Teh One Who Knocks
04-06-2015, 11:28 AM
Aleksander Chan - Gawker
http://i.imgur.com/VQKf60s.jpg
You are, in all likelihood, reading this post on a wireless internet-connected device—a computer, a phone, a tablet. Think about the last time you used (or wanted to use) a wired internet connection; now think about how long you've been slowly poisoning yourself with WiFi's ovary-killing, tumor-inducing radiation.
For as long as WiFi has connected our laptops to the web, people have worried that the technology is just too good to be true, and if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. "Proof" that WiFi is slowly poisoning us is everywhere on the internet. But theories about the dangers of wireless internet appear to coalesce around the fact that WiFi utilizes the same radio band frequency (2.4 GHz) as microwave ovens.
Except we don't necessarily worry about microwaves, or other devices that operate around the same point on the electromagnetic spectrum (baby monitors, cell phones) as WiFi. A 2006 report from the World Health Organization states there is "no convincing scientific evidence" that the radiofrequency signals emitted by WiFi routers present any genuine threat to our health. And we're all apparently being blasted with stronger radiofrequency waves from radio and television anyway:
In fact, due to their lower frequency, at similar RF exposure levels, the body absorbs up to five times more of the signal from FM radio and television than from base stations. This is because the frequencies used in FM radio (around 100 MHz) and in TV broadcasting (around 300 to 400 MHz) are lower than those employed in mobile telephony (900 MHz and 1800 MHz) and because a person's height makes the body an efficient receiving antenna. Further, radio and television broadcast stations have been in operation for the past 50 or more years without any adverse health consequence being established.
However! According to some obsessive corner of the internet, there are some facets of WiFi radiation we are not considering.
There's this piece by Mark Gibbs for Network World. It contains the incredible subhead, "What would it take to get you to stop using cellphones and WiFi completely? How about the threat of cancer against children?" Now you're listening.
Gibbs' piece is pegged to a (dubious) study published in the Journal of Microscopy and Ultrastructure, which postulates that children and their thinner, developing skulls, are susceptible to WiFi's radiation in ways adults and their developed, thick skulls aren't. WiFi could be baking cancer into your infant's brain right now, only to surface years later. "Because the average latency time between first exposure and diagnosis of a tumor can be decades," the study's authors warn, "tumors induced in children may not be diagnosed until well into adulthood."
That study and Gibbs' post, both published last year—along with a swath of other alarmist articles swimming around online—piggyback on a 2011 study conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer and WHO that classified the radiofrequency magnetic fields emitted by wireless devices, including WiFi base stations, as "possibly carcinogenic to humans," or a group 2B carcinogen. That doesn't sound good, though it's likely not as bad as it would seem. The study focused on cell phone use:
The evidence was reviewed critically, and overall evaluated as being limited2 among users of wireless telephones for glioma and acoustic neuroma, and inadequate3 to draw conclusions for other types of cancers. The evidence from the occupational and environmental exposures mentioned above was similarly judged inadequate. The Working Group did not quantitate the risk; however, one study of past cell phone use (up to the year 2004), showed a 40% increased risk for gliomas in the highest category of heavy users (reported average: 30 minutes per day over a 10‐year period).
WiFi's latent potential for harm has manifested in two ostensibly signal-boosting studies of admittedly questionable provenance. The first concerns the work of British physicist Barrie Trower, an alleged former microwave technology and warfare expert for the Royal Navy and British Secret Service, who authored a 2013 report that boldly claims, based on the statements of "University Researchers, Government Scientists and International Scientific Advisors," that "a minimum of 57.7% of schoolgirls exposed to low-level microwave radiation (WiFi) are at risk of suffering stillbirth, foetal abnormalities or genetically damaged children, when they give birth" and that "any genetic damage may pass to successive generations."
The report is appended with this insane chart illustrating how WiFi exposure can lead to birth defects in subsequent generations:
http://i.imgur.com/Ylhl0lv.jpg
He also sketches a horrific dystopian vision—in a section literally titled "A Simple Explanation"—of a future where a large segment of the population is hobbled by WiFi-induced birth defects:
Imagine you are five years old, in school and sitting with a wi-fi laptop near your abdomen. Theoretically, your ovaries can become irradiated until you leave school at aged 16-18 years old. When you become pregnant, every one of your follicles (to become eggs) will have been microwaved. Hence, you may or may not deliver a healthy child.
Should you become a pregnant as a student, your embryo (for its first 100 days * if it is female) is producing approximately 400,000 follicles (within its ovaries) for future child-birth.
The problem is that these developing follicle cells do not have the cellular protection of mature adult cells. Consequently your 'Grandchild' may have had every single follicle cell irradiated and damaged prior to its conception. Therefore when your child becomes an adult (with its irradiated follicles) there is a greater likelihood of its child (your Grand-daughter) suffering the ailments previously mentioned, during conception / embryonic and foetal development stages.
And here is Trower himself talking about the adverse of effects of WiFi for 14-and-a-half minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z99_SzoXZdY
Men, you are also in danger: In 2011, Conrado Avendano, the research director of Nascentis Reproductive Medical Centre in Cordoba, apparently led "the first scientific study showing that a laptop computer connected by WiFi may damage DNA and decrease sperm mobility in only four hours." (Four hours! Think how many hours you've spent with you laptop...in your lap.)
The second study involves an experiment conducted by a group of 15-year-old Danish students in 2013. The students placed six trays of watercress seedlings in two rooms: one with WiFi routers placed right next to the plants, the other without. After 12 days in their respective rooms, the seedlings sharing space with the WiFi routers "turned brown and died."
Those students were apparently inspired, ABC News reports, after they started "noticing that when they slept with their cellphones near their heads overnight, they had trouble focusing the next day." A biology teacher at the school, Kim Horsevad, also defended the students' study against critics who charged that the watercress seeds that died were probably dried out by the WiFi routers' heat. She claims that students kept both sets of plants "sufficiently moist during the whole experiment, and the temperatures were controlled thermostatically."
The following set of photos apparently depict the very watercress seedlings mentioned in the experiment:
http://i.imgur.com/RN2YaKs.jpg
That's your brain on WiFi. Doesn't look good.
But that study was really just a riff on a popular 2010 experiment conducted at Wageningen University, where researchers sought to find the effects WiFi radiation might have on trees. From Popular Science:
To test the hypothesis that the mystery illness was caused by radiation poisoning, the researchers took 20 ash trees and exposed them to various kinds of radiation for three months. Sure enough, the ash trees exposed to Wi-Fi signals showed telltale signs of radiation sickness, including a "lead-like shine" on their leaves, indicating the oncoming death of those leaves. In the Netherlands, a whopping 70% of urban trees are suffering from radiation poisoning, up from only 10% five years ago—understandable, considering the explosion in Wi-Fi use in the past five years.
But what about people? Have there been any reports of human beings being affected by WiFi radiation? Yes...sort of. There's a "condition" called Electro Hypersensitivity Syndrome. In 2013, the Guardian wrote about the travails of Tim Hallam, who had lined the floors and walls of his bedroom in Leamington Spa in England with aluminum to repel wireless signals, which he claims caused him unbearable headaches and pain. His bed was covered "with a glistening silver mosquito net." (This is in line with the idea that if you cover your head in tinfoil you can prevent aliens from controlling your brain.)
Dr. James Rubin, of King's College Institute of Psychiatry, does not necessarily believe EHS to be "real," exactly, but he does liken the supposed condition to a "idiopathic environmental intolerance"—or like a food allergy, with no explicit cause. He also authored a paper suggesting the condition is psychosomatic. "The suffering is very real—I don't doubt that—and I take it very seriously," he told the Guardian. "But we've spent millions on the research and the time comes when you have to say, in the future the money would be better spent on looking for effective treatments, rather than chasing a cause."
Hallam's "condition" is an extension of the fear induced by Robert O. Becker, the orthopedic surgeon and electromedicine researcher who appeared on 60 Minutes in the 1960s to warn against pylon radiation and apparently "became the face" for the case against humans living near power plants. Becker's former lab partner, Professor Andrew Marino, of Louisiana State University, though, seems more convinced that EHS could be real, because guess what? All of the scientific papers written on the syndrome (only 50) "were funded by the telecommunications industry."
But of course (of course!), all these theories, all these experiments and studies that have failed to take hold in modern thought, trace back to a long-con plot to suppress the voices of opposition to a dark truth: that WiFi is a weapon devised by the U.S. government.
Writer Jamie Lee writes about this Big Lie in rambling, seemingly unedited detail in Waking Times. "The U.S. Navy has known for decades, since at least 1976, of the significant inherent dangers in using Wifi but have only summarized the results in military terms of 'who can we harm' and 'can we be attacked'," Lee writes, citing this Wordpress blog that no longer appears to exist. "The Telecom Industry buried the effects by claiming that only heat can causes problems with wifi, when in fact study after study after study has shown that it is the low wave, pulsed, non-ionized radiation used in RF and Microwave lengths that is disrupting our systems at the molecular level."
Indeed, this silent, digital acid rain soaking us at nearly every moment of the day goes all the way to the top, as documented in chilling detail by "Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars," a very, very long manifesto allegedly discovered by a Boeing employee in 1986 inside an IBM printer he purchased to sell for parts that "details of a plan, hatched in the embryonic days of the 'Cold War' which called for control of the masses through manipulation of industry, peoples' pastimes, education and political leanings." (You can read the document, "in its virgin form, with diagrams" here.)
So what can you do to save yourself from this wireless menace? Lee suggests hiring, "for a couple hundred bucks," an expert in EMF to "come and do a reading at your home and office and check your home wiring, which also emits radiated energy, often right next to our beds where we sleep." (When I did a Yelp search for "EMF expert" and "EMF" in New York City, the only usable result returned to me was for a man named Will LeStrange, a so-called "Feng Shui Consultant." His website looks fake.)
And since there are significant financial, legal, and time barriers to lining the walls and floors of your home (or even just a room) with aluminum, you could invest in an EMF meter. There are some on Amazon, including one that apparently detects ghosts that's only $19.10 and is eligbile for free two-day shipping for Prime members. Here's a video of a guy using a EMF meter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICA19oKPi5I
Crazy stuff.
Or, as I expect many others to do, and will do so myself, take solace in willful ignorance. Maybe WiFi is poisoning us. Maybe we're all growing tumors and our grandchildren will have tumors and everyone's brains will bleed out their ears one day. Whatever, man. I am never plugging in my laptop or my phone to connect to the internet ever again if I don't have to, just like I'm going to keep guzzling diet soda and stirring fake sugar into my coffee and sitting all day and shooting myself up with modern medicine. Join me.
http://i.imgur.com/VQKf60s.jpg
You are, in all likelihood, reading this post on a wireless internet-connected device—a computer, a phone, a tablet. Think about the last time you used (or wanted to use) a wired internet connection; now think about how long you've been slowly poisoning yourself with WiFi's ovary-killing, tumor-inducing radiation.
For as long as WiFi has connected our laptops to the web, people have worried that the technology is just too good to be true, and if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. "Proof" that WiFi is slowly poisoning us is everywhere on the internet. But theories about the dangers of wireless internet appear to coalesce around the fact that WiFi utilizes the same radio band frequency (2.4 GHz) as microwave ovens.
Except we don't necessarily worry about microwaves, or other devices that operate around the same point on the electromagnetic spectrum (baby monitors, cell phones) as WiFi. A 2006 report from the World Health Organization states there is "no convincing scientific evidence" that the radiofrequency signals emitted by WiFi routers present any genuine threat to our health. And we're all apparently being blasted with stronger radiofrequency waves from radio and television anyway:
In fact, due to their lower frequency, at similar RF exposure levels, the body absorbs up to five times more of the signal from FM radio and television than from base stations. This is because the frequencies used in FM radio (around 100 MHz) and in TV broadcasting (around 300 to 400 MHz) are lower than those employed in mobile telephony (900 MHz and 1800 MHz) and because a person's height makes the body an efficient receiving antenna. Further, radio and television broadcast stations have been in operation for the past 50 or more years without any adverse health consequence being established.
However! According to some obsessive corner of the internet, there are some facets of WiFi radiation we are not considering.
There's this piece by Mark Gibbs for Network World. It contains the incredible subhead, "What would it take to get you to stop using cellphones and WiFi completely? How about the threat of cancer against children?" Now you're listening.
Gibbs' piece is pegged to a (dubious) study published in the Journal of Microscopy and Ultrastructure, which postulates that children and their thinner, developing skulls, are susceptible to WiFi's radiation in ways adults and their developed, thick skulls aren't. WiFi could be baking cancer into your infant's brain right now, only to surface years later. "Because the average latency time between first exposure and diagnosis of a tumor can be decades," the study's authors warn, "tumors induced in children may not be diagnosed until well into adulthood."
That study and Gibbs' post, both published last year—along with a swath of other alarmist articles swimming around online—piggyback on a 2011 study conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer and WHO that classified the radiofrequency magnetic fields emitted by wireless devices, including WiFi base stations, as "possibly carcinogenic to humans," or a group 2B carcinogen. That doesn't sound good, though it's likely not as bad as it would seem. The study focused on cell phone use:
The evidence was reviewed critically, and overall evaluated as being limited2 among users of wireless telephones for glioma and acoustic neuroma, and inadequate3 to draw conclusions for other types of cancers. The evidence from the occupational and environmental exposures mentioned above was similarly judged inadequate. The Working Group did not quantitate the risk; however, one study of past cell phone use (up to the year 2004), showed a 40% increased risk for gliomas in the highest category of heavy users (reported average: 30 minutes per day over a 10‐year period).
WiFi's latent potential for harm has manifested in two ostensibly signal-boosting studies of admittedly questionable provenance. The first concerns the work of British physicist Barrie Trower, an alleged former microwave technology and warfare expert for the Royal Navy and British Secret Service, who authored a 2013 report that boldly claims, based on the statements of "University Researchers, Government Scientists and International Scientific Advisors," that "a minimum of 57.7% of schoolgirls exposed to low-level microwave radiation (WiFi) are at risk of suffering stillbirth, foetal abnormalities or genetically damaged children, when they give birth" and that "any genetic damage may pass to successive generations."
The report is appended with this insane chart illustrating how WiFi exposure can lead to birth defects in subsequent generations:
http://i.imgur.com/Ylhl0lv.jpg
He also sketches a horrific dystopian vision—in a section literally titled "A Simple Explanation"—of a future where a large segment of the population is hobbled by WiFi-induced birth defects:
Imagine you are five years old, in school and sitting with a wi-fi laptop near your abdomen. Theoretically, your ovaries can become irradiated until you leave school at aged 16-18 years old. When you become pregnant, every one of your follicles (to become eggs) will have been microwaved. Hence, you may or may not deliver a healthy child.
Should you become a pregnant as a student, your embryo (for its first 100 days * if it is female) is producing approximately 400,000 follicles (within its ovaries) for future child-birth.
The problem is that these developing follicle cells do not have the cellular protection of mature adult cells. Consequently your 'Grandchild' may have had every single follicle cell irradiated and damaged prior to its conception. Therefore when your child becomes an adult (with its irradiated follicles) there is a greater likelihood of its child (your Grand-daughter) suffering the ailments previously mentioned, during conception / embryonic and foetal development stages.
And here is Trower himself talking about the adverse of effects of WiFi for 14-and-a-half minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z99_SzoXZdY
Men, you are also in danger: In 2011, Conrado Avendano, the research director of Nascentis Reproductive Medical Centre in Cordoba, apparently led "the first scientific study showing that a laptop computer connected by WiFi may damage DNA and decrease sperm mobility in only four hours." (Four hours! Think how many hours you've spent with you laptop...in your lap.)
The second study involves an experiment conducted by a group of 15-year-old Danish students in 2013. The students placed six trays of watercress seedlings in two rooms: one with WiFi routers placed right next to the plants, the other without. After 12 days in their respective rooms, the seedlings sharing space with the WiFi routers "turned brown and died."
Those students were apparently inspired, ABC News reports, after they started "noticing that when they slept with their cellphones near their heads overnight, they had trouble focusing the next day." A biology teacher at the school, Kim Horsevad, also defended the students' study against critics who charged that the watercress seeds that died were probably dried out by the WiFi routers' heat. She claims that students kept both sets of plants "sufficiently moist during the whole experiment, and the temperatures were controlled thermostatically."
The following set of photos apparently depict the very watercress seedlings mentioned in the experiment:
http://i.imgur.com/RN2YaKs.jpg
That's your brain on WiFi. Doesn't look good.
But that study was really just a riff on a popular 2010 experiment conducted at Wageningen University, where researchers sought to find the effects WiFi radiation might have on trees. From Popular Science:
To test the hypothesis that the mystery illness was caused by radiation poisoning, the researchers took 20 ash trees and exposed them to various kinds of radiation for three months. Sure enough, the ash trees exposed to Wi-Fi signals showed telltale signs of radiation sickness, including a "lead-like shine" on their leaves, indicating the oncoming death of those leaves. In the Netherlands, a whopping 70% of urban trees are suffering from radiation poisoning, up from only 10% five years ago—understandable, considering the explosion in Wi-Fi use in the past five years.
But what about people? Have there been any reports of human beings being affected by WiFi radiation? Yes...sort of. There's a "condition" called Electro Hypersensitivity Syndrome. In 2013, the Guardian wrote about the travails of Tim Hallam, who had lined the floors and walls of his bedroom in Leamington Spa in England with aluminum to repel wireless signals, which he claims caused him unbearable headaches and pain. His bed was covered "with a glistening silver mosquito net." (This is in line with the idea that if you cover your head in tinfoil you can prevent aliens from controlling your brain.)
Dr. James Rubin, of King's College Institute of Psychiatry, does not necessarily believe EHS to be "real," exactly, but he does liken the supposed condition to a "idiopathic environmental intolerance"—or like a food allergy, with no explicit cause. He also authored a paper suggesting the condition is psychosomatic. "The suffering is very real—I don't doubt that—and I take it very seriously," he told the Guardian. "But we've spent millions on the research and the time comes when you have to say, in the future the money would be better spent on looking for effective treatments, rather than chasing a cause."
Hallam's "condition" is an extension of the fear induced by Robert O. Becker, the orthopedic surgeon and electromedicine researcher who appeared on 60 Minutes in the 1960s to warn against pylon radiation and apparently "became the face" for the case against humans living near power plants. Becker's former lab partner, Professor Andrew Marino, of Louisiana State University, though, seems more convinced that EHS could be real, because guess what? All of the scientific papers written on the syndrome (only 50) "were funded by the telecommunications industry."
But of course (of course!), all these theories, all these experiments and studies that have failed to take hold in modern thought, trace back to a long-con plot to suppress the voices of opposition to a dark truth: that WiFi is a weapon devised by the U.S. government.
Writer Jamie Lee writes about this Big Lie in rambling, seemingly unedited detail in Waking Times. "The U.S. Navy has known for decades, since at least 1976, of the significant inherent dangers in using Wifi but have only summarized the results in military terms of 'who can we harm' and 'can we be attacked'," Lee writes, citing this Wordpress blog that no longer appears to exist. "The Telecom Industry buried the effects by claiming that only heat can causes problems with wifi, when in fact study after study after study has shown that it is the low wave, pulsed, non-ionized radiation used in RF and Microwave lengths that is disrupting our systems at the molecular level."
Indeed, this silent, digital acid rain soaking us at nearly every moment of the day goes all the way to the top, as documented in chilling detail by "Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars," a very, very long manifesto allegedly discovered by a Boeing employee in 1986 inside an IBM printer he purchased to sell for parts that "details of a plan, hatched in the embryonic days of the 'Cold War' which called for control of the masses through manipulation of industry, peoples' pastimes, education and political leanings." (You can read the document, "in its virgin form, with diagrams" here.)
So what can you do to save yourself from this wireless menace? Lee suggests hiring, "for a couple hundred bucks," an expert in EMF to "come and do a reading at your home and office and check your home wiring, which also emits radiated energy, often right next to our beds where we sleep." (When I did a Yelp search for "EMF expert" and "EMF" in New York City, the only usable result returned to me was for a man named Will LeStrange, a so-called "Feng Shui Consultant." His website looks fake.)
And since there are significant financial, legal, and time barriers to lining the walls and floors of your home (or even just a room) with aluminum, you could invest in an EMF meter. There are some on Amazon, including one that apparently detects ghosts that's only $19.10 and is eligbile for free two-day shipping for Prime members. Here's a video of a guy using a EMF meter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICA19oKPi5I
Crazy stuff.
Or, as I expect many others to do, and will do so myself, take solace in willful ignorance. Maybe WiFi is poisoning us. Maybe we're all growing tumors and our grandchildren will have tumors and everyone's brains will bleed out their ears one day. Whatever, man. I am never plugging in my laptop or my phone to connect to the internet ever again if I don't have to, just like I'm going to keep guzzling diet soda and stirring fake sugar into my coffee and sitting all day and shooting myself up with modern medicine. Join me.