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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 :(
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
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
as it turns out, these dudes have egg allergies so being proved wrong is causing more symptoms.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
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?
Wtiches. That's al these lunatics are, the modern day equivalent of people who think they're being cursed by witches.
Salem Witch trials. Not that hard to imagine at all really. These people are the modern day equivalent of those who think they're persecuted by witches.
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?
It's more likely just a kind of group psychology phenomenon (I'm sure someone with more knowledge of the terms involved will chime in eventually). A group of people convinced themselves that this was happening, and with more and more talking about it and believing it even more people believe they're sick from evil towers as well.
Hell, there were stories a few months back about men in other parts of Africa killing supposed witches, blaming them for shrinking genitals. These men actually believed they had the shrunk junk and killed for it. Not trying to pick on Africa in particular here, just the first story I recalled.
Come to think of it, I've heard of this exact same scenario played out somewhere in the US--A community complained of these symptoms only to find that the tower in question wasn't even finished and had never been turned on.
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.
Accidentally, many places in Africa (so South Africa too, probably, especially with their number of immigrants from across the continent) still experience hunts for supposed witches .
Or "witchcraft" generally, for that matter.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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
This is Africa. There is a lot of folk religion and superstition there, and they don't really understand how technology works. I remember watching a documentary recently about China's economic development in Angola, and they interviewed an Angolan man about a skyscraper the Chinese were building there, and he said he thought that the glass and steel didn't look safe. All he knew was a world of buildings made of bricks at best, and so regardless of the structural improvements represented by steel, he could only see new/different = suspicious/dangerous. African culture in broad terms is still essentially pre-industrial.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
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
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.
Incidentally! Incidentally! Incidentally! Incidentally!
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.
No one expects the African Inquisition!
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
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.
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...
Except now it's pedophiles and radio towers.
It's gonna be a fun decade for child care workers and HAM radio operators.
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
There's a place where it IS a good idea?
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
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.
Sorry, EN is my 3rd language, and with this you sometimes get such linguistic atrocities...
No worries - incidents happen.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
My vote is we work on a plan to put out the sun, the number one source of electromagnetic radiation.
Who's with me?
If I had a third language, I would absolutely criticize errors in your third language.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I thought it would be
Nobody inspects the African Acquisition!
..........FULL STOP.
" a lot of folk religion and superstition there, and they don't really understand how technology works"
TFA proves that this is the same everywhere, just superstitions are different.
Except that there really are pedophiles. That doesn't excuse the hysteria and baseless accusations which are sometimes flung about (and ruin lives), but at least there really is something to fear. And the "EM sensitive" people are not nearly as numerous as the "every man is a pedophile" people. Comparing the two is kinda funny (in a dark humor sort of way).
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.