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Hippies Say WiFi Network Is Harming Their Chakras
Anti-Globalism writes "A group of hippies is complaining that a recently installed WiFi mesh network in the UK village of Glastonbury is causing health problems. To combat the signals from the Wi-Fi hotspots, the hippies have placed orgone generators around the antennae." Although there have been many studies that show no correlation between WiFi and health issues the hippies say, "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."
I've been saying hippies are harming my wifi network for years. Damn hippies.
You can't own the electromagetic spectrum, man.
One man has even begun making orgone generators, which use crystals, semi-precious stones and gold to purportedly put out positive energy to combat the negative vibes flooding the town from the Wi-Fi base stations.
Elsewhere:
Orgone Generators change negative energy from microwaves, TV's, cell phones, computers, fluorescent lighting, automotive wiring, large electrical structures, high voltage lines and step-down electrical transformers, etc. into pure or positive life energy.
Positive Orgone is also known as Chi(China), Prana(India), and Ki(Japan).
The basic and simplified theory of how the orgone devices work is that the negative energy is attracted into the device by the organic component and then it gets bounced back and forth between the resin and suspended metal particles. Crystalline structures within the mix cause the energy to get organized and re-radiated as a positive, clean energy.
Oh yes, these sound like reasonable people.
1. Buy a couple hundred acres in the National Radio Quiet Zone and build a resort/spa/retirement community for all the well-heeled electromagnetophobes.
2. Quietly buy up as much of the valley as you can, then support campaigns to get Blue Cross and Medicare to cover electromagnetic hypersensitivity.
3. Profit.
I'd do it, but I don't believe I could live with myself. Especially if I had to give up ubiquitous broadband.
FiWi connectians doesn't mess up your ability to think, you knough.
They're not. It's been tested far more than something like this deserves. Their problems always magically disappear the second they're put into a double blinded test.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Assuming for a moment it's true; are you aware of the inverse-square law?
Get this, working on an antenna broadcasting at several hundred thousand watts is worse than sitting 2ft from a 1 watt (at most) transmitter...
Yes I am aware of the inverse square law. My point was that if the hippies really suffer from what they claim, they must be very sensitive to electromagnetic radiation in the microwave range because WiFi usually transmits using even less power than a mobile phone. So if they use mobile phones but say they suffer from the WiFi radiation they're likely to be affected by somethning else. I should have written it down more clearly though.
-- Cheers!
It is not a bunch of hippies doing the complaining, it is the residents. They have little use for the WiFi, which has been used 422 times in 6 months. I suspect the locals know exactly what they want. Maintaining jobs and a way of life, which draws on 5000 years of hocus pocus. Orgone generators are right in there as a mix of crystals and gold and romanticism.
As for the headaches? Quite genuine reporting I'd say. My father told me that a satellite receiving station near where he worked was found to generate a wide mix of ills in the 3 months following its official opening. This was not published because it would have embarrassed the Minister. Due to a cock-up in parts supply, they faked the opening and it sat idle but impressive whilst headaches abounded.
Headaches occur, and people want causes assigned. It's a matter of opinion whether it is better to blame an aerial or a spell cast by a witch. Just so long as the majority have a good laugh in the pub in the off-season. Witchcraft is a bit like Royalty. A good historical reason for people to kill each other, but really just a useful source of tourist dollars these days.
This is why you cure ham. This process is very common all across Southern Europe, and works quite well to disinfect the product. Basically, the restriction against eating ham only cropped up just because there was an unusual ancient tribe some thousands of years ago that didn't raise pigs. Somehow they got this practice into their holy books and, well, the rest is history.
hippies... hippies... they say they want to save the world, but all they do is smoke pot and smell bad.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
The local paper (Fosse Way) published this story without the slightest critical analysis whatsoever. As someone who has worked on, inter alia, the EMC Directive, I wrote to them asking whether the person complaining of headaches had taken part in a blind test. Perhaps needless to say, the letter has not been published and indeed I've had no acknowledgement of it.
BTW, they do not have a "way of life which draws on 5000 years of hocus pocus". The Glastonbury thing dates back to no more than the 19th century: it's as fake as Druidism in Wales. Glastonbury is just a small town in Somerset that used to make its money from the leather industry till it went bust under Thatcher. Now it's a retirement suburb, the most Conservative part of the district. Currently a few protestors are trying to stop the demolition of the old factory buildings to put up an industrial estate - the old buildings cannot be brought up to modern standards and are a complete eyesore.
Why do I complain about this? Because I live in the part of Somerset that is a net contributor of taxes to keep the residents of Glastonbury from having to have industry and jobs, that's why.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I've done maintenance work on these antenna's, and the safety warnings are no joke. Worksafe regulations forbid you from hanging in front of the drum unless the powersource has been isolated. A couple of people are killed every year because they didn't follow guidelines and had their internal organs cooked.
Having said that, wifi (radio frequency radiation) has nothing to do with this kind of high power directed microwave radiation and is completely harmless - just don't get them confused.
Er, how about us hippie broadcast engineers? I know not to climb a FM tower while it is live and I know not to touch an AM tower and the ground at the same time (you have to jump to the tower to change the light blubs :)
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
The problem with wifi health scares is the same as with nuclear health scares. Regardless of whether the pro-wifi and pro-nuclear groups are right or wrong, they are terrible at public relations. In both cases, the default response to public health concern is a derisory snort and the tendency to talk down to the people raising the concern as though they are idiots. People who do not work as engineers or biologists are not idiots, as you find out when you have to employ said people for more money than you earn to fix your plumbing or do your accounts. They are just not privy to the same understanding of the relevant issue as you are.
The same problem occurred big time in the UK with the MMR injections. The state talked down to concerned parents and treated them like idiots, the net result of which was to make them even more determined that there must be a scandal and a cover-up. Talk sensibly about the health risks of wifi (such that they exist) and show how such things have been tested independently and shown to be of no concern, and you will win-out. Laughing at anyone who raises concerns may make geeks feel smug, but it's a losing strategy and always will be.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
First, modern pork is leaner that it's ever been. Roasted pork tenderloin, for example, is significantly less fatty than roasted mutton (about 22% fat by caloric content, vs. 42% for mutton). I use mutton as an example because it's not outlawed by any (non-vegetarian) dogma, and is a typical foodstuff in places where pork is not allowed. Even ham is comparable in fat content to mutton.
Second, it doesn't require refrigeration to cure pork into ham. Traditionally preservation is the reason for curing meat in the first place. The fact that it can also be used to change or enhance flavor is a secondary usage, at least before refrigeration.
Third, in places where people don't have access to refrigeration, extra dietary fat is probably not a bad thing. It's not like dietary fat is fundamentally bad -- you need a good deal of it to be healthy -- like most things it's only bad in excess. And I can virtually guarantee that people who live without ready access to refrigeration don't eat enough meat to be worried about too much dietary fat intake.
I've discovered, on several occasions, that a visible ham radio antenna will cause large numbers of problems with the television sets and hi-fi systems of my neighbors, even when the antenna has never been connected to a transmitter. Many of the complainants are intelligent people, but the logic center of their brain shuts down when they see an unusual antenna.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Don't insult The Onion by comparing them Fox news. The Onion is America's finest news source.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Those hippies are going to be royally fucked when they realise the huge ball of incandescent gas at the middle of our solar system is the largest electromagnetic transmitter within several billion miles. How are they going to fix THAT one?
as if modern medicine is able to fathom full extent of physiological and psychological issues of homo sapiens sapiens ....
something not being known yet doesnt mean it doesnt exist.
Read radical news here
Cite? I've heard these sea stories for decades. The only factual reports of injuries that I've read involve RF burns and increases in rates of cataracts.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I served a four year apprenticeship repairing and aligning 100 watt UHF power amplifier modules on a daily basis, among other RF devices. All this was done on a test bench at approximately groin level. Despite the warnings I received at the time, it certainly has not affected my ability to reproduce. I have three normal children to prove this. The closest I ever came to injury from electromagnetic radiation was the odd RF burn on my fingers.
Everything generates EM radiation, even your own body.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
But chicken is about as 'unsafe' as pork, yet the whole friggin' world eats chicken.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
The UK is being cited as the cause of the delay in eradicating Measles from Earth because a medical quack decided that he would fake evidence that the triple MMR vaccination caused autism. The gutter press got hold of it and screamed "save the children" thereby convincing concerned parents everywhere to not vaccinate their children. I'm hoping a few of them will die of measles in order to help sharpen up peoples discrimination between nutjobs and science. I'm perfectly happy for the people of Glastonbury to do without the 21st century but I strongly object to their invocation of psudo science and trickery to condemn the rest of us to their unenlightened state. These people are wrong and should be told so in VERY large letters.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
That's the cool thing about science - nobody cares whether you believe it.
Try googling for 'rf double-blind' or if you'd like an actual journal article, here
In short, there was no correlation.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
My office has several microwave links, and I have seen birds perched on the feedhorn of an open grid parabolic antenna for several minutes without dropping dead. Granted, that is not the center of the beam. Maybe their feet are just cold.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Bring in Cartman to fix the situation.
"headaches, dizziness, nausea, severe tiredness, brain fog, disorientation and loss of appetite, loss of balance, inability to concentrate, loss of creativity"
Sounds like they have all the symptoms of smoking way too much pot.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I go to college, I'm used to pseudo science and trickery. It seems every professor I've had the last two semesters was bent on convincing the class that far left ideology is correct, and the best way to prove this was by assigning reading completely devoid of fact and unrelated to class.
With that in mind, this story and that doctor don't surprise me at all, and go to the root of the problem. It ask questions I am still trying to answer: How do people hold a philosophical belief yet purposefully fake evidence to support their claim and yet not question the claim itself? If the only evidence supporting their claim is false information created by them yet is used by them to support it how do they not question their belief structure?
I was assigned a book to read in my sociology class that was little more then subjective rhetoric and purposely set up situations to justify policy decisions. The authors concern was the good of society. What good could come from acting on false information? Information that more objective studies in my economics class had proven to be completely false through rigorous documentation. If goal is helping society and beliefs are shown to not coincide with that goal, why do people chose their beliefs over their goal?
The goal of the doctor was probably to help people and he probably believed vaccines caused autism so he faked information that will more likely hurt people. His goal of helping people has failed miserably.
Same with these "hippies." Is it just human nature to value opinion over fact? How can we address this problem?
This wasn't a problem in the past because the level of vaccination was so high that there was herd immunity. The virus couldn't spread because the odds of someone with measles passing it on to someone else, then on to someone else and so on were incredibly low.
Personally, I'd tell parents that they can't attend state school without a vaccine certificate. You either have a measles jab, or you homeschool them.
Their problems don't disappear at all in a double-blind test. They just fail to correlate with the actual presence of the signal. Often their 'problems' become exacerbated and they send themselves mentally into a crisis because of their belief that they are being subjected to RF, even though it happens to be off in that part of the test. These trials usually end up with a significant number of people dropping off due to such 'crises'. Mind you, the symptoms of the 'sensitives' are actually real and can be life-threatening, so they should absolutely be taken very seriously and they never 'disappear'. They just aren't caused by what they are convinced they are caused by.