note to eweb: 2
You can see here one of the ugly little tricks the utility bullies use, or the anti-activist mercenaries their Smart Grid homies contract with. Their robots have tagged all the words related to the local group I participate in, Families for Safe Technology with yellow hi-liter. They know a backdoor in wordpress and can use it. Whenever these words or strings of letters appear they are tagged yellow. I did not do this, it is one of the little games they play with activists, part of the infowars. // You are in a bad group. You are one of the enemy. We know who you are. Get the message. // In the other posts, I went back and manually removed them, in the back end. Every post with EWEB (the name of the utility) in the title seems to get the special sauce.
Dear Commissioners:
I came home from work one day and something was different. I couldn’t tell what it was right away. But that night I began to understand. I couldn’t sleep. I just lay there for hours. Nothing I could do would help me sleep, and I had never had that problem before. An hour. Two hours. Four hours. At four hours I got a tent out, a camping pad, and a sleeping bag. I set it up the tent on the flat roof and slept there.
The next night was the same. And the next. And the next. And I just started going straight to the roof. Occasionally the roof didn’t work and I had to drive my minivan up into the hills and sleep there. I felt like a homeless person. A refugee. I didn’t have enough money to pay for hotel rooms. There was nothing else I could do.
This went on for months, and during these months I was losing my ability to think and focus in the apartment. Finally, in desperation, I asked my body to show me why this was happening, and it immediately walked me out of the building and put me in front of the panel of fifteen utility meters. They looked different than before. My body felt anxious standing in front of them and wanted to leave. Although there was an apartment between me and these meters, they were about thirty feet from my bed.
I got online and started looking, and quickly found out that thousands of people in my area were having the same problem. I had moved from the 974 to the 947 and was living in Berkeley. Folks were unsuccessfully approaching the City Council and local utility, who had no sympathy or willingness to understand, and took no action.
That was 2004. There was not much data on the phenomenon. There was actually 80 years of data on the effects of microwave radiation on human beings from the US Navy, because the same radiation is used in radar, but that data was not being considered. That data showed that it injured and killed people. The navy was careful, in all its arrays, on ships and on land, to make sure that radar sweeps did not point at people nearby, because by the 1940s they had found out the radiation was lethal. It caused heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and other very bad problems.
More recently, in the 1980s, the Europeans had banned the use of microwave ovens for the same reasons. But no one in the US who cared about public health had made the connection yet between these meters broadcasting microwaves and the effects of microwaves are known to cause. And no one concerned with or advocating for public health had made the connection between oscillating electromagnetic fields and human brainwave states, nervous systems activity, metabolic disruption, or immune system function.
This was 2004, and people had not been forced out of our homes yet. We had not become hypersensitized yet. We had not ridden the avalanche of deteriorating health to death’s door or become refugees yet. These were beginning to happen and folks were simply caught in them. Very few had survived them, gotten stable again, or begun to fight back.
A parallel scenario is rape. Fewer than 10% of people who are sexually assaulted report it. In many areas it may be 5% or 2%. There are a number of good reasons for this: First, you will not be believed, and second, no action will be taken to fix the situation or prevent it from happening again, to you or to others. You will describe a painful and traumatic experience and no one will hear and understand how bad it was. They will find a way to downplay it. “You were dating this guy, right? This was your third date?” Or, “You were drinking, right?” Or, “You had kissed him?” You had done something wrong. Or maybe you were crazy. Or it was your opinion versus his. It was not something they needed to feel upset about or do something about.
To do something you had to take lots of steps and make lots of effort, like hire a lawyer or press charges, and that meant bringing your shame and your vulnerability out in front of lots of people, and putting yourself in a position where you would be ridiculed and discredited. The defense’s lawyer would do that. You could count on that. And after going through all this, based on others’ experiences, the chance of anything good coming out of it was tiny. Maybe someone would be punished, maybe someone else would be protected in the future, but the chance that you would actually be paid damages for what you went through was almost zero. Your life would not be fixed. Someone had casually destroyed your life, and that was your problem.
And what did you go through? Well, because the housing market was incredibly tight and housing was insanely expensive you could not move. You had to stay where you were as your health deteriorated, and your ability to work deteriorated, and your hypersensitivity to electromagnetic fields from wifi and cell phones increased to the point where you could not eat in restaurants and could barely shop for food without throbbing headaches that lasted hours or days, or feeling nauseaous, or panic attacks, or all the other symptoms. And as this happened, the meters were installed in more and more places, so the chance of finding a place to move to that did not have one got smaller and smaller. Maybe you would have to leave the area, and move somewhere else. But that was not really an option, because the meters were being installed everywhere else, too.
Keep in mind that with rape, there is someone to turn to. There are forms to fill out. There is a process that can be set in motion so that the problem can be stopped. In the best case scenario, at least for a couple years, the perpetrator may be taken out of circulation, and other people may be protected from danger. Here that is not the case. There is no constructive process with even a 10% chance of success of changing anything. Millions of people are being harmed, and the rapist gets to say we are crazy.
To understand why that is, you have to put down all romantic ideas about “democracy” and “science,” and understand “industry capture.” Industry capture occurs when the leading corporations in an industry pay elected officials to appoint industry employees or industry allies to regulatory positions. The regulatory agencies that are supposed to monitor an industry and make sure it does not harm people are staffed by the industry’s own employees and allies. These corporate agents are more loyal to their bosses and friends, and to the fat jobs and massive bonuses waiting for them when their term in government is over, than to the people they don’t know who are not paying them anything that they are supposed to protect: the members of the public. These “regulators” point government activity in new directions, away from public protection or public service, towards maximizing the profits of their industry. This has gone on for at least a hundred years here.
Virtually all departments of the US government have been corrupted in this way. An excellent study is “The Real Anthony Fauci,” by Robert Kennedy. It discusses the industry capture of the government department regulating medical practices and procedures. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is now remote-controlled by the corporations and professional organizations it is supposed to police. Public health, that is supposed to be its top priority, is now its last priority.
The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), in 1995, found that over 70% of all medical procedures in the US (including drug prescriptions), have never been cost-benefit analyzed and proven to be more helpful to human health than placebos, or to be more helpful than damaging. In retaliation, the medical industry had the OTA defunded. It no longer exists. Technology is no longer being objectively studied for its effectiveness or dangers. Its benefits and harms are no longer being evaluated by scientists outside the industry itself, whose goal is to give it the thumbs up.
This is key to our story: HHS is now industry-controlled, and no longer has integrous oversight. If HHS cared about public health, it would be protecting it. It would have meaningful standards for radiation exposure and would enforce those standards. It does not. This is a bigger topic we will only touch on. We will limit ourselves to saying that, in this case, HHS has handed off the regulatory ball to the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, a group that mostly pays outside consultants for the information it uses. Because OTA is gone, the FCC gets to decide what technology is safe and what biological effects of radiation need to be noticed, even though it does not have a meaningful health research staff.
To understand this hand off, more context is needed. The cartels (industry groups working together to set prices and steer government policies) that corrupt regulatory agencies like HHS and FCC have interlocking portfolios. These corporations have divisions in different fields of industry, like energy, medicine, and communications—so the corruption is also interlocking, and the “regulators” are working together. If tight communications regulations standards would affect medical profits, those regulations are removed. In fact, industry lawyers write the regulatory laws for their own industries to protect their profits and to protect their operations from government interference, get those laws introduced and passed by congressmen and senators they support, then have their regulators enforce them as loosely as possible. Government of, by, and for the people has no seat in this workflow. Well-meaning government workers who believe in protecting the public have bosses loyal to the industry they are supposed to be policing. These bosses decide what work is done and what problems are ignored.
In this case, HHS handed off the regulatory ball to FCC, where it was decided that the only biological effects from Smart Meters and other microwave emitting devices that would count as dangerous would be thermal: Do these devices heat the brains of people using them, and is that heat a problem?
That is the only thing that counts: Heat. Heart attacks, strokes, and cancer don’t count. Nervous system and autoimmune effects don’t count. Reproductive health issues—disrupting the fertility of whole generations—does not count. The evidence of harm is available, but does not count.
You are in a unique position to stand up for science, health, and the quality of life here. You are in a unique position to show your love and care for Eugene and these sincere, goofy, lovable mammals: our families, neighbors and friends. You are in a unique position to stand up for the character and flavor of this place that was once the leading progressive city in this country, and take it back from the corporations and industries that break lives to make money. This is our utility. It can be run in ways that serve us. It can honor life while providing power. Safe technologies do not need to be replaced with dangerous ones.
To show your love and care for this place and these people, you will have to step out of cognitive conformity and obedient passivity and think and act independently. You will have to go beyond the information spoon-feeding the energy industry provides, about what effects count and what is safe, and reach your own conclusions. You will have to become a better judge of human character, and recognize when people are lying to themselves and you, telling themselves and you what is convenient for them to believe, and disqualify that information. You will have to notice when you yourself are doing that, and choose to be honest instead. You will have to find your spine, your heart, your brain, and your values and take constructive action.
I will do any healthy thing in my power to help you do that. Reach out to me and I will.