The SEB mailbag is becoming quite the resource for entries as of late. This one comes from someone named David L. Ries who stumbled across an entry I wrote back in August of 2003 about the craptastic Philip Stein Teslar Watch. He apparently didn’t like the tone or the conclusion I came to in the entry and he wrote me to try and set my ass straight. Here’s his email:

From: “David L. Ries” ()
Subject: Teslar & Other stuff

In reading some of your post I was a bit taken by your bombastic attacks and in particular the idea not that you suggest no-thing as a better alternative.

Experts said that the earth was flat and the sun revolved around it and of course that was inaccurate? 

To give you some “medical” examples, doctors used to believe that what ever made one sick was in the blood, so therefore, we must bleed the individual.  We have learned that that was inaccurate and wrong.

We used to believe that fluoride was good and that is very harmful and is a bio accumulative toxic.

The ADA still insists that it is ok to poison the Municipal water supplies and in effect the processed foods are laced with fluoride which you and I are exposed to every day.

There is no way to control the dosage and this is a serious problem which some people and probably you are unaware of this

Please - Take a look at the attachment.

We used to put lead in the paint that was harmful?

How about DDT you want to drink some?  Perhaps have your kids playing in the yard with and DDT sprayed around? 

The real bias is in our lack of understanding and knowing.

Our brains are very delicate chemical and electrical plants as is our nervous system entirely electrical based on chemical reactions.

So perhaps you could illuminate all of us with something innovative that truly helps. 

Perhaps the Teslar is as you say - but at least it is good that some people are trying to innovate and yes make a living doing it. 

I do know one thing. Mr. NikolaTesla made the world a much better place. His ideas and inventions have helped humanity more than any single contribution
made by any other human on the planet.  I say that from my own point of view not as a scientific fact but I suggest anyone would be hard pressed to refute it.  The radio, the transistor, and television and virtually every single electronic thing is derivative of his not Edison’s or Marconi’s work.  (Good men mind you but not in Tesla’s league by any means)

That includes me and you and hundreds of thousands millions perhaps billons of us.

His work is still classified in many areas and to say what you are saying without really knowing is unjust’

I hope we learn one way or the other but it is true that there is an electromagnetic radiation coming out of every socket in your house and that may do something to our cells vibrations we don’t know.  Cows are being found to have problems when around high voltage wires in grazing so why presume that it doesn’t affect humans?  Scalar waves have been weaponized by the Government and is being USED in HARRP so please awaken to the possibility that something good could come of it and get with helping and building - beats destruction don’t you think?  .  And no I don’t have a teslar watch, nor do I work for the company just seemed you needed a little to ponder.

So there you go David/.

His attachment was one of the various “fluoride is toxic waste” nonsense filled pamphlets that have been floating around on the Internet for awhile now. I hadn’t realized how big the fluoride is dangerous crowd had gotten until I did a Google search and saw all the “herbal supplement” peddlers with tons of factually inaccurate webpages devoted to the evils of fluoride. Which isn’t to say that fluoride in high doses can’t be a problem, because it can, but those potential issues are known and accounted for with over 60 years of peer-reviewed research backing it up. The claims that it causes, among a number of things, cancer are just not true. David appears to be unaware of the fact that fluoride occurs naturally in water all over the world and, in some places, the process of water treatment involves reducing the amount already present to safe levels.

David goes on to touch on all the popular bullshit too many folks buy into these days including the “weaponized” scalar waves and repeats the ever popular at-one-time-experts-thought-X-was-safe-and-they-were-WRONG line of argument as though it was somehow an indictment of the scientific method. David also seems to think that Nikola Tesla had something to do with the Teslar watch. He didn’t. The makers of that craptastic watch chose that name specifically to try and profit off of Nikola’s reputation as a genius.

For those of you curious as to what David’s anti-fluoride attachment contained I’ll include in after the jump. It’s suppose to contain links to other sites explaining the claims in full, but they appear to have been lost in translation. I’m short on time at the moment, but I’ll try to revisit this later with links to counter-claims.