In a public battle revolving around the inherent obscenity of women’s breasts, Google today was ordered to give a list of 50,000 web sites to the Bush administration.

Google recently made headlines for refusing to give the U.S. government a random sampling of 1 million Internet addresses accessible through its search engine and a random sampling of 1 million search queries submitted over a one-week period. Google simultaneously created a censored version of Google for all Chinese viewers.¹

Media pundits were up in arms, confused about whether Google was a privacy rights hero or a capitulator to totalitarian repression. But the underlying issue wasn’t about privacy or free speech — it was, of course, about women’s breasts.

Bush’s demand relates to the so-called Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which requires restricted access (i.e. a login ID and password) for commercial sites not meeting “‘contemporary community standards’ … and that showed sexual acts or nudity (including female breasts).”² By getting a random sampling of Google’s search queries and sites, the administration wanted to demonstrate that the web was saturated with vile breasts, and that people under 18 — say, 17.5 — are seeing them.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “The dispute drew considerable attention from … legal scholars, who alternatively praised Google for defending Internet privacy and accused it of protecting smut peddlers” — such as those who show breasts on their site. But along with misusing the word “alternatively,” the Chronicle offers no evidence of an even balance of opinion among so-called “scholars.”

It appears both the Bush Administration and Google have lost this battle. The judge drastically reduced what Google had to provide, but Google still may be seen as giving in on important privacy issues.

Ironically, even if COPA becomes permanent, it may still have a negligible effect on internet breast availability. The ruling will only apply to web sites hosted in the U.S.

The Child Online Protection Act is part of a long Bush administration tradition of Orwellian naming, including, notably, the Patriot Act, Healthy Forests Initiative, No Child Left Behind Act, and the Clear Skies Initiative.

In a display of tragic irony, the most famous club for so-called “high IQ” individuals is founded on a deeply low IQ understanding of unintelligence.

Mensa, “the organization for smart people like you,” accepts people in the top 2% of “standardized intelligence tests.” These intelligence tests include:

• the LSAT — a test for law school admissions. Taking a pricey Kaplan test-prep course can significantly improve your score, thereby, according to Mensa, making you more intelligent in general.¹
• the GMAT — same as above, but for business graduate school.

It doesn’t take a Mensan to figure out that a business school test doesn’t measure your overall intelligence.

It may be difficult for overachieving academics to accept that logic and language skills aren’t the only types of intelligence humans possess. For instance, athletic, social, musical — and most importantly, satirical writing — abilities also come from the same piece of gray matter.

IQ tests also happen to be racist² and classist³ — which makes Mensa perhaps the largest promoter of the widely debunked “Bell Curve” IQ-model.⁴

Mensa, more than a high IQ society, is a sort of nerdy networking club for the upper-class.

Neoconservatives lost their last inkling of realism today, scientists have discovered.

The event occurred when, according to Reuters, neoconservative U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated that the U.S. “lags dangerously behind al Qaeda and other enemies in getting out information.”

According to one U.C. Berkeley sociology professor, Rumsfeld’s statement “completes [neoconservatives’] transition to complete, mind-numbing idiocy. There no longer exists a topic that neoconservatives can accurately describe.”

The Journal Nature agreed: “The U.S. routinely manipulates preferred foreign media outlets, controls foreign magazines and newspapers, and distributes flyers and leaflets abroad. It broadcasts radio propaganda into countries like Iraq. And it runs Voice of America, which broadcasts worldwide in forty-four languages.

“At best, Al Qaeda has email, instant messenger, and a few sympathetic satellite TV hosts. It has no official leader or base, and may not really exist.

“From a scientific standpoint,” Nature concluded, “it’s evident that Rumsfeld’s statement was the last straw for the sanity of neoconservatives.”

“We regret having become completely nuts-o,” Rumsfeld commented later. “Now if you’ll excuse me, we neocons have to invade more countries to stop war; and we’ve got lives to waste — to save lives.”

Racists everywhere are scrambling to find new outlets for their unbridled hate, thanks to the recent identification of a skin color gene.

Scientists at Penn State recently published their findings in the prestigious journal Science. According to Scientific American, while searching zebrafish for cancer causing genes, the scientists ended up isolating the gene that makes European skin white.”¹

Faced with the overwhelming meaninglessness of skin color, racists are now hard-pressed to justify their malice. According to one racist, “Geneticist Kieth Chang and his team have shown that African-Americans are really just like me. I’m now faced with the formidable task of exploiting and dehumanizing a different subset of the population. Are Muslims still fair game?”

Other racists were even more affected.

“The entire fabric of this great nation is built on the profitable abuse of blacks, yellows, reds, and browns — domestically and internationally,” said one Republican state Governor. “With scientific support for our blind malevolence no longer a possibility, who will staff sweatshops, clean my house, work in poultry factories, or provide critical prison labor? Our whole economy will collapse!”

Why is fluoride in toothpaste and tap water? The American Dental Association calls the practice “safe and effective … for preventing tooth decay.” Then again, the ADA answers to the same government that promotes the anti-evolution “intelligent design” theory.

Does water fluoridation prevent tooth decay?
Probably. But how much prevention, and at what price? Tooth decay rates have gone down since the US started fluoridating water back in the 50s. But according to World Health Organization data, tooth decay rates decreased similarly for European countries not using fluoridation, during roughly the same period.

Even scouring the Center for Disease Control and the American Dental Association, one is hard-pressed to find convincing evidence of fluoride’s overall benefit.

Is fluoride safe?
Not for humans. Low doses of fluoride are not akin to low doses of, say, anthrax. However, according to salon.com, “Fluoride is, after all, an extremely toxic compound that originally was sold as a bug and rat poison. A growing body of scientific research suggests that long-term fluoride consumption may cause numerous health problems, ranging from cancer and impaired brain function to brittle bones and fluorosis (the white splotches on teeth that indicate weak enamel). An estimated 22 percent of American children have some form of fluorosis.”

Why is fluoride in toothpaste and tap water?
Fluoride has been a poisonous industrial waste product for well over a century. But during WWII, military aluminum production caused the quantity of fluoride waste — and lawsuits against Big Aluminum — to skyrocket. Fluoride desperately needed a makeover, so the industry trumpeted the compound’s alleged dental benefits. In 1945, despite any credible scientific evidence, several industries persuaded the government to run a 15-year water fluoridation experiment (on humans) in Michigan. But before this experiment had neared completion, it was expanded to 87 more cities. Meanwhile, Edward Bernays, known as the father of the public relations industry, spearheaded an intense pro-fluoride propaganda campaign — repeating dental health allegations while downplaying safety issues. The toothpaste industry signed on with P&G’s Crest in 1956, and without further delay, a toxic compound had been transformed into a dental miracle. For a fascinating history of American fluoridation, see the Earth Island Journal

Is there an alternative to fluoride?
Maybe. Xylitol is a naturally occurring sugar alcohol found in birch trees and some fruits. Studies are still ongoing, but many have shown that xylitol reduces cavities by preventing bacteria from attaching to teeth. Xylitol can be well applied in chewing gum form.