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It is generally acceptable, and not plagiarism, to paraphrase material from any work with an appropriate citation for each paragraph, or for each element that is clearly attributed to the original author, with a reference listing at the end of the paper. Paraphrasing consists of different wording, wherein no more than two consecutive words are copied. The institution one is attending should provide guidance on formatting expectations, and the instructor should be consulted. Below is an abbreviated version of the American Psychological Association formatting guide I provided to graduate students in courses I taught.There are two commonly used academic formatting systems for scholarly works, to include the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, summarized below (a new edition has been subsequently published, and some formatting has been lost in uploading to Quora) and at: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/; and Modern Language Association (MLA) https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/.Writing GuidelinesThis document attempts to provide the expected standards to achieve that level of work, and identifies common errors in adherence to the assignment writing requirements as stated in the Syllabus and American Psychological Association (APA) publication format as presented in the Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (2001). It is also recommended that students review Common Errors in English (Brians, 2007). Another resource is the Guide to Grammar and Style, on the Rutgers University web site (Lynch, 2007) (http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/).The point of an academic institution being accredited is that the academic experience and academic rigor are generally equivalent among institutions. This facilitates a standard for acceptance of academic qualifications when it comes to teaching, research, and professional capabilities. “Rigor” concerns the requirement for students to conduct critical research of the literature, and demonstrate their skill through the incorporation of appropriate materials, notwithstanding the student’s location. That is not to say that allowances for extenuating circumstances should not be employed, they should. One way that is done is by offering a lenient course extension policy, allowing for the time consuming accumulation of appropriate references. But, devaluing the education provided by accepting substandard work does not serve the student well, and does not uphold the standards required for continued accreditation.Assignments will also be measured against the following criteria:1. Plagiarism results from failure to use quote marks and citations for the exact words of another and/or from failure to use citations when paraphrasing another author (i.e., summarizing, rearranging, or substituting for the words of another) (APA, 2001, sec. 8.05, Principle 6.22). See paragraphs 11-19 below for citation format, and paragraph 34 for the Reference list. The following are identified as academic dishonesty, which can result in penalties as severe as dismissal from the University:· Submitting another's work· Writing for someone else· Group effort without faculty consent· Buying a paper· Getting or giving outside help without faculty permission· Submitting the same work for different courses2. Please note that “primary sources” are an element of an exemplary paper. References like “Wikipedia,” “Psychology Today,” and “Court TV” are not primary sources, are not peer reviewed (reviewed for empirical integrity, accuracy, and authenticity), and are not appropriate references for scholarly writing (with the possible exception of use for anecdotal background information or case study information for course purposes). Primary sources consist of professional and scholarly journals and textbooks, they report empirical results, and they are peer reviewed for empirical integrity, accuracy, and authenticity. Establishing the credentials of the author is an important aspect of identifying appropriate sources. The authors of primary sources are established professionals and/or recognized authorities who present validated and verified theories. Journalists do not normally possess the professional qualifications necessary to evaluate the material they are presenting, and therefore should not be relied upon in essays for this course.3. Precision and clarity are called for by the APA. Economy of expression is necessary; avoid literary device, jargon, wordiness, anthropomorphism (human attributes attributed animals or objects), redundancy, cliché, colloquial expressions, euphemistic phrases, slang, and ambiguous comparisons. "Always" and "never" are seldom appropriate; most situations exist on a continuum. Verb tense should remain consistent throughout the essay, and past tense is appropriate for cited material. Use simple declarative sentences when possible, with simple and common words (APA, 2001, sec. 2.02-2.04). Hyperbole and superlatives are not appropriate for scholarly writing, and it is fine to “believe” something (as long as assertions are supported logically and/or empirically), but not to “feel.” Informally, "feel broadly substitutes for think or believe, but in scientific style such latitude is not acceptable" (APA, 2001, sec. 2.04).4. Passive voice may confuse the reader by de-emphasizing the actor and emphasizing the object. Clearly identify the subject, and place the subject before the verb. [Example: The bullet struck him in the head. Not: He was struck by the bullet.] [Example: Turvey (2001) has stated that the organized/disorganized dichotomy has no empirical support. Not: It has been argued the organized/disorganized dichotomy has no empirical support.] (APA, 2001, sec. 2.06).5. Unsupported generalizations and assertions will be challenged. If one has an opinion, it must be supported, and there is an expectation that reasons for belief will be articulated6. Many deficiencies result from lack of proofreading, it is a good idea to put the work aside, and then proofread before submission.7. Contractions are not used in scholarly writing.8. “It’s” is a contraction of it is, and does not show possession.9. Allot means to apportion or grant, “a lot” is an informal way to say “a great deal,” or “often,” do not use “a lot.” And, “allot” does not mean a lot.10. A series of elements must be in parallel in form, example: The results show that white becomes black and that red becomes green (APA, 2001, sec. 2.11).11. When another’s words are taken from a source (generally three or more consecutive words), quote marks must be used (see paragraph 1 re: plagiarism); and, authors, publication date (not the reprint date), and page numbers must be cited [Example: (Author, 2007, p. 1) (see paragraph 12 for more examples)]. Author and publication date must be included in a citation for each instance of paraphrased material unless it occurs within the same paragraph, then a citation with the author only is sufficient as long as it cannot be confused with other works. If a quote is used later in a paragraph where the source is cited and that is the only source, a page number citation is sufficient [e.g., (p. 5)]. The paragraph may be cited as the consecutively numbered paragraph following a particular heading (APA, 2001, sec. 3.34-3.94). Ellipses (...) are not used at the beginning of a quote, and the capitalization of first letter of the first word in a quote can be changed to match the placement in the essay. For the purposes of this course, in a four to five paragraph essay, a single citation in the first paragraph is sufficient if that is the only source. In electronic works, a paragraph number must be used if page numbers are unavailable [Example: (Holmes & Holmes, 2002, para. 3)]. Personal interviews are cited as:(Paragraph indented in total “block quote”)Supervisory Special Agent Rhonda Trahern, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), was queried concerning her position at the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (personal communication, February 12, 2008).12. Sentence punctuation follows the citation, except in block quotes (quotes of 40 or more words, see paragraph 19 below). [Examples: a. Holmes and Holmes (2002, p. 3) stated, “words.” b. Holmes and Holmes (2002) stated, “words” (p. 3). c. “Words” (Holmes & Holmes, 2002, p. 3) d. Holmes and Holmes stated, “words” (2002, p. 3). (APA, 2001, sec. 3.34 & 3.95). For a website list author or Corporate/Organizational author, no date, Section Heading, paragraph: Example (The Smoking Gun, n.d., The Telltale "Splotch," para. 2).]13. Sample citation, multiple authors: Smith, Jones, and Andrews (2004, p. 1) or (Smith, Jones, & Andrews, 2004, p. 1), after first use: Smith et al. (2004) or (Smith et al., 2004) (APA, 2001, sec. 3.95). Sample citation corporate or group author: first use: (American Psychological Association [APA], 2001), second use: (APA, 2001).14. Abbreviation for pages: pp. [(Holmes & Holmes, 2002, pp. 10-11)] (APA, 2001, sec. 3.28).15. If material is paraphrased, a citation must be used for each paragraph, unless it is sufficiently clear that the source remains the same. A page number is not required, and only a single citation is needed as long as it is clear that the source remains the same, per APA (2001, sec. 3.39). [Example: This is paraphrased (Holmes & Holmes, 2002).]16. Punctuation is placed within quote marks, unless the citation is at the end. Final sentence punctuation follows the citation enclosed in parentheses. And, an ampersand is only used within parentheses [Examples: Holmes and Holmes (2002, p.10) state, “Profiling: An art, not a science.” “Profiling: An art, not a science” (Holmes & Holmes, 2002, p. 10).] (APA, 2001, sec. 3.36 & 3.95).17. Secondary sources, authors referenced within another work, must be cited properly. References cited within a reference actually consulted (secondary sources) are not listed as a reference in the essay being written, to list a reference that has not been directly consulted in its original form may amount to academic dishonesty. [Example: Jones stated “that this …” (as cited in Smith, 2004, p. 1). The Smith source is listed as a reference.] (APA, 2001, sec. 4.16.A.22). If one is quoting material from a source, do not remove citations included in that material, but do not list that reference in the reference list unless it has been consulted directly for other areas of the essay (APA, 2001, sec. 3.40).18. When 40 or more words are taken from a source, an indented, double spaced block quote must be used, per APA (2001, sec. 3.34-3.41). In the block quote citation, the final sentence punctuation is before the citation in parentheses. Example:Students will write a scholarly paper that addresses one (or possibly a combination of two) of the COURSE LEARNING OBJECTIVES. This Research Review Paper will demonstrate the student’s ability to research and reason, incorporating the cognitive skills of analysis, synthesis, evaluation, defense of logic, and conclusions.19. Use of 12-pt Times Roman typeface is preferred (and will be used to judge the length of a paper), Courier is the only alternative (APA, 2001, sec. 5.02).20. The first line of every paragraph must be indented (APA, 2001, sec. 4.08).21. Double-spacing is used between all lines, to include between paragraphs (APA, 2001, sec. 5.03).22. The one-inch margins are justified only on the left (APA, 2001, sec. 5.04).23. Sections and sub-sections are continuous, they do not start on a new page (APA. 2001, sec. 5.17). Only the title page and reference list are separate pages.24. Headings are not labeled with numbers or letters (APA. 2001, sec. 3.30).25. Spacing & punctuation, single space after:· Commas, colons, and semicolons· End of sentence punctuation· After period in a person’s initials (e.g., D. L. Robb)· Except after internal abbreviation periods (e.g., U.S., D.C., p.m., i.e.) (APA, 2001, sec. 5.11)26. For a discussion of comma use see Common Errors in English (Brians, 2007), in general, use a comma:· Between elements and before the conjunction in a series of elements· Between nonessential clauses· After the year in dates (On January 1, 2000, a century began.) (APA, 2001, sec. 3.02)27. If what follows a colon stands as a sentence, the first word is capitalized (APA, 2001, sec. 3.12).28. A dash consists of 2 hyphens (APA, 2001, sec. 3.05), and is used to set off parenthetical material that consists of a strong interjection.29. Ellipsis points (…) are only used within quotes between quoted words where intervening words are not used. Quotes do not start or end with ellipsis points (APA, 2001, sec. 3.38).30. Quotation marks used to denote use of a word or phrase as being ironic, as being an invented expression, or as being slang should only be used in the first appearance of that word or phrase (APA, 2001, sec. 3.06) [Example: exhibited “normal” behavior].31. The first use of an acronym or abbreviation must be explained, spell out the words and place the acronym in parentheses (APA, 2001, sec. 3.21).32. Spell out numbers under 10, common fractions, and numbers that begin a sentence. Use figures for numbers that represent exact measurements, dates, rounded large numbers, numbers 10 and higher, and numbers below 10 when grouped with numbers 10 and higher· 3-year-old· 11th-grade student· Grade 6 (except: sixth grade)· in 2 years· age 5· 20 years old (APA. 2001, sec. 3.42-3.44).33. Plural numbers: 1970s, 10s, or 20s (APA, 2001, sec. 3.49)34. Percentages: 46% (APA, 2001, sec. 3.42d).35. In referencing gender, “he/she,” “his/her,” and similar combinations should be avoided, it is recommended that they, them, or their, be used (APA, 2001, sec. 2.13).36. Only use Latin abbreviations within parentheses (APA, 2001, sec. 3.24), etc. would be “and so forth,” e.g. would be “for example” (and e.g. denotes a partial list, therefore, adding “etc.” is redundant), and i.e. would be “that is.”37. The APA (2001) advised that the 10th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary is the standard source for spelling, pluralizing, hyphenating, and presumably Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (2004) is now the standard. The APA does not recommend that dictionary for definitions. Definitions for technology, science, research, and words specific to an academic discipline should be obtained from primary sources (i.e., recognized texts, peer-reviewed sources). If it is necessary to define a common word, the Collegiate Dictionary should be appropriate, although no examples come to mind.38. Reference format: alphabetical order, double space, hanging indent (APA, 2001, Chapter 4). Note that if a book has an editor, then there are other authors of the works within the book; the author of the actual article or chapter is listed in the citation and in the reference list.References (Examples) [I understand that some formatting is stripped on the Discussion Board submissions]:American Psychological Association. (2001). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (5th ed.). Washington, D.C.: Author. [corporate or group author]Author, A. A. (2000). Title of work. Location of publisher: Publisher. [Only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns are capitalized. For the location of the publisher, list city and state abbreviation unless it is a major city known for publishing (i.e., Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco).]Author, A. A., & Author, A. B. (2001). Article title [Only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns are capitalized.]. Journal Title (journal title capitalized first letter), xx, xxx-xxx [volume, (number), page number].Author, A. A., & Author, A. C. (2002). Chapter title. In A. Editor, & B. Editor (Eds.) Book Title (pp. xxx-xxx). Location: Publisher.Author, B. A. (2003a). Title of work. Location: Publisher. [Citation for source by same author in same year: (Author, 2007a, p. 1)]Author, B. A. (2003b). Title of second work. Location: Publisher.References:American Psychological Association. (2001). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (5th ed.). Washington, D.C.: Author.Brians, P. (2007). Common Errors in English. Retrieved on July 30, 2007, from http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.txtLynch, J. (2007). Guide to grammar and style. Rutgers University. Retrieved on December 31, 2007, from: Guide to Grammar and StyleRobb, D. L. (2007). Syllabus: Criminal Justice & Security, Course # CR531, Criminal Profiling. American Military University.Merriam-Webster. (2004). Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary (11th Ed.). Springfield, MA: Author.

MILLIONS of people have been severely disabled (mentally and or physically) by mercury from dental amalgams, and this continues now. A huge pack of LIES has been used to cover this up. The subject gets censored (removed) from various websites. You can see the full research into this in free Chapter 3 at Experts Catastrophe - the catastrophe of official medical charlatanism where you can also see the list of all the references cited below here.However, as Quora prefers long answers to short ones, I'll see how much I can copy in here for you. But I'll first mention that mercury has numerous different effects on brain and body, depending on (a) timing, (b) dose, (c) form of mercury, (d) genetic disposition, (e) interacting factors. My own "peer-reviewed" published evidence also indicates that (in moderation) it causes higher IQ. Furthermore, mercury poisoning expert AH Cutler independently came to the same conclusion as myself, that the current epidemic of "snowflakes" trying to shut down anyone who disagrees with them has also been caused by mercury poisoning. Incandescent anger at divergent viewpoints is one of the most characteristic symptoms of mercury poisoning. I should know because I was there myself in a former life. There is quite a lot more evidence than this answer here will fit in.Oh, and it is all very carefully formatted in the actual book chapters pdfs, whereas here it is a bit of hit and hope.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Before reading this chapter I recommend that you read the first two chapters of this book. Otherwise you may come to it with considerable misconceptions which could make for difficult and unproductive reading here.The main content of this chapter is a scientific paper. I wrote it with the intention of it being accepted in a scientific journal, and so you might find it rather turgid reading and with too many of those citations such as (Authorname, 2012) intruding into my florid prose. On the other hand one journal editor condemned it for (supposedly) appearing to be written like a newspaper article, so maybe there’s hope for non-academic readers nevertheless.You may be wondering whether you can have the competence to make any useful judgement of the soundness or credibility of this article. Wouldn’t the experts perhaps point out all manner of hidden things wrong with it? But I am providing you with a special resource here. In the next two chapters, you can see the world’s top experts telling me (off the record) the reasons why this article is such rubbish that you shouldn’t even be informed of its existence anyway. I suggest that you study those critiques and my rejoinders to them, and (as is always necessary eventually) then decide for yourself who if anyone has the more credibility. I can’t print the re-rejoinders from these experts because none have replied back. Perhaps you could write to these journals yourself to ask them why you shouldn’t be persuaded by what I said in my own replies.Scientific papers normally end with a list of the references cited. In this book I will transfer this paper’s reference list into the list at the end of the book. But this article is unusual in that it contains an appendix which itself contains three further lists of references. I will leave those in place just as they were present in the original documents contained in that appendix. Other than that, what follows after this paragraph is the most updated version of the manuscript I have sent to now eighteen journals. It is usual for scientific papers to begin with a summary called an “abstract”. This gives an overview for those who don’t already have the full text, but may be hard as a non-specialist to follow until you have read that full text, and you shouldn’t let yourself get bogged down by this one here. Also this chapter contains some graphs of disability epidemiology. If you are not already a wizard with such graphs, you may find it useful to jump forward to the section of Chapter 6 which discusses some misuses and abuses of similar sorts of graphs. Lastly, the “p<“ values stated herein indicate the probability of obtaining that result due to random chance.(NOTE: AT NO POINT HAVE I EVER SAID THAT ALL AUTISM IS CAUSED BY MERCURY OR AMALGAMS – See Chapter 7!)Autism, adult disability, and ‘workshy’: Major epidemics being caused by non-gamma-2 dental amalgamsRobin P ClarkeAbstract: It is unknown to most people that the dental amalgams which have been used as standard in recent decades, namely non-gamma-2 dental amalgams, have been substantially unlike those used before the 1970s, in that they constantly emit 20 to 50 times more mercury vapor than the older types. This is the first-ever study of health consequences of non-gamma-2. Following the changeover to non-gamma-2 amalgams, there promptly began a tenfoldish increase of autism, a tenfoldish change of ratio between late onset and early onset, a change from mainly genetic to mainly environmental, and a change from lifelong incurable to sometimes clearly recoverable. Exactly simultaneously there occurred a fourfoldish increase of claims for adult disability in the UK, with disabilities all or mostly of the nature that would be expected from chronic mercury poisoning (including mental disabilities and neurological disabilities). And similarly in the US. These timings cannot be dismissed as coincidence because there are no credible alternative explanations for the increases. Data strongly suggests that non-gamma-2 amalgams are currently by far the main cause of chronic disability in the UK, US, and other such countries, with about 10% of the UK working-age population disabled thereby.An experiment on millions of dis-informed subjectsDental amalgams in patients’ teeth constantly emit mercury vapor, and that vapor is easily measureable. This has been known for decades as indicated in at least 18 published studies (Berglund, 1993; Berglund et al., 1988, Boyer, 1988; Brune et al., 1983; Clarkson et al., 1988; Ferracane et al., 1995; Mackert, 1987; Mahler et al., 1994; Moberg, 1985a, 1985b; Olsson et al., 1989; Olsson and Bergman, 1987; Patterson et al., 1985; Psarras et al., 1994; Svare et al., 1981; Vimy and Lorscheider, 1985a, 1985b, 1990).And yet in stark contradiction of all this clearly established basic science, the UK’s Chief Dental Officer (2009) has publicly asserted, as some supposed fact, that dental amalgams do not constantly emit any mercury vapor (or in his second thoughts on being challenged, at least “not measureably”).Such mercury vapor has been recognised for centuries as one of the most toxic of substances, causing various mental, neurological and physical disabilities. For more than a hundred years prior to the 1970s, strong condemnations were regularly issued against the use of amalgam in dentistry. These warnings were consistently ignored by health authorities, and dismissed with claims that there was no real evidence of harmfulness.Much further evidence of harmfulness of dental amalgam has come to light in recent decades (Mutter, 2011; Hanson, 2004; Homme et al., 2014), not least in thousands of cases of improvement following amalgam removal which cannot be dismissed as merely anecdotal or placebo. Some relatively large-scale trials have been asserted to show amalgam safety, but they have been substantially flawed and in at least one case in reality showed harmfulness rather than safety (as explained by Mutter, 2011 and Homme et al., 2014).In the 1970s a new type of dental amalgam was introduced as the new standard, partly on the basis that it was very much more durable, with far less tendency to corroding and crumbling. This new type was called non-gamma-2.These non-gamma-2 dental amalgams constantly emit 20 to 50 times more of the toxic mercury vapor than the older types (Berglund, 1993; Boyer, 1988; Brune et al., 1983; Ferracane et al., 1995; Mahler et al., 1994; Moberg, 1985a, 1985b; Psarras et al., 1994). The amalgam constantly emitting this neurotoxic mercury vapor is located in a person’s mouth, less than two inches from their brain, and in the pathway to the lungs (where 80% is absorbed at each inhalation). Any notion that the levels of mercury vapor caused by amalgams are very low has to be put in the context of the general outdoor levels being many times lower still at around 0.002 mcg/m3.No safety testing was undertaken before or after it was introduced. Patients and the public in general have still not been informed of the change, let alone of the increased levels of mercury involved. No informed consent has been sought, and no warnings have been given of any possible harmfulness. Indeed, throughout the US it was actually made illegal for dentists to issue such warnings, and Hal Huggins and other dentists were struck off the register of practitioners for doing so.In the UK, a number of untruths were adopted by the NHS and DH such as to prevent people being diagnosed with mercury toxicity and to thereby further reduce any concern about risk. The following untruths have been identified by the author, but it is unlikely that they have been the only ones.1. Untrue assertion that “Chronic mercury poisoning is highly unlikely to present in a psychiatric setting”.2. Use of proven useless urine tests for supposed (dis-) diagnosis of chronic mercury poisoning.3. Use of proven useless blood tests for supposed (dis-) diagnosis of chronic mercury poisoning.4. Chief Dental Officer’s untrue assertion that “no mercury vapor” emits from amalgams, or alternatively “not measureably”.5. Chief Dental Officer’s untrue denial that amalgams are the main source of mercury in the body.6. NHS Chief Executive’s re-insistence on the untruth that dentists have capability for mercury diagnosis whereas doctors do not.The existence of these untruths is authenticated via my Freedom of Information requests as documented partly in an Appendix hereto and more fully via dental mercury falsehoodsDates of introduction and usageNon-gamma-2 amalgams are very much more durable than the previous types. Consequently, declining rates of amalgam install-ation would conceal an increase of prevalence of the amalgams in patients’ mouths. And it is here expected that the key variable would be that rising prevalence rather than the declining rate of installations and replacements.A number of US patents for non-gamma-2 were granted in the mid-1970s. The famous US dentist Hal Huggins states that the changeover to “high copper”, i.e. non-gamma-2, occurred in 1976. In 1986 the ISO standard was changed retrospectively to incorporate them. The non-gamma-2 amalgams took over in the period 1975-79 in Denmark (Hansen et al., 1993). In Germany the use of the earlier types was banned in 1992, making the non-gamma-2 the only option. And according to the manufacturer’s product sheet, Dispersalloy is the most widely used amalgam with over 25 years of proven performance, i.e., since before 1979, but perhaps after their 1974 patent no. 3841860.I have been unable to obtain any numerical data on usage or total prevalence of non-gamma-2 in people’s mouths. The DH have told me they have no such records. And NHS dental records have not recorded the types of amalgam used. It is unlikely that any better information is available in other countries. But we can very reasonably assume that the overall prevalence of non-gamma-2 will have gradually, progressively increased in the decades following its introduction.My epidemiological investigationsHaving become aware of the changeover to non-gamma-2 amalgams, I decided to look to see if there might be epidemiological evidence of any consequences. It appears that no-one has ever done this before.In respect of the following accounts it is important to understand that I have not cherry-picked selected data to prove any point, but instead have used all the best data readily available to me.To avoid undue length here, the reader is referred to consult prior reviews of substantial important other data pointing to similar conclusions as those here, including Hanson (2004), Mutter (2011), Geier et al. (2010), Homme et al. (2014), and others not specifically cited..Is mercury involved in causation of autism?Before presenting the epidemiological findings it will be useful to first show the context of existing evidence from clinical studies on this question.A number of reviews have suggested there is persuasive evidence that mercury is importantly involved in causing of autism (Geier et al., 2010; Bernard et al., 2001; DeSoto and Hitlan, 2010; Kern et al., 2012). And yet the evidence can be shown to be far more decisive than any of these suggest, and indeed beyond all reasonable doubt.In any combinatory review of studies it is necessary firstly to rule out those which lack a sound rationale. A number of studies have used blood mercury or urine mercury as criterion measures, and yet it has been known for decades that these lack merit as indicators of chronic mercury toxicity. Indeed, the most prominent such study, Hertz-Picciotto et al. (2010), stated in its second-last sentence that: “This report did not address the role of prenatal or early-life Hg exposure in the etiology of autism” [i.e., the study could not provide any evidence against causation by mercury].Another danger in meta-reviewing of studies is the merging together of data which should be kept separate. In respect of mercury in autistics’ hair, the most enlightening study is that of Majewska et al. (2010). They found that in younger children autism was associated with markedly decreased hair mercury (p<0.01), whereas in older children autism was associated with markedly increased hair mercury (p<0.01). If they had just lumped all their results together they would have got an entirely unwarranted “no difference” non-result instead. Viewed in the light of Majewska et al, all or most of the other hair mercury studies fall into a coherent pattern. There are several which have smudged together the different ages and therefrom invalidly declared non-results. Meanwhile others strongly reinforce the notion that there are real effects.Holmes et al. (2003) obtained an eightfold difference of mercury in hair, with significance level of 1 in 250,000 (p<0.000004). Some commenters dismiss that study on a basis that it was done by opponents of mercury, and “therefore” their results may have been biased or fraudulent. But one would have expected any bias or fraud to result in a finding that hair mercury was increased in autistics, as that would have been in accordance with the standard rationale for diagnosing toxin exposure from increased hair measurements. They found instead 8﷓fold reduced levels, which strongly suggests that they were instead acting competently and honestly. Their rational-ising notion of paradoxical reductions of measurements in mercury toxic subjects has since been supported by much other evidence that mercury sometimes impairs its own excretion.A study in India (Lakhshmi Priya and Geetha, 2010) found 8-fold increased hair mercury (p<0.001). Another in Kuwait (Fido and Al-Saad, 2005) found 15-fold increased hair mercury (p<0.001).Bradstreet et al. (2003) found that a challenge test with the chelating agent DMSA caused a release of mercury 3.15 times greater in autistic cases than in controls (p<0.0002). That is a 1 in 5000 probability that that excess mercury was just a fluke.The probability of just these results listed above being all due to mere chance is 1/5000 x 1/250000 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/1000 x 1/1000, that is one in 12,500,000,000,000,000,000, vastly beyond the standard of proof ever required in any criminal prosecution.And far more than one negative result is required to call into question one significantly positive result. There are far more ways of making a “negative” car that does not move than of making a “positive” one that does. I and thousands of others have lived in the UK for many years and never seen the Queen in all that time, and yet that does not constitute significant grounds for dismissing the testimony of those who claim she has existed. If there were in reality no mercury-autism connection there should be a huge pile of “no-difference-found” results among which these high-significance results would be a small minority. But there is no such pile of null results to speak against the mercury-autism connection.One could seek to interpret all those results with a notion that there could be an unknown factor which both causes autism and also harmlessly causes mercury to vary in hair and other tissues. But that notion is brought into question by the extensive commonalities between autism and mercury toxification (Kern et al., 2012). And it is completely demolished by the observations of the Autism Research Institute which has for decades been surveying the effectiveness of many potential treatments for autism. Of more than 80 treatments tested, the ARI has found that one of the most effective has been removal of mercury by careful chelation. And Blaucok-Busch et al. (2012) obtained highly-significant behavioral improvements even with the rather poor Hg chelator DMSA (p<0.001; p<0.001; p<0.001).Meanwhile, three studies have been promoted as supposedly disproving any mercury-autism thesis. The study by Ip et al. (2004) was shown to be riddled with arithmetical errors, and in reality indicated that there was indeed a mercury connection (DeSoto and Hitlan, 2010). Likewise Soden et al. (2007) actually proved the opposite (DeSoto and Hitlan, 2010). And Hertz-Picciotto et al. (2010) stated in their own second-last sentence that their study did not address causation of autism by prenatal or early-life mercury exposure. Such falsely proclaimed studies are all that stands in supposed defiance of that astronomically large number calculated above. There is even more evidence that merits mention here but it would be superfluous. We can resolutely conclude that mercury is now a major cause of autism. [Updates: Autism association with prenatal SSRI use (Harrington et al., 2014) = amalgam causes both depression of mother and autism of baby. Widespread reports of seizures in 1/3 of autistics = perinatal mercury causes both autism and seizures (Szasz et al., 2002; Klinghardt, 1998).]Increased autism?In academic papers and elsewhere, certain myths about autism are constantly portrayed as self-evident truths, so they must be addressed here. Firstly, the human race does not divide into those “with” autism and those “without” it, or those “on the spectrum” and those “not on the spectrum”. Rather, there is a continuum of variation in the extent to which individuals are more or less autistic (in varying ways). Secondly, there is no scientific basis for a distinction between autism and Asperger’s. It was merely a historical accident that Kanner and Asperger made simultaneous rediscoveries of the syndrome described by JL Down in 1887. Thirdly, there is no scientific basis for the routine references to autism as a “disorder”. Autism can be severely disabling, is often terribly distressing, and may often be a consequence of a disorder (such as maternal infection), but rather than a disorder it is properly considered to be just atypicality (as is genius). [This is now more fully discussed in Chapter 2.]Some researchers with decades of direct experience, such as Bernard Rimland and Lisa Blakemore-Brown, have been of the view that there has been a substantial increase of autistic behaviors, and not just increase of diagnoses.[Update for this book: Significant further discussion of the increase “controversy” is contained in Chapter 2 in the section “The autism increase controversy” (page 68), just before the appendix to that chapter, and also majorly in Chapter 12 and pages 188-189.]The NHS has published a report claiming to show that there has not been any increase, by supposedly showing the prevalence of autism among older adults to be the same as in children (Brugha, 2011). The report detailed the elaborate measures taken to ensure reliability of the autism assessments. And yet it gave no details at all of any measures taken to ensure the validity, that is the (infinitely more important) comparability of the diagnostic procedures as applied to adults relative to applied to children. The reason there were no such details is because there was no way of establishing such validity. And in absence thereof, such a study proves nothing about changing prevalence of autism. I myself have direct knowledge of two older persons given baseless diagnoses of autism by this same NHS that proclaims as expertise the untruths listed on a preceding page here.The Autism Research Institute has a uniquely extensive historical database of cases. Figure 1 [here 3.1] is my re-plot of a graph published by the Autism Research Institute of its own records. Figure 2 shows my extraction from Figure 1 of the time-series of case ratios between late and early onset. Before 1980, onset at birth was twice as frequent as onset in the second year (i.e. regressive autism), whereas after 1990 the later onset rose to become five times more frequent than the onset at birth. The switch-over began at the end of the 1970s and was well under way by 1990. It closely related with the apparent increase of autism illustrated in Figure 3 and elsewhere. Figure 3 shows the data from the California DDS 2003 report (2003), with the earlier 1999 report (1999) (1998 data) re-calculated to the same basis.[Note added to book chapter version: Figure 3 also shows what mathematicians call an exponential increase curve; basically it gets increasingly steeper exactly in proportion to the higher it gets.](Please see free Chapter 3 at Experts Catastrophe - the catastrophe of official medical charlatanism for the graphs, until such time as I can sort out converting them to a form that will load to here. These four graphs are at pages 86 and 87. Also note the free tutorial about use and misuse of such graphs in free Chapter 6.)Fig. 3.1. “U.S. Cases: Autistic children who behaved normally before 18 months vs. those with no normal period.” From Rimland (2000) (replotted)Fig. 3.2. Data from Figure 1 here used to show the changing ratio of cases in respect of age-of-onset. A further datum is from Mrozek-Budzyn et al. (2009) p.109.Fig. 3.3. Autism enrolment in California.Fig. 3.4. Concurrence of California data of Figure 3.3 with total autism implied in Figure 3.2 if onset at birth is assumed to have constant incidence of one unit.In Figure 4 I have added together the two series of Figure 2 such as to give a nominal “total autism” curve based on an assumption that onset at birth has had constant prevalence during those years, and that early onset cases plus late onset cases equals total autism. Figure 4 shows that the increase curves of Figure 3 peculiarly coincided in time with the ratio-change curve of Figure 2. This enables substantial confidence that the conceptually independent Figures 2 and 3 are tracking exactly the same causal phenomenon.The late-onset, regressive autism is much more difficult to overlook than the at-birth autism, as parents are baffled by the regression of their children. Any under-awareness would not have been concentrated on those late-onset cases. And yet it is those which have increased about tenfold, not the more overlookable early-onset. So this data argues against interpretation in terms of mere changing of awareness or diagnostic thresholds. And it cannot be dismissed as due to demise of the diagnosis of “childhood schizophrenia”, because ARI’s survey questionnaire asked about age of onset rather than presumed about it, and indeed the ARI was neutrally called the “Institute for Child Behavior Research” until 1991.These curves strongly suggest that the autism increase was caused by something that started having an effect on children around the end of the 1970s and also caused a tenfold change of ratio of late-onset cases relative to early onset.An overview of autism trends in the US and UK found essent-ially the same trends of increase in both areas and in respect of both autism and “autism spectrum disorders” (Blaxill, 2004). Information about other capitalist countries has been less systematic, but generally similar trends appear to prevail. In respect of Sweden, Gillberg’s three prevalence studies in Gothenburg (Stehr-Green et al., 2003) could have been plotted into Figure 3, but they would have collided impressively with the California data. The data of Denmark is rich in potential for confusion but the careful analysis by Goldman and Yazbak (2004) shows an increase from at least about 1987 onwards. Likewise, the general observation in the other countries is that there has been an increase in recent decades. And the age-of-onset data in Figure 2 follows the same pattern too. (The notion of Bernard (2003) that autism decreased in Denmark after removal of mercury from vaccines is misfounded for various reasons partly explained by Hviid (2004).)So there is here a simple thing to be explained, seemingly beginning around the end of the 1970s.In 1993 there was published “A theory of general impairment of gene-expression manifesting as autism” (Clarke, 1993) (the antiinnatia theory). It remains unchallenged in reasoning and evidence, and unrivalled as the only comprehensive fully satisfact-ory explanation of the supposed mystery of autism. Martha Herbert has recently been arguing that autism is not a brain/behavior condition but rather “whole body”, and also not essentially genetic or developmental and fixed. But the antiinnatia theory already embodied all those notions decades ago.The theory also specified circumstances in which autism would change from a mainly genetic condition to a mainly environmental one. Autism has now indeed markedly changed to a mainly environmental causation (Hallmayer et al., 2011).The 1993 paper made no mention of mercury or an increase of autism (which was only vaguely becoming apparent at the time of writing it). But it did explicitly explain why molecules which randomly, dose-dependently bind to DNA and thereby reduce gene-expression would thereby cause autism. Mercury is now known to do exactly that binding and reducing at levels far below those producing other toxic effects (Ariza et al., 1994; Goyer, 1991; Rodgers et al., 2001; Walter and Luck, 1977).A preceding section here has shown the decisive recent evid-ence of major involvement of mercury in many autistic cases. And thimerosal in vaccines cannot have been a main source of that mercury, for reasons explained in [Chapter 6]. So the question arises of:where else is the source of the mercury that is now so strongly associated with most autism.An update review of the antiinnatia theory was written in 2004-2006, and showed confirmation of various peculiar predictions [Update: including Clarke (2015)], and explained the amalgam-autism causation more fully. But almost all medical researchers have a false presumption about theories, whereby “skepticism” (in reality a prejudice against new ideas) is supposedly a characteristic of intellectual superiority (Eysenck, 1995). And “peer review” systems block from effective publication any ideas that are more than routinely original (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1992).Because readers are deprived of that update review I will outline here just a few of its important points. (1) Many mothers keep their infants close by at all times, and many people keep their homes very unventilated, even installing draught-proofing. The new prediction that autism would be associated with lack of ventilation (of the mercury vapor breathed out by parents or carers then inhaled by infants) has already found significant accidental confirmation (Waldman et al., 2008). (2) The antiinnatia theory points to causation not so much like an overdose “hammer-blow” but rather more like a sustained suppression of genetic data, and thus the every-day inhalation of mercury would be much more impactful than occasional large injections. (3) The tenfold change to predominantly later onset is explained by gradual accumulation when infants regularly inhale the vapor. (4) Any persons who dismiss the antiinnatia theory must logically be supporting one of a handful of utterly absurd alternatives, and this author requests that such “skeptics” kindly state which ones they find so credible: (i) “anti-innatia factors don’t tend to produce biological advantageousness”; (ii) “they don’t exist anyway despite their experimental demon-stration” (genuine flat-earthers will prefer that one); (iii) “they would not tend to become excessive”; (iv) “excess would not manifest as autism”.Some studies have found positive associations between maternal dental amalgams and autism (Holmes et al., 2003; Geier et al., 2009). There have also been some seemingly conflicting findings, such as Adams et al. (2008) compared to Holmes et al. (2003). But rather than concluding from these that the whole mercury or amalgam theories are unsound, or that there has been falsification or error, we may better understand them as reflecting a fact that autism is far from being simply “a novel form of mercury poisoning”, and instead other factors impact in ways not yet known. Even the causation of autism by amalgam vapor alone would be complicated by variables of ventilation, parental habits, galvanic contacts in the mouth, genetics and epigenetics, intake of protective selenium, and other intakes and exposures. That complexity could explain why small cross-sectional studies have given inconsistent results. And meanwhile the time-series data shown in the charts here reflects varying levels of non-gamma-2 applied to whole populations, such that all those confounding variables are evened out, which explains why they show a clear association with the growing prevalence of the non-gamma-2 in adults’ mouths.Increased adult disability?In 2010 I heard on BBC Radio a claim by a government minister that “There certainly hasn’t been a threefold increase of disability”. This suggested to me that perhaps there had indeed been an increase of adult disabilities, threefold or even greater.On investigating this possibility, the most extensive data I could obtain was a chart on page 9 of pathways-presentation.pdf, (DWP, no date a) and online data timeseries (DWP, no date b) from the DWP’s website.(Please see these graphs at page 91 of free Chapter 3 at www.pseudoexpertise.com)Figure 3.5. Autism enrolments (DDS) in California compared with UK adult invalidity benefits claims granted (excluding short-term lower-rate cases and excluding claims denied for policy reasons of “caseload growth now controlled”)Figure 3.6. Autism enrolments under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)I then took the Figure 4 chart from my (long-obstructed) autism theory update review draft, and removed my data-series derived from age-of-onset ratio-change, leaving only the two data-series of autism enrolment in California. I then added in the data of granted invalidity benefits from the DWP’s chart. I used only zero-baselines, so as to not to misuse the statistics to create artificial alignments. All I did was set the righthand scale such that the first datum of the invalidity benefits data was level with the autism data at that same year, 1979.This showed a close relationship of timing between the two, as shown in Figure 5 here.At this point it will be useful to show you a second chart of the autism increase, this time a different administrative database (IDEA rather than DDS) and covering the whole US, namely Figure 6. This is a more complex graph, with each data-series representing a different age at recording of the cases.With the increasing of age, fewer children from any particular birth-year cohort remain undiagnosed. So in respect of each year on Figure 6, the highest datum is the most accurate estimate to date of the real underlying level. And the falling off at the top of the latest years is due to diagnoses not yet being made.The first important thing that this chart of IDEA data shows is that the increase has been a remarkably uniform exponential sort of curve, with just a moderate decrease of slope after 1992. The other curves, from the California DDS data, can be understood as showing what would be a similarly uniform exponential, but distorted by noticeable “noise” due to smaller samples or mislaid records.Another important thing to understand about all these curves is that we are not here counting clear distinct things like apples or oranges. The number of people granted invalidity benefits in a particular year is a precisely-known integer, but the underlying number of people who were more or less “disabled” is necessarily a debatable, fuzzy one. Likewise with the autism numbers, and this goes some way to explaining why these two autism databases (DDS and IDEA) show significant discrepancies, most obviously in the starting levels before the increase. So we must understand that none of these curves document validly exact measurements of the underlying pathologies in their vertical scales. And therefore we should not be looking for particularly close alignments in the vertical scales; and if we do find such precision it should be considered largely a fluke. Also there is a lack of numerical data on usage or total prevalence of non-gamma-2 in people’s mouths.But these charts nevertheless do give an accurate document-ation on the horizontal scale, of the timing of the increases and of the form of the increases (i.e. not one big jump over a couple of years). And the four series (DDS, IDEA, onset ratio, and invalidity claims) show closely similar timing, of an increase that was gently starting off just before 1980, and then accelerating rapidly through the 1980s and well into the 1990s.Meanwhile, there is also a weight of other facts attesting to the reality of an increase of invalidity.The symptoms of chronic mercury vapor poisoning have been known for centuries, and include most especially all manner of mental and neurological disturbances, but also a variety of other symptoms. The wide variability of the presentation is easily under-stood in terms of the effects of mercury as a general anti-anti-oxidant, and as an antagonist to zinc thereby disrupting hundreds of enzymes, and also binding to the body’s own proteins thereby causing the immune system to identify them as alien and thereby producing auto-immune reactions.Page 14 of pathways-presentation.pdf gives an analysis of diagnoses of the claimants. It shows that 83% of cases are accounted for by those categories especially readily attributable to amalgam illness:Mental disorder 35%Nervous system 10%Musculo-skeletal* 22%Others** 16%(* Which could be mostly fibromyalgia, a modern “mystery” illness commonly sharing features of typical amalgam illness and often cured by amalgam removal.)(** An all-too-likely official label for cases of the amalgam illness which officially does not exist.)[Book update: In David Brownstein’s book Overcoming thyroid disorders, he quotes Dr Derry saying: “Chronic fatigue and fibro-myalgia were non-existent before 1980. So where did these two new diseases come from?” Errm.... no idea, please tell me, folks.]Further evidence supports the reality of the increase. I web-searched for the minister’s words “been a three-fold increase in disability” and found instead that in Finland 1987-1994 there was a threefold increase of disability pensions granted in respect of affective disorders (mainly depression) (Salminen et al., 1997), which is one of the most common effects of amalgam illness.And the disability claimants are now being regularly character-ised by ministers and propagandists as “workshy”, “bogus”, or merely making a “lifestyle choice” of fraudulent leisure.In 2010, the government minister Mark Harper declared on BBC Any Questions that “There are definitely some people in this country—and everyone in every community knows who they are—who are perfectly able to work, and don’t.” and then reiterated with “Everybody knows them, able-bodied people with no barriers to work who choose not to.”Another government minister, George Osborne, asserted that there were a sizeable number for whom claiming disability was a “lifestyle choice”.Meanwhile we are also being told that immigrants are subst-antially more hardworking than the natives of the UK, who appear by contrast to be “workshy”. And indeed employers confirm such a difference.In the real world of disability, the effects of adult mercury vapor poisoning can be far from obvious to “everyone in every community”. As stated in the book Amalgam Illness by Andrew Hall Cutler, at page 78, “Extremely poisoned patients do not look as sick as they are …. they make adequate adrenaline during the stressful time and perform. Then they collapse for a long time while nobody is around.” And at page 13, “One very important note: the patient looks a lot healthier than he is…..It is important to keep in mind that the patient may look well during appointments and yet be unable to conduct day-to-day activities, as well as be experiencing great discomfort on an ongoing basis.”And note also the following 1926 account by the famous chemist Alfred Stock of his own mercury vapor poisoning. Note how easily it could be “known” to be “workshy” were it not that the author was a notable professor.“Mental weariness and exhaustion, lack of inclination and ability to perform any, particularly mental, work, and increased need for sleep. …. My memory, which had previously been excellent, left more and more to be desired and became worse and worse until, two years ago, I suffered from nearly complete memory loss….. I forgot the content of the book or theater play I had just read or seen as well as my own work, which had been published. ….. Obstacles, which formerly I would have overlooked smilingly (and am overlooking again today), seemed insurmountable. Scientific work caused great effort. I forced myself to go to the laboratory without being able to get anything useful accomplished in spite of all efforts. Thought came laboriously and pedantically. I had to deny myself working on solutions to questions beyond the nearest tasks at hand. The lecture that used to be a pleasure became a torture. The preparations for a lecture, the writing of a dissertation, or merely a simple letter caused unending effort in styling the material and wrestling with the language.” (translated by Birgit Calhoun)(Stock, 1926)You can see from all the above that the characteristics ascribed to the allegedly bogus claimants are characteristics of mercury poisoning. With this understanding we can even account for the peculiar observations that workers from Eastern Europe and from more distant countries are found to be more “hardworking” than the native British, who by contrast are accused of being “workshy”. In fact a whole peculiar myth about normal human nature has been deployed here. Any normal healthy person, yourself for instance, would positively want to go out and do things rather than just lie in bed or slump in front of the tv all day every day. The normal healthy person would experience the latter prospect as more like a form of imprisonment than as an agreeable “lifestyle choice”.[[ Update for this book: Here are the words of Frank Field MP speaking on BBC Any Questions (Field, 2012):“London’s got the second highest youth unemployment, and yet it is the mecca for immigrants to come in and work. Now why is it that our schools produce people who cannot work or don’t work, as opposed to other people who at the very same time have work as part of their dna and the best thing in the world they want to do is to actually work? (loud applause).” [He then answers in terms of lazy racist white people, presumably with inferior dna, before continuing....]“It doesn’t take much money to get the kids to school on time, washed, clothed, breakfasted, and to school on time, and it is worrying that something is happening here...” [Indeed, and my own inability to get to the grammar school on time had nothing to do with my family’s shortage of money either.]And here are words about chronic fatigue syndrome from the book Plague (Heckenlively & Mikovits, 2014):“If this had been going on in the fifties and sixties, even if we had discarded it as psychiatric, it would have been written about, and [yet] it’s not in the literature.” ..... “How could we have possibly missed this disease for all these years?”. ....“....by the mid-1980s, distressed doctors and desperate patients had turned the disease into the top category of inquiry at both the CDC and public health departments ....”“Aided by a passive lay press, government scientists have sought to dismiss the disease by labeling sufferers with all manner of deficiencies and malevolent motives. That list has included malingering and cheating welfare systems, .... or people who [had] read about the disease and “wanted to have it”.“By 2009.... patients were denied not merely medical care, payouts on disability claims, and the emotional support that might have been forthcoming from family and friends had they suffered from a “real” disease,..... If they were children, they were denied educations ....” [like don’t I know myself, and see Chapter 8 here] ]]And furthermore, in reality almost all people are desperate to avoid becoming categorised as disabled, going to near-psychotic lengths of denial in the opposite direction. Few people would be pleased to be in any social context, with no better answer to a common question than: “I’ve been chronically disabled for the past five years (mentally rather than physically of course).” Virtually no-one in any society treats mentally disabled people as even near to being social or intellectual equals of themselves (in terms of marriage or educational opportunities for instance) (notwithstanding their pretentions to otherwise).An even greater catastrophe?Notably in line with the UK data, recipients of disability benefits in the US (SSI/SSDI) also increased more than twofold between 1987 and 2007.Here are some further facts. Figure 5 indicates a levelling off at 2.5 million claimants from 1995 onwards. But this must be put in the context of the words of the DWP document those figures came from. It was an internal discussion document about the “Personal Capability Assessment”, and its page 11 was headed “Caseload growth now controlled”. Translating those words from Officialese, they mean that there has been political resistance to the growth of disability claims, and that many thousands of persons genuinely disabled by DH recklessness have been denied the disability benefits they needed for survival, and that if the graph had reflected the real increase of disability it would not have levelled off, but instead would probably have surpassed more like 4 million by 2000 (which is about 10% of the UK’s working-age population). [Update August 2015: “Statistics [reluctantly] released by the DWP on Thursday revealed that 2,380 people died between December 2011 and February 2014 within 14 days of being taken off Employment and Support Allowance because a Work Capability Assessment had con-cluded they were able to work.” (Butler, 2015).][Update November 2015: 590 additional suicides linked to WCA reassessments (Barr et al., 2015; Benefits and Work, 2015).]And yet more. Four of the most characteristic symptoms of chronic mercury vapor poisoning are fatigue, depression, sleep disturbances, and poor memory. And surveys in recent years have found that now a gigantic proportion of the NON-claimant pop-ulation have these very symptoms, as follows.Depression:A survey of 2000 women and girls in England and Wales found 63% had been affected by mental health problems, having “a devastating impact on their lives”, and “48% experiencing mental health problems had stayed in bed or not left the house for a long period as a result” (Platform 51, 2011). Meanwhile, Colin Walker of Mind said his organisation’s research showed men and women experienced mental health problems such as depression and anxiety in roughly equal numbers (Hill, 2011).Insomnia:A report from the Mental Health Foundation (2011) states: “Only 38% of survey respondents (2522 people) were classified as ‘good sleepers’, whilst 36% were classified as possibly having chronic insomnia (2414 people). …. Other estimates of insomnia have put the total figure at around 30% of adults, …. although rates depend upon the criteria used to define it. Of the people reporting insomnia in the survey, over 30% have had insomnia for 2–5 years, and over 25% for over 11 years (figure 4).”The figure 4 in question then shows a distinctly bimodal distribution, in which the larger, longer-term, mode can be reasonably attributed to the effects of the dental amalgam toxicity.Fatigue:In a survey by Pharmaton (2010) in the UK, 24% said they are mentally or physically exhausted every day, 45% say they miss socialising due to tiredness, and 60% of the young are too tired to socialise, compared to 40% in 2002. And that is in line with the widespread experience that immigrants from less-developed countr-ies are substantially more “hardworking” than those who have grown up in the UK, who are conversely “workshy” as discussed on a preceding page here.Memory:Almost everyone nowadays wishes they had “better” memory, by which they mean more remembering rather than less. And yet contrary to the common assumption, memory is not something which natural selection would always be pressuring for more of (such as health or beauty). On the contrary, some persons (e.g. Solomon Shereschevsky) have had more memory than was actually useful for them. And history attests to the powerful memorising abilities of our ancestors.(This chapter continues on the next page.)Update 1All the preceding evidence here was suggesting to me an obvious further question, namely whether the original introduction of amalgams in the 19th century had caused an earlier increase of mental disabilities to the baselines shown here. Subsequent to my writing all the preceding, I learnt of the detailed historical review by Torrey & Miller (2002) of what was then called “insanity”, and the time-series graphs therein (at pages 94, 152, 188, 271, and frontispiece). In Figure 7 here I have re-plotted their data along with dates relating to the introduction of amalgam. Their book makes no mention of amalgam, or dentistry, nor of mercury as a possible cause of that increased morbidity. And yet their graphs show that rates of mental disability steadily increased from the original introduction of amalgams till a century later, by fourteenfold in Ireland and Canada, elevenfold in the US, and fivefold in the UK. These increases occurred in the context of vociferous contemporary condemnations of the use of amalgam due to its causing of mercury toxicity disabilities. The ASDS disbanded and the ADA replaced it because too many dentists preferred making quick profits from poisoning their patients with fillings deceitfully referred to as “silver”.Two curious observations on Figure 7. Firstly, the starting level being much higher in England/Wales, which could be because England was the first industrialised country, and with the main fuel both in houses and factories being mercury-emitting coal, besides which mercury was used for other purposes (such as hat-making). And indeed there is much reference in Torrey & Miller to insanity having been considered “the English disease”.Secondly, the ending level being much higher in Ireland, which could be because Ireland gets high rainfall from the Gulf Stream and consequently people are much more indoors and hence breathing in the amalgam mercury (as per my citation of Waldman et al earlier here). These two reality-harmonious observations suggest that these statistics reflect real increases rather than what some might construe as just some speculated mysterious spontaneous increase of awareness of what was then called insanity.And the Preface of their book states: “It has now been almost thirty years since one of us—E. Fuller Torrey—submitted a paper for publication suggesting that epidemic insanity was a recent phenomenon. .... The paper was summarily rejected by all journals .... and it was never published.... “.And then even my own copy of their extraordinary book had come from being dismissed from a library in Illinois.(Please see page 99 of free Chapter 3 at Experts Catastrophe - the catastrophe of official medical charlatanism for this next graph:)Figure 3.7. Insane persons in relation to the history of amalgams[Update 2 (added to this book chapter, August 2015)[missed out here, see book chapter for full].Conclusions and PredictionsIt is important to bear in mind here the further supporting data reviewed by Mutter (2011), Hanson (2004), Geier et al (2010), Homme et al (2014), and others.There are roughly two alternative viewpoints which may be reached from the data presented here. On the one hand there is a notion which entails that:(1) The heavy involvement of mercury in modern autism has nothing to do with the largest source of mercury input but instead is due to some other mysterious source or process.(2) And these graphs and other observations are mere coincid-ences in time.(3a) And either some mysterious unknown substance caused all these disabilities just so as to resemble the mercury symptoms that Mutter, Hanson, Geier, etc., have long been predicting anyway on entirely different evidence, and just happened to coincide at the right time to neatly confuse the author.(3b) Or there has been either a huge moral degeneration into “workshy” or else millions of people have enthusiastically embraced a “lifestyle choice” of living like a prisoner combined with the social leper dis-status of being mentally disabled, and furthermore these shirkers by some fluke just happened to be getting diagnosed with mercury symptoms even though they knew nothing about mercury toxicity, and by further impressive fluke so closely coincided with the increases of autism diagnoses and non-gamma-2 prevalence. And these “workshy” millions are somehow descendants of the people who hand-built the huge medieval cathedrals in a cold wet small island and then went on to create the largest empire (of hardworking foreigners) in history.(4) And a many-fold increase of mercury burden has not had any harmful effects on the millions thus burdened.(5) And the change of autism from life-long genetic to environmental and recoverable is just another of these mysteries.(6) And those gross untruths from the NHS just happened by fluke to all relate to preventing people getting diagnosed with mercury poisoning (two evidence-defying pseudo-tests, the “birds are highly unlikely to have wings” nonsense, the “see a dentist instead” - “see a doctor instead” nonsense, the review of my non-dental problems complaint exclusively by a dental panel with no toxicological or neurological expertise, the NHS’s own pseudo-study to pretend away the autism increase, and the Chief Dental Officer’s evidence-defying insistence that no mercury vapor comes off anyway).(7) And merely by yet another fluke Torrey’s graphs confirmed my suspicion that there would have been a previous increase of mental disabilities following the original introduction of amalgam 150 years earlier.(8) And merely by yet another fluke there is that observation that most mental disorders start in the 12-25 age-range.Alternatively there is a notion that non-gamma-2 amalgam has been the main cause of a tenfoldish increase of autism and a fourfoldish increase of adult disability including so-called “workshy”. It is the view of this author that this latter interpretation of the data strains credibility very much less than the former. It is hardly a surprising discovery given what Mutter, Hanson, and others have previously predicted on entirely different evidence already.And likewise the data of an increase in the 19th century cannot be lightly dismissed as “merely” coincidence. Some such increase was to be suspected by inference from the later non-gamma-2 data; it is scientifically explainable in terms of known mercury toxicity; and indeed it was very much pre-warned of already by ASDS members 170 years ago. And the ADA then adopted the propaganda language of “silver amalgams” by way of the ongoing cover-up. And I obtained that data from a very detailed review book which did not even mention dental or amalgam, so can hardly be dismissed as some sort of cherry-picking.Editors of putatively scientific medical journals have a duty to ensure that the public is not being kept unaware of evidence of possible serious harm from standard medical practices. It is a serious breach of ethics for such evidence as contained here to be refused publication other than for rigorously justified reasons. If there really are any serious faults in the case presented here, they should be openly published in the scientific literature rather than used as mere excuses to prevent the evidence being raised in the first place.It is here predicted that these increases will tend to correlate together in comparisons between different nations, due to the common causality. It is predicted that these epidemics will only be reversed by reduction of prevalence of non-gamma-2 in victims’ mouths. And meanwhile the risk of autistic disability can be reduced by ensuring adequate ventilation (in practice with a through draught at breathing-level).Appendix: Four Freedom of Information requestsPlease see the actual free book Chapter 3 for continuation - at Experts Catastrophe - the catastrophe of official medical charlatanismAND this is NOT the end of all the evidence by any means. Dental mercury poisoning is the greatest medical catastrophe in history and is the reason why I and you have been and still are constantly LIED to about it. It is almost impossible to get anything published about the subject. Nothing has EVER been published about the catastrophic health effects of non-gamma-2 unless you count this chapter here as being published.Cheers for reading so far and I would be interested to read your thoughts about it.

The Backstory of Article 370: A True Copy of J&K’s Instrument of AccessionNote: This article was first published on October 26, 2016 and is being republished on August 5, 2019.October 26, 2016 marked the 70th anniversary of the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India.On account of the troubled times that J&K has been passing through since July, there is little space for celebrating this event, but a sober commemoration of this historic moment is necessary.The Instrument of Accession signed by Maharaja Hari Singh has become the object of a never-ending controversy, unlike similar accession instruments signed by other princely states.First page of Jammu and Kashmir’s Instrument of Accession.Second page of Jammu and Kashmir’s Instrument of AccessionThe author seeks to reinvigorate informed debate on this issue by placing a true copy of the signed accession instrument in the public domain. The copy was obtained from the National Archives of India. This article also critically examines some of the popular claims regarding this document by making a reference to other contemporaneous official records.Re-discovering the J&K Instrument of AccessionOn a hot and humid mid-September afternoon, I walked in to the research room of the National Archives in New Delhi to find out if my search for a “historic” document had borne results. The document in question was the original Instrument of Accession (IoA) signed in October 1947 by the then ruler of Jammu and Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh and accepted by Lord Mountbatten of Burma, who was Governor General of India at the time. Earlier, the Union ministry of home affairs had transferred to the National Archives my RTI application seeking a copy of this document and a handful of IoAs signed by other Rulers[1]. Subsequently, the Central Public Information Officer (CPIO) of the National Archives invited me to access the documents under the Public Records Act, 1993[2].I walked towards the shelves situated at the end of the hall, my shoes squeaking across the extra smooth flooring, butterflies fluttering in my stomach. The J&K IoA lay in a cream coloured folder at one corner of a shelf waiting to be picked up. The last time I got as excited was a few days earlier, when I spotted a reference to this document in the Index of 1,847 treaties and agreements transferred by the Central government to the National Archives for safe keeping.[3]The J&K IoA has been the subject of one of the biggest and long drawn controversies in independent India. Does it really exist or not? One academic doubted its authenticity and reportedly dismissed its very existence.[4] Andrew Whitehead has claimed that he was denied access to this document on the ground that it was “classified”.[5] The retyped text of this document is currently accessible on a privately hosted website.[6] Whitehead writes that a facsimile of the J&K IoA was displayed on the website of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) for some time.[7] I could not trace this facsimile copy on the MHA site.Through this article in The Wire, I can confirm that the J&K IoA exists for real, is safe and well preserved in the collection of the National Archives.I have elected to place in the public domain a copy of the J&K IoA obtained legitimately from the National Archives for the purpose of facilitating informed debate amongst those interested in the subject.I have also placed copies of the IoAs of Mysore, Manipur, Tehri Garhwal and Udaipur obtained by me from the National Archives in the public domain so that readers may compare them with the J&K IoA for ascertaining its genuineness.[8]Is the J&K IOA held by the National Archives a genuine document?I am not a forensics expert, nor was I familiar with the signatures of the Maharaja of J&K and Lord Mountbatten before I looked at these five IoAs. However, at least three indicators seem to testify to the genuineness of the J&K IoA.First, like several other IoAs, the document signed by the Maharaja of J&K is in two parts. The first three pages contain the text of the terms of the accession- this is the IoA proper. Page 2 of the document bears the signature of Maharaja Hari Singh and the acceptance of the instrument signed by Lord Mountbatten. Page 3 contains the list of subjects on which the Dominion Legislature’s powers to make laws applicable to J&K were accepted by the Maharaja by virtue of this accession instrument. Pages 4 and 5 contain the standstill agreement between J&K and the Dominion of India, as it was called in 1947 before India became a republic. IoAs signed by the several other princely States contain a standstill agreement between them and the Dominion of India as annexures.[9]First page of Jammu and Kashmir’s Instrument of Accession.Second page of Jammu and Kashmir’s Instrument of AccessionSchedule attached to Jammu and Kashmir’s Instrument of AccessionStandstill agreement with Jammu and KashmirSchedule attached to Jammu and Kashmir’s standstill agreement.Second, in all the IoAs signed by the rulers of Mysore,[10] Manipur,[11] Tehri Garhwal[12] and Udaipur[13], Lord Mountbatten signed his acceptance of the instruments and mentioned the date of acceptance in green ink – just like he did while accepting the J&K IoA.[14] Further, the overall faded appearance of this document – just like the other IoAs I picked up – clearly hints to its vintage.Third, the appended standstill agreements are an added element confirming the authenticity of the Jammu and Kashmir IoA.At the time of independence, various parts of the Indian sub-continent were under different kinds of administrative arrangements. Chiefly, there were two kinds of jurisdictions – the principalities – large and small which were ruled by hereditary princes and provinces which were directly under British administration. The British Raj had entered into separate treaties and agreements with several princely states for a variety of purposes, such as the construction and the maintenance of roads and power supply facilities, railway tracks, communication facilities including posts, telegraph and wireless, flights, taxation, currency and coinage, external affairs etc. With the ousting of the British Raj, these treaties would become void automatically. So the newly established Department of States drew up an agreement in consultation with the Chamber of Princes (comprising of the rulers of princely states) to ensure that these administrative arrangements would continue unaltered (i.e., standstill) until the new Constitution was drawn up. Almost all princely states that had such treaties and agreements with the British Raj signed a standstill agreement along with the Instrument of Accession to the Dominion of India.First page of Mysore’s Instrument of Accession.Second page of Mysore’s Instrument of Accession.Schedule attached to Mysore’s Instrument of Accession.Standstill agreement with MysoreSchedule attached to Mysore’s standstill agreement.As can be seen from the documents posted here, the Rulers of Mysore, Tehri Garhwal, Manipur and Udaipur did not sign the standstill agreements annexed to the IoAs, nor did Lord Mountbatten append his signature to the same. In all these cases, the standstill agreements were signed by the rulers’ subordinates. In the case of Mysore, the standstill agreement was signed by the dewan (prime minister) of Mysore, in the case of Manipur, it was signed by the private secretary to the maharaja, in the case of Tehri Garhwal it was signed by the chief secretary of the state and in the case of Udaipur it was signed by the then acting prime minister.First page of Udaipur’s Instrument of Accession.Second page of Udaipur’s Instrument of Accession.Schedule attached to Udaipur’s Instrument of AccessionStandstill agreement with UdaipurSchedule attached to Udaipur’s standstill agreement.The J&K standstill agreement, however, was signed by Maharaja Hari Singh himself and for good reason. All writers commenting on the events leading to the accession of J&K to the Indian Dominion are unanimous on one fact, i.e., the then prime minister of J&K, Justice M. C. Mahajan[15] was in New Delhi on October 26 – the date on which Maharaja Hari Singh is said to have signed the IoA. So there was probably no authority other than the Maharaja in Kashmir who could sign the standstill agreement. In all five cases, the standstill agreements were signed by Shri V. P. Menon on behalf of the Dominion of India.Readers may ask, what about the letter that Maharaja Hari Singh is purported to have sent to Lord Mountbatten along with the signed IoA and the reply the latter sent back to the maharaja. Those documents, whose existence is not in doubt, thankfully, are not included in the file containing the IoA and the standstill agreement. They seem to remain in the custody of the Union home ministry. The text of this correspondence is published in a document published by the Political Branch of the Ministry of States.[16]What about the overwriting in the J&K IoA?Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir. Credit: WikimediaMaharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir. Credit: WikimediaSome writers have commented on the overwriting visible in the J&K IoA to argue that it is not a genuine document.[17] This issue can be explained by the fact that a common template was used for the purpose of the IoAs. The printed stationery mentioned the month of August, leaving a blank space for filling up the exact date of accession at the time of signature by each Ruler. While a large number of Rulers signed their respective IoAs in August itself, Maharaja Hari Singh signed it in October when his hands were forced by the invasion from across the State’s borders. This explains the striking out of “August” to insert “October” in the IoA.Making such minor technicalities as the basis to contest the authenticity of the J&K IoA may not help advance the debate much because overwriting is seen in at least one other IoA whose copy I was able to obtain form the National Archives. For example, in the Mysore IoA, the date of acceptance was initially mentioned as the “ninth” day of August in black ink. Lord Mountbatten seems to have put in the correct date, namely, the “sixteenth” while appending his signature. The correction is made in green ink – the same colour he used for signing his acceptance of every IoA that I have looked at. Further, in the case of the standstill agreement with Mysore, the dewan signed on the portion which was reserved for the signature of the Secretary of the States Department of the Dominion. So the designation of V. P. Menon had to be typed up manually at the bottom of this document.While the title of the rulers of Manipur and Udaipur were type-written on the IoAs, those of their counterparts in the case of the IoAs of Mysore, Tehri Garhwal were hand written. Should this discrepancy then be used to dispute the validity of the accession of any of these princely States to the Dominion?Interestingly, while the IoAs and the standstill agreements in the case of Mysore, Manipur, Tehri Garhwal and Udaipur indicate that they were drawn up in the names of the rulers of those states and the Dominion of India, in the case of J&K, both documents are drawn up in the name of the Jammu and Kashmir State.[18] Should this curious titling be taken to imply that the residents of J&K had consented to the accession, when they were not even consulted on this matter? Such nitpicking does not help informed debate on the subject. Given the trying circumstances in 1947 and the sheer number of documents that had to be signed from across the country, such discrepancies are highly likely to occur, especially in a newly created department that was short staffed and had set a near impossible deadline for itself to secure the integration of India.Is the J&K IoA a unique document?There is a general consensus that unlike other princely states, J&K acceded to the Dominion of India under unique circumstances. I do not intend to delve into these circumstances to examine the claims and counter claims in this brief article. However, another myth that popular lore about J&K has perpetuated is that Maharaja Hari Singh signed a specially drafted Instrument of Accession that took care of his demands. Almost every layperson I met with in J&K during my travel to promote awareness and the use of the state’s RTI Act would point out during informal discussions that the maharaja had recognised the powers of the Dominion to make and implement laws only on three subjects matter, namely foreign affairs, defence and communications. Until I began my research on this subject, I had also harboured a similar misconception.A comparison of the four IoAs of Mysore, Manipur, Tehri Garhwal and Udaipur that I accessed from the National Archives and a careful reading of V. P. Menon’s narrative account of the process by which India was integrated, indicates otherwise.First page of Manipur’s Instrument of AccessionSecond page of Manipur’s Instrument of Accession.Schedule attached to Manipur’s Instrument of Accession.Standstill agreement with ManipurSchedule attached to Manipur’s standstill agreement.Every one of the 140 princely states that signed IoAs with the Dominion of India agreed to the same terms and conditions as J&K. All these rulers also initially acceded to the Dominion limited to the same three subjects. The remaining powers were retained by them just as the maharaja of J&K had sought to do. However, eventually some of them signed instruments of merger, to form larger administrative units such as the Matsya Union, Vindhya Pradesh, PEPSU, Travancore and Cochin etc. and finally accepted the scheme of administration laid down by the new Constitution. The then yuvaraj of J&Km who exercised all powers delegated to him by the Maharaja, issued a proclamation on November 25, 1949 stating that the soon-to-be-adopted Constitution of India would govern the relations between J&K and the Union only to such extent as its provisions would apply to J&K. Article 306a – which would later become Article 370 – laid down the terms and conditions of this relationship. Interestingly, the provisions under Article 370 were intended to be transitional and temporary in nature. Menon’s tome contains a detailed account of these developments. Subsequently, Noorani[19] and others have extensively dwelt upon the manner in which the protection provided by Article 370 was eroded from the very beginning. I do not intend to go into those matters in this brief article.Tabling of the IoAs in the Constituent Assembly (Legislative)In fact, my inspiration to seek copies of the IoAs including that of J&K came from a reading of three pieces of legislation, namely, The Government of India Act, 1935 (GoI Act), the India Independence Act, 1947 and The India (Provisional Constitution) Order, 1947.While the GOI Act had laid down the accession procedure for the princely states (to the undivided Dominion of India as was envisaged then), the provisional constitutional order made an important amendment to its provisions, amongst several others. Section 6 of the GOI Act relating to the accession of the Indian states to the Dominion was amended to incorporate several changes. Sub-section 6 of the new Section 6 required the laying of copies of the Instrument of Accession on the table of the dominion legislature soon after they were accepted by the governor general. Eventually, the dominion legislature came to be known as the Constituent Assembly-Legislative (CA-L) when it was performing legislative functions outside of its main mandate, namely the framing of a constitution for India.When the MHA did not respond to my request for copies of the IoAs, I filed an RTI application with the Lok Sabha secretariat seeking access to the same documents and the CA-L debates. I pointed out that the IoAs were required to be tabled before the CAL and the Lok Sabha being a successor body to the CA-L, ought to have maintained copies of these documents. The CPIO of the Lok Sabha has not responded to my RTI application till date. Subsequently, I secured access to the library of Parliament and located the debates of the CA-L for the period 1947-1948.[20]Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, as the deputy prime minister, in charge of the Ministry of States, tabled the IoA of J&K along with those signed by 116 other princely states before the CA-L on 19 November 19, 1947.[21] Kashmir is listed at #68 in Schedule I Part A of the paper laid on the table of the house. The date of signature of the IOA is mentioned as October 26, 1947 and the date of acceptance as October 27, 1947. Several writers have raised doubts about these dates. This is an area I intend to research next, so I will not offer any comment on this matter for now.Before closing, it is necessary to dispel one more myth popularised by those who question the existence of the J&K IoA. Its origin seems to be based on the write-up attributed to Prof. Lamb.[22] If he has truly written that the signed copy of the IoA was never attached to the White Paper on J&K that the Government issued in 1948 or included in the documents that the Indian government sent to the UN Security Council that year, that discrepancy may also be explained in simple terms. It must be remembered that during the late 1940s and 1950s, photocopying and mimeography were not available in India. So the government perhaps appended only a copy of the IoA template which was commonly used to secure the accession of the 140 princely States to these documents. I have already shown that the text of the IoA templates was retyped for the purpose of laying them before the CA-L. Of course the government could have anticipated its future acerbic and often vituperative critics and included photographs of the signed copy of the J&K IoA in all these documents. It was within its powers to so do. Why it elected not to do so, is not my job to explain. That explanation should come from the government of India.My objective in this article is limited – to place legitimately obtained true-to-the original images of the J&K Instrument of Accession along with other comparable and supporting documents to encourage informed debate across the country and elsewhere on this subject. I trust this article has accomplished this objective.It will not be an exaggeration to describe the IoAs and the standstill agreements as the threads that knit the disparate administrative jurisdictions into a Union. Instead of tucking them away and providing access to researchers only on demand, the National Archives should work with the government to display them in a museum which people can visit at will. Citizens have the right to know more about these building blocks that became India.Venkatesh Nayak is an RTI activist and a history researcher based in New Delhi. He works with the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.Endnotes[1] While the Central Public Information Officer (CPIO) of the MHA did not bother to reply to my request, my RTI application was transferred to the National Archives only after I submitted the first appeal to the appellate authority in MHA. According to Section 7(2) of The Right to Information Act, 2005 where a CPIO fails to send a reply to an RTI application within 30 days, it will be deemed that he or she has refused to the request for information and the right of the applicant to submit a first appeal gets activated automatically.[2] The Public Records Act, 1993 and the Public Records Rules, 1997 lay down the statutory framework for the declassification and the archivisation of official records, including those labelled “top secret”, “secret” or “confidential”, held by public authorities under the Central Government. The National Archives is the custodian of such archived records and provides access to such records to researchers. Similar laws and rules have been put in place by several State Governments for the purpose of placing their old records with their own State-level Archives.[3] National Archives Register No. R.R. 271, page no. 27. The J&K IOA is preserved in file no. P-I/20/47, Year 1947. Strangely, the National Archives refused to provide a photocopy of this page. This register indexes various treaties and agreements signed between 1831 and 1985[4] This is what Prof. Alastair Lamb wrote about the J&K IoA in 1991: “The actual Instrument of Accession…was, in fact, no more than a printed form, not unlike an application for a driving licence, with blank spaces left for the name of the State, the signature of the Maharaja and the date; and it also contained a printed form of acceptance which required dating and signature by Mountbatten as Governor-General.” See Alastair Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy 1846-1990, Roxford Books, Hertfordshire,1990, page 137: accessed on 22 October, 2016. In an alleged excerpt from another work attributed to him: The Myth of Indian Claim to Jammu and Kashmir: A Reappraisal, uploaded on the website of Pakistan’s Ministry of External Affairs, the following statement is displayed: “The far more important document (a), the alleged Instrument of Accession, was not published until many years later, if at all…. The 1948 White Paper in which the Government of India set out its formal case in respect to the State of Jammu & Kashmir, does not contain the Instrument of Accession as claimed to have been signed by the Maharajah: instead, it reproduces an unsigned form of Accession such as, it is implied, the Maharajah might have signed. To date no satisfactory original of this Instrument as signed by the Maharajah has been produced: though a highly suspect version, complete with the false date 26 October 1947, has been circulated by the Indian side since the 1960s. On the present evidence it is by no means clear that the Maharaja ever did sign an Instrument of Accession. There are, indeed, grounds for suspecting that he did no such thing. The Instrument of Accession referred to in document (c), a letter which as we have seen was probably drafted by Indian officials prior to being shown to the Maharajah, may never have existed, and can hardly have existed when the letter was being prepared.”:, accessed on 22 October, 2016. Despite several efforts I could not locate on the Internet reliable bibliographical information about this work attributed to Prof. Lamb. There is no mention of this work in subsequent scholarly publications on Kashmir such as Andrew Whitehead’s Mission in Kashmir, etc. (see f.n. #4 below) or in Victoria Schofield’s Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War”: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., London, 2003) and A. G. Noorani’s, The Kashmir Dispute: 1947-2012, Vol. 1, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2013.[5] “The Instrument of Accession is in the holdings of India’s National Archive. I have been refused permission to consult the document because it is, apparently classified. A facsimile of the entire document was posted in 2005 at the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs website”. See f.n. #29 in Chapter 6: Signing up to India in Andrew Whitehead, Mission in Kashmir, Viking, Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 2007, New Delhi, page no. 255, accessible online on the author’s website, accessed on 22 October, 2016.[6] See: Legal Documents: Instrument of Accession, accessed on 22 October, 2016. This document is surprisingly replicated on the website of the Commissioner of Customs, Excise and Service Tax, Hydebarad-IV, accessed on 22 October, 2016.[7] See f.n. #29 in Chapter 6: Signing up to India in Andrew Whitehead’s Mission in Kashmir etc. (see f.n. #5 above).[8] Please note that the image files have been created from the images I obtained legitimately upon payment of the prescribed fees at the National Archives. All copyright vis-à-vis these IoAs is claimed by the National Archives. I request readers to access these files in the original from the National Archives using the file numbers mentioned in these foot notes.[9] With deep respect to Prof. Lamb, it must be said that the parallel he drew in 1991, between the template on which the J&K IoA was drawn up and an application for a driver’s license, is uncalled for, for multiple reasons (see f.n. #4 above). First, the integration of the princely States into the Dominion could not afford a diversity of arrangements, if integration were to be achieved at all. The process by which the common text of the IoA template was drawn up by the newly established Ministry of States under the leadership of Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and the stewardship of its Secretary, Shri V. P. Menon is documented in Chapter V of his well known publication: The Story of the Integration of the Indian States, Longmans Green & Co. London, 1956, pages 67ff. Second, practicality, based on common sense, dictated the need for printing a common template for the IoA to be used for securing the accession of all major princely States instead of having to retype each document. This would have required at least 280 documents to have been typed up i.e. 140 sets of 2 documents each – one copy for the Ruler who signed the IoAs and another for the government of the Dominion. Given the pressing times, I believe this would have been a cumbersome course of action to follow, resulting in delays which the country could ill afford.[10] National Archives Register No. R. R. 271, page no. 22. The Mysore IoA is preserved in File No. M-II/1/47, Year 1947.[11] National Archives Register No. R. R. 271, page no. 1. The Manipur IoA is preserved in File No. A-I/1/47, Year 1947.[12] National Archives Register No. R. R. 271, page no. 34. The Tehri Garhwal IoA is preserved in File No. U-I/8/47, Year 1947.[13] National Archives Register No. R. R. 271, page no.20. The Udaipur IoA is preserved in File No. I/33/47, Year 1947.[14] Although I had sought copies of the IoAs signed by the Rulers of 16 Princely States in my RTI application to MHA, the duplication fee rates (Rs. 20 per page) charged by the National Archives for providing photographs of the IOAs forced me to limit them to five. So I elected to pick up one IoA from each part of India – east, west, north and south as representative samples. Perhaps if I had a handsome fellowship to work on this task full time, I might have secured scanned images of all IoAs signed by the Rulers in India. The National Archives also provides photocopies of these documents. As monochrome copies do not satisfactorily reproduce the appearance of the original documents, I elected to obtain coloured images for publishing them in this article.[15] See the works of Prof. Lamb, Andrew Whitehead and Victoria Schofield, cited at f.n. #4 and 5 above. After serving in J&K, Justice Mahajan was appointed Judge of the Supreme Court established by the new Constitution, in 1950 and became the third Chief Justice of India, in January 1954.[16] File No. 11(8)-PR/47 on the subject: Kashmir Affairs – Accession of Kashmir State to the Dominion of India. The author has in his possession a legitimately obtained photocopy of Copy No. 4 of this long document form the National Archives. Some parts of this document are published in Noorani’s Article 370… etc. (see f.n. #19 below).[17] While I have not read the original work, Kashmir: Triumphs and Tragedies, Gulshan Books, Srinagar, 2014, authored by Dr. Abdul Ahad, an archivist of repute (this book is out of stock on all e-seller websites), I found a reference to his claims in Abdul Majid Zargar, “Kashmir Accession Document Shrouded in False Myths”, Counter Currents, 27 October, 2013.[18] See the title of both documents in the images accompanying this article.[19] For example, see A. G. Noorani, The Kashmir Dispute: 1947-2012, Vols. 1 & 2, etc. and A. G. Noorani, Article 370: A Constitutional History of Jammu and Kashmir, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2011. Interestingly, Mr. Noorani dedicates Article 370 to Ms. Mridula Sarabhai. While researching the IoAs and declassified files relating to J&K in the National Archives, I came across multiple files containing the correspondence between Ms. Sarabhai and the Government of India, particularly in relation to the abducted women and children after the partition of the sub-continent. The Indices of Proceedings of the Ministries of State and Home Affairs, 1947 onwards, contain references to several files which demonstrate the leading role played by her in the relief and rehabilitation efforts. This is a subject matter for other scholars to research and bring to light her contributions to alleviating the sufferings of the worst affected during the chaos caused by the partition of the sub-continent. These documents are open for researchers to access at the National Archives.[20] I am grateful to Shri Husain Dalwai, MP, Rajya Sabha, and his secretarial staff for facilitating easy access to the library of Parliament for doing this research. I am also grateful to the staff of the library for providing immediate access to the volumes containing the CA-L debates and facilitating photocopying of the relevant pages despite the fact that the monsoon session of Parliament was on at that time.[21] The text of the IoA signed by the 140 States similar to that of J&K were also laid down before the House. There were other templates for the IoA of the smaller princely States, especially, the rulers of small sized principalities in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Odisha. These IoAs along with the names of acceding Princely States were also tabled before the CA-L. The text of these IoAs is also reproduced in the record of the CA-L proceedings from 19 November, 1947. Earlier members of the CA-L had raised starred queries seeking to know the status of integration of princely States into the Dominion of India. On the same day Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru made a statement on the events in J&K at the CA-L.[22] See f.n. #4 above.Note: An earlier version of this article stated that Article 309 became Article 370. It was in fact Article 306a that gave rise to Article 370.Join The DiscussionTotal Comments (14)Also ReadtodayFrom Kashmir and 370 to Partition, BJP's Hatred of Nehru is Fuelled by Falsehoods08 AugDuring the Quit India Movement, the Hindu Mahasabha Played the British Game07 AugWhat Thinker Theodor Adorno Understood About the Far Right 50 Years Agohttps://thewire.in/history/public-first-time-jammu-kashmirs-instrument-accession-india