996. Autism occurred in one out of every 350 of these children. Today, providers follow an immunization schedule, prepared by the CDC and approved by the AAP and AAFP, that includes 13 vaccines given, with variable numbers of booster shots, 33 times before a child reaches the age of 2 (when the development of the brain is completed). Autism now afflicts 1 in 100 boys and 1 in 400 girls, and physicians diagnose 100,000 new cases of this disease every year in the U.S (using diagnostic criteria, in the DSM-IV, that is more restrictive than the previous DSM-IIIR). Over the last 30 years more than one million children have come down with this disease, and currently one in every 68 families in America has an autistic child.

Mainstream medical journals, like Pediatrics and The New England Journal of Medicine, only publish studies that claim thimerosal is safe. And it turns out that these articles are written in large part by researchers in the pay of vaccine makers, as the Coalition for Safe Minds (Sensible Action For Ending Mercury-Induced Neurological Disorders), a private nonprofit organization, has shown. Editors of these journals will not publish studies that show a link between thimerosal and autism like "Thimerosal in Childhood Vaccines, Neurodevelopment Disorders, and Heart Disease in the United States" by Mark and David Geier, which documents a strong association between the amounts of mercury injected in vaccines and autism. Such articles can only find acceptance in alternative (i.e., "politically incorrect") journals like the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, where this one was published.

The amount of damage a given dose of mercury can do to the brain (and also the heart) depends on one’s age, sex, and genetically determined ability to excrete mercury. Young children with still developing brains are more susceptible, and males are more vulnerable to a given dose of mercury because testosterone enhances its neurotoxicity. Most important, however, is one’s genetically programmed ability to rid the body of mercury. The brain has a house-cleaning protein that removes dangerous waste products, which comes in three varieties: APO-E2, APO-E3, and APO-E4. The APO-E2 protein can carry 2 atoms of mercury out of the brain; APO-3, one; and AOP-E4, none. The genes we acquire from each parent determine which two we have. People with two APO-E4 proteins (and thus no APO-E2 or -E3) have an 80 percent chance of acquiring Alzheimer’s disease. And according to one study, autistic children have a huge preponderance of APO-E4 protein in their brains.

Alzheimer’s disease was discovered in 1906, again in America, where dentists used mercury-laden amalgams to fill cavities (dentists in Europe largely avoided them). Today, more than 4 million Americans now have Alzheimer’s disease. It afflicts half of people over the age of 85 and 20 percent aged 75 to 84.

The first symptoms of this disease are difficulty concentrating and variable degrees of memory loss, leading ultimately to devastating mental deterioration. The brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease shrink by 25 percent and have distinct pathologic hallmarks (neurofibillary tangles, amyloid plaques, and phosphorylation of tau protein). Brain cells grown in the laboratory develop the same three pathologic findings when exposed to nanomolar (3.6 × 10-10 molar) doses of mercury, an amount approximating that found in the brains of people who have a lot of amalgam fillings.

Dental amalgams are the main source of mercury in an adult’s brain. An average-sized amalgam filling contains 750,000 micrograms of mercury and releases around 10 micrograms a day. Researchers put radiolabelled mercury amalgams in the teeth of sheep and determined where escaped mercury went with a scanner. They showed that mercury atoms exhaled through the nose travel up filaments of the olfactory nerve to the hippocampus, which controls memory, and to other critical areas in the brain. In another study, rats given the same concentration of mercury that people inhale from their amalgams develop the pathologic markers of Alzheimer’s disease. People with Alzheimer’s disease have mercury levels in their brains that are 2 to 3 times higher than that seen in normal people.

The mercury in flu vaccines also plays a role in this disease. One investigator has found that people who received the flu vaccine each year for 3 to 5 years had a ten-fold greater chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease than people who had zero, 1, or 2 shots.

Another important factor with regard to mercury on the mind, which officials at the CDC, FDA and the professors in the IOM do not consider, is synergistic toxicity — mercury’s enhanced effect when other poisons are present. A small dose of mercury that kills 1 in 100 rats and a dose of aluminum that will kill 1 in 100 rats, when combined have a striking effect: all the rats die. Doses of mercury that have a 1 percent mortality will have a 100 percent mortality rate if some aluminum is there. Vaccines contain aluminum.

Why do officials at the CDC, FDA, and leaders of the medical and dental establishment discount or ignore all these important facts? Some of them being in the pay of vaccine makers is one reason. The specter of litigation for having sanctioned thimerosal and amalgams and, in the case of the FDA, not doing appropriate safety studies on them is another. But it is more complicated than that. The hypothesis that mercury causes autism and Alzheimer’s disease is a new truth. And as Schopenhauer points out (see my article on him), each new truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. And third, it is accepted as self-evident. The mercury truth is now in the second stage.

In the 1790s Edward Jenner observed that milk maids did not have pock marks on their faces, like people did who had contracted and survived smallpox. Milking cows with cowpox rendered them immune to smallpox. He took fluid from the pustules of infected cows, injected it into children, and found that it protected them, when exposed, from contracting smallpox. The medical establishment of the day dismissed the idea of vaccinating people with cow pus as nonsense; and Sir Joseph Banks, president of the British Royal Society (the IOM of the day), told Jenner that he would ruin his reputation if he tried to publish these findings, which were so much at variance with established knowledge. When other doctors and informed individuals like Thomas Jefferson recognized that "vaccination" did indeed work, its value was, in time, accepted as self-evident. Jenner’s vaccine saved millions of lives and eradicated a disfiguring disease that has a 30 percent mortality rate. (But laboratories in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. preserved the virus that causes smallpox, and we now know that Soviet microbiologists grew vast quantities of it in chicken eggs for use as a biological weapon of mass destruction.)

Today the medical establishment, led by the AAP, AAFP, AMA, CDC, and IOM, has gone to the other extreme. The accepted wisdom now is that vaccines are a panacea. Health care providers start injecting them in infants on the day of birth, and government officials seek to have them made mandatory for all Americans. But some little-discussed facts belie their value. Deaths from diphtheria, for example, declined 90 percent from 1900 to 1930, due to better sanitation and nutrition, before there was a vaccine for this disease. Likewise, the death rate for measles declined 95 percent (13.3 to 0.03 deaths per 100,000 population) between 1915 and 1958, before the vaccine for measles vaccine was introduced in 1963. Viewed from a risk/benefit perspective, providers and government officials downplay the deleterious effects that vaccines can have on one’s health and inflate their benefits. The top medical textbook on the subject is Vaccines, edited by Drs. Plotkin and Orenstein. In the 1999 3rd Edition that I reviewed (a slightly longer 4th Edition was published last year), its authors confine their discussion of mercury in vaccines to two short paragraphs in this 1,230-page book. They do not address concerns that have been raised about its neurotoxicity.

Vaccine manufacturers have started removing thimerosal from vaccines. And for the first time since the state began keeping records on this disease, California has had a decrease, of 6 percent, in the annual number of children over the age of 3 who have been diagnosed with autism. This occurred in children born in 2000, when the phase-out of thimerosal in vaccines began. Iowa has passed a law banning thimerosal in that state, and California has done the same thing for pregnant women and children under 3 (the bill awaits the governor’s signature). But pharmaceutical companies still add thimerosal in their Flu vaccines; and pediatricians are vaccinating children with their remaining supply of thimerosal-containing vaccines, which the FDA has chosen not to recall.

Taking mercury out of vaccines would substantially reduce the incidence of autism, but this alone will not eliminate the disease. Giving too many vaccines over too short a time to infants whose nervous system is not yet fully developed can also trigger autism and its spectrum of disorders. As Dr. Blaylock has shown (see Recommended Reading below), multiple vaccines given close together over-stimulate the brain’s immune system and, via the mechanism of "bystander injury," destroy brain cells.

Avoiding flu shots that contain thimerosal, and having dentists stop implanting mercury amalgams in people’s mouths would lower the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. If you have amalgam fillings, particularly if there is a family history of Alzheimer’s disease, you might consider having them removed. Be sure to have a dentist do it who follows the protocol established by The International Academy of Oral Medicine & Toxicology for safely removing them.

For the third source of mercury, follow the CDC’s advice and don’t eat mercury-contaminated fish, especially if you are pregnant because mercury in your bloodstream crosses the placenta and is concentrated in the fetus’ brain.

Recommended Reading — in addition to the online links provided above

An excellent review of thimerosal and autism, titled "Mercury in Medicine — Taking Unnecessary Risks," is to be found, of all places, in the Congressional Record. Prepared by its Subcommittee on Human Rights and Wellness, this report was presented to the Committee on Government Reform, chaired by Congressman Dan Burton (who has an autistic grandson). Congressional Record, May 21, 2003, E1011—E1030.

SafeMinds president, Lyn Redwood, presented testimony at a Congressional hearing held on September 8, 2004 that exposes malfeasance by the CDC and FDA related to thimerosal. It is titled "Truth Revealed: New Scientific Discoveries Regarding Mercury in Medicine and Autism" and is posted on their website, safeminds.org. See also this organization’s 84-page Report to Congress titled, "A Brief Analysis of Recent Efforts in Medical Mercury Induced Neurological and Autism Spectrum Disorders" (September 8, 2004).

"The Three Modern Faces of Mercury" — in fish, vaccines, and dental amalgams — by Thomas Clarkson in Environmental Health Perspectives Volume 110 | Supplement 1 | February 2002 | pages 11—23. This study provides an current-day perspective on mercury exposure, post Calomel, Merthiolate, and Mad Hatters.

If your dentist parrots the American Dental Association stance on this subject and says that "silver" — i.e., mercury — amalgams are perfectly safe, insist that he or she read Dr. Boyd Haley’s response to the president of the ADA on his defense of dental amalgams. It is posted on this website. I sent it to my dentist who I had been going to for a number of years. When he chose to ignore it, I changed dentists — to a mercury-free one and had him remove all my amalgam fillings.

"Mercury: the Silent Killer," Chapter 3 in Health and Nutrition Secrets That Can Save Your Life by Russell L. Blaylock, M.D. As a board-certified neurosurgeon, Dr. Blaylock, like me, is a member of the medical establishment. He now, however, studies and writes about wellness and complementary/alternative medicine on a full-time basis.

Are Vaccines Safe and Effective? by Neil Z. Miller (2002). This 78-page (paperback) book is well worth reading, especially if you have children or if you are being pressured to get a flu shot.

For a comprehensive review, with 167 scientific references, on how vaccines damage infants’ and soldiers’ brains (Gulf War Syndrome) when given too close together, see Dr. Blaylock’s "Interaction of Cytokines, Excitotoxins, Reactive Nitrogen and Oxygen Species in Autism Spectrum Disorders" in the Journal of the American Nutraceutical Association (JANA 2003;6[4]:21—35). See also his study, "Chronic Microglial Activation and Excitotoxicity Secondary to Excessive Immune Stimulation: Possible Factors in GulfWar Syndrome and Autism" in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JAPS 2004;9[2]:46—52). Dr. Blaylock has written a simplified version of these studies for the general public titled "Vaccines: the Hidden Dangers," in his Blaylock Wellness Report (Vol. 1, No. 1), which is published monthly and can be purchased online.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle and a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com, including bioterrorism. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com.

Donald Miller Archives

Colombia Generating Station
Hanford Site, Kennewich, WA
Output: 1,150 MW

Owing to the public’s fear of radiation, abetted by the nuclear protection industry and the media, nuclear power in the United States is at a standstill, just when we most need it. Construction on all nuclear power plants ordered after 1974 has stopped, and no orders have been placed for any since 1978. In the last 15 years, 8 nuclear power plants in the U.S. have been shut down because of escalating regulatory costs and public fears about radiation (103 remain).

The U.S. uses fossil fuels, mainly coal and natural gas, to produce 70 percent of its electricity. Nuclear power generates 19 percent and hydroelectric dams the other 11 percent. (Energy obtained directly from the sun, gathered by mirrors or photovoltaic cells, and from wind turbines generates less than one-tenth of one percent of our electricity.) Production of electricity consumes 36 percent of the energy we use.

Oil is now used primarily for transportation — to run our automobiles, trucks, airplanes, ships, and most buses and railroad trains. Overall, the U.S. obtains 85 percent of its energy from fossil fuels — about half from oil and the other half equally from coal and natural gas. (Before drilling for oil began in the 1800s, humans had just two main sources of energy, other than their own manual labor: wood and animals. Today, rather than ride horses, teenagers compare the horsepower of their automobiles.)

Compared to coal and hydroelectric dams, nuclear power is the safest and cleanest way, from an environmental standpoint, to produce electricity. And the fuel it uses, uranium, is more abundant than fossil fuels (or rivers left to be dammed). In contrast to the U.S., other countries do recognize the advantages of nuclear power. France uses nuclear power to generate 77 percent of its electricity, and 35 nuclear power plants are currently under construction around the world, 24 of them in Asia.

With 442 nuclear power plants operating in 32 countries for a cumulative 10,000 reactor-years of commercial operation, Chernobyl, in the former Soviet Union, is the only accident in the history of nuclear power where any radiation-related fatalities have occurred. In that accident (in 1986) radioactivity from part of the reactor’s overheated core escaped into the atmosphere. Acute radiation sickness affected 134 employees and 28 died. An estimated 70 extra cases of thyroid cancer occurred in children as a result of the accident, which could have been prevented by timely ingestion of potassium iodide. Otherwise, no increase in the incidence of other cancers occurred (despite dire predictions, based on the linear no-threshold hypothesis, that 110,000 new cancers would occur due to radioactive fallout from the accident). Chernobyl’s real victims were 200,000 pregnant women in Europe who, caught up in a wave of radiophobic hysteria, feared that their fetuses would be damaged by radiation from the fallout and had their pregnancies terminated. Low dose radiation does not cause genetic defects, and fetuses exposed to radiation from Chernobyl that were not aborted developed normally and did not have any increased incidence of congenital abnormalities or genetic defects.

Chernobyl is unique. That kind of accident will not happen in any other nuclear power plants because all the reactors currently in operation around the world are placed inside a containment building (Chernobyl was not). The reactor core meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, which happened when its core cooling system failed, also produced a lot of radiation; but the containment building the reactor was housed in kept it from being released into the atmosphere, and there were no injuries or deaths.

All the nuclear power plants in the U.S. are second-generation reactors, based on designs derived from those made for naval use. Third generation reactors, with an output of 600 MW, are simpler, smaller, more rugged, and reduce substantially the possibility of a core meltdown accident, from a likelihood of 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 800,000 per reactor year. (Third generation reactors have, for example, 80 percent fewer control cables and 60 percent less piping.) They are standardized to expedite licensing and reduce construction time. Fourth generation fusion reactors, one hopes, will be coming into operation in the foreseeable future.

On the Columbia River System, in my part of the world, 75 people died building the Grand Coulee Dam. Failure of the Teton Dam on a tributary of the Snake River near Idaho Falls (in 1976) killed 14 people, obliterated one town (Wilford), severely damaged several others, and caused $3 billion (2002 dollars) in property damage. The energy released when this dam ruptured was the equivalent of ten (20-kiloton) atom bombs, and it caused the greatest flood in North America since the last ice age. (Fortunately, the dam failed during the daytime, which saved thousands of lives because workers were there to warn the populace downstream to evacuate, before phone lines went down.) The St. Francis Dam near Valencia, California collapsed (in 1928) and killed 450 people. The Machu Dam in India killed 2,500 people when it ruptured in 1979.

Compared to nuclear power, coal is a much less safe source of energy. In addition to the pollutants and carcinogens coal delivers into the atmosphere when burned, 100 coal miners are killed each year in the U.S. in coal mine accidents and another 100 die transporting it. Per amount of electricity produced, hydropower causes 110 fold, coal, 45 fold, and natural gas, 10 fold more deaths than nuclear power. As Petr Beckmann, founding editor of Access to Energy, shows in his book The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, nuclear power is the safest source of energy in all aspects, not excluding terrorism and sabotage, major accidents, and waste disposal.

From an environmental standpoint, nuclear power is far superior to coal or hydropower.

In the U.S., coal is strip-mined (the way we get 60 percent of it) at a rate of more than 65,000 acres per year, with over a million acres awaiting reclamation. Of the 8 million acres that overlie underground mines (to obtain the other 40 percent), one-fourth of that acreage has subsided. When burned, the carbon in coal combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide (CO2) and carbon monoxide (CO). A large coal-burning plant that produces as much electricity as a nuclear power plant burns 3 million tons of coal annually, which generates 11 million tons of CO2 (700 lbs. per second). Coal contains sulfur, 0.5 to 3 percent by weight, which combines with oxygen to form sulfur dioxide, the principal cause of acid rain; and the nitrogen in it produces nitrous oxide, a major pollutant (a 1,000 megawatt coal plant produces as much nitrous oxide as 200,000 automobiles). It contains health-damaging heavy metals like lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, and beryllium. Coal also has uranium in it in a concentration of 1 to 2 parts per million. As a result, a coal-fired plant releases up to 50 times more radioactivity than a nuclear plant, where the radiation emitted by uranium and its byproducts is contained. (The EPA ignores this fact.)

Hydropower is even worse. Hydroelectric dams generate 85 percent of the electricity produced in my state (Washington). The dams in the Columbia River Basin have had a devastating impact on its ecosystem. It began with the New Deal, in 1932, when the Army Corps of Engineers submitted a study of the river to President Roosevelt identifying ten promising locations for dams. Beginning with the Bonneville Dam, built by the Corps of Engineers, and the Grand Coulee Dam, built by the Bureau of Reclamation, over the next 40 years these two federal agencies built 30 major dams on the Columbia and Snake River system. Its largest, the Grand Coulee Dam, blocks salmon access to more than 1,000 miles of productive river. Called the "cesspool of the New Deal" (by a New York newspaper), its 125 square mile reservoir inundated 12 towns with 1,200 buildings.

The hydroelectric dams in the Columbia River Basin (along with hatcheries that the Bureau established to mitigate their effects on fish) have been instrumental in reducing the number of wild salmon that come back up the Columbia River each year to spawn, from 10 to 16 million to less than 200,000 now, a 98 percent decline. Eliminating the nutrients (obtained eating crustaceans and plant life in the ocean) that salmon provide for the Basin has had a major impact on its ecosystem. Salmon gain 90 percent of their body weight at sea and carry the nutrients obtained there back to their home stream. Grizzly bears, for example, obtain up to 90 percent of the nitrogen in their bones and hair from the salmon they eat. The environmental impact of the decline of salmon is reflected in these Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates: the Basin’s population of fur-bearing mammals has declined from 13,000 to 500; game birds dependent on this landscape, from 120,000 to 2,000; and winter songbirds, from 95,000 to 3,000. Twelve second-generation nuclear power plants would produce as much electricity as all the hydroelectric dams that have been built in this Basin, at a negligible environmental cost.

Nuclear energy (that uranium 235 and uranium 238-derived plutonium produce) emits no harmful gases or toxic metals into the environment. And, unlike hydroelectric dams, it does not alter a region’s ecosystem. Furthermore, despite what activists and the media say, the wastes nuclear power create are far less of a problem than those produced by coal, or the silt that builds up behind dams. One pound of uranium produces 20,000 times more energy than one pound of coal. A nuclear power plant generates (high-level) radioactive wastes the size of one aspirin tablet per person per year (a plant’s yearly wastes fit comfortably under a dining room table). Coal-fired plants generate 320 lbs. of ash and other poisons per person per year, of which 10 percent is spewed into the atmosphere. Disposal personnel encapsulate nuclear waste in (fireproof, water-proof, and earthquake-proof) boron-silicate glass or ceramic and then bury these now effectively non-radioactive artificial rocks. In the U.S., these "rocks" will (in 2010) be buried deep in extremely arid ground in a remote part of Nevada, in a repository at Yucca Mountain (where nuclear weapons tests were once conducted). The chance that this encapsulated waste will ever harm anyone is virtually zero (especially given that the linear no-threshold hypothesis now disproved). Waste disposal is not a disadvantage of nuclear power; it is one of its advantages.

Yet another advantage of nuclear power is the relative abundance of its fuel, as this illustration, put together by Petr Beckmann, shows. Uranium is the heaviest of all naturally occurring elements and is present in most of the earth’s crust. There is enough uranium 235 (box C), the fuel for current-day U.S. nuclear reactors, to keep them operating through most of this century. But uranium 238 (99 percent of natural uranium), fuels breeder reactors. Breeder reactors turn uranium-238 into plutonium. As Bernard Cohen points out in his book, The Nuclear Energy Option (in Chapter 13, which is available online), the supply of uranium 238 on the planet to run breeder reactors will last thousands of years.

The Golden Triangle and US Military Bases in the Persian Gulf

Oil is dwindling fast in the U.S. In 1950 America produced one-half of the world’s oil and consumed 6 million barrels per day (MBPD), which was more oil than all the rest of the world consumed. Today the U.S. produces 4 percent of the world’s oil and consumes 20 MBPD, and the rest of the world consumes close to 60 MBPD. (China, with its 1.2 billion people, leads the race in growing oil consumption, and it has to import an increasing percentage of the oil that it consumes. India, with one billion people, is close behind.)

Sixty percent of the known oil in the world lies within this "golden triangle" in the Middle East. Oil wells there pump 10,000 barrels per day, compared with wells in the U.S that pump 300 barrels per day. U.S. oil reserves have now dropped to the point that if we were not able to import any oil, at the current rate of consumption, we would exhaust our 22-billion barrel reserve and run out of oil in three years.

The "War on Terror," as the Bush Administration has chosen to prosecute it, is designed to further American energy interests. It’s "all about oil." In addition to U.S. bases in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and the 14 new ones that are planned for Iraq, the U.S. has also established military bases, known as "power projection hubs," in Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Oman. One base in Qatar, one of several in that country, is particularly valued by the Air Force because it has a three-mile long runway.

Iraq has 11 percent of the world’s oil, five times as much as the U.S. now has. The only country with more is Saudi Arabia. This map, prepared by the National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Vice-President Cheney (obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act) shows the location and extent of Iraq’s known oilfields and divides the western part of the country into nine exploration blocks.

Central Asia is another important source of oil and natural gas. (America’s natural gas wells now produce only one-third the amount of gas they did 30 years ago.) The problem is how to get it out. One of the Bush Administration’s goals in occupying Afghanistan is to build a pipeline through that country to the Arabian Sea that avoids going through Russia or Iran. With the Taliban running Afghanistan there was no hope that this pipeline could be built.

There is another way to get oil for our automobiles and airplanes, which would eliminate the need for the United States to import any Middle Eastern or Central Asian oil. American entrepreneurs are marketing a new technology called a "thermal conversion process" that can make oil out of various agricultural, industrial, and municipal wastes; and nuclear power is the best source of electricity to run it. The process employs a technique known as thermal depolymerization, which in essence mimics the geothermal process that created our fossil fuels, notably oil. Wastes subjected to temperatures of 500 degrees F and pressures of 600 pounds per square inch, under controlled conditions, will produce light oil that is half diesel and half gasoline.

You can put most anything in it — sewage sludge, plastic bottles, old tires, turkey offal, wet bandages and needles. If a 175 lb. person accidentally got caught in the process, it would turn him into 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of purified minerals, 7 pounds of methane gas, and 123 pounds of water. Putting all the country’s agricultural wastes through this process would produce 4 billion barrels of oil, the amount we currently import from OPEC each year.

What about solar power and windmills as an alternative source of energy? California is the leader in developing solar power. Its Solar Two Plant in the Mojave Desert has a peak output of 10 megawatts. In order to produce as much energy as a 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor, its mirrors would have to occupy 127 square miles of land. The Solar Electric Generating System in Kramer Junction, CA has a higher output — 100 megawatts. This system currently generates 90 percent of the world’s direct solar electricity. (It has rows of mirror-like shiny surfaces that focus sunlight onto tubes filled with therminol fluid running along the top of the array, which turns water into steam to power the turbines.) Its mirrors have to be washed every five to ten days to maintain a reasonable (70 percent) optical efficiency. It requires 33 square miles of mirrors for this system to produce as much electricity as one nuclear power plants. Also, solar plants require substantial government subsidies and tax credits to make the electricity they produce economically feasible.

The Nine Canyon Wind Project in my state completed its Phase II expansion last year, adding 12 new wind turbines to the previously existing 37. With the wind blowing hard, they have a peak output of 64 megawatts. Based on the average wind speed there it would take 50,000 wind turbines of this size, in a 300 square mile area, to generate the same amount of electricity one nuclear power plant produces. (If they were made to the height of a 20-story building, it would take only 1,000 windmills to produce that amount of power.)

Windmills kill a lot of birds. They act as bait and executioner for birds because rodent populations multiply rapidly at their base, and the birds get killed trying to get at them. The windmills on Altamont Pass east of San Francisco, for example, kill eight times as many bald eagles each year as those that died in the one-time Valdez oil spill in Alaska. This is also a problem with solar energy. Bird deaths per megawatt of electricity generated by solar plants are higher than at Altamont Pass, a result of their flying into its mirror-like surfaces. Despite the enthusiasm politicians and the media exhibit for solar and wind power, these sources of energy, compared with nuclear power, produce tiny amounts electricity; and they harm the environment. They cannot replace fossil fuels, or nuclear power.

The many billions of dollars our government is spending occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, to ensure a continued supply of fossil fuels, would be much better spent building nuclear reactors.

Our country needs to bring the troops home and start building third (and fourth) generation nuclear power plants, like China and other Asian nations are doing. The War on Terror will not be won, with our adversary employing fourth-generation-warfare suicide attacks on civilians in one’s homeland, until our country pulls its stick out of the hornet’s nest. The only way Muslim terrorists are going to leave us, and our soon-to-be former allies like Spain alone is if we pull all of our troops out of the Middle East, and leave them alone.

This is perhaps the greatest advantage of nuclear power, coupled with new technologies like thermal depolymerization. It will better enable our country to follow the advice its first President gave us in his Farewell Address — to conduct dealings with other nations in the marketplace, not on the battlefield. Building nuclear power plants can help end the War on Terror, in addition to keeping our lights and computers on.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle and a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com, including bioterrorism. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com.

Donald Miller Archives

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NCR), two federal entities charged with addressing radiation safety, hold the view that exposure to any amount of ionizing radiation, no matter how small, is harmful. No amount of radioactivity can be proclaimed safe. Accordingly, the EPA and the NCR have set extremely stringent regulatory limits for public exposure to radiation — 15 and 100 mrem (millirem)/year respectively. This is the level of cleanup radioactive sites have to achieve, for example, before they can be released for public use. The initial limit for radiation exposure was 36 rem (36,000 mrem). With the advent of nuclear-powered ships, where sailors would be in close proximity to nuclear reactors for extended periods of time, it was though prudent to reduce it to15 rem, even though no deaths or injuries were documented under the 36-rem protection limit. (For practical purposes, rad, rem, Sievert, and Grey are interchangeable measures of radiation, where 1 rad = 1 rem, 1 Sievert = 1 Grey, and 100 rad or rem = 1 Sievert or Grey. A millirem — mrem — is 1/1000th of a rem.)

Along with the EPA and NRC, elected government officials, newspaper science writers, TV reporters and journalists, and, consequently, most Americans believe that low doses of radiation are harmful. People have "radiophobia" — the fear that any level of ionizing radiation, no matter how small, is dangerous. Why? For one thing, the news media fosters it because fear sells. Scary stories about the dangers of radiation keep people tuned in. Another reason, which lies deeper in the collective psyche, is that this phobia expresses the deep-seated sense of revulsion that Americans feel over the devastation and loss of life caused by the atomic bombs that its country dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. A third, more correctable reason is that the relationship between radiation dose and its biological effects is believed to conform to the "Linear (No-Threshold) Hypothesis," or "model." Regulators use this model to predict the number of cancer deaths that low doses of radiation are assumed to cause and then cite these predictions to justify their draconian radiation safety standards.

This is how the linear hypothesis works: After America developed the atom bomb, tested it, and dropped two on Japan investigators learned that 600 rem — 600,000 mrem — of radiation constitutes a lethal dose (it is 100 percent fatal), and 50 percent of people exposed to 400 rem will die of radiation sickness. Signs and symptoms of radiation sickness — such as vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding, sore mouth, weakness, and hair loss — begin to appear when a person receives 75 to 100 rem. This hypothesis assumes that there is no threshold beneath which the deleterious effects of radiation cease to appear. Even very small doses will cause cancer in some people, if a large enough group is exposed. It predicts, for example, (in a simplified form) that 0.0625 percent of people exposed to a 500 mrem dose will die from radiation-induced cancer, a rate extrapolated in a linear fashion from the mortality rate observed at higher doses. Although this is a very low rate for a dose of this amount, when applied to a large group of people it gets scarier. For a population of one million people who are exposed to 500 mrem of ionizing radiation, the linear model predicts that 625 people will die from radiation-induced cancer. If 10 million people, in a city like New York, are exposed to this dose, 6,250 deaths are assumed to occur.

Regulators acknowledge that a prediction like "there will be 62,500 deaths in 10 million people exposed to 500 mrem of radiation" is an assumed risk. It is based on the assumption that "any exposure to ionizing radiation carries with it some risk," as the ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) regulation puts it. Known and documented health-damaging effects of radiation — radiation sickness, leukemia, and death — are only seen with doses greater than 100 rem. The risk of doses less than 100 rem is a black box into which regulators extend "extrapolated data." There are no valid epidemiologic or experimental data to support linearly extrapolated predictions of cancer resulting from low doses of radiation. (Proponents argue that some studies support this model, but they "capriciously misrepresent" the data in those studies and apply the linear hypothesis in an a priori fashion to make the data fit, ignoring data that does not.)

Contrary to what is perceived to be true, the actual truth is that ionizing radiation in low doses does not cause cancer (or genetic defects). It, in fact, has a beneficial effect on one’s health. There are epidemiological studies and scientific data on health effects from low to moderate doses of ionizing radiation that show it decreases the risk of cancer. Government authorities and regulators — including the news media — ignore this data.

Americans are exposed to an average 200 mrem of natural and medical radiation per year. Natural background radiation comes from cosmic rays, isotopes of uranium and thorium in the bricks, plaster, and concrete of buildings, and radioactive potassium. Radioactive potassium in our bodies generates about 25 mrem of radiation per year — more than the EPA safety limit. It comes from potassium-40, a naturally occurring radioactive isotope of potassium. People that suffer from radiophobia and think that they would be better off without that source of radioactivity in their bodies can take comfort in knowing that organisms grown in the laboratory consuming only non-radioactive potassium-39, with no potassium-40 in their diet, develop severe growth defects. The radiation that potassium-40 in our cells provides is vital for our health.

People who live in Ramsar, Iran, a resort on the Caspian Sea, are exposed to natural background radiation of 79,000 mrem per year, 5,266 times more than what the EPA’s 15-mrem/year radiation safety standard allows. The local river and its streams have a high concentration of radium, which is 15 times more radioactive than plutonium. Its 2,000 residents do not have an increased incidence of cancer, as the linear hypothesis would predict, and their life span is the same as that of other Iranians. Fortunately, for that resort, EPA regulations don’t apply there, or to people in Guarapari, Brazil, who get 17,500 mrem of radiation per year with no ill effects.

One place with high background radiation where EPA regulations do apply is a park in Santa Fe, Fountainhead Rock Place. It has radioactive rock of volcanic origin that emits 760 mrem of gamma radiation, 14 times the allowed amount. Regulators, however, have chosen to make an exception here and have not closed the park off to the public.

A process known as radiation hormesis mediates its beneficial effect on health. Investigators have found that small doses of radiation have a stimulating and protective effect on cellular function. It stimulates immune system defenses, prevents oxidative DNA damage, and suppresses cancer.

Accordingly, atom bomb survivors in Nagasaki who received 1,000 to 19,000 mrem of radiation have had a lower incidence of cancer, especially with regard to leukemia and colon cancer, than the non-irradiated control population. And it is turning out that Japan’s atom bomb survivors are living longer. They have a death rate after the age of 55 that is lower than matched Japanese people not exposed to radiation. (Don’t expect to hear this on the evening news.)

30-Year Cancer Mortality in People Exposed to Radiation from
Thermonuclear Test Explosions in the Former Soviet Union

Another important epidemiological study has tracked the cancer mortality in people exposed to radiation from a thermonuclear explosion in 1957 in the former Soviet Union (in the Eastern Urals). Investigators followed 8,000 people who lived in the area for the next 30 years. The group exposed to 12,000 mrem (120 mSv) had a substantially lower cancer mortality compared with a non-irradiated control group, exposed only to a normal 100 mrem of natural background radiation. The group that received a considerably higher dose of 50,000 mrem (500mSv) had a not quite as good but still statistically significant decrease in cancer mortality. The same thing is seen with shipyard workers. Those that work on nuclear powered ships have a lower mortality than non-nuclear workers. Investigators matched 29,000 nuclear workers (many received more than 5,000 mrem of radiation) with 33,000 non-nuclear workers. The linear hypothesis predicts that the non-nuclear workers will live longer. The hormesis model predicts, correctly, that just the opposite would happen.

The radiation hormesis model explains why residents of radon spa areas (in Japan, Germany, and central Europe) and people who live in homes that have high radon levels also have a decreased incidence of cancer. But perhaps the most impressive study that shows just how good low dose radiation can be for you is one just published in the (Spring 2004) Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

In Taiwan (in the early 1980s), 180 apartment buildings were built with recycled steel that was accidentally contaminated with Colbalt-60. The buildings’ occupants, 4,000 people, lived in them for more than 10 years before their radioactive state was discovered. The amount of radiation they received ranged up to more than 1,500 mrem per year. (Colbalt-60 has a half-life of 5.3 years.) The cancer mortality, over a 20-year period, in the radiated occupants was 97 percent less (3.5 deaths per 100,000 person years) than that of the general population of Taiwan (116 deaths per 100,000 person years). Even the incidence of congenital heart malformations in the children they bore was reduced. This carefully done study shows, as its authors put it, that "chronic radiation [far above EPA limits] is an effective prophylaxis against cancer."

"Two of the leading scientists in this field who study radiation hormesis and have been instrumental in disproving the linear hypothesis, are Bernard Cohen, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Pittsburgh and Myron Pollycove, Emeritus Professor of Nuclear Medicine, University of California at San Francisco. I first learned about radiation hormesis from talks they gave at meetings of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (the doctors in this group include Ph.D. physicists, other Ph.D.s, and M.D.s). Their work stimulated me to study this subject. Most physicians, unfortunately, know little or nothing about radiation hormesis.

The EPA and NRC radiation regulations, in addition to their negative health benefit and the huge regulatory costs they incur, aid terrorists. If a terrorist detonates a "dirty bomb" — a conventional bomb wrapped with radioactive material — it will give off radiation that exceeds EPA and NRC public-exposure limits. But even the most potent dirty bomb wrapped with cobalt-60 will deliver only a few hundred mrem of radiation within a one-half mile radius of its detonation, an amount equivalent to the yearly dose those apartment dwellers in Taiwan got, which kept them from getting cancer — and in that park in Santa Fe. If federal authorities follow the EPA’s 15 mrem/yr radiation limit, they will make people evacuate the city where the bomb goes off and shut the city down. That will be completely unnecessary, instill radiophobic hysteria, and serve only to further the terrorists’ aims.

The citizens of Sacramento need to know that low to moderate doses of radiation are not harmful — and that there is even good evidence it improves health. People who are afraid of nuclear power plants need to know that nuclear power is in fact the safest and cleanest form of energy on the planet for producing electricity. That will be the subject of another article.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle and a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com, including bioterrorism. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com.

Donald Miller Archives

Initiated by two disaffected students at Columbia University in the late 1940s and named the Beat Generation by its leader, Jack Kerouac, this movement has had a profound effect on American culture, spawning, among other things, hippies in the 1960s and the "Me Decade" of the 1970s (as christened by Tom Wolfe). Its two main spokesmen were Allen Ginsberg, who was suspended from Columbia, and Kerouac, who dropped out. This movement came under nationwide scrutiny following the publication of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems in 1956, with its famous first line, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked," and Kerouac’s novel On the Road in 1957. The steadily increasing price of a first edition of Howl reflects this movement’s cultural and literary importance. City Lights Books published Howl in a small-sized 44-page paperback edition (1000 copies in the first issue), Number Four in its Pocket Poet Series, costing 75 cents. In 1990 a first edition, first issue, signed copy of Howl in very good condition cost $2,000. Book dealers today sell it for $5,500.

The Beat Generation was the first generation in American history to be subjected to peacetime military conscription. It was also the first generation of young adults who had to confront the stark reality that two powerful nation-states, which might wind up fighting each other, possessed nuclear weapons in sufficient quantity to possibly destroy the world. The Beat fringe expressed their displeasure and alienation from mainstream, statist society by seeking enlightenment, and escape, through sex, drugs, modern jazz, and forays into Eastern mysticism.

For Kerouac and Ginsberg, the inspiration and guiding light of this movement was Neal Cassady. He was an energetic and fast-talking, handsome, sensual, bisexual, compassionate con man from Denver, Colorado. Kerouac and Ginsberg met Cassady when he went to New York to visit a friend from Denver who was at Columbia. Both were bowled over by him. In Ginsberg’s Howl, Neal Cassady is "N.C.," the "secret hero of these poems," the celebrated "cocksman and Adonis of Denver" whose ultimate purpose in "ecstatic and insatiate" copulation is to achieve spiritual enlightenment. In Kerouac’s On the Road, Cassady is Dean Moriarty, the main character in the novel, who has "got the secret we’re all burning to find." Kerouac calls him a "new American saint," who introduced him to the religion of IT — a self-transcending attainment of synchronization with the Eternal Now.

Gregory Stephenson, in The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation (1990), in my opinion the best book so far written on this subject, describes Neal Cassady (shown here driving) this way:

He is a catalyst — initiating, inciting action, urging others on to pleasure and abandon… He is a prophet of the libido, of the instincts and appetites. His desperate hedonism is not, however, an end in itself but rather the means to an end: the transcendence of personal consciousness and time. His message, incoherent and inarticulately expressed, is of the perfection and essential unity of all experience.

Called the "HOLY GOOF" by Kerouac and a "friendly and flowing savage" by Stephenson, Neal Cassady as a teenager, when not in reform school for stealing cars, spent his afternoons after work in the Denver Public Library reading Arthur Schopenhauer and Marcel Proust. Before he died (in 1968 at the age of forty-two), Cassady and Ken Kesey became friends; nicknamed "Speed Limit," he drove the Pranksters’ "psychedelic" bus in their romp across America. He is a central figure in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). In that nonfictional account of the adventures of Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Wolfe examines the "living legend" of Neal Cassady and depicts him as a mythic figure in pursuit of "the westernmost edge of experience."

Cassady did not publish any books while he was alive, but he wrote letters and the first third of his autobiography, published after his death by City Lights Books under the title The First Third & Other Writings (1971). Creative Arts of Berkeley published the letters he wrote to Ginsberg in As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg & Neal Cassady (1977).

Jack Kerouac — the cause célèbre of the Beat movement — wrote fifteen novels. As Wilson notes in his list, his one best seller, On the Road (his second novel), probably has had a greater impact on its readers than any other work of fiction in the 20th century. I was 17 years old when On the Road was published, and it did indeed have a big impact on me. I played the saxophone in a jazz quintet, which essayed the genre known as hard bop, and was interested in philosophy, particularly philosophy of religion. My sympathies easily lay with the Beats. My family and I were sufficiently part of the "establishment," however, for me to steer a course through college and medical school. Nevertheless, I have remained interested in this jazz-appreciating, quasi-religious movement and have been able to assemble a fairly extensive collection of its literature.

Among Kerouac’s fourteen other novels, the most notable ones are The Dharma Bums (1958), The Subterraneans (1958), Doctor Sax (1959), Big Sur (1962), and Visions of Cody (published after his death in 1972). Kerouac also wrote several books of poetry, the most important being Mexico City Blues (1959). A serious collector of Beat literature must acquire all of Kerouac’s books in both their American and British first editions.

Other Beat writers in the Wilson 50 include William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, William Everson, Robert Duncan, Gary Synder, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Diane DiPrima. Burroughs seminal work is The Naked Lunch (1959). It was issued in Paris in the now famous Traveler’s Companion series of the Olympia Press. Some observers say his "cut-up" method of writing fiction has revolutionized narrative writing more than anything since the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Gregory Corso’s collection of poems titled Gasoline (1958), Number Eight in City Light’s Pocket Poet Series, is on the Wilson 50. Corso is the quintessential Beat. Kerouac describes him as "a tough young kid from the lower East Side who rose like an angel over the rooftops and sang Italian songs as sweet as Caruso and Sinatra, but in words." Corso embodied the dual meaning of Beat: one who discovers joy (beatific) through suffering (beat). The beatific part is the blessedness that arises from illumination about the true realities of life, which is rooted, for the Beats, in Zen Buddhism. Employed as a manual laborer in the garment district and at times homeless, Corso met Ginsberg, who said that he was drawn to him by his interesting face, at a bar in Greenwich Village. After seeing the poems that this beaten-down laborer had stashed in a suitcase, Ginsberg took him to meet Kerouac. Corso came to be closely associated with Kerouac and Ginsberg and, taking on the role enfant terrible, thus became a member of what one could call the original triumvirate of Beats.

In 1955 the Beat scene moved to San Francisco. Kerouac and Ginsberg traveled there to visit Neal Cassady, now living in San Jose with his wife, Carolyn, who wrote Heart Beat: My Life with Jack & Neal (1976), and their three children. Ginsberg gave the first public reading of Howl, with Kerouac and Cassady present — offering encouragement and passing around jugs of wine — at the Six Gallery on October 7, 1955. Two other Beat writers in the Wilson 50 also read poems there that night: Michael McClure and Gary Snyder. McClure’s Dark Brown (1961) and Snyder’s Regarding Wave (1969) are on the Wilson 50 list. Duncan and Ferlinghetti also attended the reading at the Gallery; and Duncan’s Selected Poems (1959) and Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) are among the "50."

After the reading Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Books and publisher of the Pocket Poets Series, told Ginsberg that he wanted to publish Howl. Twelve months later, shortly after he published it, the U. S. Customs and the San Francisco police seized the edition and banned its further sale, until forced to release it after City Lights successfully argued the merits of the work in a long court battle. In addition to being a successful bookstore owner, publisher, and important promoter of Beat poets, Ferlinghetti is a first-rate poet himself. His first book of poetry, Pictures of the Gone World (1955), which initiated the Pocket Poet Series (and sold for 65 cents), is an essential work in a collection of Beat literature.

In a seemingly male-dominated movement, three women Beat writers stand out — Denise Levertov, Joyce Johnson, and Diane DiPrima. DiPrima went to Swarthmore College, dropped out after two years and went to live in Greenwich Village in Manhattan with her lovers and write. Her first book of poetry, This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards, was published in 1958. It is also an essential title in a Beat collection. Olympia Press published her Memoirs of a Beatnik in 1969 in its Traveler’s Companion series. It is sexually explicit, "for adults only;" but her picture of Bohemian life in New York rings true. In describing the momentous impact the appearance of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems had on her and her fellow beatniks, she writes:

I already clung instinctively to the easy, unselfconscious Bohemianism we had maintained at the pad, our unspoken sense that we were alone in a strange world, a sense that kept us proud and together. But for the moment all this was buried under a sweeping sense of exhilaration, of glee: someone was speaking for all of us, and the poem [Howl] was good. I was high and delighted. I made my way back to the house and to supper, and we all read the poem. I read it aloud to everyone. A new era had begun.

Robert Wilson justifies putting Memoirs of a Beatnik on his list with these comments: "Beyond question [DiPrima is] the leading female member of the Beat group…[and]…despite the high quality of her poetry at its best, I have selected this volume of memoirs because of its overwhelming honesty, and also because it is the only book I have encountered that presents a totally accurate and at the same time moving account of the Beat period."

Wilson included Denise Levertov’s second book Here and Now (1961) on his list. Published by City Lights, it is Number Six in the Pocket Poet Series. Joyce Johnson, who lived for a short time with Kerouac before he became famous, has written, along with several novels, two books that shed light on the place of women in the Beat movement: Minor Characters: A Memoir of a Young Woman of the 1950′s in the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac (1983) and Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957—1958 (2000).

Literature about the Beat Generation is large and still growing. For example, I have nine biographies of Jack Kerouac in my collection, and there may be more to be written. There are several good bibliographies of Beat literature. In addition, an important reference work exists in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America (1983).

I continue "on the road," so to speak, in my collector’s pursuit of the Beats and their literary efforts. But as with life, it is the journey, not the destination, that counts.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle and a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com, including bioterrorism. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com. This article, in somewhat altered form, was published in The Journal of the Book Club of Washington (December 2003, Volume 4, Number 2).

Donald Miller Archives

Six thousand people die each day in the U.S. Most of them die from diseases that are preventable. The leading cause of death is coronary heart disease, which accounts for 2,000 of these deaths each day. Cancer and stroke are the next two leading causes, with 1,400 and 500 deaths a day respectively. In contrast, 125 people die in automobile accidents and 60 are murdered each day. You may not be able to avoid getting killed in an automobile accident, but coronary artery disease (atherosclerosis), most cancers, and carotid disease (the principal cause of strokes) are preventable diseases. You can avoid them.

Fortunately, modern medicine has come up with some remarkable remedies for people who do acquire these diseases, like coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG), which one of us has been doing and teaching for thirty years. While this operation has helped many people — 15 million Americans since this operation was introduced in 1969 — you can avoid ever needing to have it. One can do this by taking the six-fold path to optimum health, beginning with one’s diet.

Eat a Mediterranean Diet (and Take Nutritional Supplements)

Medical doctors, including the editors of The New England Journal of Medicine, are just now beginning to understand the value of a Mediterranean diet in preventing and treating disease, particularly coronary artery disease. Two doctors at the Harvard School of Public Health, Walter Willert and Meir Stampfer, present a strong case in the January 2003 issue of Scientific American for their modified Mediterranean diet, shown in the "New Food Pyramid" below. They examine the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Guide Pyramid and show why it is seriously flawed. This food pyramid, introduced in 1992, conveys the message that "Fat is bad" and "Carbs are good." Actually, some fats are good for you, and some kinds of carbohydrates, particularly the kind that Americans eat, are bad. This is the opposite of what the USDA says.

A Mediterranean diet has a relatively high percentage of fats. Plant oils, especially olive oil (along with other unrefined vegetable oils, if you can find them) are at the base of the pyramid, to be used on a daily basis with most meals. Researchers have found that people who eat a Mediterranean diet with its 40 percent fat content have a lower incidence of coronary heart disease than people in Japan who consume a very low fat diet (10 percent fat). Not all fat is bad, just saturated and trans fats. (For a larger view of this pyramid, click here.)

There are four kinds of fats. Two kinds — monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, notably the Omega 3 fatty acids — are good for you and promote optimum health, Olive oil, with its monounsaturated oleic acid, is the mainstay of the Mediterranean diet. Omega 3 fatty acids, found in flaxseed, walnuts, and fish, confer important health benefits. Researchers have found that Omega 3 fatty acids thin the blood, reduce arrhythmias (heart rhythm disturbances), and help prevent breast and colon cancer. Eskimos, with no fruit and vegetables, eat a diet high in fats, and they have a very low incidence of coronary disease. This is because the fats they consume are the good ones — omega-3 fatty acids — found in cold-water fish.

With regard to the other two kinds of fats, saturated and trans fats, saturated fats are bad and trans fatty acids are terrible. Food companies insufflate hydrogen into food in order to increase its shelf life. This process, called "partial hydrogenation," turns less stable polyunsaturated fats into stable, but unnatural trans fats. This straight-chained monounsaturated fatty acid has the physical characteristics of saturated fats. It is not a normal component of human fat and is found in nature only in small amounts (2 percent of total body fat) in antelope, buffalo, and other ruminants. Trans fats, however, can comprise up to 60 percent or more of the total fat present in processed "partially hydrogenated" foods such as crackers and margarine, and in such fast foods as French fries and McDonalds’ chicken McNuggets. Consumption of trans fatty acids lowers the good HDL cholesterol and raises bad LDL cholesterol, thereby increasing your risk of getting heart disease. They also increase one’s risk of getting cancer.

In their New Food Pyramid, the Harvard researchers place bad carbohydrates at the top of the pyramid, alongside red meat, with its saturated fat, to "use sparingly." Foods made with flour, milled (refined and processed) from whole grains, contain carbohydrates in the form of starch — glucose molecules loosely bound together that can be quickly broken down and metabolized. Consumption of starch raises blood sugar levels higher than eating pure sugar does. (Sugar is sucrose, a disaccharide containing a 1:1 mixture of glucose and fructose.) Foods made with flour include white bread, white rice, white pasta, and donuts. These foods, as the New Food Pyramid shows, should be used sparingly. Foods that have unprocessed, good carbohydrates are fruit and vegetables, legumes (beans, peas, and lentils), oatmeal, whole wheat bread and pasta, and brown rice. They are at the base of the pyramid, to be eaten daily.

Most Americans eat too much and make poor food choices. We need to "Trade French Fries for Fruit." This is the essence of the type of diet we must follow in order to remain in optimum health into old age. We should eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, nuts, legumes, whole grains, and fiber; and we should avoid processed foods, with their high content of starch and trans fats. If you see the phrase "partially hydrogenated" in the chemistry list of ingredients in the box of "Nutrition Facts" displayed on the food’s package, avoid it. That phrase is the tip off that the product contains trans fats. Take Wheat Thins, for example. Its label says that it has "no cholesterol;" but left unsaid is the fact that it contains trans fats, which are far worse than cholesterol. Most crackers and pretzels are partially hydrogenated to increase their shelf life. Eat nuts (almonds and walnuts, especially) instead for snacks, perhaps mixed with some dried cranberries, dates, raisins, sunflower seeds, and dry roasted soybeans.

The best vegetables from a health standpoint are broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, beets, tomatoes, cilantro, kale, spinach, parsley, and purple or red cabbage. The best fruits are blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, apples, grapes, prunes, cranberries, pineapple, currants, oranges, and tangerines. These fruits and vegetables contain health-enhancing antioxidants and flavenoids. Rather than going to a pharmacy to have prescriptions filled, we should frequent the produce section of a grocery store. With the help of the antioxidants and flavenoids that these fruits and vegetables contain, we can help avoid coming down with diseases that prescription drugs are designed to treat.

We also need to take nutritional supplements — also termed dietary supplements and micronutrients — with the food we eat, which is being grown in increasingly nutritionally depleted soil, and to help us better cope with modern-day environmental toxins. In addition to vitamins and minerals, these micronutrients include various antioxidants, flavenoids, Omega 3 fatty acids, coenzyme Q 10, and other herbal substances.

A growing body of evidence indicates that nutritional supplements strengthen the immune system, prevent cancer, and delay aging. A study in The Lancet, for example, shows that elderly people who take vitamin and mineral supplements have fewer sick days and improved immune function compared with those who do not. Supplements that investigators have found will help a person keep from getting coronary artery disease include Vitamin E, Coenzyme Q10, Selenium, Magnesium, Zinc, l-carnitine, flavenoids, Vitamins A and C, Folate, Vitamins B6 and B12, Omega-3 fatty acids, and other herbal substances. Supplements that reduce the risk of acquiring prostrate cancer, for example, include zinc, selenium, Omega-3 fatty acids, and Saw palmetto.

We offer recommendations on specific supplements to take, with their doses, in a separate article titled "Recommended Nutritional Supplements" that is posted on our website (www.donaldmiller.com).

Drink Filtered Water

The human brain, with its 100 billion nerve cells interconnected in an exceedingly intricate way, is 80 percent water, and the body as a whole is 72 percent water. In order to have optimum physical and mental health our bodies need good water.

Public health officials add chlorine and fluoride to municipal water supplies. Chlorine removes harmful bacteria, but it has a number of not-well-publicized adverse effects. For example, drinking chlorinated water increases the risk of breast, prostrate, and colon cancer by 15 to 93 percent. Trihalomethane, a chlorinated byproduct found in tap water, is a known carcinogen; and studies show that women with breast cancer have 50 to 60 percent more chlorinated byproducts in their breast tissue than women without breast cancer.

In this regard, chickens fare better than people. Poultry producers have learned to raise their chickens on dechlorinated water because if raised drinking chlorinated tap water they will have drooped feathers, show signs of poor circulation, and have a reduced level of activity.

Adding fluoride to the water is supposed to prevent tooth decay. Most dentists say, however, that any benefit that fluoride may provide in preventing tooth decay requires that it be applied with a toothbrush. Fluorinated water, in fact, is bad for one’s health. People who drink fluorinated water have an increased incidence of hip fractures. Fluoride binds with any aluminum in the blood and takes it across the blood-brain barrier into the brain, producing pathologic changes similar to those seen in Alzheimer’s disease. A neurosurgeon, Russell Blaylock, M.D., spells out in chilling detail the danger fluoride poses to one’s brain, and health in general, in his book Health and Nutrition Secrets that can Save Your Life (2002). (Dr. Blaylock also shows how the excitotoxins monosodium glutamate and aspartame — NutraSweet — damage the brain.)

One needs to drink chlorine and fluoride-free filtered water on the path to optimum health.

We should filter all the water that we drink. In addition to removing chlorine and fluoride, a good water filter also removes harmful pathogens such as Cryptosporidium, Guardia, and other chlorine-resistant microscopic waterborne cysts and spores; toxic chemicals, detergents, pesticides, and other harmful industrial and agricultural wastes; and heavy metals such as aluminum, copper, lead, and mercury. Filters also remove unpleasant taste, odors and sediment from tap water.

In addition to removing unwanted chemicals and contaminants, our bodies become better hydrated when we drink healthy water. Our intervertebral disks, in particular, stay better hydrated and full. People become shorter as they grow older because their intervertebral disks dry up and shrink.

For optimum health you should drink eight glasses of water a day (a half-gallon, which is eight 8-ounce glasses).

Bottled water is not the answer. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to determine the quality of a given brand of bottled water. Federal regulations require that bottled water only be "as good as" tap water. And bottled water is very expensive. At four to five dollars a gallon, it is more expensive than gasoline.

Drinking filtered water is not enough. Since we bathe with chlorinated tap water, we also need to shower with filtered water. You should put a filter on your shower head for these two reasons: to prevent absorption of chlorine through the skin and to avoid inhaling chlorine in the steam that a hot shower generates. The amount of chlorine a person absorbs through the skin and the lungs during a long shower is equivalent to drinking tap water for a month!

There are a large variety of good, reasonably priced filters on the market — point-of-use, tabletop, and under counter water filters. There are also a variety of portable filters for filtering water we drink outside the home — at work, hiking, and when traveling. Thus equipped, there is no reason you ever have to drink tap water. Once you stop drinking chlorinated water you will find that its taste, when you do drink some tap water, will be noticeable and rather unpleasant. You will find it alarming, as we did, to realize that you had been ingesting this kind of water all your life.

We discuss water filters in more detail, and recommend some, in On Filtered Water, which is posted on our website.

Control Weight

The path to optimum health requires that one not be obese. The most dangerous form of obesity is abdominal obesity, also known as visceral obesity. It is a major risk factor for coronary heart disease, particularly in men who have a waist circumference of 40 inches or more. There is something about fatty tissue inside the abdomen, with its thrombotic and pro-inflammatory properties, that predisposes one to coronary disease. A relatively small amount of weight loss, however, will selectively melt away a greater percent of visceral as compared to subcutaneous fat and thereby substantially reduce the risk of coronary heart disease. (Click here to enlarge the above illustration.)

Obesity also increases a person’s risk of getting cancer, particularly colon, pancreas, and uterine cancer. And it is a major risk factor for developing Type 2 Diabetes.

In addition to waist circumference, another measure of obesity is the body mass index (BMI), which is weight (in kilograms) divided by height (in meters) squared — BMI = Kg/M2. (The formula for calculating BMI using pounds and inches is: BMI = Weight [lbs.] x 703/ Height [in.] x Height [in.].) You can use this table to quickly determine your BMI, and you can easily calculate your exact BMI with this online calculator. As defined by doctors and insurance companies, a normal weight person will have a BMI of 19—25. A person is considered to be overweight when his or her BMI is 25—30; moderately obese at 30—35; severely obese, 35—40; and morbidly obese when the BMI is over 40. Over the last 15 years Americans have gained an average of 8 pounds, and today one-third of Americans are obese (BMI >30). Another third are overweight, and only one-third of the people in the U.S. maintain a normal weight.

Despite what proponents of various diets say, going on a diet to lose weight does not work. Most people regain two-thirds of the weight they lose on any given diet, be it a Pritikin low fat or an Atkins low carbohydrate-high protein diet, within a year after stopping it and resuming their normal eating habits. Within five years, the vast majority of people regain all of the weight they had before going on a diet, and often add on even more weight than they started out with.

Rather than go on a "diet," to keep our weight at an ideal level, which for most people is what they weighed when they were 20 years old, we must adopt a palatable life-long eating plan. In addition to being good for your health, a Mediterranean diet/eating plan, with its fats, fruit and vegetables, fish and occasional meat, fiber, and wine, is also good-tasting. Studies show that a Mediterranean diet is the only eating plan that enables people to keep off the weight they lose.

Maintaining a normal weight requires that we eat right and make an effort to restrict the number of calories that we consume. It also requires that we exercise on a daily basis.

Exercise Daily

Exercise is essential to good health. Not only does it keep our muscles in good shape, but exercise also improves mental function, by 20—30 percent according to one study. Muscles burn calories more quickly than other tissues in the body, so having an adequate muscle mass is an important factor in maintaining a healthful weight.

The foundation of an exercise program is aerobic movement, such as walking, bicycle riding, swimming, jogging, rowing, dancing, skating, and jumping rope. One also needs to do stretching exercises to increase flexibility, and weight training to tone and strengthen the muscles and increase muscle mass.

We should exercise a minimum of four hours a week — 35 to 45 minutes a day. An hour-long walk with your dog is a good form of exercise, arguably better than jogging. You don’t injure your joints walking, and it benefits both you and the dog.

One form of aerobic exercise we particularly like is called rebound exercise. You do it on a 40-inch diameter mini-trampoline. (We use and recommend the sturdy, well-constructed rebounder made by Needak.) Rebound exercise is low impact and much easier on one’s joints than jogging, and it gives you a very good workout. Studies show that this kind of exercise, in particular, strengthens the immune system and helps improve lymphatic circulation. (In its study of rebound exercise, NASA concluded: "…for similar levels of heart rate and oxygen consumption, the magnitude of the bio-mechanical stimuli is greater with jumping on a rebounder than with running, a finding that might help identify acceleration parameters needed for the design of remedial procedures to avert de-conditioning in persons exposed to weightlessness.")

Investigators at Harvard studied 72,000 female nurses aged 40 to 65 years over an eight-year period and found that sedentary women had substantially higher rates of coronary events (death and nonfatal heart attacks) than women who were active. They compared the relative merits of moderate versus vigorous exercise and found that moderate exercise was equally as good in reducing the risk of coronary disease. Walking three to four hours a week reduced the risk of coronary events by 30 to 40 percent. Using statistically sophisticated multivariate relative-risk analyses, the authors of this study estimate that more than one-third of coronary events among middle-aged women in the U.S. are attributable to physical inactivity.

Children, adolescents, and adults — men and women of all ages — benefit from walking. A study of childhood obesity published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise in 2002 (a meta-analysis) found that the exercise program which was most effective in reducing body weight and percent body fat in this age group (age 5—17) was long walks combined with repetition resistance exercise.

Manage Stress and Meditate

Chronic stress damages one’s health, especially the kind that breeds hostility and repressed anger. Investigators have shown that death rates from coronary artery disease and cancer are four to seven times higher among people who harbor hostile attitudes. Stress is a major cause of disease. Another study showed that people who reported a history of workplace stress over the previous 10 years developed colon and rectal cancer at a rate 5.5 times greater than that of unstressed people.

The website holistic-online.com presents a nice in-depth discussion of this subject. Titled "Stress, the Silent Killer," it covers the leading causes and early warning signs of stress, its effects on the body, and the various ways to cope with this malady. Owning a pet, for example, helps one cope with stress. Pets keep us healthy. Studies show pet owners are less likely to get heart disease than their pet-less counterparts. Meditation is another important way to manage stress. It not only relieves stress, but also helps one to establish an inner peace that is good for your health.

Meditation is a state of consciousness different than sleep, dreaming (during REM sleep), and our regular awake state. Although done awake, it is a unique form of consciousness, unlike daydreaming and relaxing in an easy chair. Meditation, as commonly practiced, is "sitting still and doing nothing" in an attitude of poised awareness, the mind quiet and one’s attention anchored in the present moment, not reacting to thoughts and feelings that you let pass by like clouds going across the sky. Meditation is a form of "mental fasting," where one stills the mind, enabling it to recharge its batteries and regain clarity and focus, better for the latter than taking a nap. Practiced daily, meditation confers important health benefits.

There are many different ways one can meditate. The most common way is to sit still in a quiet place and focus attention on an image, a sound (mantra), or on your breathing. Another kind, which involves physical activity, is yoga. Also, prayer can be a form of meditation. We are personally familiar with two types of meditation, Transcendental Meditation (TM) and Zazen. TM focuses on a mantra and Zazen, on one’s breathing. In TM one sits comfortably for 20 minutes with the eyes closed and recites silently a two-word mantra, like "la ling," assigned specifically to that person by an instructor. When the mind quiets you stop thinking the mantra, returning to it when your attention is diverted by thoughts that bubble up into consciousness or distracting sounds (like the dog barking). While a quiet place is preferable, experienced TM practitioners are able to meditate in noisy, crowded places, like commuter trains and airplanes. With Zazen one assumes a straight posture seated on a cushion or on a chair with the eyelids kept partially open. You look down towards the floor, not focusing on anything, and silently count, or mentally follow, each inhalation and exhalation, emptying the mind of everything else. Zen Buddhists practice Zazen, but you don’t have to be a Buddhist to do it.

More than 500 scientific studies have been done on the health benefits of Transcendental Meditation. One randomized, well-controlled study in African-Americans showed that TM, practiced twice a day, reduces the thickness of the vessel-obstructing plaques (atherosclerosis) that form in carotid arteries. In addition to causing strokes, these plaques predict a high likelihood of coronary artery disease. A similar study showed that TM can lower the blood pressure in people who suffer from high blood pressures, down to levels comparable to those achieved with prescription drugs. Overall, people who do TM on a daily basis need less "health care." Studies show that they reduce their health care utilization by 50 to 55 percent compared with people who do not meditate. While most scientific studies on the benefits of meditation have been done on TM, the findings may apply to other kinds of meditation as well. Similar studies are now being done on Zazen.

Stress is not all bad. It triggers a neuroendrocrine and hormonal "fight or flight" response, which is necessary from an evolutionary standpoint to help preserve the lives of the members of a given species. Chronic unrelieved stress, however, destabilizes the immune system and generates free radicals, which injure the body’s tissues, particularly the vital structures in the brain.

Dr. Allen Elkin, of the Stress Management and Counseling Center in New York, likens stress to a violin string. "If there’s no tension, there’s no music. But if the string is too tight, it will break. You want to find the right level of tension for you — the level that lets you make harmony in your life." In corporate America, people who handle stress well rise to the top. But according to one government study, more than 50 percent of U.S. workers view job stress as a major problem in their lives. The number of workers calling in sick due to stress has tripled over the last four years. Analysts estimate that $200 billion a year is lost to industry from stress-related ailments, and over the last ten years the new discipline of stress management has become a $10 billion industry.

To enjoy optimum health and avoid needing "health care" you should meditate, ideally, as with TM, for 20 minutes twice a day. It is a much healthier thing to do than watch television.

Get Enough Sleep

Sleep takes up one-third of our existence. It is one of the pillars of health, equally important as nutrition, water, and exercise. Dr. William Dement, a pioneer in sleep research, calls physical fitness, good nutrition, and adequate sleep the "fundamental triumvirate of health." All animals need sleep, including fruit flies (the most widely studied of invertebrates) and fish. Birds and reptiles sleep with one eye open; and aquatic mammals, like dolphins and whales, have one side of their brain sleep while the other side stays awake, enabling them to swim up to the surface for air.

Researchers divide sleep into non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, with NREM sleep having four stages going from light to deep (delta wave), dreamless sleep. REM sleep follows the successive stages of NREM sleep, all of which occur in a 90-minute cycle — 5 cycles in a 71/2 hour period of sleep — with the percent of REM sleep increasing in each successive cycle so that it winds up comprising 20—25 percent of total sleep time. When your dog’s legs start twitching when she is sleeping that means she is in the REM phase of sleep and is likely to be dreaming.

Sleep rejuvenates both the mind and the body, consolidating memory and processing new information, repairing tissues, and allowing the immune system to perform vital housekeeping tasks. It is vital for our mental and physical health. In addition to cognitive impairment and an inability to concentrate, sleep deprived people have increased blood pressure, signs of incipient diabetes, and markers (like an increased C reactive protein) of systemic inflammation.

Investigators have shown that disturbances in the normal 5-part sleep pattern, as measured by an EEG (electroencephalogram), predict a shortened life span. Also, people who habitually get six hours or less of sleep a day have a shorter life span than people who sleep 7 to 8 hours a day, which is the requisite amount for most people.

A person who does not get an adequate amount of sleep builds up a sleep debt that must, sooner or later, be repaid if one is to function normally. One can make up for lost sleep. Over a given period of time, you simply have to sleep the extra hours required to pay back the accumulated hours of sleep lost. Unrepayed sleep deprivation has a number of adverse consequences.

One researcher terms sleep deprivation "the royal route to obesity" because people who don’t sleep adequately have physiologic abnormalities that increase appetite and caloric intake. Obesity results, with all its sequelae.

American adults today sleep an average of 6.85 hours, and 31 percent report sleeping less than 6 hours per night. (Thirty years ago Americans slept 7.7 hours; and 80 years ago, 8.7 hours a night.). Most of us need to sleep more than we do. You might want to take the "How’s Your Sleep?" test that is on the National Sleep Foundation Web site (www.sleepfoundation.org). If you have a sleep problem, seek help for it.

The Relative Importance of Genes and Lifestyle on Health

Each species of living thing has a genetically programmed maximum life span. In turtles it is 150 years; for dogs, 20 years; and for a bristlecone pine it is 5,000 years. Longevity medicine specialists reckon that the maximum life span for humans is 120 years. The world’s oldest person with an authenticated birth certificate, Jeanne Calment in Arles, France, died in 1997 at the age of 122. The world’s oldest man with a well-documented birth date also died in 1997 at the age of 115. Jeanne Calment attributed her record long life to olive oil and port wine.

Very few people live to become centenarians (over the age of 100), only about 1 in 20,000 in most developed countries. In the U.S., 1 in 4,000 people are centenarians — 70,000 in a population of 275 million.

One’s genetic makeup is an important determinant of life span, but the lifestyle one adopts plays an equally, if not more important role in determining how long you will live.

Coronary artery disease (atherosclerosis), the most common cause of death in both men and women, is principally a lifestyle disease. People with a genetic predisposition for coronary disease that maintain a good, i.e., healthy lifestyle will not live as long as people with good genes and a good lifestyle. But having good genes does not insulate you from needing to adopt a good lifestyle if you want to live a long life in good health. People with bad genes and a good lifestyle live longer free of heart disease than people that have good genes who adopt a poor lifestyle.

The current life expectancy for people in the U. S. is 76.9 years, three more years for women and three less for men. This is the highest average life expectancy in the recorded history of our species. (In 1900, it was 47.3 years.) But 76.9 years is still 43 years short the human species’ maximum life span. There is a lot that we can do on the six-fold path to optimum health, good genes or not, to stay healthy avoid needing "health care."

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle and a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for lewrockwell.com, including bioterrorism. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com. Linda Miller (send her mail) has 25 years of experience in both conventional and alternative medicine, beginning as a hospital-based respiratory therapist. She was a technician on a heart surgery team and has worked in various capacities as a wellness consultant.

Donald Miller Archives

Jane Orient, MD and Arthur Robinson, PhD organized the meeting, which was titled "21st Century Threats and Conflicts." (Dr. Orient is the Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons — AAPS — the pro-market, libertarian alternative to the American Medical Association; and Dr. Robinson is the Director of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and editor of the newsletter Access to Energy.)

The first truth told at this meeting was that there is no human-caused global warming, despite what (some) government-funded scientists, anti-technology environmentalists, and the media tell us. Dr. Willie Soon, a physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, in a talk titled "Level with Me: the Sea, the Sun, and Climate Change," refuted claims that the 1990s was the warmest decade of the millennium — or that the 20th century has been warmer than any other century.

Dr. Soon presented data from his recently published study, coauthored with Sallie Baliunas, titled "Lessons & Limits of Climate History: Was the 20th Century Climate Unusual?" (April, 2003). The last ice age ended 14,000 years ago. This study shows that since then there has been a Medieval Warm Period, lasting from 800—1,300 C.E., followed by a Little Ice Age, lasting from 1400—1900 C.E. The 20th century has emerged from this 500-year cold cycle to return to a more typical interglacial temperature. The global warming that occurred during the Medieval Warm Period far surpassed anything that has been seen over the past century. Variations in solar irradiance, volcanism, and other natural phenomena affect the planet’s temperature, not human activity. People who fear global warming can take comfort in the fact that the Antarctic polar ice cap is growing slightly, not receding.

The report, Global Warming: A Guide to the Science, by Drs. Soon, Baliunas, Arthur Robinson, and his son Zachary Robinson, presents the facts on climate change in a clear and unbiased fashion. It is a good antidote to the report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The temperature of the planet’s atmosphere has not changed over the last 25 years, as Dr. Robert Balling, Director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University, showed in the next talk, based on data obtained by surface, satellite, and balloon thermometers. Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, however, are another matter. They are rising. Is this something we need to be concerned about? The answer is "No." Dr. Balling presented data that allays fears about greenhouse gases, fears which brought about the Kyoto agreement. His book, The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming, coauthored with Patrick Michaels, addresses this subject.

Sherwood Idso, PhD, President of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, presented data that validates a second truth related to the environment: Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is essential to life. Animals cannot live without oxygen, and plants cannot live without carbon dioxide. Indeed, increased atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have a beneficial effect on plant life. Conducting experiments where he grew plants in atmospheres containing different concentrations of CO2, Dr. Idso found that a 300 ppm (parts per million) boost in concentration of CO2 increases the productivity of plants by 30 to 50 percent, as measured by rate of photosynthesis and biomass production. Orange trees, for example, produce twice as many oranges, each containing a 20 percent greater amount of vitamin C when you increase the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere from 300 to 600 ppm (the level of CO2 in the atmosphere now is 370 ppm). Dr. Idso’s Center publishes the CO2 Science Magazine weekly online, which provides plant growth data, temperature trends, editorials, and journal reviews.

A third truth told at the DDP meeting is this: HIV is not the cause of AIDS. Sounds outrageous? Read "The chemical bases of the various AIDS epidemics: recreational drugs, anti-viral chemotherapy and malnutrition" (2003), by Peter Duesberg, Claus Koehnlein, and David Rasnick; and "The AIDS dilemma: drug diseases blamed on a passenger virus" (1998), by Duesberg and Rasnick. Read these studies with an open mind and I think you will agree that this shocking statement will very likely prove to be true. Drs. Duesberg and Rasnick are both professors of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. (Dr. Duesberg isolated the first cancer gene in his work with retroviruses.) Dr. Rasnick gave the talk on this subject at the meeting in Phoenix.

AIDS is a government-identified and defined disease. Twenty-three years ago the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that a growing number of male homosexuals and intravenous (IV) drug users were experiencing a mysterious epidemic of diseases, which included several odd types of pneumonia, a rare malignant tumor called Kaposi’s sarcoma, lymphoma, dementia, tuberculosis, weight loss (anorexia), fever, diarrhea, etc. Officials at the CDC called the epidemic "AIDS" (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), which this agency now defines as comprising 26 different diseases. From 1981—2001 AIDS has afflicted 800,000 people in the US, 250,000 in Europe, and (?) 1,000,000 in Africa. In this country, it strikes young male homosexuals (66% of all AIDS cases), male and female IV drug users (32% of all AIDS cases, 75% of them male), hemophiliacs and other transfusion recipients (1%), and children borne to drug-addicted mothers (1%).

In 1984, government researchers proposed that a sexually transmittable virus ("AIDS-virus"), now called HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), is the cause of AIDS. In the US and Europe, a person must have a positive HIV test (antibodies to the virus) to be diagnosed as having AIDS, along with one of the AIDS-defined diseases, or, since 1993, a low T cell count (T cells are one of the types of cells that make up our immune system) in an otherwise healthy person with no diseases. But people in Africa can be diagnosed as having AIDS without needing to have an HIV test, based on a ruling by the World Health Organization. Anyone in Africa who gets pneumonia, for example, is classified as having "AIDS."

Over the last 20 years the US government has carried out a program to eradicate the HIV virus that has engaged the efforts of more than 100,000 government-funded doctors and scientists and has cost the US taxpayer to date more than $100 billion. There is growing evidence, however, that the premise upon which this program is founded is wrong.

The establishment view that "HIV causes AIDS and is sexually transmitted" is flawed. This hypothesis fails to account for 17 important facts about the HIV virus and AIDS, which, as Drs. Duesberg and Rasnick have shown, casts serious doubt on the validity of this hypothesis. One of these 17 facts is this: Only 1 in 1000 unprotected sexual contacts transmits HIV, and since only 1 in 275 US citizens has antibodies to this virus, the average uninfected person would need to have 275,000 random unprotected "sexual contacts" to get HIV. Another fact: According to the HIV-AIDS hypothesis, HIV causes immunodeficiency by killing T cells; but T cells grown in test tubes that are infected with HIV don’t die. They thrive and produce the large quantities of HIV virus that laboratories need to detect antibodies to this virus in a person’s blood. The actual virus (not just antibodies to it) is extremely hard to find inside a person’s body. It infects less than 1 in every 500 T cells. For these and other reasons, there is a growing body of evidence that makes the HIV-AIDS hypothesis untenable. In people with AIDS-defining diseases and HIV, it would appear that the elusive HIV virus just goes along for the ride, seated in some of the body’s T cells. This retrovirus is not the pilot of the AIDS airplane.

If HIV is not the cause of AIDS, then what is? Dr. Rasnick presented strong evidence in support of the hypothesis that AIDS is caused by three things, singly or in combination: 1) long-term recreational drug use (cocaine, heroin, nitrite inhalants, and amphetamines); 2) the anti-viral drugs (DNA chain terminators, like AZT, and protease inhibitors) that doctors prescribe to people who are HIV positive; and 3) especially in Africa, malnutrition (and lack of drinkable water). The noninfectious chemical bases for AIDS is supported by a lot of important data, facts like this one: HIV-positive people treated with anti-viral drugs have an annual mortality rate of 6.6—8.7 %, compared with an annual mortality of 1.4 % in HIV-positive people who refuse treatment with anti-viral drugs.

When asked what the best book to read on this subject was, Dr. Rasnick said it is Inventing the AIDS Virus, by Peter Duesberg, with a Forward by Kary Mullis. (Dr. Mullis won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for his invention of the Polymerase Chain Reaction for copying fragments of DNA.)

There were other talks at this meeting that also held important truths. Some of them were:

• "The Misuse of Data for Political Gain," by Craig Cantoni
• "Quagmire: the Scandal of Biotechnology Public Policy," by Henry Miller, PhD
• "Mercury Poisoning: Sources, Doses, and Effect," by Boyd Haley, PhD
• "Risk Analysis of Wastes from Generating Electricity, " by Bernard Cohen, PhD
• "Scientific Frauds and Vector-Borne Diseases," by J. Gordon Edwards, PhD
• "The War for Western Civilization," by Otto Scott
• "Preparing a Medical Response to Bioterrorism," by Meryl Nass, MD
• "Protection against CBN Terrorism Agents: New Discoveries and New Directions." By Dr. Russell Blaylock, MD. (He provided important information on how one can best survive, through good nutrition and by taking nutritional radioprotectants, a terrorist attack with smallpox virus or a suitcase nuclear weapon.)

The three truths discussed here, on climate change, carbon dioxide, and AIDS, share one thing in common, as do other truths found at this meeting. They all correct flawed hypotheses and models that have resulted from government involvement in science and medicine.

You can order a complete set of audiotapes of this meeting (for $99), when they become available, from the DDP website.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle and a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com.

Donald Miller Archives

Arthur Schopenhauer

Americans are fighting a culture war against statism. Our country, founded as a limited constitutional government that derives its “just powers from the consent of the governed,” is under attack by people who seek to transform it into a totalitarian state. There is a philosophical basis for this conflict, which is worth examining. It can be helpful to the defenders of liberty and freedom that are fighting this war.

There are basically two kinds of philosophers. On the one hand philosophers, beginning with Plato (427—327 BC), go beyond the world of human experience and construct abstract explanations, which they impose on experience. For them, as one philosopher (Bryan Magee) puts it, “The world of human experience is not what is permanent or permanently important, and we should try to transcend it with our minds, or at the very least to think our way to the boundary between our world and what is of ultimate significance and see what we can know about it.” Then there are philosophers, beginning with Aristotle (384—322 BC), who take the approach that even if the empirical world is not all there is, it is all we can experience and know, and if we try to go beyond it we end up talking nonsense.

Plato was the first statist. He offers his vision of the ideal state in the Republic. An elite group of philosopher-rulers run it. They are wise and all knowing. The rulers are not accountable to the public, and they require absolute individual devotion and submission to the good of the state. In Plato’s republic only philosophers can have access to objective knowledge, philosophers being, as he puts it, people “who are capable of apprehending what is eternal and unchanging” — those few individuals who can sit down in a quiet place and think clearly. Everyone else, the rest of us, he describes as “those who are incapable of this [and] lose themselves and wander amid the multiplicities of multifarious things.”

According to Aristotle and subsequent empiricist philosophers, knowledge is a public process of critical exchange that is derived from, and tested by, human experience. Aristotle studied plants, animals, ethics, and different forms of political organization, all in an encyclopedic way. He worked inside experience and did not try to impose abstract explanations on it from the outside.

Then we come to Immanuel Kant (1724—1804). The greatness of Kant rests on his being able to integrate these two lines of philosophical thought, which he did in his Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781. He plays a pivotal role in the conflict between liberty and modern statism.

Kant demonstrated that the world we experience is not the real world. That world does not embody our species’ concepts of space, time, and causality. We perceive things through a scaffolding of three-dimensional space, in a tense of past-present-future, and within a framework of casual connections. As an 18th century philosopher would not have known, but 20th century physics has confirmed, these constructs are not even a component of the world that we can describe mathematically and measure with special instruments. Newtonian concepts of space and time do not apply to the macro world of special and general relativity or to the micro world of quantum mechanics. The real world is something altogether different from what we human beings experience and measure. Kant concludes that the deepest level of reality is inaccessible to human thought and knowledge. He terms the ultimate, rock bottom reality — of “things as they are in themselves” — that underlies the perceived world the Noumenon.

Kant’s two main successors were G.F.W. Hegel (1770—1831) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788—1860). They did not entirely agree with Kant’s vision of the Noumenon and explored what, if anything can be known about it. Hegel and his followers, most notably Karl Marx (1818—1883), took one approach, which is the philosophical basis for modern-day statism. Schopenhauer took a different route.

Hegel views reality as a process. This process, or dialectic, as he terms it, is one of perpetual, ordered change that proceeds in an historical time frame. Dialectical change continues unceasingly until the point is reached where Mind/Spirit recognizes itself as being the Ultimate Reality. For Hegel, this is self-knowledge of Absolute Spirit/Idea (Geist). The dialectic contains elements that are constantly in conflict with each other. An action (“thesis”) invokes an opposing action (“antithesis’) that resolves into a third state of affairs (“synthesis”), which bringing its own antithesis into being becomes the thesis of a new triad. Through this kind of abstract reasoning (which in real life, one must agree, does not really make all that much sense) Hegel believed that he had reconciled the unknowable noumenal sphere of things-in-themselves with everyday reality. More importantly, however, particularly in light of the economic and human devastation that Marxism wrought in the last century, Hegel’s idea of dialectical change includes the concept of alienation, which figures prominently in Marx’s Dialectical Materialism and concept of class struggle.

In Hegel’s system, dialectical change proceeds historically from individuals — to groups — to the state. The group has primacy over the individual and the state has primacy over the group. Individuals represent a lower level of reality. The state, being closer to the Absolute Spirit/Idea in the dialectical process, is more real. It is the highest order of humanity, to which individuals owe their obedience and subservience. The state is not subject to ordinary moral laws. Rights are socially defined. The state decides who should be the rights holders who are given special legal privileges and entitlements, and who are to be obligations bearers. In this schema, truth follows theory — not, as empiricists would say, the other way around, where truth corresponds with the facts of reality.

This, of course, is a recipe for political absolutism. Such a worldview does not tolerate an individualistic mindset that permits freedom of thought and conscience, private property, and free markets. It is an anti-business, anti-technology, anti-science ideology. The Hegelian statist does not like capitalism because it frees individuals from restraints, breeds entrepreneurs, and begets non-conforming behavior.

Prussia was the first modern state. It was the first government, in 1819, to implement compulsory public education, with the goal of producing obedient citizens who thought alike about major issues. Other components of the modern state initiated by Prussia include public pensions (like social security, making people dependent on government), disarmament of citizens (to prevent resistance to authority), universal state identification papers, and peacetime military conscription. Hegel taught philosophy at several Prussian universities as an employee of the government.

Schopenhauer was a citizen of Prussia and a contemporary of Hegel, but his political views and philosophy were diametrically opposed to those of Hegel. Unfortunately, the route Schopenhauer took is not well understood today, and he is not as listened to and as celebrated as he should be — and once was, before the advent of collectivism in the 20th century.

This is what Schopenhauer has to say about Hegel and his statist cohorts: “It is easy to see the ignorance and triviality of those philosophers who, in pompous phrases, represent the state as the supreme goal and greatest achievement of mankind and thereby achieve the apotheosis of philistinism.”

Schopenhauer viewed the role of the state from a classical liberal perspective. He writes, in The World as Will and Representation:

The State is nothing more than an institution of protection, rendered necessary by the manifold attacks to which man is exposed, and which he is not able to ward off as an individual, but only in alliance with others. [This] protection [includes] the safeguarding of private right. But, as is usual in things human, the removal of one evil generally opens the way to a fresh one, [which requires] protection against the protection… This seems most completely attainable by dividing and separating from one another the threefold unity of protective power, the legislative, the judicative, and the executive, so that each is managed by others, and independently of the rest.

Schopenhauer agreed with Kant that the ultimate reality of the world is impenetrable to analytic thought and descriptive language. And Schopenhauer’s successors, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889—1951) and Henri Bergson (1859—1941) present more, convincing evidence that this is indeed the case. Philosophers like Hegel who construct systems that encompass the Noumenon do so with what are essentially meaningless abstract concepts, like “Absolute Spirit,” “The Good,” and “Perfection of Being.” Schopenhauer writes: “The greatest effrontery [to Kant] in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel.” (Hegel’s retort might be, “So what if I generate a lot of verbiage without really saying anything. Only power matters.”)

I majored in philosophy in college and had to take a painful course on Hegel. My professors ignored Schopenhauer, and I did not find out about him until years later when I was reading about Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. (Wagner discovered Schopenhauer in 1854, at the age of 41, writing “he has entered my lonely life like a gift from heaven.”) Schopenhauer is the needed antidote to Hegel and his collectivist offspring. Among other things, Schopenhauer’s philosophy provides a strong justification for individual liberty and freedom.

Schopenhauer studied the “carnival of life” in all its aspects, like Aristotle. He carried out an in-depth study of sex and our sexual urges, the first philosopher to do this, and he studied Hindu and Buddhist texts (that had been recently translated into German). He takes religion seriously and gives aesthetics a central place in his philosophy. A number of his insights foreshadowed discoveries that were later made in evolutionary biology, depth psychology, and physics. Schopenhauer focuses on real life and does not flinch from dealing with its dilemmas and tragedies. As Carl Jung puts it, “He was the first to speak of the suffering of the world, which visibly and glaringly surrounds us, and of confusion, passion, evil — all those things which [other philosophers] hardly seemed to notice and always tried to resolve into all-embracing harmony and comprehensibility.”

Schopenhauer’s philosophy supports the concept of Natural Rights — to life; liberty; the acquisition, owning and disposing of property; and the pursuit of health, happiness, personal interests, and avocations without outside interference (so long as these actions do not infringe on the rights of others). Commenting on health and freedom, he writes, “We do not become conscious of the three greatest blessings of life as such, namely health, youth, and freedom, as long as we possess them, but only after we have lost them.” His philosophy espouses a Western tradition of natural rights that began with the Twelve Tablets of the Roman Republic (450 BC); were enunciated by Cicero (108—43 BC); and further codified by the Magna Carta (1215), St. Thomas Aquinas (1225—1274), Edward Coke (1552—1654), John Locke (1632—1704), William Blackstone (1723—1780), and the American Declaration of Independence (1776). Although not commonly viewed as a successor to these thinkers and philosophers, Schopenhauer quotes Cicero and Locke in his writings, and, like Locke, he believed that respect for the individual is the only viable basis for human relations.

Schopenhauer studied human action in a manner similar to that later done by Ludwig von Mises in economics. He observed that human behavior is directed by three principal motives, which exist in varying degrees in each individual. They are self-interest, compassion, and malice. Regarding the motive of self-interest, by far the most prominent one of the three, Schopenhauer writes:

The individual is filled with the unqualified desire of preserving his life, and of keeping it free from all pain, under which is included all want and privation. He wishes to have the greatest possible amount of pleasurable existence and every gratification he is capable of appreciating.

Efforts by Hegelians and Marxists to create a socialist utopia without incentives to work and produce, any private property, or possibility for profit are, by the nature of human action, doomed to failure. Schopenhauer sums up the matter from a praxeological standpoint this way: “Egoism [self-interest]… will never be argued out of a person, as little as a cat can be talked out of her inclination for mice.”

Socialists do not like Schopenhauer. (No wonder he is not taught in government-financed schools.) The Marxist historian Franz Mehring describes Schopenhauer as “the philosopher of the terrified philistines… in his sneaking, selfish, and slandering way the spiritual image of the bourgeoisie which, frightened by the clash of arms, trembling like the aspen, retired to live on its revenues and foreswore the ideals of its epoch like the plague.” (Schopenhauer lived independently on an inheritance bequeathed by his father, a merchant.)

With regard to the battle that is being waged today between liberty and statism, one of the most important findings in his study of human action is that the keystone of morality lies within human nature itself. Educators in our state run schools teach moral relativism, and they forbid any mention of religious concepts of right and wrong. Schopenhauer’s ethics corroborate, on an empirical basis, religious morals. His insights validate traditional character education, which teaches specific virtues and character traits such as justice, self-control, honesty, responsibility, and courage. It invalidates statist “values clarification” and the decision-making model, where each student is charged with deciding de novo for himself/herself what is right and wrong.

In a praxeological fashion, Schopenhauer examined human behavior without any preconception about what one ought to do. He studied the choices and decisions people make and the actions that they take. Observing the facts and testimony of experience, he found that compassion underpins morally right behavior. Schopenhauer found that it is possible to establish an empirical, objectively based standard of morality, which, it turns out, is the same as that taught by the great religions, particularly Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. This moral standard applies to all human beings, irrespective of their race, ethnicity, or gender. Schopenhauer’s study of human action shows that Hegel’s successors, the cultural Marxists, led by Antonio Gramsci (1891—1937) and the Frankfurt School, are wrong. There is, indeed, a universal standard of morality.

The motive of compassion includes two cardinal virtues: natural justice and loving kindness. Schopenhauer writes:

Whoever is filled with compassion will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man’s rights; he will rather have regard for everyone, forgive everyone as far as he can, and all of his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving kindness.

The fundamental principles of natural justice are do harm to no one and take from none his own. This kind of justice is an innate part of our makeup and distinct from the kind that is practiced in a self-interested way (to gain favor with one’s peers, etc.) or that is framed in laws and enforced by penalties. The fundamental principle of loving kindness is help all people as far as lies in your power. One suffers with another person in a selfless way, without expecting anything in return. Loving kindness/sympathy is a reflection of the deep-seated kinship that each of us has with all fellow creatures.

Natural justice, sympathy/loving kindness, and self-control underpin morally right behavior. Unrestrained self-interest (i.e., lack of self-control) and malice (the desire to harm someone simply for the pleasure of hurting them) define morally wrong behavior.

The Christian view of morally right and wrong behavior is not a dominant group, oppressor-applied means of controlling subordinate groups, as the cultural Marxists would have it. It mirrors the true reality of life. Moral codes are not products of a particular culture or historical epoch; they are an innate part of the human condition and thereby universal.

Compassion in Schopenhauer’s philosophy has both moral and metaphysical significance. He sees this spontaneous, irrational force as being a manifestation of the innermost reality of life. It provides an intuitive glimpse into the Noumenon (which he terms Will ) — the realm of ultimate reality that contains the essential truths of life and the world. While not accessible to knowledge and linguistic description, Schopenhauer discerned that one can nevertheless gain an intuitive perception of it. Experiencing compassion is one way into the castle of ultimate reality. And what it tells us is that at its deepest level, reality is an all-encompassing oneness. Schopenhauer identifies and considers thee other intuitive, nonrational keys to the castle of the Noumenon. They are music, mysticism, and the feeling of oneness we experience with sex.

Defenders of liberty and freedom will do well to read Schopenhauer. He is an ally. He debunks and thoroughly discredits the Hegelian dialectic. He provides a strong argument for there being a universal moral standard, which is not dependent on religious teachings, but does, in fact, corroborate them.

The 20th century followed the “ideals of its epoch,” as framed by Hegel and Marx, and tried socialism, fascism, and collectivism. One hopes that the 21st century will have the good sense to reject these philosophers and turn to Schopenhauer.

(Do not be put off by descriptions of Schopenhauer that say he is a pessimist and a misogynist. Remember, socialists don’t like him. Schopenhauer studied life in all its multifarious aspects. And he also addresses, in a very interesting way, the question, “What happens to us when we die?” Wagner was right. His philosophy is, indeed, a gift from heaven. I recommend that you start with his essays Wisdom of Life. Then go on to Volume 2 of The World as Will and Representation, which covers pretty much the same material as that in Volume I and is more readable. I then recommend The Basis of Morality, and, especially for its Preface with its vitriolic attack on Hegel, On the Will in Nature. For a discussion of his four keys to the castle of ultimate reality, see my book Heart in Hand, which one can download from my web site. The best analysis of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is Bryan Magee’s The Philosophy of Schopenhauer.)

There
is a new kind of fitness shoe on the market. It is a weighted
shoe. Shoes used for jogging weigh less than a pound. Weighted
fitness shoes, depending on the size, weigh 2.2 to 4 pounds each.
Weighted shoes are worn only for walking (they should not be worn
for jogging or other kinds of high impact, vigorous exercise). Investigators
have found, however, that moderate exercise — i.e., walking — is
equally effective as vigorous exercise in preventing coronary heart
disease and some cancers, and in averting, or treating, insulin
resistance and Type 2 diabetes.1 Why the weight?
Studies show that adding a weight load to the lower part of the
body at the ankles or feet substantially increases calorie expenditure.
Walking in weighted shoes enables one, without changing his or her
diet or level of activity, to lose weight. Adding weight to the
feet also provides muscular resistance that strengthens and tones
one's legs, buttocks, lower back, and abdominal muscles.

Investigators
at Harvard carried out a prospective study of walking as compared
with vigorous exercise in the prevention of coronary heart disease
in 72,000 female nurses aged 40 to 65 years, published in the New
England Journal of Medicine in 1999. Over an eight-year study
period they found that sedentary women had substantially higher
rates of coronary events (death and nonfatal heart attacks) than
women who were active. The authors assessed the comparative roles
of walking and vigorous exercise in the prevention of coronary events
and found that the magnitude of risk reduction with vigorous exercise
was no greater than that found in women who walked briskly three
or more hours a week. Walking this amount each week reduced the
risk of coronary events by 30 to 40 percent. Using statistically
sophisticated multivariate relative-risk analyses, authors of this
study estimate that more than one-third of coronary events among
middle-aged women in the U.S. are attributable to physical inactivity.2

Children,
adolescents, and men and women of all ages benefit from walking.
A meta-analysis of childhood obesity published in Medicine &
Science in Sports & Exercise (in 2002) found that the exercise
program which was most effective in reducing body weight and percent
body fat in this age group (age 5–17) was long walks, combined
with repetition resistance exercise.3
Wearing weighted shoes on long walks further increases caloric expenditure,
thereby helping to further reduce body weight and percent body fat,
and they also provide a form of repetition muscular resistance while
walking.

Americans
today are becoming more sedentary and are experiencing an epidemic
of obesity, insulin resistance (also known as metabolic syndrome),
and Type 2 diabetes. Currently, 65 percent of US adults are overweight
or obese, as measured by the Body Mass Index.4
Thirty-one percent are clinically obese. Americans weigh on average
eight pounds more than they did fifteen years ago. The Surgeon General's
report on overweight and obesity issued in 2000 says that less than
one-third of US adults engage in the recommended amounts of physical
activity and 40 percent do not engage in any leisure time physical
activity.5 Type 2 diabetes, brought
on by obesity and a sedentary lifestyle, afflicts 20 percent of
the US population over age 65. Another twenty percent of the US
population has developed insulin resistance (which turns into diabetes
when the beta cells in the pancreas wear out making extra amounts
of insulin trying to overcome the body's growing resistance to it).
Worse than smoking, obesity combined with a sedentary lifestyle
is the principle reason why two-thirds of people in this country
die prematurely from cancer and cardiovascular disease.6

Another
report by the U.S. Surgeon General on Physical Activity and Health7
notes that a growing body of scientific evidence indicates that
physical inactivity is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease
(the most common cause of death in both men and women) and some
cancers (colon cancer, in particular, and, according to some studies,
breast and prostrate cancer). The report goes on to say that most
Americans have little or no physical activity in their daily lives.
It reviews prior public health recommendations and points out that
they have evolved from emphasizing vigorous activity for cardiorespiratory
fitness to now include "the option of moderate levels of activity
for numerous health benefits." The report advises people of
all ages "to include a minimum of 30 minutes of physical activity
of moderate intensity (such as brisk walking) on most, if not all,
days of the week." For people who can't find the time to do
this and remain physically inactive, wearing weighted shoes is an
alternative. In physically inactive people, wearing weighted shoes
throughout the day while performing the activities of daily living
(walking about the house, at work, doing household chores, preparing
meals, shopping, walking back and forth to one's car in parking
lots, etc.) can provide needed, and otherwise not obtained, aerobic
exercise and leg muscle strengthening. People who follow the Surgeon
General's recommendations on physical activity and take brisk walks
three to four hours a week will achieve added benefits when they
wear weighted shoes on their walks.

What
is the metabolic effect of adding a few pounds of weight to one's
feet? Soule and Goldman studied the energy cost of loads carried
on the head, hands, or feet of young soldiers.8
They found that weights on the feet produces a six-fold increase
in energy cost (caloric expenditure) compared with the same amount
of weight carried on the torso, and a three-fold increase in energy
cost compared with the same weight carried in the hands. A relatively
small amount of weight added to the soles of the feet, therefore,
has a disproportionately magnified effect on caloric expenditure.

If
you like this site, please help keep it going and growing.

A
185-lb. man walking three miles in an hour expends 300 kcal/hr (kcal
= kilocalories, commonly referred to simply as calories). Studies
show that the same walk wearing weighted shoes (3.1 lbs. each) generate
a caloric expenditure of 600 kcal/hr.9
An individual who consumes 2,000 kcal of energy a day engaging in
daily tasks, without exercise, will nevertheless increase her caloric
expenditure by 25 percent by wearing weighted shoes, to 2,500 kcal
a day. One pound of body fat has 3,500 kcal of stored energy. If
a person carries out his or her daily tasks in a pair of weighted
shoes, he or she will burn an extra 3,500 kcal a week — and thereby
shed one pound of fat. Taking off one to two pounds a week is a
healthy way to lose weight.

At
any given time in the U.S., 33 to 40 percent of women and 20 to
24 percent of men are trying to lose weight. Dieting does not work.
Most people regain two-thirds of the weight they lose within one
year — and all of it back, and sometimes more, within five years.
They lose weight by following a special kind of diet (low fat, high
protein, or some other kind) and regain it when they resume their
regular, "normal" eating habits. Wearing weighted shoes
enables people to lose weight and keep it off.

The
foundation of an exercise program is aerobic movement — walking,
jogging, bicycle riding, swimming, rowing, dancing, skating, bouncing
on a trampoline, jumping rope, cross-country skiing, etc. — but
one also needs to do stretching exercises to increase flexibility,
and weight training to tone and strengthen the muscles and
increase muscle mass. A weight load in the soles of one's shoes
works the muscles of the spine, abdominal muscles, gluteal (buttock)
muscles, and the thigh and leg muscles simultaneously. The repetitive
motion of walking in weighted shoes firms and tones these various
muscle groups. Muscles burn calories more quickly than other tissues
in the body, and having a well-toned muscle mass, which weighted
shoes help provide, is an important factor in maintaining a healthful
weight.

Wraparound
ankle weights provide the same physiologic benefits as weighted
shoes do, but they are much less comfortable and can place too much
strain on the unsupported ankle and injure it. It is much better
to place leg-bearing weights in the sole of a shoe. That way padding
in the upper part of the shoe can support the ankle.

iWellness™
designs ergonomically engineered weighted fitness shoes called
MetaTreksu2122.10 Multiple, small bars
of steel laid transversely in the sole add 2.2 to 3.1 pounds of
weight resistance, depending on the shoe size, to each foot. Like
with regular fitness shoes, these shoes are flexible, support the
foot's natural movements, and are comfortable to wear.11
They are durable, and the rubber outer sole is designed for good
traction. The sole is laminated with shock absorbing Neopontex.
The inner lining of the shoe contains charcoal for antibiosis and
deodorization, along with nano silver to prevent and eradicate athlete's
foot.

Comfortably
fitting, weighted shoes are a new technology that enables busy people
to "exercise" while they go about their daily activities.
MetaTreks also come in black and, attractively designed, can be
worn at work. Weighted shoes are made for low-impact exercise. You
should not play tennis or jog in them. Walking in them, briskly
or leisurely, is enough. As with any type of equipment, listen to
your body. These shoes take time to get used to. They should be
used moderately at first. Some people prefer to wear them on alternate
days in order to give their muscles a rest. Once acclimated, however,
they can be worn on a daily basis.

Weighted
shoes are the next generation in fitness shoes. They enhance the
benefits of walking, a low-impact, joint-sparing, moderate form
of exercise that has been shown to have the same health benefits
as more vigorous exercise. These benefits include a reduced risk
of cardiovascular disease and cancer; and preventing insulin resistance
and Type 2 diabetes, which is a consequence of obesity and physical
inactivity. Exercise, enhanced by wearing weighted shoes, has also
been shown to help lower high blood pressure, keep one's bones strong,
prevent osteoporosis, and help relieve stress.

Notes:

1. Walker KZ,
   Piers LS, Putt RS, Jones JA, O’Dea, K. Effects of regular walking
   on cardiovascular risk factors and body composition in normoglycemic
   women and women with type 2 diabetes. Diabetes Care 1999;
   22: 555-561.
2. Manson
   JE, Hu FB, Rich-Edwards JW, Colditz GA, Stampfer MJ, Willett WC,
   Speizer FE, Hennekens CH. A prospective study of walking as compared
   with vigorous exercise in the prevention of coronary heart disease
   in women. N Engl J Med 1999; 341: 650-658
3. LeMura,
   LM and Maziekas, MT. Factors that alter body fat, body mass, and
   fat-free mass in pediatric obesity. Med Sci Sports Exerc
   2002; 34: 487-496.
4. The Body
   Mass Index (BMI), used by doctors and insurers to measure obesity,
   is the relationship between a person’s height and weight, where
   BMI = W/H2 (W is weight in kilograms and H is height in meters).
   Individuals with a BMI 18.5 to 25 are normal weight (those less
   than 18.5 are underweight). People with a BMI greater than 25
   are classified as overweight and those with a BMI over 30, as
   obese – 30-34.9, moderately obese; 35-39.5, severely obese;
   and greater than 40, massively/morbidly obese. To calculate your
   BMI using weight in pounds and height in inches, multiply your
   weight by 703 and divide this by your height multiplied by itself-W
   (lbs.) x 703/H (in.) x H (in.) = BMI.
5. U.S. Department
   of Health and Human Services. The Surgeon General’s Call to
   Action Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity. Atlanta,
   Ga: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for
   Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease
   Prevention and Health Promotion, 2000. Stock number 017-001-00551-7.
6. For more
   on this subject see Miller DW, Miller LL. Technologies for Maintaining
   Optimum Health and a Strong Immune System. On www.donaldmiller.com.
7. U.S. Department
   of Health and Human Services. Physical Activity and Health:
   A Report of the Surgeon General. Atlanta, Ga: U.S. Department
   of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and
   Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and
   Health Promotion, 1996. Stock number 017-023-00196-5.
8. Soule RG,
   Goldman RF. Energy cost of loads carried on the head, hands, or
   feet. J. Appl. Physiol. 1969; 27: 687-690.
9. Studies
   done at Han-Lim University Laboratory of Shoes (in Korea) by Guak
   Chang-Su and
   at Osaka University School of Health and Sport Sciences (in Japan)
   by Mitsuhiko Masuhara.
10. The company’s
    Website is www.iwellness.us.
11. U.S. Patent
    No. 6,397498.

March
5, 2003

Donald
Miller
(send him mail)
is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University
of Washington in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors
for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety
of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com

The
Best of Donald Miller

There is a new kind of fitness shoe on the market. It is a weighted shoe. Shoes used for jogging weigh less than a pound. Weighted fitness shoes, depending on the size, weigh 2.2 to 4 pounds each. Weighted shoes are worn only for walking (they should not be worn for jogging or other kinds of high impact, vigorous exercise). Investigators have found, however, that moderate exercise — i.e., walking — is equally effective as vigorous exercise in preventing coronary heart disease and some cancers, and in averting, or treating, insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes.1 Why the weight? Studies show that adding a weight load to the lower part of the body at the ankles or feet substantially increases calorie expenditure. Walking in weighted shoes enables one, without changing his or her diet or level of activity, to lose weight. Adding weight to the feet also provides muscular resistance that strengthens and tones one’s legs, buttocks, lower back, and abdominal muscles.

Investigators at Harvard carried out a prospective study of walking as compared with vigorous exercise in the prevention of coronary heart disease in 72,000 female nurses aged 40 to 65 years, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1999. Over an eight-year study period they found that sedentary women had substantially higher rates of coronary events (death and nonfatal heart attacks) than women who were active. The authors assessed the comparative roles of walking and vigorous exercise in the prevention of coronary events and found that the magnitude of risk reduction with vigorous exercise was no greater than that found in women who walked briskly three or more hours a week. Walking this amount each week reduced the risk of coronary events by 30 to 40 percent. Using statistically sophisticated multivariate relative-risk analyses, authors of this study estimate that more than one-third of coronary events among middle-aged women in the U.S. are attributable to physical inactivity.2

Children, adolescents, and men and women of all ages benefit from walking. A meta-analysis of childhood obesity published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise (in 2002) found that the exercise program which was most effective in reducing body weight and percent body fat in this age group (age 5—17) was long walks, combined with repetition resistance exercise.3 Wearing weighted shoes on long walks further increases caloric expenditure, thereby helping to further reduce body weight and percent body fat, and they also provide a form of repetition muscular resistance while walking.

Americans today are becoming more sedentary and are experiencing an epidemic of obesity, insulin resistance (also known as metabolic syndrome), and Type 2 diabetes. Currently, 65 percent of US adults are overweight or obese, as measured by the Body Mass Index.4 Thirty-one percent are clinically obese. Americans weigh on average eight pounds more than they did fifteen years ago. The Surgeon General’s report on overweight and obesity issued in 2000 says that less than one-third of US adults engage in the recommended amounts of physical activity and 40 percent do not engage in any leisure time physical activity.5 Type 2 diabetes, brought on by obesity and a sedentary lifestyle, afflicts 20 percent of the US population over age 65. Another twenty percent of the US population has developed insulin resistance (which turns into diabetes when the beta cells in the pancreas wear out making extra amounts of insulin trying to overcome the body’s growing resistance to it). Worse than smoking, obesity combined with a sedentary lifestyle is the principle reason why two-thirds of people in this country die prematurely from cancer and cardiovascular disease.6

Another report by the U.S. Surgeon General on Physical Activity and Health7 notes that a growing body of scientific evidence indicates that physical inactivity is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease (the most common cause of death in both men and women) and some cancers (colon cancer, in particular, and, according to some studies, breast and prostrate cancer). The report goes on to say that most Americans have little or no physical activity in their daily lives. It reviews prior public health recommendations and points out that they have evolved from emphasizing vigorous activity for cardiorespiratory fitness to now include "the option of moderate levels of activity for numerous health benefits." The report advises people of all ages "to include a minimum of 30 minutes of physical activity of moderate intensity (such as brisk walking) on most, if not all, days of the week." For people who can’t find the time to do this and remain physically inactive, wearing weighted shoes is an alternative. In physically inactive people, wearing weighted shoes throughout the day while performing the activities of daily living (walking about the house, at work, doing household chores, preparing meals, shopping, walking back and forth to one’s car in parking lots, etc.) can provide needed, and otherwise not obtained, aerobic exercise and leg muscle strengthening. People who follow the Surgeon General’s recommendations on physical activity and take brisk walks three to four hours a week will achieve added benefits when they wear weighted shoes on their walks.

What is the metabolic effect of adding a few pounds of weight to one’s feet? Soule and Goldman studied the energy cost of loads carried on the head, hands, or feet of young soldiers.8 They found that weights on the feet produces a six-fold increase in energy cost (caloric expenditure) compared with the same amount of weight carried on the torso, and a three-fold increase in energy cost compared with the same weight carried in the hands. A relatively small amount of weight added to the soles of the feet, therefore, has a disproportionately magnified effect on caloric expenditure.

If you like this site, please help keep it going and growing.

A 185-lb. man walking three miles in an hour expends 300 kcal/hr (kcal = kilocalories, commonly referred to simply as calories). Studies show that the same walk wearing weighted shoes (3.1 lbs. each) generate a caloric expenditure of 600 kcal/hr.9 An individual who consumes 2,000 kcal of energy a day engaging in daily tasks, without exercise, will nevertheless increase her caloric expenditure by 25 percent by wearing weighted shoes, to 2,500 kcal a day. One pound of body fat has 3,500 kcal of stored energy. If a person carries out his or her daily tasks in a pair of weighted shoes, he or she will burn an extra 3,500 kcal a week — and thereby shed one pound of fat. Taking off one to two pounds a week is a healthy way to lose weight.

At any given time in the U.S., 33 to 40 percent of women and 20 to 24 percent of men are trying to lose weight. Dieting does not work. Most people regain two-thirds of the weight they lose within one year — and all of it back, and sometimes more, within five years. They lose weight by following a special kind of diet (low fat, high protein, or some other kind) and regain it when they resume their regular, "normal" eating habits. Wearing weighted shoes enables people to lose weight and keep it off.

The foundation of an exercise program is aerobic movement — walking, jogging, bicycle riding, swimming, rowing, dancing, skating, bouncing on a trampoline, jumping rope, cross-country skiing, etc. — but one also needs to do stretching exercises to increase flexibility, and weight training to tone and strengthen the muscles and increase muscle mass. A weight load in the soles of one’s shoes works the muscles of the spine, abdominal muscles, gluteal (buttock) muscles, and the thigh and leg muscles simultaneously. The repetitive motion of walking in weighted shoes firms and tones these various muscle groups. Muscles burn calories more quickly than other tissues in the body, and having a well-toned muscle mass, which weighted shoes help provide, is an important factor in maintaining a healthful weight.

Wraparound ankle weights provide the same physiologic benefits as weighted shoes do, but they are much less comfortable and can place too much strain on the unsupported ankle and injure it. It is much better to place leg-bearing weights in the sole of a shoe. That way padding in the upper part of the shoe can support the ankle.

iWellness™ designs ergonomically engineered weighted fitness shoes called MetaTreksu2122.10 Multiple, small bars of steel laid transversely in the sole add 2.2 to 3.1 pounds of weight resistance, depending on the shoe size, to each foot. Like with regular fitness shoes, these shoes are flexible, support the foot’s natural movements, and are comfortable to wear.11 They are durable, and the rubber outer sole is designed for good traction. The sole is laminated with shock absorbing Neopontex. The inner lining of the shoe contains charcoal for antibiosis and deodorization, along with nano silver to prevent and eradicate athlete’s foot.

Comfortably fitting, weighted shoes are a new technology that enables busy people to "exercise" while they go about their daily activities. MetaTreks also come in black and, attractively designed, can be worn at work. Weighted shoes are made for low-impact exercise. You should not play tennis or jog in them. Walking in them, briskly or leisurely, is enough. As with any type of equipment, listen to your body. These shoes take time to get used to. They should be used moderately at first. Some people prefer to wear them on alternate days in order to give their muscles a rest. Once acclimated, however, they can be worn on a daily basis.

Weighted shoes are the next generation in fitness shoes. They enhance the benefits of walking, a low-impact, joint-sparing, moderate form of exercise that has been shown to have the same health benefits as more vigorous exercise. These benefits include a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer; and preventing insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes, which is a consequence of obesity and physical inactivity. Exercise, enhanced by wearing weighted shoes, has also been shown to help lower high blood pressure, keep one’s bones strong, prevent osteoporosis, and help relieve stress.

Notes:

1. Walker KZ, Piers LS, Putt RS, Jones JA, O’Dea, K. Effects of regular walking on cardiovascular risk factors and body composition in normoglycemic women and women with type 2 diabetes. Diabetes Care 1999; 22: 555-561.
2. Manson JE, Hu FB, Rich-Edwards JW, Colditz GA, Stampfer MJ, Willett WC, Speizer FE, Hennekens CH. A prospective study of walking as compared with vigorous exercise in the prevention of coronary heart disease in women. N Engl J Med 1999; 341: 650-658
3. LeMura, LM and Maziekas, MT. Factors that alter body fat, body mass, and fat-free mass in pediatric obesity. Med Sci Sports Exerc 2002; 34: 487-496.
4. The Body Mass Index (BMI), used by doctors and insurers to measure obesity, is the relationship between a person’s height and weight, where BMI = W/H2 (W is weight in kilograms and H is height in meters). Individuals with a BMI 18.5 to 25 are normal weight (those less than 18.5 are underweight). People with a BMI greater than 25 are classified as overweight and those with a BMI over 30, as obese — 30-34.9, moderately obese; 35-39.5, severely obese; and greater than 40, massively/morbidly obese. To calculate your BMI using weight in pounds and height in inches, multiply your weight by 703 and divide this by your height multiplied by itself-W (lbs.) x 703/H (in.) x H (in.) = BMI.
5. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The Surgeon General’s Call to Action Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity. Atlanta, Ga: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 2000. Stock number 017-001-00551-7.
6. For more on this subject see Miller DW, Miller LL. Technologies for Maintaining Optimum Health and a Strong Immune System. On www.donaldmiller.com.
7. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Physical Activity and Health: A Report of the Surgeon General. Atlanta, Ga: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 1996. Stock number 017-023-00196-5.
8. Soule RG, Goldman RF. Energy cost of loads carried on the head, hands, or feet. J. Appl. Physiol. 1969; 27: 687-690.
9. Studies done at Han-Lim University Laboratory of Shoes (in Korea) by Guak Chang-Su and
   at Osaka University School of Health and Sport Sciences (in Japan) by Mitsuhiko Masuhara.
10. The company’s Website is www.iwellness.us.
11. U.S. Patent No. 6,397498.

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com

The Best of Donald Miller

All
Americans are susceptible to smallpox. Forty percent of the population,
born after 1972, has never been vaccinated. The rest were vaccinated
more than thirty years ago, and they are also susceptible because
smallpox vaccine loses its effectiveness in most people after 5
to 10 years. But if the Federal government, which controls the vaccine
(paid for with tax dollars), releases it and permits mass vaccination
for smallpox on a voluntary basis, Americans would be protected
against smallpox. Should the government decide whether or not to
permit voluntary "pre-event" vaccination, or should Americans
themselves decide whether or not to have the vaccine?

As
conceived by America's Founders, government's main function is to
protect the liberty and property of its citizens. Self-ownership
underpins a truly liberal society. Individuals are free, within
the constraints of honoring their contracts and not encroaching
on other persons and their property, to do what they want. From
this perspective, each citizen should decide whether he or she wants
to be vaccinated. But many people today who call themselves liberals
hold a different view of government and the state. They think the
state must take charge of the health and welfare of its citizens.

The
Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), in the government's
Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), addresses vaccination
policies. This 15-member committee issues "recommendations"
on vaccinations, which more often than not become compulsory state
policy, as, for example, requiring doctors to inoculate newborns
with hepatitis B vaccine. Most states have adopted this policy and
have made hepatitis B vaccination mandatory, even though there are
doctors, Dr. Jane
Orient among them, who have shown
that children are a hundred times more likely to suffer adverse
effects from the vaccine, including
death, than they are to catch hepatitis B – a disease that
rarely occurs in children and is found mainly in drug abusers, people
with multiple sex partners, and through occupational exposure to
blood products.

The
ACIP updated its "recommendations" on smallpox vaccination
in its June
2002 Draft. They are: 10 to 20,000
medical workers "pre-designated by the appropriate bioterrorism
and public health authorities" should be vaccinated for smallpox.
The committee opposes voluntary mass vaccination. Its parent agency,
the CDC, controls all the smallpox vaccine in the country, enough,
properly diluted, to vaccinate all 288 million people in the United
States. The ACIP contends that the vaccine should not be
made available to the general public because, in the committee's
opinion, "the potential benefits of vaccination do not outweigh
the risks of vaccine complications." People who disagree with
this assessment and think that the benefits of vaccination do indeed
outweigh its risks and want to be vaccinated are out of luck. The
CDC keeps a tight lid on its stockpile of smallpox vaccine.

Smallpox
has an ancient lineage. Egyptian writings 5,700 years old describe
this malady, and there is a mummified pharaoh in the Cairo Museum
(who died in 1157 B.C.) that has pustules indicative of smallpox
on its face and hands. According to Jonathan Tucker in Scourge:
The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox, when Columbus discovered
America in 1492 the native population of North and South America
was around 72 million. By 1800 it had decreased to 600,000, in large
part because of smallpox, which Europeans brought with them. Queen
Elizabeth I, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln contracted this
disease. Smallpox left Elizabeth with disfiguring facial scars and
bald, requiring her to wear a wig and heavy makeup for the rest
of her life. America fought the Revolutionary War in the midst of
a smallpox epidemic, which British forces exploited to their advantage
(by sending infected civilian refugees into the American lines).

A
person who comes in contact with a smallpox victim need inhale only
a few smallpox virus particles to become infected. Russian scientists
found in their laboratory tests that five viral particles were sufficient
to infect 50 percent of animals exposed to aerosols of smallpox.
Once having gained a foothold in its new human host, the virus utilizes
that person's cellular machinery to make countless copies of its
genome. Following seven to seventeen days of incubation, typically
on the twelfth day, the disease begins with the abrupt onset of
flu-like symptoms of fever, headache, backache, nausea, and vomiting.
These nonspecific symptoms are followed two to three days later
with a skin rash that starts out as red spots, initially on the
face and hands, and then spreads over the entire body. The spots
swell into blisters that over a period of about a week fill with
pus. Scabs form after the pustules swell to the point that they
damage the skin. When the scabs fall off the survivor is left with
pockmarks (pitted scars), which are most severe on the face. Smallpox
is infectious over about a three-week period, beginning either with
the onset of fever or the rash (investigators disagree on this)
until the pockmarks heal. A smallpox victim is likely to be infectious
before the rash appears because throat swabs taken in the
pre-eruptive period contain the virus.

The
overall mortality rate for smallpox in unvaccinated people is 30
percent – 40 percent in young children, 20 percent in adults,
and 30 percent or more in the elderly. (Flat-type smallpox has a
95 percent mortality rate; and a mild form of the disease, variola
minor, has a 1 percent mortality rate.) Boston had its final smallpox
epidemic in 1901 (when the average life expectancy in the U.S. was
47 years and there were fewer elderly and immunosuppressed people
in the population than today). Eighty-two deaths occurred in 754
previously vaccinated people (11 percent) and 188 deaths in 842
unvaccinated people (22 percent). The last two epidemics in the
U.S. occurred in 1946 and 1947 in Seattle and New York, respectively.
In Seattle, 51 people contracted the disease before the outbreak
could be contained and 16 died (31 percent). In New York, where
there had been no cases of smallpox for 20 years, 12 people came
down with the disease and two died. Hourly bulletins were broadcast
on the radio, and frightened New Yorkers queued in blocks-long lines
to be (re)vaccinated at 250 vaccination stations set up at police
stations, schools, offices, and factories. The 250,000 doses of
vaccine that the city had on hand quickly ran out, and city officials
issued urgent appeals for more, which it obtained from military,
pharmaceutical, and other sources from around the country. The Commissioner
of Health reported that health workers vaccinated 6,350,000 people
in the city over a four-week period.

In
1990, when the U.S. was planning to invade Iraq the first time (in
1991), analysts at Armed Forces Military Intelligence reported that
Iraq had a "mature offensive BS [biological weapons] program,"
one that could deliver biological weapons from aerosol generators
carried on trucks, boats, or helicopters; in artillery shells and
missiles; and from aircraft. At the time, according to Judith Miller
and coauthors in Germs:
Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, the CIA issued
a report titled "Iraq's Biological Warfare Program: Saddam's
Ace in the Hole." In 1990 the bioweapons of greatest concern
to military planners were anthrax and botulinum toxin. Now, in 2002,
it is smallpox.

The
full extent of the Soviet bioweapons program in the 1970s and 80s,
which focused on smallpox, is now known. Ken Alibek (Kanatjan Alibekov),
one of its directors, reveals its extent in Biohazard:
The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons
Program in the Worldu2014Told From the Inside by the Man Who Ran It,
published in 2000. With the breakup of the Soviet Union the thousands
of scientists working in this program became unemployed and some
of them, along with their families, destitute. Both their services
and stocks of variola virus came onto the black market. Richard
Preston in "Demon
in the Freezer," published in The New Yorker in
1999 (he has written a book with that title that will be published
in October 2002), points out this irony with regard to the eradication
of smallpox: "The eradication [with the Soviet Union's help]
caused the human species to lose its immunity to smallpox, and that
was what made it possible for the Soviets to turn smallpox into
a weapon rivaling the hydrogen bomb." He writes, "The
Central Intelligence Agency has become deeply alarmed about smallpox"
and reveals that the U.S. government keeps a classified list of
states that it suspects has weaponized smallpox. Iraq is on the
list (along with Russia, China, Pakistan, N. Korea, and Cuba).

The
November 16, 2001 issue of Jane's Foreign Report (#2664)
says that a reliable source tells them that Iraq bought smallpox
virus from Russian scientists, who now work there; and "agents
[are] provided with smallpox to spread abroad." Jane reports,
"Our informant reckons that Saddam might try such an attack
only if he felt the game was over and he faced death."

The
Federal government, in its September 16, 2002 Smallpox
Vaccination Clinic Guide, outlines how state and local public
health authorities can set up and staff clinics to carry out "voluntary,
large-scale, post-event smallpox vaccination" should a "smallpox
outbreak" occur. The 48-page guide states that "once Federal
authorities have authorized release of vaccine" it could distribute
280 million doses around the country within five to seven days,
and by following the template provided in the guide local public
health officials (utilizing a staff of 4,600 people) could vaccinate
1,000,000 people over a seven-day period. This plan would supplement
standard measures of surveillance and control and "ring vaccination"
(tracking down and vaccinating every person who has been within
ten feet of a smallpox victim). Health officials used these techniques
to eradicate smallpox.

Ring
vaccination in natural outbreaks of smallpox worked because people
infected with smallpox virus can escape the full effects of the
disease and not pass it on if they are vaccinated in the first four
days of the infection. "Post-event" mass vaccination is
predicated on this fact. This most likely would not be the case
in a biological attack. The strain of smallpox virus that the Russians
weaponized and what Iraq most likely has is the India-1 strain,
which is highly virulent. Soviet laboratory tests showed that monkeys
exposed to an aerosol of this strain would contract smallpox in
1 to 5 days rather than the usual 7 to 17 days with other strains.

In
the last smallpox outbreak that occurred in this country, the one
in New York in 1947, a man who became infected with smallpox in
Mexico rode a bus to New York while he was in the prodromal phase
of the disease and developed a skin rash (which doctors misdiagnosed)
when he arrived in the city. That single, naturally occurring case,
when it was discovered to be smallpox in people that he had infected,
created havoc. In a biological attack a likely scenario would be
that a terrorist, carrying an aerosolized can like that used for
hair spray, would spray freeze-dried smallpox virus in a shopping
mall, airport, or sports stadium. Aerosolized smallpox sprayed in
the men's rooms of a dozen airports around the country by a group
of terrorists would, two weeks later in an unvaccinated population,
create a crisis of unimaginable proportions and turn "post-event"
mass vaccination into a logistical nightmare.

When
the U.S. invades Iraq the likelihood that America will be attacked
with smallpox will rise substantially. The risk that there will
be a smallpox attack and of dieing in it will be much greater than
one-in-a-million (the mortality rate for revaccination – in
people who have been previously vaccinated – is one in 10 million).
Federal authorities should heed the advice of the Senate's only
doctor, Senator Bill Frist, M.D. (a fellow cardiac surgeon). In
his book When
Every Moment Counts: What You Need to Know About Bioterrorism
he describes smallpox as "the scariest bioterrorism
nightmare." He advocates voluntary, preexposure, mass vaccination
and makes the point that "Americans should be able to decide
for themselves whether to accept the risk of inoculation,"
adding, "I believe the threat of a smallpox attack outweighs
the risk of providing smallpox vaccinations to a well-informed public."

Why
will Federal authorities not release the vaccine to Americans who
want to be vaccinated? They are concerned that people with skin
disorders, like eczema, and people with immune system deficiencies
who have cancer, organ transplants, and AIDS might inadvertently
get vaccinated. Such people are at an increased risk for an adverse
reaction, including death, and should not undergo vaccination. (This
includes pregnant women and young children.) But as Dr. William
Bicknell points out in his article in the New England Journal
of Medicine titled "The
Case for Voluntary Smallpox Vaccination,"
an increased level of immunity in a vaccinated population
will "reduce the overall risk of infection among immuno-commpromised
persons in the event of an attack." Also, more careful screening
on a patient-by-patient basis can be done in a pre-event setting
to avoid vaccinating people with immune system deficiencies than
would be possible in a crisis atmosphere after a biological attack.
Smallpox vaccine is a live virus (vaccinia virus). People who are
inoculated with it can spread virus particles at their vaccination
site to others in close contact with them, particularly if they
do not observe standard precautions of keeping the site dry and
bandaged until the scab falls off and washing one's hands thoroughly
after changing the bandage. Secondary infection contact rarely happens,
but the CDC obviously does not want to be confronted by an irate
AIDS Lobby protesting its pre-event release of the vaccine if a
person with AIDS should die from a vaccinia infection acquired by
contact with a person who has been recently vaccinated.

If
the government refuses to release smallpox vaccine to the general
public, there is still a way to be inoculated against smallpox.
One can be vaccinated "arm-to-arm." We can, if we have
to, vaccinate ourselves the way people sometimes did it in the 19th
century.

Edward
Jenner discovered smallpox vaccination in 1796 (after a milkmaid
told him that cowpox, which she contracted from a cow's utter, protected
her from smallpox, and he then noticed that milkmaids rarely exhibited
the facial scars of smallpox). Absenting cows with cowpox to provide
material for inoculation or refrigeration to store and transport
stocks of it, people would transfer the vaccine from one person
to the next arm-to-arm. The Spanish brought smallpox vaccine to
the New World this way. A group of orphans were recruited for the
long voyage, and two children were vaccinated shortly before departure.
When cowpox pustules developed on their arms the ship's doctor would
take material from their lesions and use it to vaccinate two more
children, repeating this procedure each time new pustules formed
in successive children until they reached Venezuela, with yet two
more children providing an aliquot of active vaccine for people
in South America.

The
government plans to vaccinate military personnel and health care
workers (officials have not yet decided how many, but it will be
somewhere between 20,000 and 500,000). These people could provide
a source of active vaccine for their family and friends arm-to-arm
reminiscent of those orphan children bringing smallpox vaccine to
the New World. The technique
of vaccination is fairly simple
(and it does not require a bifurcated needle).

If
you cannot obtain vaccinia vaccine one way or another, a devastating
biological attack has occurred and smallpox is rampant, in a worse
case scenario you can do the kind of vaccination that people employed
for centuries before Jenner. That is variolation. Rather than have
to suffer the disease with its 30 percent mortality rate and disfiguring
facial scars, people inoculated themselves with the smallpox virus
itself obtained from a pustule on a smallpox victim. Smallpox introduced
through the skin rather than the lungs results in a much-attenuated
disease, with only pustules forming around the inoculation site.
Variolation, known as "buying the smallpox," has a fatality
rate of 1 percent, much better odds than with the full-blown disease.

One
thing we must do, especially with the prospect of a biological attack
looming, is to maintain optimum health and to keep our immune system
strong. This will improve the odds that we will survive it. Read
Dr. Russell Blaylock's booklet Bioterrorism:
How You Can Survive. I summarize
his recommendations, and offer others for good health, in an article
I wrote with Linda Miller.

Let
us hope that our government leaders will release smallpox vaccine
for voluntary, pre-attack, mass vaccination.

September
26, 2002

Donald
Miller (send him mail)
is
a cardiac surgeon in Seattle. He is a director of Prepared
Response, Inc. and a member of Doctors
for Disaster Preparedness. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com.

His
daughter lived in good estate well into her nineties and died when
I was eighteen. She took a fancy to me, even though she would remonstrate
that I was ill-mannered and should be sent to military school. Mary
Lyde Williams was an old-school Southern Presbyterian, who, as a
leader in the Daughters of the Confederacy, gave the Presentation
Address at the Unveiling of the North Carolina Memorial on the Battlefield
of Gettysburg, on July 3, 1929. She had many books on the Civil
War in her library, some of which are now in my collection.

Captivated
as I was with my great-grandmother and her Southern views on the
Civil War, I learned in public school that it was wrong for people
like her to support secession and the Confederacy, and for her father
and his compatriots to fight and die for it. I was led to believe
that a person who says the South did the right thing by seceding
from the Union, while not openly admitting it, must secretly approve
of slavery.

The
first books about the Civil War I began collecting after my formal
education was completed were biographies of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant's
own Personal
Memoirs of U. S. Grant (2 vols., Charles L. Webster and
Co., 1885–86) is arguably the best of all the Grant books.
David Eicher in his analytical bibliography The
Civil War in Books (University of Illinois Press, 1997)
says, "Grant's memoirs comprise one of the most valuable writings
by a military commander in history." Not only a remarkable
work by a military commander, Memoirs is a great work of
literature. Although my views on the nature and significance of
the Civil War have changed, I nevertheless continue to collect and
read books about General, and later President, Grant. Two recently
published ones stand out: Al Kaltman's Cigars,
Whiskey & Winning: Leadership Lessons from General Ulysses S.
Grant (Prentice Hall Press, 1998), which encapsulates many
interesting facets of Grant's character; and Frank Scaturro's President
Grant Reconsidered (University Press of America, 1998),
a valuable corrective to the view held by mainstream historians
that Grant's presidency was a near-complete failure. (One good thing
that Grant did as president was to resurrect the gold standard,
which brought on a fifty-year period of economic prosperity in America.)

Collectors
group books about the Civil War into these categories: General works,
which include Histories and books on Battlefields, Equipment, Common
Soldiers, Slaves and Black Americans, Politics and Society, Medical
Aspects, Prisons, etc.; Battles and Campaigns; Confederate and Union
Biographies, Participant accounts, and Letters; Unit Histories,
particularly Regimental Histories; and Civil War fiction. A special
set of books in my collection is the Photographic
History of the Civil War (Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ed.-in-Chief,
The Review of Reviews Co., 1911) that was published on the fiftieth
anniversary of the war's start. David Eicher calls it "The
grandfather of pictorial histories," and writes, "This
mammoth work is a necessary part of any Civil War library."
My set came from my great-grandmother's library, shortly before
most of her collection was lost in a fire. This 3,497-page 10-volume
set has 3,389 photographs taken during the war – of battlefields,
camp scenes, hospitals, prisons, forts and artillery, army movements,
and materiel. Tucked away in one of the volumes was a newspaper
clipping from the September 1, 1949 New York Times. It described
the last official "encampment" of the Grand Army of the
Republic, held in Indianapolis that year. A photograph shows the
six GAR veterans who attended the event – the youngest at age
100, the oldest at 108.

There
are a few core works that every Civil War book collector will have.
Battles
and Leaders of the Civil War (4 volumes, Century Co., 1887–1888)
is the classic 19th century work containing 388 articles
with 197 maps that were published in the Century magazine
between 1884 and 1887. Another is Allan Nevins' 8-volume history
of the Civil War, in three sections titled Ordeal
of the Union, 1847–1857; The
Emergence of Lincoln, 1857–1861; and The
War for the Union, 1861–1865 (Scribners, 1947–71).
As befits one of the leading court historians who presents the victors'
view of the war, Nevin idolizes Lincoln and argues that the war
was a necessary catalyst for establishing the modern American state.

A
listing of core works must include Bruce Catton's The Centennial
History of the Civil War in 3 volumes titled The
Coming Fury, Terrible
Swift Sword, and Never
Call Retreat (Doubleday, 1961–65); James M. McPherson's
Battle
Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press,
1988); and my favorite, Shelby Foote's 3-volume The
Civil War: A Narrative (Random House, 1958, 1963, 1974).

Two
resources that I have used in putting together my Civil War book
collection are Richard Barksdale Harwell's In Tall Cotton: The
200 Most Important Confederate Books for the Reader, Researcher
and Collector (Jenkins Publishing Co., Austin, 1978) and Michael
Mullins and Rowena Reed's The
Union Bookshelf: A Selected Civil War Bibliography (Broadfoot's
Bookmark, Wendell, North Carolina, 1982). Part I of The Union
bookshelf contains 114 Annotated Books; Part II, a List of Regimental
Histories; and Part III, a List of Participant Accounts.

Four
books about the Confederacy belong in every Civil War library. One
is Mary
Chesnut's Civil War (C. Vann Woodward, Ed., Yale University
Press, 1981), certainly the best of all Civil War memoirs. This
well-edited edition won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in History. Another
is Children
of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (Robert
Manson Myers, Ed., Yale University Press, 1972). The third is Robert
Selph Henry's The
Story of the Confederacy (De Capo Press, 1989); and the
fourth, Margaret Mitchell's great American novel, Gone
with the Wind (Macmillan, 1936). Those who have read Mitchell's
prose will agree that the book is much better than the famous film
based on it. (One bookseller is currently offering this book in
a first edition, first printing, in a first-issue dust wrapper,
signed by Mitchell in near fine condition for $17,500.00.)

To
date more than 60,000 books and pamphlets have been published on
America's Civil War. By serious collectors' standards I have a relatively
small and undistinguished Civil War book collection – three
hundred books in all, with only a few of them first editions in
fine or near fine condition. But my collection has seven books,
all published in the last twelve years, that I consider vitally
important in helping one to understand the true nature and significance
of the war. They are:

• Francis
  W. Springer's War
  for What? (Bill Coats Ltd., Nashville, TN, 1990)
• Robert
  W. Johannsen's Lincoln,
  the South, and Slavery: The Political Dimension (Louisiana
  State University Press, 1991).
• Jeffrey
  Rogers Hummel's Emancipating
  Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil
  War (Open Court, 1996)
• Secession,
  State & Liberty (David Gordon, Ed., Transaction
  Publ., 1998)
• Lerone
  Bennett Jr.'s Forced
  Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream (Johnson Publ..
  Co., 1999)
• Charles
  Adams' When
  in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern
  Secession (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000)
• Thomas
  J. DiLorenzo's The
  Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda and
  an Unnecessary War (Prima Publishing, 2002).

The
authors of these books reach startling conclusions that stand the
conventional schoolbook account of the Civil War on its head.

Until
a few years ago, I, like most Americans, had accepted the standard
view of the Civil War. In this version, historians portray Abraham
Lincoln as one of our greatest presidents because he ended slavery
and restored to the Union the slaveholding states that had seceded.
But, as James McPherson puts it, Lincoln also engineered "a
Second American Revolution." This revolution, in contrast the
first revolution of nearly ninety years earlier, established a strong,
centralized form of government, an outcome that has rendered the
founder's emphasis on state sovereignty an anachronism.

The
first thing one learns from reading the books listed above is that
America did not need a war to end slavery. Every other Western
country that held slaves in the nineteeth century – which included
Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico,
Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Jamaica – freed them peacefully.
The South would have done the same before the century was over.
If anything, the fact that seven slaveholding states seceded from
the Union when Lincoln was elected president would have sped up
the process. As several of the historians above point out, many
people in the North considered the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law to be
an abomination, and the law would have been repealed if Lincoln
had allowed the Southern states to go their own way. The Constitution
of the Confederate States of American prohibited the importation
of slaves (Article I, Section 9); with their supply thus restricted,
and slaves now having a place to escape to, slavery in the Confederacy
would have ended as it did elsewhere, without war.

Charles
Adams in When in the Course of Human Events and Thomas DiLorenzo
in The Real Lincoln show in a convincing fashion that the
Civil War was not fought over slavery. It was fought over money
and politics. Abraham Lincoln entered office with a political agenda
that did not include ending slavery. (Emancipation was introduced
as a "war measure," as Lincoln put it, in 1863, in the
third year of the war.) Following in the footsteps of Alexander
Hamilton and Henry Clay, his idol and mentor, Lincoln sought to
create a strong centralized national authority. This would enable
him, as president, to implement his long-held agenda of protective
tariffs, to shield (Northern) American industries from foreign competition;
centralized banking, which would give him control of the money supply;
and "internal improvements," i.e., government subsidies
to politically favored industries, particularly the railroad and
canal-building companies that bankrolled the Republican Party. With
no corporate, property, or income taxes then in force, the government's
principal source of revenue was import tariffs; and the South, with
the greater number of ports, paid 87 percent of the taxes that the
federal government collected to fund its operations and pay government
salaries. Lincoln was willing to let the South keep its slaves and
enforce the Fugitive Slave Law so long as the Southern states remained
in the Union and continued to pay its disproportionate percentage
of taxes.

American
political history since the founding has been divided into two great
camps – the Hamiltonians (beginning with Alexander Hamilton,
Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and on to Lincoln) who favor a highly
centralized state; and the Jeffersonians (beginning with Thomas
Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John C. Calhoun, John Randolph,
and Andrew Jackson) who espouse a limited, decentralized, constitutional
government constrained by state sovereignty. One camp sought to
have a Republic that respects and protects individual liberty and
property; the other, to establish an Empire where the ends justify
the means and the individual is subservient to the state. The American
Civil War was a pivotal event for these opposing views of government.
Abraham Lincoln prevailed and set the stage for the United States
to become an American Empire. We, in 2002, are living with the results
– with a currency managed by the Federal Reserve, today's central
bank, that has lost 95 percent of its value; with a continuing diminution
of individual liberty and freedom under the thumb of a federal government
that regulates every aspect of our lives; and now with suicidal
attacks on our home soil by terrorists who hate America and the
Empire it has become.

I
believe the seven books listed above belong in every serious American
Civil War book collectors' library. Read them, particularly Charles
Adams' When in the Course of Human Events and Thomas DiLorenzo's
The Real Lincoln, and you will begin to view America's Civil
War in a new, more penetrating, and truer light. These scholars
give us a much-needed insight into how what is happening in our
country today, in the twenty-first century, is in large part a consequence
of the outcome of its war that was fought 140 years ago.

September
2, 2002

Donald
Miller (send him mail)
is
a cardiac surgeon in Seattle. He is a director of Prepared
Response, Inc. and a member of Doctors
for Disaster Preparedness. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com.
This
article was published in the Summer 2002 issue of The Journal
of the Book Club of Washington (Volume 3, Number 1).

Construction
of the towers began in 1966, the year the bull market that began
in 1942 following the Great Depression ended. Terrorists demolished
them in 2001, one year after the bull market that went from 1974
to 2000 ended.

The
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey wanted to build a center
for international trade in lower Manhattan, and in 1962 it commissioned
the Japanese-American architect Minuro Yamasaki to design the project.
As Yamasaki put it, "The Center's intent is to provide communication,
information, proximity, and face-to-face convenience for exporters,
importers, freight forwarders, customs brokers, international banks,
and the many other enterprises involved in world trade."

They
selected a 16-acre site two blocks from Wall Street, named for the
wall the Dutch built there across the northern extent of their settlement
to keep the British out. The site is adjacent to St. Paul Chapel.
Built in 1766, it is the oldest public building in the city. When
the thirteen States discarded their Articles of Confederation and
ratified the Constitution in 1788 the Founders selected New York
to be the nation's capitol. George Washington attended Thanksgiving
services at St. Paul Chapel after his inauguration as America's
first president.

The
land-filled site where the World Trade Center towers stood was once
the harbor of New Amsterdam. More than 300 years ago, Dutch traders
loaded fur pelts bought from Native Americans onto ships bound for
markets in Holland.

The
Port Authority specified that the complex must have a minimum of
10 million square feet of office space (the Empire State Building
has 2.1 million sq. ft.). Yamasaki did it with a mix of low and
high structures surrounding a large open space. The five-acre plaza,
comprising about one-third of the site, was, for him, the essential
element in the design, not the grandeur of the two towers. He designed
this space to provide "a great relief from the narrow streets
and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area." More importantly,
Yamasaki writes, in his autobiography A
Life in Architecture, "Like many other important plazas
in the world, it is designed as an end in itself, to set off the
buildings facing it and to create an environment made totally for
the pedestrian… an oasis."

Facing
seemingly insurmountable technical challenges, Yamasaki and his
team of engineers and architects nevertheless figured out a way
to construct the world's tallest buildings on that site. They had
to anchor the towers in granite that was 70 feet below the adjacent
Hudson River. To do this they made a "slurry wall," something
that engineers had used for a subway system in Milan. Like the hull
of a ship, this steel and concrete-reinforced wall kept river water
from flooding the 500 by 1000-foot wide area of excavation. Two
other innovations – load-bearing exterior walls and a "skylobby"
system – substantially increased the amount of useable space
on each floor. This enabled Yamasaki to have room for his plaza
and still meet the square footage requirement for the center. Like
he did with his 20-story IBM building in Seattle, Yamasaki provided
structural integrity to the towers by placing steel columns around
the outside of the building – 236 of them spaced 22
inches apart. These vertical columns, 1353 feet high, along with
the 47 in the central core, provided sufficient support for each
floor to eliminate the need for any interior columns. Each tower
had 254 elevators. Skylobbys, where people transferred from express
to local elevators (on floors 44 and 78), divided the tower into
three sections. He stacked the shafts for local elevators that serviced
the lower, middle, and upper thirds of each tower one on top of
the other. Yamasaki and his team thereby made 75 percent of each
floor available for rent, compared with 50 percent per floor in
other skyscrapersu2014and they built those towers for the same cost
as a conventional skyscraper half as tall.

I
first went to Ground Zero in January 2002 with former Mayor Giuliani
and the US Conference of Mayors (I was there as a director of a
start-up emergency response company that was one of the business
sponsors of the conference). Mayor Giuliani pointed out that St.
Paul Chapel, standing less than 100 yards from all that devastation,
had escaped, amazingly, undamaged. At a luncheon held at a hotel
near the site, John Whitehead, Chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development
Corporation, told us that people were willing to wait for hours
in line, regardless of the weather, to get to the public viewing
area next to the Chapel's graveyard for a good view. He predicted
that Ground Zero would become one of the most highly visited places
on the planet. Indeed, looking out across that 12-city-block-wide
hole in the ground, created by removing 100,000 truckloads of debris
that once was the World Trade Center, gives one a sober cultural,
economic, and political view of 21st century America.

Herbert
Levine, in the late 1940s, invented a new way to insulate steel
and render it relatively fireproof. He sprayed wet asbestos on it.
This replaced concrete (the Empire State building's steel skeleton
is encased in concrete), which is more cumbersome. Yamasaki's design
stipulated that the World Trade Center towers' steel framework be
insulated with asbestos. Sprayers began with the north tower. When
they were on the 64th floor, however, city officials,
concerned about a report that asbestos can cause cancer, made the
builders stop using asbestos and switch to a different material.
Nothing equals asbestos as a fire-retardant material. As a result
of this edict, the builders had to use a less effective insulator
for the steel columns supporting the upper floors of the north tower
– and for all of the steel columns in the south tower. At the
time (in 1970) Herbert Levine, pointing to the (north) tower where
workers were now spraying a substitute, non-asbestos fire-retardant
onto its upper steel columns, predicted: "If a fire breaks
out above the 64th floor, that building will fall down."
(One will not find this prophetic statement cited in any of the
thoroughly researched articles that the staff of the New York
Times has written about the destruction of the World Trade Center.)

At
a hearing held by the National Institute of Standards and Technology
recently a panel of architects and engineers presented their findings
on why the towers collapsed. The panel said that the fires caused
the towers to collapse, not the structural damage done to them by
the impact of the planes. They noted that insulation of the load-bearing
steel columns in each tower at the sites of impact was done with
a non-asbestos fire-retardant; and they concluded, "The insulation
is going to turn out to be the root cause" of the towers' (premature)
collapse.

The
plane that hit the North Tower destroyed about 35 of the 59 steel
columns on the north face at floors 94-98. The steel there had been
sprayed, the panel found, with a 1-inch-thick flame-retardant.
The North tower collapsed an hour and 44 minutes after the fire
started. The plane that hit the South Tower took out 30 of the 59
columns on the south face at floors 78-84. The steel there had -inch-thick
non-asbestos fireproofing. This tower, although it sustained less
structural damage than its twin and one stairwell to the upper floors
remained intact, collapsed in 56 minutes. If the builders had been
allowed to use asbestos, the towers' collapse, although inevitable,
would have been slowed. Rescuers and firefighters would have had
more time to evacuate people and fight the fires. Steel loses half
its strength at 1,100 degrees F and buckles at 2000 degrees F. Sprayed-asbestos
insulation keeps steel that is exposed to a raging fire, including
one fueled by the impact of a fully loaded airplane, from reaching
this critical temperature for four hours. The designers of the twin
towers reckoned that this length of time would enable people trapped
in the building above a fire to be evacuated from the roof by helicopter
and give firefighters time to fight it with helicopters.

In
the North tower, all 1,344 people that were trapped on the floors
above the fire and 84 still on the lower floors when it collapsed
died. In the South tower, 602 people above the fire (who given enough
time could have escaped down the intact stairwell, as 16 people
did before it collapsed) and 18 still on the lower floors when this
tower collapsed died. Another 363 civilians, 343 firefighters, and
78 rescuers died – 2823 people in all. (These figures are from
the New York Times.) Had government regulators not stepped
in and banned asbestos fire-proofing of the upper steel columns,
the North tower could have remained standing for another 2 hours
and 15 minutes, and the South tower, for another 3 hours. Many of
these people, most likely, would have survived.

The
demonization of asbestos tells us a lot about the current state
of American culture. Arthur Robinson, in the title of an article
in his newsletter Access to Energy that he wrote shortly
after 9-11, sized it up this way (before the actual number of deaths
were known): "Terrorists 1000 and Enviros 5000." Terrorists
destroyed the 7-building World Trade Center complex and killed people
at the airplanes' point of impact; but environmentalists, by convincing
government officials in New York to ban asbestos, killed thousands
more.

Asbestos
can cause cancer (lung cancer and mesothelioma). There is no
evidence, however, that insulating buildings with asbestos causes
cancer or is in anyway harmful to human health. Shipyard workers
in the 1940s and 50s got cancer when they worked with a special
kind of asbestos – amphibole crocidolite (blue) asbestos mined
in Africa – to insulate ships. Its fibers are sharp and needle-like.
These workers were exposed to high concentrations of this material,
concentrations 100,000 to 1,000,000 times higher than those found
in a building that has been insulated with asbestos. The asbestos
used in 95 percent of commercial applications – for sound-proofing,
in brake lining and fire-fighting hoses, to insulate steel, etc.
– is chrysotile (white) asbestos. White asbestos has larger,
serpentine fibers that are more easily expelled from the lungs.
It is less dangerous than blue asbestos. The risk of having chrysotile
asbestos in buildings and trucks is virtually non-existent. A recent
study published in the New England Journal of Medicine of
women living next to a chrysotile asbestos mine in Quebec showed
that long-term exposure to relatively high levels of this type of
asbestos did not increase their risk of getting cancer.

Environmental
activists lumped the two kinds of asbestos together and argued that
all "asbestos" is bad. The federal government's Environmental
Protection Agency joined the cause and in 1989 issued a rule banning
all commercial uses of asbestos. Basing their assessment of risk
on a "linear no-threshold" model, the EPA warned that
thousands of Americans exposed to even very low levels of asbestos
in the air would die of cancer. This model posits that the harmful
effect of something – a carcinogen or radiation – is directly
related to the degree of exposure. Its harmful effect is linearly
extrapolated down to zero. This means that only a zero dose
– the absence of that thing – will ensure that one will
have no bad effects from it. This means that if a shipyard worker
gets cancer after being exposed to a concentration of asbestos that
is 10,000 times greater than that found in an asbestos-insulated
building, then for every 10,000 people working or going to school
in a building with asbestos one of them will get cancer. For two
hundred million Americans so exposed, this means 20,000 deaths will
result from exposure to even a very low dose of asbestos. But it
has not happened. Exposure to low-level concentrations of chrysotile
asbestos does not result in an increased incidence of cancer. The
model is wrong. Nevertheless, a frightened American public did not
protest the EPA's ban on asbestos, or its abatement orders. As a
result, hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted removing
asbestos from buildings and schools to eradicate what is a nonexistent
health problem. Several hundred corporations have gone bankrupt
paying out huge claims for injuries alleged to have resulted from
exposure to low-level concentrations asbestos. The American economy
has suffered. But an army of environmentalists, politicians, lawyers,
businesses that remove asbestos from buildings, and doctors who
testify as expert witnesses for plaintiffs has profited handsomely
from asbestos litigation and abatement.

Banning
asbestos has caused an estimated 400 deaths a year due to unsafe
non-asbestos brake linings (one percent of the yearly 40,000 deaths
from vehicle accidents) and the deaths of perhaps 2500 people when
the twin towers collapsed prematurely. Far worse than the ban on
asbestos, however, which has caused thousands of unnecessary deaths,
the EPA's ban on the use of DDT has killed millions.

The
EPA banned DDT in 1972. The evidence that prompted EPA regulators
to ban DDT – that it weakened the eggs of endangered birds
and that it is a carcinogen – is weak, and upon careful scrutiny,
nonexistent. This US government edict to date has caused the deaths
of 60,000,000 children from DDT-preventable malaria, 2 million children
a year (estimates of the number of deaths range from 1 to 3 million
a year). The mosquito that is the vector for this disease was on
the verge of being eradicated when the EPA banned DDT. As we view
Federalist America in the 21st century, especially in
light of its 18th century origins, Americans must face
the fact that an unconstitutional arm of its central government
has engaged in actions that have killed as many people, all of them
children, as Hitler and Stalin together murdered in the last century.

When
confronted with these facts, hard-core environmentalists say it
can't be helped. There are too many humans on the planet. Humans
are stripping the earth of its resources. Technology, commercialism,
and world trade make matters worse.

Critics
for the New York Times and the New Yorker did not
like the World Trade Center. Paul Goldberger, architecture critic
of the New York Times, wrote: "[The towers are] boring,
so utterly banal as to be unworthy of the headquarters of a bank
in Omaha. Two big, tall boxes, with… absolutely no relationship
to anything around the site – to either the river or the surrounding
streets… The buildings remain an occasion to mourn: they never should
have happened, they were never really needed, and if they say anything
at all about our city, it is that we retreat into banality when
the opportunity comes for greatness." Lewis Mumford in the
New Yorker described them as, "Purposeless gigantism
and technological exhibitionism." After terrorists destroyed
the towers, Jeffrey St. Clair, in CounterPunch, wrote: "Under
other circumstances, thousands would have gathered to cheer the
planned demolition of these oppressive structures as lustily as
they have the implosions of the Kingdome in Seattle and other misbegotten
monstrosities of the 1970s." The intellectual elite of American
culture, like environmentalists, has an anti-business, anti-technology,
anti-science mindset. "Banality" and "exhibitionism"
are the terms that best describe, for them, the technological innovations
of the World Trade Center.

A
hip-hop group called The Coup put the anti-business tone of American
culture in bold relief on the cover of its album titled "Party
Music." It shows one of the rappers, Boots, with his finger
on a detonator blowing up the twin towers, America's icon of business
and commerce. The towers behind him are on fire with smoke billowing
out from each one. The album has songs titled "Kill My Landlord"
and "5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO" and lyrics like this:
"Toss a dollar in the river and when he [the CEO] jumps in/If
you find he can swim, put lead boots on him and do it again."
One reviewer gave the album an overall 9 out of 10 with the lyrics
getting the highest rating, a 9.5/10. The album was scheduled for
release in late September 2001. (After 9-11 they changed the cover,
before the album's release, to one that shows a party going on in
a bar.)

Three
tenets of today's tax-financed education system in America come
to mind when one stands at Ground Zero. Those musicians in The Coup
(from Oakland) did not acquire their anti-business bias in a vacuum.
The media and public schools implanted these ideas in them. (It's
no different in private schools.) Students today are taught that
businessmen are greedy and cannot be trusted. Profits are bad. Educators
view unregulated markets and inequality of wealth, both essential
ingredients for a healthy economy, as defects of capitalism. A market
economy, they teach, produces disastrous consequences for the public
welfare. A centrally planned, government-regulated economy is better.
That is how President Roosevelt got the country out of the Great
Depression, which capitalism caused.

Also,
students today learn little about the first 300 years of American
civilization. Teachers gloss over America's Colonial Period from
1607 to 1775 (from the settlement of Jamestown to the Battle of
Lexington-Concord). They do point out, however, that the colonists
committed genocide by infecting the Native Americans with diseases
like smallpox. Educators likewise pay little attention to The American
Revolution, which began in 1775 and reached its turning point in
the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. For them, the Founders who wrote
and signed the Declaration of Independence were "Dead white
guys who owned slaves." Educators gloss over the Confederation,
from 1777 to 1788 – that important stage of American history
that began with the signing of The Articles of Confederation and
ended with the ratification of the Constitution. The Articles of
Confederation? How many American high school and college students
know what they are? Educators also quickly pass over the first 150
years of the current Federalist Era that began in 1788, except to
venerate Abraham Lincoln for freeing the slaves and saving the Union.
From a Marxist perspective, American history before the presidency
of Franklin Roosevelt is not important.

The
ethics upon which the American republic was founded are natural
rights to liberty and property. British Common Law supports these
rights, which Richard Maybury distills into two principles: "Do
all you have agreed to do," and "Do not encroach on other
persons or their property." In stark contrast, as America enters
the 21st century and with the Federalist era now 214
years old, the ethics of cultural Marxism have gained ascendancy.
Cultural Marxists say that Thomas Jefferson is wrong. Rights do
not exist "in nature." They are "socially defined,"
as the Tavistock Group puts it (in their manifesto on ethics in
health care). Government decides who should be the "rights
holders," and given special legal privileges and entitlements,
and who must be the corresponding "obligation bearers"
– a 21st century American variant of the classical
Marxist dictum, "From each according to his ability, to each
according to his need." For cultural Marxists the ideal state
is one where everyone, except its rulers, is equal, in their economic
standing and in all other respects as well – an egalitarian
government-run utopia. This ethic espouses "social justice"
and "social responsibility." What politicians, educators,
and environmentalists really mean by these catchphrases is that
it is they who are charged with defining "responsibility"
and "justice," not a set of obsolete moral rules, natural
rights, or common law. Whenever they use the word "social"
as a predicate, read "government." Government authorities
enforce "responsibility" and "justice" by taking
money from well-off businesses and citizens and redistributing it
to people they deem deserve support – i.e., to those who "need"
it. This statist view of ethics now pervades all levels of education,
including MBA programs in business schools.

A
third tenet of today's government-controlled education system stems
from this Marxist ethic. It is: the collective trumps the individual.
From an egalitarian, everybody-is-equal perspective, individualism
– individual identity, initiative, achievement, and accountability
– is out. Group identity, group participation, group rights
and entitlements are in. One's associations and group define a person,
not one's individual accomplishments. In postmodern, Marxist America
"independent, self-reliant people" is an anachronism.

Traditional
American values of hard work and individual initiative fueled Yamasaki's
life and architecture. Minuro Yamasaki (1912–1986) was a Nisei,
a second generation Japanese-American. He was born in Seattle and
grew up there and graduated from the University of Washington in
1934. When World War II began he was living in New York and worked
for an architectural firm. He brought his parents to New York to
live with him in order to keep them from being put in a "relocation
camp," the Roosevelt administration's version of concentration
camps for American citizens of Japanese descent who lived on the
West Coast. When most architects were embracing the International
Style of flat, glassy structures, Yamasaki designed buildings that
were more decorative and ornamental and drew upon historical traditions.
He wrote, "I believe contemporary architects should not ignore
the arch, whether Roman, Gothic, or Islamic, simply because they
were used in traditional buildings." Yamasaki's work reflected
George Washington's advice to his countrymen to have commercial
relations with all peoples and nations but to "steer clear
of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world"
(in his Farewell Address). Yamasaki built three airports in Saudi
Arabia and that country's Monetary Agency Headquarters in Riyadh.
The Royal Family so admired his design of the Dhahran Air Terminal
(completed in 1961) that they displayed it on one of their banknotes.
He built a stunning and inspiring synagogue, the Temple Beth-El,
in Bloomfield Township, Michigan (1974); an equally arresting Founder's
Hall in Shinji Shumeikai, Japan (1982); the Science Pavilion at
the 1962 Seattle World's Fair; and the Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs at Princeton University (1965),
among many other architectural works around the world.

When
Yamasaki designed the World Trade Center and construction began
in 1966, 36 years ago, America was an economic powerhouse. The US
had a merchandise balance-of-trade surplus (exports exceeding imports)
of $3.8 Billion ($21.2 Billion in 2002 dollars). In 2001, instead
of a surplus America had a trade deficit of $427 Billion, importing
that much more manufactured goods than it exported. Today Intel,
IBM, GE, and Microsoft, and many other US corporations are manufacturing
more and more of their high-tech products outside of the US in other
countries, notably China. Wal-Mart has become this country's largest
corporation. America is now like a third-world country in that it
only maintains a trade surplus in such things as natural resources
(coal), agricultural products (soybeans, wheat, rice, corn, and
animal feed), and low-tech goods such as cigarettes and scrap metal.
(It has small but diminishing surplus in airplanes and specialized
machinery and parts.) From the vantage point of Ground Zero, it
is ironic that America, like it was in the 1600s, is once again
a net exporter of fur hides.

In
1966 the US dollar was fixed in value against gold at the rate of
$35.00 per ounce. Only people in other countries, however, could
exchange their dollars for gold. That ended in 1971. Since then,
freed from the constraints of the Gold Standard, the US dollar has
lost more than 80 percent of its value. Goods and services that
$1.00 could purchase when the twin towers were under construction
now cost $5.57. In 1966 America was a net creditor to the world.
Now the US is the world's largest debtor nation, with a net external
debt of $4.1 Trillion. In 1966 the US National Treasury debt was
$329 Billion. In 2001 this debt had risen to $6.1 Trillion, nearly
half of it held by foreigners, which U.S. taxpayers must service
and eventually repay. The federal government also owes an estimated
$13 Trillion in its obligation to pay social security and $17 Trillion
for Medicare. Add these tax-financed unfunded liabilities to the
Treasury debt and the US National debt balloons to $36 Trillion.
In a population of 288 million that is a liability of $125,000 for
each citizen. The cost of these entitlements far exceed an amount
that politicians can tax its citizens to pay for them, which spells
the demise of Social Security and Medicare in 21st century
America.

Although
it has become an unrivaled military superpower, Federalist America
is in decline. Like that hole in lower Manhattan that was once the
World Trade Center, the unpayable $36 Trillion financial black hole
that the federal government has dug with promises of entitlements
to its voters may prove to be its downfall.

In
contrast to the Founders' intentions, Federalist America has a bloated
central government that regulates all aspects of its citizens' lives.
The federal government employs one million people that are housed
in the equivalent of 321 Empire State buildings – in 674 Million
square feet of office space. This does not include the US military,
which occupies an additional 3.3 Billion square feet. The number
of people that the federal government employs has increased 4,000-fold
since 1800, while the US population has increased only 71-fold.
Federal expenditures are 18.7 percent of the GDP, up from 2.9 percent
in 1900. Direct government payments to individuals – for Social
Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and government pensions – comprise
nearly half of all federal spending. Government spending on social
programs has grown 14 times faster than the economy. The Constitution
does not address 90 percent of what the federal government now does.

The
federal government regulates the economy and the lives of its citizens
with an alphabet soup of extra-constitutional agencies. Regulators
have adopted a standard of acceptable risk where the chance of getting
cancer from environmental pollutants, ionizing radiation, and other
potential carcinogens should be one-in-a-million (10-6),
or at most one-in-a-hundred-thousand. And they use the linear no-threshold
model to assess risk. Government managers apply this inappropriately
assessed, overly stringent level of risk to things like ionizing
radiation, which reap considerable economic benefits (more nuclear
power plants would make America less dependent on Middle Eastern
oil), to protect a population that already has a one-in-three
chance of developing cancer of all types during one's lifetime
and a one-in-four chance of dying from cancer. Even worse,
some federal regulations, like banning asbestos and DDT, wind up
killing far more people than they purportedly save. Compliance with
federal regulations cost $834 Billion a year (8 percent of GDP),
which has stifled the economy and bankrupted many productive businesses.

The
federal government owns 40 percent of all the land in America and
controls, through regulation and land use directives, the other
60 percent.

In
Federalist America, government has taken control of education. During
America's Colonial Period and short-lived Confederation, families,
churches, and local communities (except for some city-run New England
schools) educated American citizens. Schools were not financed by
taxes or controlled by the state. In the Federalist Era, however,
after the Civil War, government managers gradually decided that
they needed to take control of education in order to produce responsible
citizens. Following Horace Mann's advice, government adopted the
Prussian model of education and then, in the 20th century,
John Dewey's Progressive method of socializing children. The result:
a correct thinking, dumbed-down public living contentedly in a semi-socialist
society.

As
a world empire, Federalist America has bred enemies that hate us
with such passion that they are willing to sacrifice their own lives
in order kill Americans and destroy their property. And if their
attacks compel the US government to further restrict the liberty
of its citizens in an effort to give them more security, so much
the better. The terrorists' resolve is too strong for it to be simply
a matter of envy and hatred of Western freedom and prosperity, although
correct thinking would dictate that this is their sole motivation.
The US military has killed more innocent people in Afghanistan in
their post 9-11 bombing raids than terrorists killed in America
on 9-11. Since the US imposed a trade embargo on Iraq eleven years
ago, 500,000 children have died from malnutrition and lack of access
to clean water (chlorine, along with other water purification chemicals,
is one of the items banned by the sanctions).

As
America enters the 21st century, we can see clearly that
the Founders' attempt to establish a constitutional republic under
the rule of law, with a limited central government that protects
the lives, liberty, and property of its citizens and derives "its
just powers from the consent of the governed," has failed.

The
first major setback in maintaining a constitutional republic was
Abraham Lincoln's Civil War, which disallowed by force of arms a
state's right of secession and set the precedent for a strong central
government that could infringe on personal liberties (see "A
Jeffersonian View of the Civil War.") The second major
setback was Woodrow Wilson's decision to send American troops to
Europe and turn what was a stalemated European War into World War
I. This action put Federalist America on the path of empire (with
the Spanish-American War of 1898 serving as a prelude). Today Federalist
America is a world empire on the Roman model. It polices the world
and uses its unrivaled military power to ensure that its needed
supply of oil from the Middle East arrives on schedule. Can America
once again become a republic? See "A
Fourteen Point Plan for a Post-Wilsonian America."

The
federal government in 21st century America no longer
protects the lives, liberty, and property of its citizens. The post
9-11 USA PATRIOT ACT (Public Law 107-56), voted on in Congress before
most legislators had a chance to read it, effectively rescinds the
Bill of Rights. The government can now eavesdrop on our phone calls,
faxes, and emails at will (Section 207 [III]). Section 358 of the
Act requires US and foreign banks, stockbrokers, and credit-card
companies, without your knowledge, to provide information about
you to intelligence agencies on demand. And among other things,
this new law permits police to break into your home or business
without a search warrant if they suspect that you are using a computer
to commit a criminal act (Section 213). They can now do this legally
and surreptiously and seize files and property and, if they wish,
plant a bug on your computer.

This
is a far cry from the constitutional republic that States' legislators
envisioned when they ratified the Constitution in 1788. Had they
known it would come to this they would have undoubtedly heeded Patrick
Henry's admonition not to do it and kept their States free and independent
with their already established Articles of Confederation.

July
31, 2002

Donald
Miller (send him mail)
is
a cardiac surgeon in Seattle. He is a director of Prepared
Response, Inc. and a member of Doctors
for Disaster Preparedness. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com.

Such
acts of patriotism date back to this country's founding. Americans
have displayed their flag ever since the Continental Congress certified
its initial design, with thirteen stars, in June 1777. Francis Scott
Key wrote the lyrics for the Star-Spangled Banner in 1814 to celebrate
America's victory against the British in a battle at Baltimore in
the War of 1812. He penned these lyrics to what was then a popular
pub song, written in 1770 by John Smith. (Congress passed an act
in 1931 making it, with Key's lyrics, the national anthem.)

The
United States has gone through three stages in its 225-year history.
They started out as a republic (1776-1864). When the South
lost the Civil War it became a nation (1865-1916); and when
President Wilson sent American troops overseas to fight in the Great
War in Europe the United States became an empire (1917-the
present). Patriotism in America has also gone through various phases,
like the country it honors.

America's
first patriots included the 56 men who signed the Declaration of
Independence. In this declaration they mutually pledged to each
other "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor"
in their decision to secede from British rule. All of the signers,
except one, were wealthy landowners and thus had a lot to lose.
These patriots were willing to sacrifice their lives and property
to establish a republic that was based on classical liberal ideas
of individual liberty, the rule of law, personal responsibility,
and constitutionally limited government.

The
American republic lasted 84 years. It came to an end when
Abraham Lincoln initiated a Civil War against the southern states
that had seceded from the Union and, victorious, turned the country
into a nation. People no longer called the country these
United States but instead, the United States in a singular
tense. Lincoln also laid the foundations for the U.S. to be an empire,
a subject I
address in another article.

In
the nation stage, a more nationalistic kind of patriotism arose.
The southern states were back in the Union, conquered and subdued.
Millions of immigrants were streaming into the northern states to
work in factories and build railroads. Americans embraced new patriotic
slogans like the one displayed at a Grand Army of the Republic encampment
in 1897, which proclaimed, "One country, one flag, one people,
one destiny." Immigrants should not continue to hold attachments
to their former country and have divided loyalties; and Southerners
must accept the fact that the United Stated is now a nation ruled
by the central government in Washington, D.C., to which they owe
their allegiance. Patriotic organizations like the Grand Army of
the Republic, the Women's Relief Corps, and the United Confederate
Veterans worked in concert to promote national unity.

In
the 1890s educators and opinion makers realized that public schools
could serve as a "mighty engine for the inculcation of patriotism,"
as the author of Methods of Teaching Patriotism in Public Schools
(1890), George Balch, put it. Government began using the public
schools to instill patriotism in their students. Balch wrote the
first Pledge of Allegiance in 1887, one that went, "We give
our hearts to our country. One country, one language, one flag."
But the Pledge written by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister in
Boston, in 1892, won out. It said, "I pledge allegiance to
my flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible,
with Liberty and Justice for all." (Flag "of the United
States" was added in 1923, and one nation "under God"
by an Act of Congress in 1954.) Americans recite this pledge, with
its emphasis on the nation being "indivisible," a rebuff
to Confederate pretensions to secession; and "Justice for all,"
which presaged the current-day American Marxist's concept of "social
justice." (Francis Bellamy was a first cousin of Edward Bellamy,
author of the utopian socialist novel Looking Backward; and
he shared his cousin's belief that an enlightened centrally planned
economy would bring social and economic equality for all.)

President
Woodrow Wilson transformed the American nation into an empire
by sending U.S. troops to France to come to the aid of Britain,
France, Russia, and their allies in their war against the German
Hohenzollern Empire and its allies. By 1917, this war between European
empires, one that had no bearing on American national interests,
had reached a stalemate. American intervention in what is now called
World War I had disastrous consequences. The Wilson-inspired Treaty
of Versailles destroyed Germany as an economically and politically
viable nation, resulting in the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis,
and making it too weak to thwart the Bolshevik takeover of Russia
and thus prevent the rise of Stalin.

Franklin
Roosevelt steered our country into World War II, joining forces
with Stalin, who he called "Uncle Joe." Worse than Hitler,
who killed 20 million people, Stalin killed, in the name of socialism,
more than 40 million people, by starvation, exposure, and executions;
and his Soviet apparatchiks tortured millions of innocent men, women,
and children. Roosevelt told his soldiers that they were fighting
for freedom and democracy. But the truth of the matter is that World
War II resulted in Roosevelt delivering ten Christian European nations
to his Soviet "ally" to do with as he pleased. Stalin
and the rulers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics who followed
him occupied and brutally suppressed these countries for the next
45 years, until the Soviet Empire itself collapsed in 1989. And
after World War II rulers of the USSR threatened our country with
nuclear annihilation.

The
American Empire's record in the Middle East is no better. It has
supported and help establish corrupt dictatorships throughout the
region, most notably in Iran, where American aid brought the Shah
to power in 1953. Our empire has trained and supported terrorists
that now attack us – Osama bin Laden, to fight the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan; and Saddam Hussein, to carry out a war against Iran.
Even worse, the United States government countenanced Iraq's use
of chemical weapons of mass destruction in its war against Iran.
Imperial American presidents impose their will on Mideast countries
by bombing them and by imposing crippling economic sanctions. The
economic sanctions that our empire has enforced on Iraq over the
last ten years have killed 1.4 million civilians, 400,000 of them
children.

Stephen
Decatur, U.S. Navy hero of the Barbary Wars of 1801-05 and 1815
against pirates in Tripoli, said, "Our country! In her intercourse
with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country,
right or wrong." Our country, right or wrong is the
motto for modern-day patriotism in imperial America. A patriotic
American in 2001 does not question the government's judgment in
its conduct of foreign affairs.

In
addition to displaying the American Flag, saying the Pledge of Allegiance,
singing the National Anthem, and not questioning our government's
actions in the running of its empire, government officials and opinion
molders in the media encourage a new kind of patriotism. Americans
need to get out and go shopping and buy new cars, refrigerators,
and VCRs to keep the economy strong; and they should buy stocks
to help support U.S. financial markets. It is now "unpatriotic"
to save. Americans need to get out there and SPEND.

The
ultimate sacrifice a patriot can make, of course, is to give his
life for his country. For what reason? For a geopolitical interest?
For oil at $20 a barrel? To maintain the U.S. empire or to repel
an invasion of our country? American soldiers fought in Vietnam
and 55,000 died. Why were American soldiers fighting a war in Southeast
Asia? Was it for a reason worth my life or your life? Richard Maybury,
author of Early Warning Report, speaks for many of us when
he writes:

The
only thing I would be willing to die for is my home and family;
I would do whatever it takes to repel an invader, to protect
my homeland. When I am deciding what I think of a U.S. military
operation in some far off corner of the world, I always ask
the question, would this be worth my life? If the answer
is no, then I don't think it would be worth anyone else's life
either.

Asking
questions like this fall on deaf ears in the current political climate.
Those on the Left, with their collectivist bias, like the writers
at The New York Times, advocate an empire-type form of global
governance. And with regard to causalities incurred in the realization
of this goal, as old French proverb puts it, "You can't make
an omelet with breaking eggs." Those on the Right, like the
writers at The Weekly Standard and National Review,
want to maintain and strengthen the existing American Empire (particularly
if they are in charge and don't have to be on the front lines fighting
for it). A true patriot will risk his life for his country, but
only for the right reason.

America
should follow the example of Switzerland, a country that engages
in trade with all nations but maintains neutrality in international
disputes. Fundamentalist guerillas may detest freedom and democracy,
but not to the point where they will mount an attack on a country
like Switzerland, which is a bastion of these virtues. People hate
America because the United States intervenes in their affairs. America
should adopt a noninterventionist foreign policy and become a Switzerland
writ large. With chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in the
hands of terrorists, the price an empire must now pay to be the
policeman of the planet is too high.

In
the worst-case scenario, terrorists will use portable nuclear weapons
and the variola (smallpox) virus to kill large numbers of Americans
on their home soil. A nuclear weapon with the power of the one the
United States dropped on Hiroshima in the Second World War now weighs
less than 100 pounds and can fit inside a suitcase. FedEx will ship
suitcases weighing 100 pounds, overnight delivery, anywhere in the
world, for $700.

The
last case of smallpox in the world occurred in 1977; and in 1979
the World Health Organization declared that vaccination had eradicated
this disease in humans (but not the virus itself, which investigators
study in several laboratories). This organization, however, discounted
the possibility that some states would stockpile the virus and might
one day use it as a biological weapon – most notably the USSR,
which before its breakup controlled vast quantities of the virus,
some of it stored in warheads on missiles targeted at American cities.
Routine vaccination for smallpox was halted in the U.S. thirty years
ago; and in people vaccinated before 1972, the vaccine, being effective
for only ten to twenty years, no longer provides any immunity. The
disease has a 30% mortality rate in unvaccinated people, and antibiotics
don't help – antibiotics are useless against viruses. Smallpox
is highly contagious: it is transmitted person-to-person by skin
contact, contact with contaminated clothing and bed linen, and in
the air (virus particles in the mouth become airborne when an infected
person talks). The U.S. government's Center for Disease Control
(in Atlanta) currently controls enough well preserved vaccine to
vaccinate 7 to 15 million people, in a population of 300 million.
The Black Death in the 14th century caused by bubonic
plague, a bacterial disease susceptible to antibiotics, killed 40%
of the population of Europe. In the urban and widely traveled 21st
century, a well-planned and ruthless terrorist attack with variola
virus could produce a Black Death from smallpox that could kill
as many as 50-100 million Americans. (In the 20th century
alone, with vaccination employed on a mass scale, smallpox killed
300 million people worldwide before the disease was eradicated in
the 1970s.)

Homeland
security measures will not entirely stop determined terrorists.
Even if the country becomes a full-fledged police state that requires
national ID cards and travel permits, imposes martial law and curfews,
engages in phone/email/internet surveillance, and has soldiers with
automatic weapons manning check-points on the nation's highways,
terrorist attacks will still occur. No homeland security measures
can stop a guerilla that is willing to sacrifice himself in his
effort to kill other people. The only policy that will stop
terrorism completely on our home soil is for our country to bring
its troops back home and dismantle its empire.

In
my article, "A
Fourteen Point Plan for a Post-Wilsonian America," the
first five points, from a foreign policy standpoint, are: 1) End
the United States' worldwide military presence and bring American
troops home; 2) Place no economic sanctions on other countries;
3) Engage in unrestricted trade with all nations; 4) Declare principled
neutrality in all foreign disputes and wars; and 5) Withdraw from
the United Nations. We should do this irrespective of its salutary
effect on terrorism. America needs to return to a foreign policy
of "peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations;
[but] entangling alliances with none," as Thomas Jefferson
put it.

What
should we do we do about the terrorists, and those who have supported
them, who have killed and maimed our loved ones and fellow citizens?
Use a remedy that the Constitution provides for punishing pirates.
Issue Letters of Marque, with substantial monetary rewards from
the United States government added, to anyone who can deliver, dead
or alive, the perpetrators of these attacks, beginning with Osama
bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Mark
Twain, in the closing pages of a notebook he used from 1905-1908,
wrote:

In
the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave,
and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join
him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

As
the third stage in our country's history soldiers on to a bad end,
America desperately needs patriots like those who signed the Declaration
of Independence announcing the American Colonies' secession from
the British Empire. We need the kind of patriots now that America
had then. It will require very courageous people to effect this
country's change from the world's sole superpower, with troops stationed
in 106 countries supported by influential special interests that
profit from their presence abroad, to a Switzerland writ large – from
an empire to a republic. America needs brave and true
patriots, ones like Congressman Ron Paul, that can help to bring
this about, who will stand up to the United States Empire and free
America from its grip. The stakes involved are freedom, liberty,
and prosperity.

October
30, 2001

Donald
Miller (send him mail)
is a cardiac surgeon in Seattle.

The
Truth Needs Your Support
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make a donation to help us tell it,
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In
an address given to a joint sessions of Congress in 1918, Wilson
presented a 14 point program, "our program…the only possible
program," as he put it, for world peace. These points addressed
the adjustment of colonial claims, the borders and sovereignty of
Belgium, France (in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine), Italy, Austria-Hungary,
Rumania, Serbia, Montenegro, Turkey, and Poland. Point 6 welcomed
Russia into the society of free nations, with the "assistance
of every kind she may need and may herself desire." Point 14
advocated a new world order through the formation of a "general
association of nations," i.e., the League of Nations. As Richard
Gamble puts it in Reassessing
the Presidency, "The Fourteen Points were a direct
effort to rearrange Europe, marking an unprecedented entry of the
U.S. into European affairs and a further departure from America's
traditional foreign policy of nonentanglement and non-intervention."

American
intervention in this European war, one that had no bearing on American
national interests, resulted in the Wilson-inspired Treaty of Versailles,
which effectively destroyed Germany as an economically and politically
viable nation and led to the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis.
America's first acts as an Empire had consequences that proved disastrous.
Had the United States not intervened and allowed World War I to
end in a stalemate, an intact Hohenzollern Germany could have thwarted
the Bolshevik takeover of Russia and prevented the rise of Stalin.
Although he said he wanted to "bring light and liberty and
peace to all the world," Wilson's involvement in European affairs
instead enabled Bolshevism to conquer Russia and Central Asia. Over
the next seventy years Lenin, Stalin, and their successors killed,
in the name of socialism, more than sixty million people, by starvation,
exposure, and executions. Soviet apparatchiks tortured many millions
of innocent men, women, and children.

Eight
decades after President Wilson created it, the American Empire now
deploys its military forces worldwide. Our Empire has troops in
106 countries. American presidents impose their will on other countries,
for whatever wrongs their leaders may commit, even when they do
not affect our national interests, by bombing them (without a declaration
of war) and by imposing crippling economic sanctions, both of which
have killed many thousands of innocent civilians. These imperial
actions have fomented widespread resentment, and millions of people
in the world hate our country. Our government's actions have bred
a horde of bitter enemies, people who will sacrifice themselves
in an attempt to kill as many Americans as they can, including children,
by whatever means they have at their disposal.

Wilson
was a Progressive. From a domestic and economic standpoint, as with
his foreign policy, he wanted to expand the power of government
to effect a revolution in society. He sought to increase both the
size and scope of government. He said that he wanted to put government
"at the service of humanity." During his two terms as
president, from 1913-1921, Congress passed bills creating the Federal
Reserve System (1913); the Federal Income Tax (Amendment 16, ratified
in 1913); the Harrison Narcotics Act (1914), which made heroin and
cocaine illegal; the Federal Trade Commission (1914); the Federal
Farm Loan Act (1916); and the Prohibition of alcohol (Amendment
18, ratified in 1919).

Before
Wilson was elected president federal government spending never exceeded
3 per cent of GDP, except during times of war (the War of 1812 and
the Civil War). Government spending rose to more than 20 per cent
of GDP during Wilson's two terms as president; and over the last
half of the 20th century, with Franklin Roosevelt's New
Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, government spending has
ranged between 17-24 per cent of GDP. The principal reason why the
thirteen American states agreed to establish a central government
was to have a more coordinated and effective defense against foreign
invasion. Now, however, 57 per cent of federal government spending
goes for social programs, 12 per cent for interest on the federal
debt, 1 per cent for foreign aid, 14 per cent for miscellaneous
things, and 16 per cent for defense. Making matters even worse,
the Federal Reserve Bank's monetary policy has obliterated 94 per
cent of the value of the U.S. dollar. A basket of goods and services
that cost $100.00 in 1913 now costs $1,673.00.

John
Lukas, in his book Outgrowing
Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century,
argues that Wilson, not Lenin, "turned out to be the real revolutionary."
Abraham Lincoln, with his "American System" of high tariffs,
internal improvements (i.e., corporate welfare and subsides), and
central banking with paper money not backed by gold, set the stage
during the Civil War for Wilson's social and economic revolution
sixty years later. (For more about Lincoln's role in helping to
create the American Empire see my article "A
Jeffersonian View of the Civil War."

American
citizens now have to bear the consequences of Lincoln and Wilson's
transformation of the United States from a Constitutional Republic
into an Empire. American citizens are now subject to attack at home,
and we can expect terrorists to begin using chemical, biological,
and nuclear weapons of mass destruction on us. Citizens who escape
these attacks must confront the economic consequences of a burst
economic bubble created by a Federal Reserve-engineered credit expansion,
consequences that include a falling stock market, further devaluation
of the dollar, job layoffs, and rapidly increasing personal and
corporate bankruptcies.

Woodrow
Wilson presented a Fourteen Point plan to Congress that launched
the 20th century American Empire. The following is a
Fourteen Point plan for a post-Wilsonian America, one that will
restore our country in the 21st century to the Republic
it once was:

Foreign
Policy

1. End the United States' worldwide military presence and keep American
   troops in the United States.
2. Stop
   placing economic sanctions on other countries.
3. Engage
   in unrestricted trade with all nations; drop all trade barriers
   with nations that will do the same.
4. Declare
   principled neutrality in all foreign disputes and wars.
5. Withdraw from the United Nations.

Domestic
Policy

1. Abolish Government restrictions on domestic energy production.
2. End the War on Drugs; decriminalize their sale and use.
3. Privatize health, education, welfare, and social security.
4. Dismantle federal government regulatory agencies, such as the
   EPA, FDA, OSHA and BATF.
5. Proscribe corporate welfare and subsidies.
6. Return all illegal aliens to their homeland.

Economic
Policy

1. Decommission
   the Federal Reserve banking system.
2. Repeal the 16th Amendment and abolish the Federal Income
   Tax
3. Place the nation's currency back on a Gold Standard.

Are
these Fourteen Points too radical? The founders of our Republic
– Jefferson, Mason, and Madison, in particular – and other
classical liberals would argue that this is a sound plan. Implementing
these Fourteen Points would restore the American government to its
pre-Wilsonian state and re-establish freedom and property rights
for its citizens.

Left
liberal socialists, like my son-in-law, a Harvard academic leftist,
revere Woodrow Wilson. For them, he is a Progressive hero, a millennial
prophet. Such people think Wilson did the right thing by having
government take more control over the economy and extend the scope
of its power to solve social problems and achieve "social justice."
They brand a plan like the one offered here as "isolationist"
and dismiss these fourteen foreign, domestic, and economic points
as not applicable to the complexities of life in the 21st
century. Pursuing "peace, commerce and honest friendship with
all nations; [but] entangling alliances with none," however,
as Thomas Jefferson put it, is not isolationist. It is engagement
in a peaceful manner. It is the best way to deal with people throughout
the world. Trade with them and otherwise leave them alone.

Would
an American President and Congress, irrespective of which party
they belong to, ever adopt such a plan? Not any time soon, and not
willingly. The lure of the power they wield is too great. But it
can happen nevertheless.

After
terrorists commandeered four large civil airliners and used them
to kill thousands of Americans and destroy the World Trade Center
and part of the Pentagon, symbols of America's financial and military
might respectively, the blood of the American people is up and a
war fever grips the country. Retribution will be had, come what
may. But as suicidal terrorists carry out more attacks on American
civilians on their home soil, more and more Americans will address
the question: Why is this happening? They will examine
more carefully their country/cum/Empire. They will find that having
the United States serve as the self-appointed policeman of the planet
carries unacceptable risks in a world where zealots who hate us
can gain access to weapons of mass destruction. American citizens,
acceding to government authorities to give up their freedom for
security, will find that they have neither freedom nor security.
As the circle of violence widens an increasing number of people
will come to realize that the only sure way to end the terror will
be to close down our Empire and to return to our country's roots.

We
need in the 21st century to adhere to the advice President
George Washington gave Americans in the 17th century
– to extend commercial relations with all nations but
have as little political connection with them as possible.
The United States should declare neutrality in the continuing Thousand
Year War between Muslims and Christians in the Mideast, one that
shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

Likewise,
if we do not wish to be mired in the coming economic depression
for a prolonged period of time, as happened with the last one in
the 1930s, which lasted twelve years, we must substantially reduce
government spending, taxes, and regulatory compliance costs. Federal
spending has grown eight times faster than the economy since the
last depression. Over the last forty years federal expenditures
on regulatory activity have increased 2.7 times faster than economy
– a 14 per cent per year annual growth rate, compounded. Government
regulations currently consume $977 Billion annually, siphoning off
13 per cent of the economy, which is $3,300.00 per man, woman, and
child. In order for our country to regain economic health we must
make sure that the free-market private sector once again becomes,
as it was before our nation assumed the burdens of empire, the largest
and fastest growing segment of the economy.

In
the war against terrorism, the president and Congress will most
likely put into effect National ID cards, travel permits, video
surveillance cameras on roads and in public places, and other measures
that encroach on individual freedom. When Americans find that these
measures are ineffective in combating terrorism and all they have
to show for it is the loss of their liberty and freedom, people
in some states may do what people in the southern states choose
to do in 1860-61 when Abraham Lincoln was elected president. They
may opt to secede from a United States controlled by a ruling elite
that wants to maintain its Empire despite continuing and unstoppable
terrorist attacks on Americans. Such a move would enable citizens
in those states to regain their liberty, plus secession from the
United States Empire would insulate seceded states from continuing
terrorist threats. If this were to happen and one or more states
once again seceded from the Union, it would go a long way towards
helping to coerce U.S. political leaders to dismantle their Empire.

When
Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America,
was vacating Richmond as the war was coming to a close, a traveling
companion remarked that the cause of the Confederacy was lost. Davis
replied:

It
appears so. But the principle for which we contended is bound
to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another
form.

That
principle is the federal compact of limited constitutional government,
natural rights, and the rule of law. It is grounded in state sovereignty
and the right of secession.

Let
us hope that as a nation we will have the good sense to dismantle
our Wilsonian Empire and choose to live in peace with our neighbors
before a growing army of terrorists kills too many more Americans,
and before our military kills too many more innocent Islamic civilians.

September
28, 2001

Donald
Miller (send him mail)
lives in the state of Washington and is a cardiac
surgeon in Seattle.