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I wonder how much of the occasional health panic that springs up around wifi - and indeed other technologies - can actually be attributed to the high pitched hums that can be emitted by badly manufactured devices.

Most of it can be attributed to Mr. Paul Brodeur: http://fumento.com/cancer/emf.html

You take nothing at face value? I call bull.

When I said "I take nothing at face value" I was talking about this report and many others that claim the demise of the Earth is nigh. But I will continue, just to prove how foolish you are, because you seem like the sort that needs proof.

Do you need to stick your hand in a flame to determine that it is hot? Is every flame hot?

Not all flames are hot, moron. You can stick your hand in many flames. That you don't know that speaks volumes about you.

Can you say with certainty that the laws of the universe don't change with every breath?

The laws don't change to be sure, but our interpretation of the laws change every day. Someone finds something that invalidates our previous understanding. Take an obvious recent case like Maybe - nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

That certain gases will affect the heat retention in a gaseous mixture is a fact that you can confirm to your own personal belief. It's done all the time in school science fairs.

And only a moron, like yourself, would believe that an experiment at a school science fair accurately predicts how gas mixtures will radiate heat into space.

The amounts that are put into the air by humans, very well might have an effect in our atmosphere. That can be calculated.

This just is false. How do you "calculate" something that is not quantifiable? Nobody knows how much C02 the earth itself creates Without that, what the fuck are you doing?

So now we have something that is falsifiable, and possible avenues of refutation of the concept.

Sorry bro, AGW is not falsifiable. That is in fact the biggest issue I have with the theory. Can you tell me what "event" or "condition" would falsify it?

If global warming via human activity not causing the atmosphere to retain heat from insolation, what would be the mechanism that prevents the expected warming effect?

Because it can't possibly be wrong, right? Listen to yourself, you say in one breath it is falsifiable, then get within inches of realization then step back and say "well, it can't be wrong, we just haven't figured it out all the way".

Now we have something we can sink our teeth into. I can think of a few possibilities,

I noticed you omitted "we may be wrong". Sounds a lot more like a religion.

Duly noted that you didn't mention the anti - AGW crowd. Do you approve of their Intelligent design and Creationist type arguments for their position?

And why is it that I would talk about another group of people that have nothing to do with this argument? I'm sorry, did I say: "I am a priest" earlier? What makes you think creationism has anything to do with it? You know what, I'll bet these crazy creationists also think communism is bad, murder is bad and that you shouldn't paint your house magenta. I happen to agree with all of that. Does that somehow make me a creationist?

That American professor that they have been after, and has been cleared by multiple inquiries, but they just say the inquiries are flawed.

I'm guessing you're talking about Hansen. It may be stressful to you, but Hansen did get caught

As Gary Taubes, author of "Good Calories, Bad Calories"...

Taubes is a scientific and journalistic fraud, who pushes nutritional pseudoscience and misrepresents the positions of people he interviews. See http://www.fumento.com/fat/reason.html and http://www.atkinsexposed.org/atkins/105/Center_for_Science_in_the_Public_Interest.htm.

A huge part of the problem these days is the massive consumption of carbohydrates.

No, in fact the bulk of your caloric intake should be complex carbohydrates. Now, highly refined carbs do make it easier to overeat -- as do fatty foods. But the bulk of our problem is very simple: we eat something on the order of 25% more calories now than we did three or four decades ago. When you're overeating by 500 calories a day, shuffling around the proportions of macronutrients is re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Carbohydrates raise blood sugar, which raises insulin levels, which promotes fat storage, inhibits release of energy from fat tissue and promotes inflammation, associated with next to all our "western diseases" like heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, fibromyalgia and so on

Yeah, that's why you see so many fat Japanese people, all that rice. And why we've had all these "western diseases" for centuries, as we ate a grain-centered diet since, like, the beginning of human civilization.

Oh, wait a minute...obesity rates in Japan, where the typical diet gets about 55 to 60% of calories from carbs, are about 1/10 those of the U.S. -- but are rising as carb levels decrease and fat and protein levels increase.

And the fact that for most of human history[*] the majority of the human race has eaten a grain-centered high carbohydrate diet -- these "diseases of affluence" were awfully rare until the 20th century.

([*]To be taken literally: history starts with writing, which comes after the Neolithic revolution.)

And a high protein meal will also raise insulin levels -- good, since insulin is necessary for uptake of amino acids protein synthesis.. And people who are exercising lose weight and improve insulin response on high carb diets better than on high fat ones. And a high-complex carbohydrate diet will have you lose much more weight that a low-carb, high fat diet.

So, in summary: Taubes, full of shit; low carb diets, not backed by science.

Perhaps you'd care to find a better example than that fraud Brockovich? See http://www.fumento.com/erinwsj.html for more info.

2. Wind turbines causing women to have multiple menstrual cycles a month?

Come on. The real issue is that these people think wind turbines will decrease their property value. They don't have to make up shit like this.

For some of them that may be the reason. But for a significant number of people, when some illness or other misfortune happens to a family or to that person themselves, they'll look around for some environmental situation that they think may have caused it.

For an example, see Erin Brockovich's lawsuit against PG&E, in which she (successfully) claimed that a leak of chromium 6 caused dozens of different medical problems in a small community, "ranging from nosebleeds to breast cancer, Hodgkin's disease, miscarriages and spinal deterioration," even though for most of these problems there is no scientific evidence that chromium 6 can be a cause.

(see also: Brockovich's response and the following counter-response.)

The reason is not that these people are especially nutty or anything. It's more a lack of scientific education, and a natural distaste to the idea that some things -- particularly major life-changing events -- often happen just by chance.

Anyway, MTBE, power lines, and so on are more popular scapegoats. But, in a pinch, windmills will do almost as well.

2. Wind turbines causing women to have multiple menstrual cycles a month?

Come on. The real issue is that these people think wind turbines will decrease their property value. They don't have to make up shit like this.

For some of them that may be the reason. But for a significant number of people, when some illness or other misfortune happens to a family or to that person themselves, they'll look around for some environmental situation that they think may have caused it.

For an example, see Erin Brockovich's lawsuit against PG&E, in which she (successfully) claimed that a leak of chromium 6 caused dozens of different medical problems in a small community, "ranging from nosebleeds to breast cancer, Hodgkin's disease, miscarriages and spinal deterioration," even though for most of these problems there is no scientific evidence that chromium 6 can be a cause.

(see also: Brockovich's response and the following counter-response.)

The reason is not that these people are especially nutty or anything. It's more a lack of scientific education, and a natural distaste to the idea that some things -- particularly major life-changing events -- often happen just by chance.

Anyway, MTBE, power lines, and so on are more popular scapegoats. But, in a pinch, windmills will do almost as well.

That is absolutely wrong. People who know will tell you that bird flu kills those with healthy immune systems far easier than those with weak immune systems.

Really? Why would that be? Can you give any evidence for this? I'm not doubting you, but I can't understand why that would be true and how we would know as the number of deaths from bird flu is as yet fairly low.

The problem with many virulent infections is the collateral damage that a very healthy immune system can do when fighting off disease in lung tissue - this is why many types of infections, which are not all that serious in themselves, result in secondary infections and pneumonia. In fact, detailed analysis of the historical resords reveals that most of the victims of the 1918 flu were killed by pneumonia caused by secondary infections, not the flu itself. The existence of modern antibiotics to effectively treat such secondary infections is one of the biggest reasons that drawing a parallel between the 1918 flu and anything that could happen today (at least in a developed country) is pretty flawed reasoning.

This is explored in a more detail, along with a few good supporting links in Michael Fumento's recent article on this topic: http://www.fumento.com/disease/flu2005.html

Recommended reading if you really care about separating the facts from the hype.

Bird Flu hysteria is just that. Here is a very well-researched current article that points out a number of very good reasons why Bird Flu is unlikely to be anywhere near as big a concern as the professional hand-wringers are saying: http://www.fumento.com/disease/flu2005.html The article includes many links to a number of reliable sources as well as panicky and completely unsupportable press accounts.

Remember that in 1976, more people died from the Swine Flu *vaccine* amid similar hysteria than from the swine flu itself. There may be a lesson there. (And if you can handle the truth, you might want to have a good look at how similar hysteria drives the "global warming" alarmists, too...)

>The traffic accidents of which you speak did not:

>1) Cause billions of dollars of damage in less than an hour's time and shut down an entire industry for days.

I'm not sure it was billions of dollars for the buildings (and, btw, that's the only fair measure; take 400,000 people / 2 people/car * $10,000/car and you're looking at ~$2 billion loss, btw; it's the people who survive all those accidents demanding more cars which apparently benefit society (look up the economic theory of the broken glass window on why it's not really a benefit, btw)). Millions, sure. As for shutting down an industry for days, that's just a silly statement. More below on that.

>2) Generally result from malicious intent from people who have declared they will not be happy until millions of Americans are dead

Yes, well, boohoo. Malicious intent that kills a person isn't nearly as destructive as accidents that kill 100. Until terrorists can actually do the sort of damage to make the numbers even *remotely* match, their wants aren't very relevant.

>3) Paralyze an entire nation's ability to move people and goods

The only thing that paralyzed the movement of people and goods was governmental interference. You see, there were only four planes involved in 9/11. There were literally hundreds in the air not affected. Instead of resolving to carry on, under the real and obvious fact that a) not acting like normal would be bowing to fear (the only power that the attacks had any real chance of enforcing, given how clearly they don't have the army to enact a real war) and b) the fact that people now knew what was involved if their plane was hijacked, so would be utterly less likely to just play along, the President of the United States made a solemn pledge to fight back. And then almost immediately the airlines were given huge loans, and 9/11 began being used as a fear campaign to enact far-reaching change, like what this whole article is about. And it's not like the media's push for sensationalism, to sell, helped.

But that leads to your next point:

>4) Happen as the result of an accident

Yes, car accidents are by definition accidents. But what about the countless accidents caused by "road rage"? Few end in death, but certainly such has created a good bit of fear. In fact, this site points out just how overblown the whole "epidemic" of "road rage" has been exaggerated. Road rage might even, possibly, be responsible for 2,000 deaths over the 10 years period original cited. Of course, the number is probably a lot lower than that (perhaps 500), but who cares; sensationalism sells, be it from the White House lawn, the Capitol floor, or the newsroom desk.

This is the true evil of the post-9/11 world. Terrorism relies on one chief element: sensationalism. Without it, 4,000 dead people, a few destroyed skyscrapers, and four downed planes just turn into a week long tragedy. And while certainly the media grabbed onto this tragedy with open arms, it's been primarily the Bush administration that will not let this tragedy die. Why? Because without the fear of terrorism there's nothing much behind the Bush Presidency. It's little surprise that whenever any difficult questions come up, the talk turns to "the war on terror". Nor is it surprising that such fake news like "The Daily Show" would talk about 9/11 as Bush's security blanket. What Bush can't offer in strong leadership in the war on terror, he can always simply push an eye-for-an-eye of fear to justify extraordinary actions.

But let me end here, as I'm now more ranting about the Bush administration. My general point is, accident or not, malice or not, wants do not equate actions. The observable actions indicate that we have a lot more to fear from simple car accidents than terrorists. Most importantly, the simple fact that so many people die and so many cars are lost so reguarly indicates that nothing about a few planes were what stopped industry

It's still the longest undefended border in the world last I checked, and it's not like we put a big ol' fence up to keep them out or something.

I guess for me I'm thinking 'about time' vs. 'oh my god I'm violated'. I've had the honor of going to Canada twice now and I took my passport with me both times. I would take my passport anytime I leave the country, and Canada is one of those times.

I think of it being the opposite? Not that Canada is any harder/easier to forge papers in but what if Ahab the Arab is in Canada and actually goes through a border checkpoint instead of walking across a frozen river in the winter. Making them have to forge a few more papers shouldn't be that hard.

They've lost some 'favored nation' type status because of our history together, big deal. We make every other country use a passport to get in and that's not stopped the tourists, hell even getting them killed in florida doesn't stop em.

...has been on it for 6 months...

Exactly - Atkins has short term positive effects, but in the long term it is a harmful diet to stay on. For a good critique, check out Michael Fumento's articles on the subject.

And my rule is never trust a diet whose main proponent (Dr Robert C Atkins) himself suffered from poor health and a heart attack.

Bad analogy. Really bad.

They just write down the laws, the politicians come up with them and weild them about threateningly.

I agree...

Data compiled by Robert Schmults of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, and Investor's Business Daily, drawn from a variety of sources indicates that about 40% of the 535 members of Congress are attorneys. This includes over half of the senators.

Please read the article. Atkins has been discredited time and again, and this study is just another nail in the coffin. More info on Atkins is here.

...By indulging his hypochondriac fantasies. I glanced over his autobiography, and here's what I think (I am not a mental health professional, but I know plenty of mildly crazy people)

1. He's had trouble getting a job because he keeps on bringing up his fantasy 'handicap' (though he surely believes it's real), and he finds no employer wants to deal with a handicapped IT person.... I think it would be more accurate to say no company wants to deal with a crazy employee in any proffession.

2. His entire autobiography, he paints himself a victim of this 'syndrome.' (and peer abuse, and being overweight) Never anything more than that. True, his weblog is about 'non-toxic' housing, so he may want to keep it on topic, but it really seems to be more of an entire 'pity me' diatribe than a tale of his life thus far. Certainly he takes no responsibility for the over-eating and inactivity that made him fat, and is responsible for his low stamina. (News flash: Fat people can't move fast, or far. Remember, KE=M*V^2!)

3. I bet his doting, single mom raised him to think he was always sick- ever heard of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy ? Tell a kid something long enough, and he's likely to believe it. Drag him around to all sorts of doctors starting in infancy, and you might start to think you can never be healthy.

MCS, as many other posters have pointed out, is a fantasy illness. Michael Fumento, a respected health writer, has written a number of articles on the subject that can be found here. Incidentally, I reccomend browsing through his articles for any other topics that might be of interest to you.

So here's my (albeit non-proffessional) advice to this gentleman:

A. Stop eating.

B. Start Exercising. Cardio-Vascular and weight training. Do it till you drop. Guess what? You'll find that every week you keep it up, you'll last just a little bit longer. I'm not slim (6'1", 255lbs so not grossly obese either) but I've started exercising regularly- trust me, it won't be long before you start noticing the improvements. Maybe weeks. The fatter you are, the more you need to start right now.

C. STFU. really. No one cares about your problems, except fellow hypochondriacs who are looking for reciprical support on their bullshit illnesses. Any given ailment can be exploited for a very limited amount of sympathy. Coming up with new ailments all the time will just piss off the people around you, and turn sympathy into mild disgust.

Buddy, it seems to me your mom screwed you up from the start, before you even had a chance to know better. Blame the doctors for prescribing too many anti-biotics? Blame your mom for bringing you to so many doctors and insisting on medication. Up until the mid 90's, anti-biotics, especially weak ones, were the classic 'go-away' prescription, since doctors can't exactly prescribe sugar pills to crazy patients, or patients with crazy moms.
Oh yeah, the bad thing about over prescribing anti-biotics is that it makes the pathogens more resistant- they don't do much to you except a little diarehhia, because they kill helpful intestinal bacteria. But you must of missed that news report.

Your mom screwed you up. It's high time you got over it.

The article poses the question: What Is Environmental Illness? It then goes off about Northern Exposure, which was a very funny television show, but is not a well established authority on immunological disorders.

It's a psychosomatic condition. Get a subscription for paxil and go the fuck outside.

Whats next, it'll be illegal to claim you have a better product too?

Actually, it is.

If Ebola or any other horrific disease wipes out 90% of one village in a few days, most people from other villages will stay far away so they don't catch it... Not to mention that death rates of "up to 90%" seem to happen only when people are undernourished, overcrowded, and lack all modern medicine. "As low as" rates don't make headlines, but when WHO gets a medical team in soon enough death rates are down to 40% of those infected, and most don't get infected. In a more modern society, where it's harder to quarantine diseases, people are healthier to begin with, Ebola is somewhat treatable, and the death rate would be quite a lot lower.

When the media can't find enough real dangers, they go hysterical about Ebola. Michael Fumento
put it into perspective:

Talk about an outbreak! From the apparent inception date of the current epidemic in Uganda last October 14th to January 25th of this year, 427 Ebola cases have been reported with 173 deaths. During the same time there were over 1,900 media references to the disease on the Nexis database.

That's 11 media mentions per fatality.

...

"It's possible that someone with Ebola might leave a remote area where the disease is occurring and might even get sick here," Dr. C.J. Peters, chief of the Special Pathogens branch at the federal Centers for Disease Control told me. But, "Because our socioeconomic level allows high standards in hospitals . . . there would be a few cases but they would be controllable under our circumstances."

Ebola has as much chance of spreading in the North America as malaria does in the Arctic.

Finally, even in Africa, Ebola as an infectious disease killer is a pipsqueak.


The slow stealthy diseases can be more dangerous. Bubonic plague is exceptionally bad, because it spreads through rats without drawing much attention (most people think of piles of dead rats as a good thing), and then suddenly jumps to humans. But it's treatable with antibiotics; most Americans who catch it (a few every year, from wild rodents) survive. And at it's absolute worst, the plague didn't bring down western civilization, but probably contributed to bringing about the renaissance, the age of exploration (did the switch from galleys to sailing ships happen because of a shortage of galley slaves?), and the industrial revolution.

For that matter, they could move to Alaska; there are valleys there that, possibly, no human being has set foot in, ever. But that, of course, wouldn't be terribly convenient. It reminds me of Halifax, Nova Scotia; you'd think that there would be plenty of places in Canada where you could ban perfume, artificially-generated EM radiation, clothes, or whatever else you want to get rid of, and it'll cause no more inconvenience than a passing joke on late-night talk shows. Problem is, once someone's convinced that it's their God-given right to have their own personal neuroses catered to without inconveniencing them personally, just try to pry them loose of their delusions.

BTW, read in the Sunday paper that Erin Brockovich is on the trail of another suit against PG&E for Chromium 6 in ground water.

Here's what the EPA's Integrated Risk Information System, updated in 1998, says about chromium 6: "No data were located in the available literature that suggested that it is carcinogenic by the oral route of exposure."

Exhaustive, repeated studies of communities adjacent to landfills packed with chromium 6, including that detectable in residents' urine, have found no ill health effects, cancer or otherwise. A January report from Glasgow, Scotland, found "no increased risk of congenital abnormalities, lung cancer, or a range of other diseases." Earlier, a panel evaluating exposed residents near a New Jersey landfill estimated that "the plausible incremental cancer risk to individuals at residential sites would be substantially less than 1 in 1,000,000."

A study by Mr. Blot and others, just published in The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, evaluated almost 52,000 workers who worked at three PG&E plants over a quarter of a century. One was the Hinkley plant, and another is near Kettleman, Calif., where Ms. Brockovich's firm is rounding up plaintiffs today. The researchers found cancer rates were no higher than in the general California population and death rates significantly lower than expected.

Other studies have shown that rodents dosed at 25 parts per million and dogs dosed at 11.2 parts per million displayed no ill effects. The amount of chromium 6 in Hinkley's water never got higher than 0.58 parts per million. As for miscarriages, the EPA reports that in studies of mice and rats, "the reproductive assessment indicated that administered at 15-400 ppm in the diet [it] is not a reproductive toxicant in either sex."

Given all this, why did PG&E cough up $333 million? For one thing, much of this medical evidence came in after the settlement. Further, Ms. Brockovich's small firm enlisted high-powered trial lawyer Thomas Girardi, a specialist in toxic pollution suits. Slick lawyers and sympathetic witnesses could have cost the company much more at trial or arbitration.

Oh my, suburbia invaded by giant mutant dandelions, what a nightmare, or extremely low-maintenance lawn, depending on your approach to yard work. 8-) Except that these were found "in an area that was untouched since the days of the accident," leading me to suspect that these are just ordinary dandelions that got left along long enough to grow really big. I have no idea how big a dandelion can grow, do you? But you get enough people out looking for something weird and they are going to find something, because there's always something weird out there. Call it the Erin Brokovich effect.

I wouldn't have wanted to save that gas in a tank and breathe it all, but the way it was vented it would have spread over a wide area and raised the background radiation level a fraction of a percent. A coal-fired plant releases more radiation in the fly-ash. Your TV set and CRT computer monitor emit more radiation. It was nothing to worry about, except that the way this happened (a stuck valve undetected for hours) suggests that either the operators were incompetent or the control console was beyond human comprehension...

Try running some statistics; the poor in the year 2000 are better off than the middle class in 1971. The average work week has gone DOWN by about 2 hours in the last 30 years.

Since 1900, we've gone from 76% of out income being spent on food, clothing, and shelter to 37%, which is why we have *twice* the income to spend on goodies like cars and computers. If you want a workweek half as long, just give up those toys. More good news like this here.

Here's another tidbit. Did you know that bank's create wealth. Say a ``rich person'' puts a billion dollars in the bank. That money gets loaned out to people who buy goods which funds your salary. You, and a million other people put a thousand in the bank. Guess what? There's now two billion in the bank. So what if they have a billion in the bank? You have your thousand in the bank. Who controls more wealth? Your million friends of the big evil rich person? You both have the same wealth; wealth that you wouldn't have had had then not invested it. What does it matter, unless your envious?

That's what annoys me about all this inequitable distribution of wealth crap. If someone has money, they either do one of two things with it. They spend it, funding other people's salaries, or they invest it, where it gets multiplied 10x; with most of that going to other people's pockets.

The federal reserve is the one thing that's kept this economic expansion going so long. Fundamentally, if you make the competetion for labor sufficiently intense, the cost of labor goes up. Businesses then have to raise prices to compensate for the higher labor costs. This raises the cost of living and makes people demand higher wages. IE: inflation. Inflation is hideous, it can wipe out fixed incomes. (If you're retired and have to live on $500/month, having prices double over 5 years is nasty). It forces interest rates up, as banks have to hedge against being paid back in dollars that are worth less. It also makes long-term planning in any contract. If you agree to sell a million playstations for $300 over the next 3 years, and find out that the dollar is worth 1/2 as much near the end; you've wiped out your profit margin. There are places where inflation has been so severe, that prices have doubled every week; people got paid twice a day to help keep up. Either way, lending rates go up discourage lending, and the economy slows down. One's just nastier than the other.

Now, I will agree that a lot of the crap that corporations do should be stopped. I hate corporations railroading over honest people or freedom just because they're bigger. I hate corporations that lie and manipulate people or are hypocritical (like Ben and Jerrys unsafe, dioxin laced ice cream. ). I dislike the WTO or the MPAA.

But on the other side, I dislike the sabotage, terrorism and, most critically, the lies spread by the anti-corporations side.

Like any other human-made system, capitalism and corporatism isn't perfect. The system needs tuning and fixing once in a while. But, overall, it's the best way to run things that we know about. It's not a fundamentally broken system.

Spreading misinformation or lies around just to scare people into joining you is not the way to win. Spreading the truth is. Ultimately, in a democracy, the government answers to the people. If enough people demand something, it will happen.

1st. The anger involved wasn't immediate and transient. It's something that has been carefully built for years before use.

2nd. The crime is more likely to be repeated because a Nazi honestly thinks he is on a holy crusade to protect his own kind from an alien invader of sorts.

However what happens when 200 black churches ( in theory this doesn't exist. In practices American blacks and whites attend different temples. especially in the south ) are burned to the ground in one year ? It's considered an organized hate crime and someone caught for one is treated almost as a serial arsonist or a conspirator on the others. This stuff can't generally be proven but you can sometimes prove that the color of the congregation was the motive

and don't get me started on the Sphinx. The infamous "broken nose" was shot off with mortar fire by French or Italian troops because a broad flat nose on such a huge and ancient monument implies something they were not willing to consider. In theory this is an act of vandalism on par with painting a mustache on Mona Lisa ( never happened ). The racial implications add a lot to the crime however. The perpetrators wanted to claim the Sphinx and by extension the Pyramids as being the creation of Europeans or failing that space aliens. Nobody can claim a great engineer as inferior or less than human so destroy the evidence of that engineering and you can get by.