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Tower Switch-Off Embarrasses Electrosensitives
Sockatume writes "Residents in Craigavon, South Africa complained of '[h]eadaches, nausea, tinnitus, dry burning itchy skins, gastric imbalances and totally disrupted sleep patterns' after an iBurst communications tower was put up in a local park. Symptoms subsided when the residents left the area, often to stay with family and thus evade their suffering. At a public meeting with the afflicted locals, the tower's owners pledged to switch off the mast immediately to assess whether it was responsible for their ailments. One problem: the mast had already been switched off for six weeks. Lawyers representing the locals say their case against iBurst will continue on other grounds."
The fact that the case still isn't dismissed apparently means the lobby of electrosensitives is rather strong there :(
Man, this kind of horse shit pisses me off. Egg in your faces!
What excuses will they come up with next?
There can well be something else that causes symptoms of area residents which is not related to microwave radiation. This may or may not be related to iBurst. For example, construction of the tower could have used toxic materials responsible for rashes, headaches and so on. The fact that symptoms appeared at the same time as the tower still bears investigation, but the world is full of coincidences.
Perhaps this proves that "electrosensitivity" is more mental than tangible....
The issue that remains is if a company can be held responsible for the mental anguish that it indirectly caused. (I mention indirectly, because the act of constructing a tower isn't directly changing peoples mental condition, it's simply "turning on" something that may have been there)... Either way, it should be interesting to see how this pans out...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
It's hard to imagine the whole community would get behind this for just no reason at all. What is their concern exactly? Maybe they think it's an eyesore or maybe they really are getting sick for some other reason wrongly attributed to Evil Tower Rays. Doesn't sound as though the issue can just be forgotten about.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
I had a physics professor who's wife was concerned about the EMF coming off the power lines that ran near the plot of land upon which they were contemplating building (through a common area behind their back yard). His solution? During the construction of his house he installed wire mesh in all his walls, ceiling, doors and floors. While he left his windows as standard windows, he said that he got no cell phone, radio, or TV over the air reception in the house.
The worst part was that he freely admitted that his wife was a loon.
see my gorgeous little child was at a restaurant and a heartless cruel waitress walked by with a thai peanut sauce dish and well my child got a good whiff of it. and now as a result every day for the last 3 months his intellectual development and emotional focus has been totally off. the swine flu shots have only made it worse, i swear he is borderline autistic now
i've gone to the principle of his school and insisted that all children's bags be searched and sniffer dogs bought in for the sake of peanuts destroying our children, but he babbled something about correlation and causation- completely uncaring and unsupportive!
to make matters worse afterwards i went to mcdonalds and ordered a big mac and felt nauseous a few weeks later. i didn't know what it was until a friend of mine told me there is a bad case of celiac disease going around. environment destroying corporations just don't care that they give people celiac disease and warm the atmosphere with cell phone waves. now i have to be on a gluten free diet for the rest of my life!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why is this in Idle? It's a real issue, not because the electrosensitives are right, but because they cause real trouble. Good evidence against them is valuable.
Lost: one sig, witty, 120 chars, sentimental value. Reward offered.
Placebo waves.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
Perhaps they've been coached into doing this? Like a conspiracy of some kind? Perhaps by lawyers?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Clearly they are suffering not from the effects of radiomagnetic radiation, but from withdrawal! Quick, turn it back on!
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Either it's placebo from seeing the tower (like a hypochondriac) or they're out for a quick buck. I Vote quick buck.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
This limits the construction of any EMF emitting source including things like cell phone towers and power lines. There is enough belief in the idea that EMF causes medical problems that companies are pretty much unable to push construction projects ahead in the face of opposition.
The result of this is that building a new transmission line in a new area is pretty much off limits unless it winds around to avoid existing structures by miles and miles. If someone can see it, they can use this as an argument to prevent (or at least delay) construction. I have seen this happen in Illinois.
Anyone thinking that we are going to get all sorts of new "green" superconducting transmission lines for wind and solar power needs to understand the seriously wacked out nature of these protesters. Until these issues are really put to rest, they will prevent progress on many fronts.
Think the cell phone brain cancer rumors are over? This is the same people, and it keeps coming up every few years.
Hold it a second, are they implying it is possible to embarrass someone who thinks they are "electrosensitive" and is wiling to say so publicly?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
When ham radio operators erect a new mast in their backyard, they often leave it unconnected for a month or two. When the inevitable complaints of baby monitors malfunctioning, televisions going crazy, and other non-sense crap from their neighbors blamed on the mast gets reported to the FCC or the police,
the ham radio operator calmly leads them outside and shows them the disconnected cable that goes nowhere and does nothing.
Perhaps commercial entities should take note of this, given our remarkable slide into the cesspool of stupidity where we believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories, vaccinations causing brains to turn into jello and yellow smoke to pour out, and how we're being poisoned by EM waves, and a particle accelerator's going to cause the world to end.
Seriously... There should be an idiot tax on court filings.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
perhaps if they cranked it up or put a few more towers it would kill the nerve cells that are bothering every one.
Hello Cruel World
spray a giant amount of oven cleaner in the oven, and, most importantly, because this is what makes it work: put the magnetic bands on your wrists immediately. stick your head in the oven and take a few deep centering breaths while chanting the sacred mantras. i find myself going on deeply spiritual vision quests for a few minutes. i wake up on the floor and i can feel the magnetic bands vibrating in the negative chi energy dimension aligning with the crystals
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Clearly the culprit is mercury from flu vaccines
My question is... will the company be able to sue the people in the community for economic damages?
This sort of stupidity would be much less of a problem if people were held accountable for the nonsense they disseminate.
At the very least, people like this should be put on a pedestal for other people to point and laugh at.
The same goes for people who still believe that the earth is flat, and people who say that Y2K was a fraud because 'nothing happened'.
It doesn't matter that the actual tower is completely inert. What people believe about it absolutely can cause headaches, nausea and sleeplessness. You can replicate this effect very easily by giving people sugar pills and telling them that they will lower their blood pressure, but have side effects like headaches, nausea and sleeplessness. The people who eat those inert pills really will sleep less and have more real headaches. It's not because they're somehow crazy. All humans, including the readers of slashdot, are susceptible to placebo effects.
hilarious dead on troll or hilarious WHOOOSH! over the head, either way its funny
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't think people who go around complaining all day about their electric field allergies are the type who care about their image in the community. Chronic victims crave attention, positive or negative - these people will no doubt end up on the local news talking about how stupid they are because of the way society has abused them over the years.
I used to think I was a hypochondriac...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Reminds of the Radio tower in Fringe last night that was being used to mess with people's senses to make ugly mutants look normal. Maybe the answer lies in Mutating the residents so they HAVE to live under it otherwise they will be shunned as weird looking mutants......
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Olivier added that anyone who thinks that their legal case is based only on health issues is sorely mistaken, adding that their case is not built on health concerns alone, but rather various other aspects related to the mast, including the public participation and environmental approval processes which they are confident are flawed.
So "other issues" are in fact environmental...
According to Olivier residents are now looking at a solution through the Department of Environmental Affairs, and if that fails they will fight the matter in court.
So the residents certainly don't seem to be after money, as it seems they're just trying to get the tower gone.
Another resident, Dave McGregor, is also quoted in The Star as saying that his wife and nine-year-old son suffer bouts of nausea and retching, and have developed skin rashes since the erection of the tower. “We’ve told our son that the tower is only switched on one day a week, so it’s not psychosomatic,” McGregor told The Star.
Now this is interesting, assuming it's true. One answer might be that the son saw his mom still exhibiting symptoms, and did so in response to that. Another answer - one that seems more likely - is that there is something else added to the environment when the tower was installed, which is having a more direct impact.
Look, these residents may be complete fucking loons but...
According to TFA, iBurst furnished technical reports proving the tower was turned off in early October.
In other news, British American Tobacco furnished reports showing that cigarettes have no negative health effects.
In other news, Exxon furnished reports showing that increases in CO2 are likely to transform the world into a tropical paradise.
In other news, CIA medical officers report that water-boarding releases calming endorphins in detainees.
I'm just saying...
you know, like 4 of those 500 gram ones. odorless, tasteless, and colorless, but boy oh boy!: sure to bring on a huge case of the niacin flush and those itchy eye watering hives all over the body and the nausea. since they don't know what is going on, i tell them i poisoned them and they have 30 minutes to live and so they better tell me the truth about my ex or where the money is, etc. i got a few to admit some really hilarious felonies in that condition
it backfired once where the guy picked up the steak knife and was hellbent on getting his revenge before he "died", so i had to off him for real, but otherwise, when the massive flush of hives and sometimes vomitting recedes 3 hours later, my friends always get a good laugh out of it and think i'm so freaking hilarious you wouldn't believe it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This also reminds me of the people who complain that the wind turbines put near their house 500m or more away cause them mysterious ailments. Someone should do an experiment where they erect a new tower but don't actually turn it on in the first place and see what happens. My guess is it'll be just like this where people all of a sudden think they are getting sick from a towering non powered antenna.
I recently moved away from a cell antenna site that was placed within 100 feet of my kids' bedrooms (by literal distance, not just horizontal). When the site was proposed, I googled the research and then I spoke with the scientists regarding possible dangers. They were more than happy to speak with me over the phone. The advice was that there are no longitudinal studies, so they can't say what might happen when growing up so close to a site. That is, they need 10-30 years to actually conduct these longitudinal studies. They said "no problem" regarding the older analog stuff, but they said that there are stats that can't yet be explained. That is, there is a correlation for problems, but they can't figure out the causation when it comes to this multiplexing digital stuff. The ongoing research efforts seem to stress DNA replication (mitosis) errors and later meiosis. So, this would be of particular concern to kids and young adults where you have lots of both going on in particularly interesting parts of the body, like the three B's (brain, bones, balls).
The really cool thing is that the scientists were more than happy to speak with me. I do the same thing in my line of work. When an interested person calls, I geek-out and am more than happy to take the call and spend the time.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Historically, the cause of these problems has almost always the indiscriminate overuse of herbicides during tower construction.
Usually, the parent company that contracted for erection of the tower or pole is not even aware that the contractors used 10,000 times the recommended concentration of herbicide because "more must be better, right?".
You pretty much have to do on-the-spot soil sampling to confirm this. The local people who actually sprayed will deny everything, because if they don't the local people who are suffering will lynch them.
If no real testing has been done, you have no evidence. You need blood samples and soil samples and you need them as soon as possible - after a year it will be impossible to prove or disprove anything.
But hey, don't let me interfere with the pile-on here... I can think of ten other plausible scenarios but apparently people would rather mock than sympathize.
Next time, buy a piece of land that is not a toxic waste site. No wonder it was cheap land.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
My vote is we work on a plan to put out the sun, the number one source of electromagnetic radiation.
Who's with me?
I nominate Goldbrick's Syndrome.
Also known as: SomethingForNothingitis, the Easy Street Flu, and the Gravy Train Trots.
Regards;
This seems to be a more level-headed analysis of the situation in South Africa:
http://www.techcentral.co.za/fourways-residents-vow-to-pursue-iburst-matter/12210/
I nominate Goldbrick's Syndrome; also variously known as SomethingForNothingitis, Easy Street Flu, and the Gravy Train Trots.
Regards;
Seriously, iBurst?
I Burst (open into a mist of meat when this thing is turned on)
(When they turn on the tower I had an) Eye Burst
LOL
Dear resident,
You may have noticed that we have recently broken ground on our new electronic communications tower. You will be pleased to note that the eyesore will not cause headaches, nausea, tinnitus, or dry burning itchy skin. Further,there is no way it could possibly disrupt sleep patterns or interfere with digestion. People who have claimed otherwise are loons. Besides, they've only been exposed to other towers and not this one.
If you notice any health changes, we're sure that you'll find they are imaginary or stress induced. We encourage you to find a responsible health care professional. If they tell you that our tower is involved then they are not responsible health care professionals and can be sued for malpractice.
Have a good day!
(Note to mods, this parody is a joke. If you didn't get the joke, step away from the computer and don't come back until you get "more smarter".)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
The people complaining are white and according to Google maps live in a walled community with swimming pools and hot tubs. So y'all can stop giggling about your "ignorant benighted darkies who fear witchcraft" meme now.
I guess there's no use pointing out that these people might have been hit by wind-blown soil sterilants when the tower was put up, and that their alleged symptoms are consistent with accidental exposure to chemical toxins. God forbid anyone should suggest a rational solution that doesn't involve EMF, hypochondria or corporate malice.
Last year I posted this:
"I'm willing to give this lady R10,000 CASH if she passes a double blind test in telling me when a tower is on or off. South Africa needs a James Randi, Penn n Teller, aka BS debunker."
10,000 in South Africa rand is about $1350 as of writing.
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?p=3360119#post3360119
Luddites. My guess is they are more concerned with a tower being there than any actual problems.
-]Phreak Out[-
If the shoe fits... (I do emphasize that I said "if you didn't get the joke".)
I discovered long ago that any joke I posted on Slashdot was always modded down by the incompetent unless I explicitly stated that I was joking. I don't need to be modded up on a joke, but I hate it when I get modded down because someone else cannot see the obvious.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Obviously they should tell people they are now running it in reverse or switched the polarity or something so everyone can feel awesome.
Maybe U2 will hold a show for the benefit of South African Electosissytivity syndrome.
He could then extol the virtues of communication via log drums instead of this modern communications menace we are forcing on a beautiful society of Mandellas charity sponges.
Who are we to take the music from these people and attack them electronically, filling them with our evil western ways. This is a land where a man takes his fallen brothers place. Bravely in the face of disease he will fulfull his dead brothers obligation to extend his family out 10 more kids and not forget his own. Who are we to call their superstitions religion? or whatever.
Lets just all hold hands and sing....
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Perhaps this proves that "electrosensitivity" is more mental than tangible.... The issue that remains is if a company can be held responsible for the mental anguish that it indirectly caused. (I mention indirectly, because the act of constructing a tower isn't directly changing peoples mental condition, it's simply "turning on" something that may have been there)... Either way, it should be interesting to see how this pans out...
Then I want to sue the churches for mental anguish. They spent years telling me as a child, "If your not a christian your going to burn forever." and "the rapture could happen any day!". That shit's pretty terrifying for a child.
... And that's where you should check at all times when married ;)
[commercial pitch] Thinkgeek has some handy mirrors for that ..[/commercial pitch]
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
... Plastic & Eggs would taste like shit anyways!
Who on earth would eat eggs .. yuck!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Agree, and you have stated your opinion as "fact"