According to a popular story, a resident of Mechelen, Belgium, emerged unsteadily from an inn one foggy night in 1687, looked up at St. Rumbold’s Cathedral, and raised an alarm — the tower was on fire.

Residents flung open their windows and saw the same reddish glow. The rumor raised an uproar, and the mayor organized a chain of volunteers to pass buckets of water up the tower stairway.

Before they reached the top, though, the fog cleared and the alarm was called off. The red glow had been only the moon’s light shining through the tower’s red bell windows.

Ever since, residents of Mechelen have been known as Maneblussers, or moon extinguishers.

Washington Post health columnist Dr. Leana Wen is at it again. No, she’s not weirdly downplaying another pandemic … she’s agreeing with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on fluoride.

Yes, Dr. Wen, whom you may also remember from the ten seconds she was president of Planned Parenthood, has got herself a bad case of the Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues, which has tragically manifested in a Washington Post article titled “RFK Jr.’s views on fluoride aren’t as crazy as you might think.”

Spoiler alert: They are exactly that crazy.

For the 80 millionth time, the dose makes the poison. In order to get fluoride toxicity, one would need to drink, in one sitting, 5 liters of water for every kilogram of their weight. So, someone who weighs 140 pounds (63 kgs) would have to drink 315 liters of water, or 83 gallons in one sitting — and would definitely die from water toxicity (and possibly many other things) before they got to that point.

In order to make her point, Wen cites a few studies she says suggest that drinking fluoridated water while pregnant “might interfere with brain development.”

But there are problems with those studies.

A JAMA Pediatrics study concluded that Canadian women who drank fluoridated water during pregnancy had children with lower IQ scores at ages 3 to 4 years old. There was no statistically significant effect on girls, but IQ scores of boys born to women with higher fluoride consumption were nearly 4.5 points lower.

That would be some really damning evidence, save for the fact that the women who participated in this study were drinking water with a higher-than-optimal fluoride level. The study itself notes that “it is unclear whether fluoride exposure during pregnancy is associated with cognitive deficits in a population receiving optimally fluoridated water.”

The next Canadian study she cites had an entirely different result — they found no effect on intelligence, but found some “poorer inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility,” but this time in girls rather than boys.

That study actually took place in Calgary in Alberta which decided to defluoridate its water supply in 2011. The city has since decided that they will refluoridate the water next year. Why?

CTV News reported:

James A. Dickinson, a professor of medicine at the University of Calgary, said the rates of dental treatments under anesthesia have risen steadily in Calgary since the loss of fluoridation.

“We are concerned about avoidable and potentially life-threatening disease, pain, suffering, misery and expense experienced especially by very young children and their families due to dental decay,” Dickinson said in an emailed statement.

“In just eight years after fluoridation ended in 2011, the need for intravenous antibiotic therapy by children to avoid death by infection rose 700 per cent at the Alberta Children’s Hospital.”

According to Dickinson, a recent University of Alberta study shows that for children under five years old, the rate of dental treatments under anesthesia doubled from 22 per 100,000 in 2010-11 to 45 per 100,000 in 2018-19.

For kids aged six to 11, the rates rose from 14 per 100,000 to 19 per 100,000.

Sounds like fun!

What else you got, Wen?

Three studies from Mexico found a link between fluoride intake during pregnancy and a significant drop in IQ, attention-deficit/hyperactivity symptoms and cognitive development problems.

These studies did not conclude that what is considered the optimal level of fluoride led to these things, they concluded that higher doses of fluoride led to them. Additionally, the last Mexican study cited found, like the first one and unlike the second, that only boys were affected. I’m sorry, how is it possible that these studies are reliable if you’ve got one saying “Oh, it only affected girls and not boys” and others saying “Oh, it only affected boys and not girls”? I’m not a scientist, but that seems a little sus.

Shall we try again?

Earlier this year, a U.S. study published in JAMA Network Open found that prenatal fluoride exposure was associated with children developing neurobehavioral problems. Researchers followed 229 women in the Los Angeles area from pregnancy through about the third year of their child’s life and linked higher amounts of fluoride by the expectant mothers to nearly double the odds of the child having problems such as anxiety and emotional instability.

In this study, the researchers compared levels of fluoride found in the urine of these women and then tracked their children to compare those with low levels to those with high levels. There were no fluoride-free participants, no tap-water-free participants — they were only comparing low levels of fluoride in the urine to higher levels of fluoride in the urine. Again, we already know that higher levels are bad. I fully concede that no one should be eating an entire tube of toothpaste, especially if pregnant.

But here is my favorite quote from that study:

Most participants (192 participants) reported fasting in the third trimester for at least 8 hours.

I’m sorry, what? They were fasting? Like, as in not eating? The thing that you are supposed to be doing “for two” at that time?

Gee, could that have had some impact on a child’s cognitive abilities? I think it might! The researchers also didn’t actually take down any data on how much tap water these women were even drinking or what they were eating (aside from the part where they were not eating at all) — because there are also foods that have fluoride in them. Spinach, potatoes, lots of other fruits and vegetables, shellfish (which pregnant women aren’t supposed to have anyway, but still). There’s also fluoride in black and green tea — and, ironically, given the whole “teeth” thing, coffee and wine.

I find it highly doubtful that Leana Wen legitimately believes, as RFK Jr. does, that we should defluoridate the water supply. She has a long history of trying to adjust her views to fit what she believes is popular opinion, like the time she tried to convince Planned Parenthood to stop pushing for abortion rights (in 2018-2019) and instead direct their energy to “general” health, including suggesting they put up webpages about asthma and the common cold — conditions rarely treated at family planning clinics. Or back when she suggested that we should all just accept superspreader events as “the new normal.”

She prides herself on being “pragmatic” and “meeting people where they are,” but I just don’t know that we should be doing that when “where they are” is alone, in a dark alley, after midnight, holding a knife.

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Now, even if I do not think these studies are terrifically convincing, I see absolutely no problem in exercising extra caution and perhaps suggesting that pregnant women be careful about consuming excessive amounts of fluoride (distilled water, which does not contain fluoride, is cheap to buy and free to make if one is so inclined). I also have no problem with people conducting further studies on this or anything else — I’m always happy to be proven wrong.

However! Until there are studies that actually prove that water fluoridation at the level that exists in the United States is toxic to us all, everyone else still needs it for tooth decay reasons. This is especially important for the kids out there whose parents cannot afford to get them proper dental care, and who certainly cannot afford general anesthesia (which is not always covered by insurance) if the kid gets an infection.

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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe talks to the Boston Globe's Beth Teitell <> about the bay leaf and whether it's necessary or not for your dish.

 For journalists, at least the good ones, the commitment has been to the craft, the truth-telling, not to the ownership. 

For forty years, I worked on the copy desks at Gannett and Tribune papers, and our commitment was always to getting the stories factually accurate and clear for the reader. We lived in tension with our masters, cynical about the self-serving pronouncements of corporate apparatchiks. (God help me, I once worked for Sam Zell!) You did the best job you could to follow your principles under the circumstances. 

This year's presidential election has posed problems not just for journalists but for readers, and readers as consumers and customers. 

Some weeks ago I canceled my subscription to The New York Times after decades as a reader (I once applied for a job there). It covered President Joe Biden with ceaseless questioning about his age and capacity while covering Donald Trump as if we were in the South, murmuring, "Well, that's just his way." The editor's mealy-mouthed defense of this blatant disproportion fails to persuade. 

When it came out that Jeff Bezos had sandbagged his editorial staff's endorsement of Harris, several members of the staff resigned in protest and a quarter of a million readers canceled their subscriptions in disgust. I doubt that Bezos's bootlicking congratulations to Trump on his election will draw many back. 

Several voices have been raised urging readers to continue to support these papers, for the sake of the journalists still there struggling to do good work. I am sympathetic. 

After thirty-six years, I remain a seven-day-a-week print subscriber to The Baltimore Sun, where I worked for thirty-four years as an editor, even though the publication has been taken over by David Smith, who imagines that he can run a newspaper, and Armstrong Williams, who imagines that he can write. They have filled the news pages with low-grade pigswill from Sinclair and FOX45 and driven off some of their best people. (One is almost nostalgic for Sam Zell.) 

I continue to subscribe in support of the remaining staff, members of the News Guild struggling to negotiate a contract that will protect their ethical and journalistic standards. They are the Resistance operating at the Vichy Sun. But every morning I think, "How much more of this can I take?"

For you, the reader, the consumer, the customer, the question comes down to this. Your subscription supports the remaining journalists struggling to do professional work in troubling circumstances. It also supports the ownership and the ownership's decisions about what to cover and how. It's not clear-cut, but you have to look at what you are getting. What do you find good in it, and is the good worth what you pay for it? What do you find bad in it, and do you want your money to support that? 

For me, I have subscribed to The Guardian. 

It is inevitable that people will claim that the losing candidate in an important election was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign, even if there’s no particular evidence for it. To follow up on Erik’s post from yesterday, in 2016 and 2024 critiques of the Democratic are inevitably combined with claims that Donald Trump is such an unusually bad candidate that it would take a particularly inept campaign and/or bad candidate to lose to him. But this is not true. As Bill James once said about the San Francisco Giants of the late 60s and 70s, Trump isn’t a typical bad candidate, but one who yokes extraordinary strengths and extraordinary weaknesses. Trump is indeed a bad, undisciplined candidate in many ways. But he has two major strengths — an ability to mobilize sporadic and first-time voters, and the ability to lie about rejecting unpopular core positions of the party (in this election, pretending to be moderate on abortion and healthcare) without alienating the party’s base. And these strengths are evident when you compare Trump to other MAGA figures downballot. Erik mentioned Jacky Rosen winning Nevada with fewer votes than Harris. We can see this in other states:

• In Michigan, Harris lost with ~2,724, 000 votes, while Elissa Slotkin won with ~2,708,000, another election with a critical number of Trump-only ballots.
• In Wisconsin, Harris got ~1, 667, 000 votes, and Baldwin got ~1,672,000. Given that Baldwin is a very strong candidate with carefully cultivated ties to local interests, that still looks pretty good for Trump.
• The one key battleground where the Democratic Senate candidate decisively outperformed was Arizona, but this proves the point in a different way. Part of it is that Gallego is a really strong candidate, IMHO a much more interesting potential presidential candidate than Kelly. But part of it is Kari Lake demonstrating once again that hardcore Trumpism without Trump tends to be a losing proposition in competitive elections, even if you can find a candidate who was a fairly well-liked local celebrity before entering politics. (Mark Robinson is obviously the most extreme example of MAGA without Trump from this cycle; the teflon isn’t transferrable.)

What this means for the post-Trump Republican Party is of course uncertain. But when I read that someone like DeSantis would have won a true landslide — I think that’s actually a highly questionable proposition. I can easily see a scenario where a candidate with less scandal baggage but more right-wing positions and less ability to mobilize low-information voters loses to this Harris campaign, and I don’t think it’s going to be easy for Republicans to find a good candidate in 2028 (especially if Trump is still around to effectively hand-pick his successor.)

The post Trumpism without Trump appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

by Gustavo Arellano photos by James Collier/Paprika Studios “Thank you for a fantastic week,” said Castro, chef and co-owner, along with her sister, Lydia, who sat across the table. “First week off the books. Many more to come.” The small, elegant spot opened in July to acclaim and crowds. On the evening I visited, it […]