Updated below: intro EMF bioeffects sources.
1. “The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.” — Stephen Hawking
2. Shall we trust any double-speaking man who seeks to reconstruct Reality, merging Strange unnatural dreams with creation? Consider:
FCC Chairman: “Everything that can be connected WILL be connected”.
3. New Statesman: Why you should give up your smartphone (one author’s reflection on ‘simple’ cognitive impairment and his decision to reduce this impairment in his own life, breaking the addiction. Physical dangers of an EMF world follow)
By Ed Smith, 11 February 2017
Silicon Valley has us hooked on digital dope. A “dumb phone” is one way to break that addiction. (We can always use local library facilities too, for email, special post insertions, emergencies, etc. —SH)
“Pushers” have contempt for “users”. They rely on them for profit but interpret the relationship as the justified exploitation of stupidity by intelligence. Drugs are an obvious example, captured during a classic exchange in the US television series The Wire.
When one user asks his dealer for a hit, the pusher replies: “It ain’t even nine, and you fiending on it . . . He’s a goddam drug addict.” Separately, when a drug lord thinks a junior colleague is losing his judgement, he asks furiously: “You ain’t using, are you?” Using is for other people: using is the business, refraining is the lifestyle.
I thought of The Wire as I was chatting with a senior executive of a soft drinks company at a corporate function. Slim and elegant, she waved away the sugary or alcoholic drinks, favouring sparkling water. Sugar was for other people.
To drugs and sugar, I’d add a third: digital dope, the rampant addiction of our time.
My favourite story from Silicon Valley relates to Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder. How does Dorsey start his day? With a big hit of social media, a chunky dose of the gear he pushes to us, a fat line of digital chemicals applied to his bleary brain?
You must be joking. Dorsey kicks off every day, unfailingly, with meditation followed by a workout. He avoids checking emails until the evening. The man has got to think, you know. Dorsey, a devotee of austere food diets, retains his discipline in digital life. Like a host wandering around a party foisting doughnuts on his guests, he is privately sipping super-juices.
Protected from distractions, Dorsey dedicates his talents to finding ways to hook users into spending more time on his platform – monetising those goddam addicts.
Well, I am pushing back at the pushers and their push-notifications. There is nothing cool about the values being pushed to us by Silicon Valley. Under the pretence of joining something liberating and modern, we are giving up information and control to a class of secretive billionaires. This dichotomy will define the next generation: disciplined people creating addictions for ill-disciplined ones, and then profiting from that dependency.
The preposterous share offering by Snap (its Snapchat app allows users to send naked pictures that automatically “dissolve”) is a classic of the genre. Devise a product, whether or not it makes the world better; inflate a bubble; never make a profit; finally, having flogged the gear to stupid users, then flog it to even stupider investors by selling them shares that don’t even give them a stake in the running of the company.
Just before Christmas, I accidentally smashed the screen of my smartphone. It came back from repair with all the apps deleted. I liked app-free life and kept the phone clean. But my email was still on my smartphone. And, like most people, when I know that my emails are in my pocket I find it hard not to check them.
No longer. I’ve acquired a “dumb phone”, made by the Swiss company Punkt. This phone does two things: calls and texts. It has zero digital capacity. Emails and apps are impossible. If I want to check my emails, it must be a conscious decision, not a habit.
I’ve kept my smartphone. If I’m travelling and likely to need email access, I swap the sim card back into the smartphone. But evenings, weekends and writing days are now mostly free from emails and apps.
Since the dumb phone arrived, I’ve noticed two opposite but connected developments. First, it has helped sustained concentration, escaping into my writer’s world. Second, I’ve found it easier to switch completely into work-free family life. Days are more productive and less stressful. That’s because the addictive drug of mildly stimulating but usually meaningless curiosity – spreading through emails, tweets and posts – is a barrier to entering a more interesting psychological space.
Cognitive reasoning relies just as much on empty space as it does on stimulation. Ideas may be initiated by information, but to grow and develop they rely on spare capacity. Fed constant information, we have no hunger to think deeply; dosed up on sweets, we’re giving up proper meals. The people pushing the pings are flogging self-medicated paralysis.
The smartphone is ten years old. A decade – that is our evolutionary exposure to living in the digital sweetshop, our hands just a moment away from another fluffy hit of sugary vapidity. We are not doing a great job of saying no.
That was the central insight of Petter Neby, Punkt’s founder. After a series of losing battles with his teenage stepdaughter about smartphone addiction, Neby then looked at himself. Checking his emails late at night, he was taking those problems to bed with him. “Technology is not the problem,” he explained to me last week. “We’re benefiting from it in this conversation now. But we must be the master of technology, not it the master of us.
“I could have written a book about it, but I’m an entrepreneur, not a writer,” Neby said. “I had to find my way to do something I’m in disagreement with.”
The shocking thing about the ubiquity of digital life is the paucity of our ambition. Can’t we choose a more exciting lifestyle model than fiddling with a small rectangle? Go back to square one – how do I want to live? – and ask yourself, “Who would advocate smartphone addiction?”
Intermittent fasting, we now know, is far healthier than any degree of “healthy eating”. It’s the same with our digital diet. Need inspiration? Think of the Silicon Valley mogul – post-meditation and post-workout – laughing at you fumbling for your phone first thing in the morning. “Ain’t even six,” he says to his masseuse, “and they’re fiending on it. Goddam addicts!”
© New Statesman 1913 – 2016
EMF bioeffects list:
One Josh del Sol has assembled the following
1) 1,659 studies on EMF and bioeffects:
http://www.powerwatch.org.uk/science/studies.asp
(Of these:
• 1,032 found effects (most effects being harmful)
• a further 370 had other “important insights or findings”
• only 257 did not find effects.)
2) Additional links with several thousand studies show biological effect and/or harm:
http://bioinitiative.org
http://www.justproveit.net/studies
http://www.emf-portal.org
http://stopsmartmeters.org.uk/resources/resources-scientific-studies-into-the-health-effects-of-emr/
3) Harvard Ethics Department ebook, “Captured Agency: How the FCC Is Dominated by the Industries It Presumably Regulates”:
http://ethics.harvard.edu/files/center-for-ethics/files/capturedagency_alster.pdf
4) 2016 Cell Phone Radiation Boosts Cancer Rates in Animals: $25 Million NTP Study Finds Brain Tumors, DNA Breakage
http://microwavenews.com/news-center/ntp-cancer-results
5) Watch the ABC Cataylst episode “Wi-Fried”, which got the journalist and entire staff fired due to industry “lobbying”:
Video:
Firing: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/31/catalyst-staff-to-be-sacked-and-weekly-tv-show-format-scrapped
6) FCC: intimidating press, suppressing science at “5G” announcement (A report by Josh del Sol)
7) TAKE IMMEDIATE ACTION ON “5G”:
http://www.parentsforsafetechnology.org/stop-5g-spectrum-frontiers.html
8) 34 Scientific Studies Showing Adverse Health Effects From Wi-Fi:
http://wifiinschools.org.uk/30.html
9) Radiofrequency science charts to visually compare studies, radiation intensities and biological effects:
http://www.bioinitiative.org/rf-color-charts/
10) Apple manual states to keep your iPhone away from your body at all times:
http://www.newsweek.com/iphone-6-bendgate-apple-says-your-iphone-shouldnt-go-your-pocket-avoid-273313
11) Study: Mobile phones are cooking men’s sperm:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/12167957/Mobile-phones-are-cooking-mens-sperm.html
12) Brain surgeon Dr Charlie Teo warns against mobiles, wireless home appliances:
http://www.news.com.au/technology/brain-surgeon-dr-charlie-teo-warns-against-mobiles-home-appliances/story-e6frfro0-1225791947213
13) American Academy of Pediatrics warns: Limit children’s exposure to cellphones:
http://www.today.com/video/pediatricians-warn-limit-childrens-exposure-to-cellphones-559871555807
14) More than 60 international warnings on Wi-Fi and microwave radiation:
http://www.safeinschool.org/2011/01/international-warnings-on-wi-fi.html
15) A List of Teacher Unions and Parent Teacher Organizations Taking Action On Wi-Fi (USA, Canada, UK, etc):
http://safetechforschoolsmaryland.blogspot.com/2016/02/teacher-unions-and-parent-teacher.html
16) TED Talk from a former Environmental Engineer in Silicon Valley:
17) Insurance giant Swiss RE has given electromagnetic frequencies the HIGHEST possible long term risk rating:
https://takebackyourpower.net/major-insurance-firm-swiss-re-warns-of-large-losses-from-unforeseen-consequences-of-wireless-technologies/
18) Another insurance giant, Lloyd’s of London, will not insure anything wireless:http://www.naturalhealth365.com/wi-fi-radiation-electromagnetic-fields-lloyds-of-london-1356.html
19) Risk Management Magazine – The Invisible Threat: Radiofrequency Radiation Risk
http://www.rmmagazine.com/2010/08/01/the-invisible-threat-radiofrequency-radiation-risk/
20) Newsweek – “Cellphone Radiation Warning Sign Sparks First Amendment Battle”
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/11/11/cellphone-warnings-first-amendment-berkeley-516357.html
21) US CDC retracts cellphone radiation warning following pressure from industry lobbyists:
http://microwavenews.com/news-center/caution-vs-precaution
22) WHO involved in suppression of additional science showing harm, since 2011:
https://takebackyourpower.net/tag/who/
23) Study Uncovers How Electromagnetic Fields Amplify Pain in Amputees
http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2016/2/3-31891_Study-Uncovers-How-Electromagnetic-Fields-Amplify-_story-wide.html
24) CEO of 1 Billion-dollar U.K. company speaks out on microwave sickness:
25) Dozens of specific scientific abstracts that all show harm:
http://emfsafetynetwork.org/shortcut-to-science/
26) Solutions: Reducing Wirelesss Radiation and EMF
27) Solutions: Reducing Your EMF Exposure
http://www.emfanalysis.com/solutions-interview/
Susan Clarke Interview on Wireless Radiation Pollution
Note: In what follows no endorsement of this YouTube channel or its contents is otherwise implied. The sole interest here is the person interviewed, Susan Clarke, formerly of the Harvard School of Public Health whose research into the dangers of Electromagnetic Radiation and it’s 5G expansion is an important contribution in the field. Her discussion on EMF specifically, easy enough to corroborate, is informative. For decades she has lectured on the subject of this wireless pollution to schools, corporations and governments.
In The Alternative 