Slashdot Mirror
ELF Knocks Down AM Towers To Save Earth, Intercoms
ScentCone writes "The ELF (Earth Liberation Front) has claimed responsibility for destroying the primary AM towers used by radio station KRKO in Washington state. From their statement: 'AM radio waves cause adverse health effects including a higher rate of cancer, harm to wildlife, and that the signals have been interfering with home phone and intercom lines.' The poor intercom performance must have been the last straw."
Because they hide behind this agenda of "defending nature" when everything they do is politically and financially motivated. Green peace, peta, these "elf" too.. Green peace are BigOil's puppets, don't even get me started on peta...
No, no, no. No need to group the treehuggers, the illiterate, nor the morons in with ELF. ELF is a bunch of lunatics who strive to be the most notable domestic terrorists. They'll usually burn cars, buildings (every good environmentalist likes a good bon fire, right?), and I guess knock over radio antennas now.
Since it's decentralized in nature, any nut can say they're ELF. Well, just like any nut can say they're Al-Qaeda. You'd have to be a nut to say you're aligned with either one though. Well, I guess you'd have to be a nut to go around burning things just because you felt they did you wrong.
Speaking of which, I feel a cigarette has done me wrong, so I'm going to burn one rather than reading any more about Nutjubs Inc. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
But they are right about the interference issue. I live a little more than a mile away from AM towers, and they cause all kinds of goofy stuff. Anything with speakers or headphones is an AM radio here. I had to buy new equipment to get rid of the interference via trial and error with my wallet. I used to dismiss the Brady Bunch episode where Jan's braces picked up a radio station. But now it seems plausible.
However, I assure you I have no plans to bomb it. Although, I'd like give them a 20-foot finger.
Table-ized A.I.
Why is it that none of the "radio waves are going to kill us all" crowd seems to have done a single epidemiological study of people living in this intense, continual, long-term bath of radiation? Instead pretty much all I see are collections of anecdotal accounts with no controls. "They put a cell tower next door last week and today I have cancer" is not what I would consider a definitive study.
Epidemiological studies are not that expensive in the US, once consent forms have been gathered it comes down to statistical analysis of already-computerized data. It's more of a job for insurance analysts, who are actually very well equipped for this sort of task.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Disclaimers: I live a few houses down from the station owner, so I've followed this for a while. I was a broadcast engineer in a past life (even did some contracting at a former iteration of this station.)
Here is the story from the local paper: http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20090905/NEWS01/709059909&news01ad=1 (good set of pictures)
From the Seattle Times version: "Andy Skotdal, general manager of the family-owned sports-radio station, isn't convinced ELF is responsible, even though the group's North American press office in Washington, D.C., issued a news release and posted an item on its national Web site Friday saying it was.
He suspects disgruntled locals who have long opposed the siting of the towers on 40 acres of farmland may have taken matters into their own hands after losing a key ruling in King County Superior Court a few weeks ago.
"My suspicion is, it's somebody local," Skotdal, whose family has owned the station for 20 years, said by phone Friday as he watched dozens of sheriff's detectives and FBI agents comb the property for evidence. "It could be somebody painting ELF on a banner to throw off suspicion."
In the same story, the FBI sees a few things that point to ELF but they are only a day into the investigation. I'd lay away from making a call right now on who is responsible.
Either way, stealing a excavator, driving it through a muddy field and pulling down two towers has to leave a good amount of evidence. I'm also thinking that the guy wires must have been cut too, just to keep from kill the machine operator on the first tower.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
No. We have science education. The bar is set way too low for high school graduates. Physics was an option when I went to high school. I took the class and understood more when I effectively took the same course over in college just like Chemistry and a few others. Now when people graduate from high school they know what they want and not what they should. Science education is not a problem. Science education of a higher order of general knowledge should be mandatory.
bob@Osprey:~>
I sit corrected. After looking at news photos of the event, it seems the towers were free-standing (i.e., they had no guys), and were series-fed, meaning that the towers were insulated from ground by insulators placed in each tower leg. While there would have been a brief light show when the excavator first touched the tower above the insulators, the operator was in no serious danger of electrocution as long as he stayed at the controls, since the machine itself would have carried the transmitted current to ground. It's likely that the transmitter's self-protection circuitry would have detected the short circuit at its output very quickly, and shut the transmitter down (before it could be electrically damaged). After that, unless a restart of the transmitter were attempted (either manually, remotely from the studio, or automatically, by a timer), the operator was probably in much greater danger of being killed by falling steel than by anything electrical.
A tower outside of Allentown, PA was deliberately felled the same night. As it was a guyed tower, the vandals cut the guys to bring it down.
Ah, but if the 'leaders' of these 'ecowarriors' go to jail, who will lead the 'troops'? You send the 'troops' to jail, but keep the 'leaders' free to inspire more and more violent actions in the name of ELF, etc.
ELF, btw, is 'descended' from an outfit called Earth First!, who include people like convicted arsonist Rod Coronado as sterling examples of the 'best' that they offer. No wonder PETA likes nutjobs like him, they make PETA look 'moderate'.
I was talking with an ecofreak once who told me that the 'carrying capacity' of Earth for humans is on the order of 500 million tops. So, with about 7 billion people on the planet at the moment, seems 13 of 14 need to die & join the compost heap. I'd asked the ecofreak if he was volunteering to be one of the first into the compost heap. He told me 'Of course not, they need me to show them the way'. Seems I hear similar things from any of the econutters out there; they're the only ones who can save us from ourselves as long as we do what they say.
I say, compost 'em first.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Yep. I think this is a universal phenomenon around the world. Poor people readily admit their crimes, but blame them on the circumstances of leading a life in poverty. Middle class people tend to blame it on "violations" by "society" or perhaps more specifically by something like capitalism or socialism, depending on where they hail from politically. Working class people's excuses are a mix of the poor man's excuse and the middle class man's excuse. Upper class people tend to argue that they didn't know that what they did was, technically, illegal. They never fail to point out that what they did seemed to them to be perfectly ethical, when one considers all the circumstances, and that the laws need to be changed.