This month, BioEM2013, a joint scientific meeting of the Bioelectromagnetcis Society (BEMS) and the European Bio-Electromagnetics Association (EBEA) was held in Thessaloniki, Greece, and the proceedings were recorded by Dariusz Leszczynski on his blog, Between A Rock and a Hard Place. Highly recommended reading. Here are the links up to June 12:
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Don
Read more →The law firms of David Kyle and Paul Overett have filed suit against SCE Edison and PG@E for health effects from smart meters/smart grid and will host a press conference on Wed. June 12th, 12:00 PM at 5150 E. Pacific Coast Hwy, Long Beach, CA 90804.
A total of 16 plaintiffs, 10 SCE Edison and 6 PG@E with health effects ranging from headaches, loss of energy and ringing in the ears to cancer, heart attacks and medical implant interference/defibrillator shut offs, are holding those responsible for the new wireless digital meters accountable. Also named in the lawsuit are smart meter distribution companies, Corix and Wellington and smart meter manufacturers, Itron and Landis and Gyr, with possibly more defendants to be added as the suit progresses. Health effects associated with smart meters and smart grid have been reported all over the country, but because of the 3.4 billion dollars in federal stimulus grants offered utility companies in exchange for smart meter installation, these complaints have largely been ignored. Also ignoring the complaints of health effects was CPUC president Michael Peevey, who served as president of Edison for over a decade.
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In response to the Channel 10 News report (last two messages) the Australian military has requested that Channel 10 refrain from focussing on individual systems, meaning the EMC backpacks. To quote in part:
“For operational security reasons, defence cannot provide details on the configuration, operation or employment of these systems. This approach limits our adversaries’ ability to access information which may enhance their efforts to attack our personnel. Similarly, Defense will not provide focused imagery of these essential items because to do so may assist our adversary to defeat the protection they offer. For this reason we ask that Channel 10 does not specifically focus on the employment of individual systems.”
However Sam Milham, risking violating someone’s official secrets act and upsetting the NSA, has sent in a link to such an item, manufactured by a firm in India.
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Further to the last message, to view the Channel 10 News story on the Australian soldier who died of cancer (last message) go to the website and scroll through the video menu for: “Combat cancer?” and the predictable “Defence statement on cancer” http://ten.com.au/news.htm
Read more →Just aired tonight on Australian Channel 10 News is a breaking story of Australian soldier Kevin DIllon who died in his late 20’s from cancer. The story did not elaborate on what type of cancer but his family believes it was caused by the high power electronic counter measures (ECM) backpack that he carried on patrol in Afghanistan.The Australian Medical Association and Rear Admiral Robyn Walker has publicly indicated they are willing to look into this.
An important case but watch the spin merchants try to cover this one up. Like what they did with the unfortunate civilian workers who were zapped doing a radar upgrade of the PC3 Hawker de Haviland Orions at the RAAF base in South Australia in the late 1990’s. But that’s another story…..
Read more →Following up on previous messages to this list: “The Future According to Google”, and “Julian Assange on what the “smart” revolution is REALLY all about”, here is more on Google’s central role in pushing for grid technology. Nice to see that Google is providing a $2.65 million grant to the “Energy Foundation” to promote the smart grid. Check out the various links on the Energy Foundation website. Clever move for Google, provide generous funding to foundations promoting programs for sustainable prosperity and preventing dangerous climate change to get the environmental movement on-side. Looks suspiciously like a $2.65 million investnent in “Greenwashing” in my opinion.
Don
“Like many firms before it, Google has come to realize that policy and regulation are the biggest obstacles to grid modernization. As Michael Terrell, one of the firm’s senior lobbyists explains on a company blog, “the challenge is that the rules governing electricity distribution were written for last century’s grid.”
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From Lyn McLean, EMR Australia:
Earlier this year, in a ground-breaking legal case, an Australian man was awarded compensation for injuries received from exposure to electromagnetic radiation (EMR). This important case has implications for workers and employers, and for the authorities who regulate workplace safety and Australian & international standards.
You might also be interested to hear that there is now evidence linking mobile phone use with ADHD and brain tumours. International scientists have spoken out about the risks of wireless radiation and called for precautions. And there is fascinating research that an electric sense underlies the process of pollination – and therefore life.
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The following has direct implications to smart technology. Imagine the treasure trove of information available for “intelligence mining” with the smart grid and all those Wi-Fi enabled appliances, such as WI-See, uploading their data to a wireless cloud somewhere.
Don
U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program
By Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, Friday, June 7, 7:43 AM
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.
The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before.
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Read more →With this “Smart” technology your electricity provider (and their owners in Singapore if you happen to live in Victoria, Aust.) will be able to do far more than know which appliances you are using in a smart grid enabled home. Bathed in a sea of Wi-Fi microwaves, your family’s very movements can be monitored and data collected.
The mind boggles with the implications…thinking of having a sexy night in the sanctity of your bedroom? With “WiSee” technology someone may be seeing your every move and perhaps later sent you a text message on your smart phone advertising relevant sex aids, etc. …… If you want some privacy at least line the toilet with copper mesh…… or throw the damn WI-fi in the trash if you can bare to live without it.
Don
The Wi-Fi in your home can track your moves like Xbox Kinect
Devin Coldewey NBC News
Want to switch off the living room lights from bed, change channels while washing dishes, or turn the heat up from the couch? A team at the University of Washington has rigged a standard Wi-Fi home network to detect your movements anywhere in the home and convert them into commands to control connected devices.
Gesture recognition is the latest fad in games and tech, but even the newest systems require high-tech depth-sensing cameras or other special hardware. Microsoft’s new Kinect, for instance, uses a photon-measuring method called “time of flight” sensing that was, until the Kinect was announced, limited to high-tech laboratories. And Kinect isn’t small, either.
UW computer science students, led by assistant professor Shyam Gollakota, looked at the gesture-detection puzzle another way – specifically, how people affect the environment they’re already in.
Our bodies distort the Wi-Fi signals we use to beam information to and from our laptops and phones. By watching those signals very closely, the team could determine not just what room you’re in, but where you’re standing and how you’re moving your body. They call the system WiSee.
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We should be skeptical when reading books about the future. We should be outright incredulous if the authors expect to make money out of it. Eric Schmidt, co-author of this particular look ahead, is the executive chairman of Google and Jared Cohen is the director of Google Ideas.
On top of that the first two pages of their book consist of lengthy and euphoric endorsements by, among others, Richard Branson, Henry Kissinger, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. This is not just hype, it’s a sign that the global establishment wants us to believe in the Schmidt-Cohen vision or, at least, to accept its inevitability.
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Hard to read as it may be, this is an important book, partly as an account of what may happen, but mainly as a picture of the present mind-set of Silicon Valley. As such, its undeniable seriousness is undercut by a touch of parochialism and a lot of, perhaps unconscious, intellectual confusion, primarily hinging on that issue of the neutrality or otherwise of the technology. Read but never forget that Google wants not just to sell you stuff but also to make sure you have no choice but to buy.
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June 1, 2013
The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’
By JULIAN ASSANGE
Excerpt
“THE New Digital Age” is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas. The authors met in occupied Baghdad in 2009, when the book was conceived. Strolling among the ruins, the two became excited that consumer technology was transforming a society flattened by United States military occupation. They decided the tech industry could be a powerful agent of American foreign policy….The authors offer an expertly banalized version of tomorrow’s world: the gadgetry of decades hence is predicted to be much like what we have right now – only cooler. “Progress” is driven by the inexorable spread of American consumer technology over the surface of the earth. Already, every day, another million or so Google-run mobile devices are activated. Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States government, between the communications of every human being not in China (naughty China)…..This book is a balefully seminal work in which neither author has the language to see, much less to express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing. “What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century,” they tell us, “technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st.” Without even understanding how, they have updated and seamlessly implemented George Orwell’s prophecy. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces – forever. Zealots of the cult of consumer technology will find little to inspire them here, not that they ever seem to need it. But this is essential reading for anyone caught up in the struggle for the future, in view of one simple imperative: Know your enemy.
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Read more →Increasing incidence of burnout due to magnetic and electromagnetic fields of cell phone networks and other wireless communication technologies
Ulrich Warnke and Peter Hensinger
Abstract: Burnout syndrome (BOS) is a psychosomatic stress disorder. Exogenous stress leads to oxidative cellular stress, the formation of excessive reactive oxygen species, reactive nitrogen species, and reaction products (ROS/RNS). This then leads to mitochondrial metabolic dysfunction, which results in a lack of ATP (adenosine triphosphate) and subsequently in a diminished performance of cells. Lack of ATP is a crucial factor in BOS, as well as in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). A crucial element in the multisystem disease BOS is inflammation as a consequence of nitrosative and oxidative stress,
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Smart meters have become a big subject in the media lately and opponents have challenged utilities and public commissions on their safety, health effects and privacy concerns. The Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) is looking into the concerns as mentioned in a recent article in The Independent.
A public meeting on smart meters was hosted by the White Mountain Conservatives and held at the Show Low VFW Hall on May 22. Elizabeth Kelley of Tucson was the speaker at the meeting. She has been a public advocate on electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) since the mid 1990s and has made numerous presentations to state, national and international officials. She founded and directs the Tucson-based Electromagnetic Safety Alliance and is the coordinator for Arizonans for Safer Utility Infrastructure, where she has been challenging the installation of smart meters.
A 2010 Harpers Magazine article by Nathaniel Rich identifies Kelley as “the voice for EMF safety” in the United States. She was co-producer of the award-winning documentary film “Public Exposure: DNA, Democracy and the Wireless Revolution.”
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Just published in Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine, June 2013
Wi-Fi technology – an uncontrolled global experiment on the health of mankind
Marko Markov – Research International, Williamsville, NY, USA, Yuri G. Grigoriev – National Committee of Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, Moscow, Russia
More than 10 years ago, at the WHO organized meeting on harmonization of standards one of the authors pointed out that neglecting the hazard of high-frequency EMF for children is a crime against humanity (Markov, 2001). We believe that scientific community must be more insisting in comprehension of potential hazard that mobile exchange of information is potentially invoked in human organisms. In that aspect, it is very important that the IARC classified the RF EMF as a possible cancerogene (2B). It is important to note that for less than two years this major International Agency switched from “no conclusive evidence for health hazard” to “possible cancerogen”….In 2003, IEEE published astandard that affirmed that biological effects can only be thermal (Cho & D’Andrea, 2003). No heat – no effect. This policy serves very well in the industry and creates a serious barrier preventing biology-based assessment of the human health. The scientific community must be more insisting in comprehension of potential hazard that mobile exchange of information potentially invoke in human organisms.
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May 31, 2013
By Antoni Slodkowski
HISANOHAMA, Japan (Reuters) – Dozens of crabs, three small sharks and scores of fish thump on the slippery deck of the fishing boat True Prosperity as captain Shohei Yaoita lands his latest haul, another catch headed not for the dinner table but for radioactive testing. Japan’s government banned commercial fishing in this area, some 200 km (125 miles) northeast of Tokyo, after a devastating 2011 tsunami and the reactor meltdowns and explosions that followed at the nearby Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co, or Tepco, has battled since then to keep radioactive water used to cool the crippled reactor from leaking into the ground and the sea…..The fishermen and Tepco are in dispute over the utility’s plans to dump 100 tons of groundwater a day from the devastated plant into the sea. The complicated clean-up plan for Fukushima could take 30 years or more. Tepco’s challenge is what to do with the contaminated water that has been pooling at the plant at a rate of 400 tons a day – enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool in a week.
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The former president of Microsoft Canada is among those warning about the dangers of Wi-Fi and electromagnetic radiation exposure, and he’s heading up initiatives to find safe alternatives to current wireless uses. Frank Clegg, a leader on the Canadian technology scene for many years, says he supports those parents and concerned individuals who object to wireless Internet in schools. Former Microsoft Canada President Frank Clegg is actively involved with raising awareness about threats to children and health, particularly those posed by wireless technology or online activity. Photo from KINSA. Former Microsoft Canada President Frank Clegg is actively involved with raising awareness about threats to children and health, particularly those posed by wireless technology or online activity. Photo from KINSA.
“This is a real hazard and we shouldn’t wait for the government to catch up to the technology,” said Clegg, who was head of Microsoft Canada for nearly 15 years and now leads a national organization called Citizens 4 Safe Technology (C4ST). “We should exercise caution, especially with children.”
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Japanese citizen associations have been reporting violations of the right to health of populations in Fukushima since the first months of the accident. Meanwhile WHO continues to minimize health risks, despite reports from independent scientists, health professionals and citizen groups of high levels of contamination, inadequate radioprotection and early signs of very serious health problems. The Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, Anand Grover, has issued a strong statement (1) following his visit to the stricken area.
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Within days of the Fukushima nuclear accident and on the basis of no information whatsoever, WHO stated that “at the moment there is very little public health risk outside the 30 km (evacuation) zone”. In contrast, independent researchers (2) stated – on the basis of the composition of the emissions – that core meltdowns had occurred with massive radioactive contamination. They were right of course as TEPCO and the Japanese government conceded a few weeks later – too late to avoid harm.
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by Dr Aric Sigman
Health Education Lecturer, Fellow of the Society of Biology, Associate Fellow of the British
Psychological Society.
Introduction
The EU discusses many aspects of its citizens’ lives. Yet the main waking activity of Europeans – watching screen media – has never been thought of as an issue requiring parliamentary consideration. Over the course of childhood, children spend more time watching TV than they do in school (Zimmerman et al 2007a). The average seven-year-old will have already watched screen media for more than one full year of 24-hour days. By age 18 the average European young person will have spent a full 4 years of 24-hour days in front of a screen. But screen time is no longer merely a cultural issue about how children spend their leisure time. Screen time has now become a medical issue. Research published in the world’s most reputable medical and scientific journals shows that the sheer amount of time children spend watching TV, DVDs, computers and the internet is linked with significant measurable biological changes in their bodies and brains that may have significant medical consequences.Given that children undergoing key stages of development are spending increasingly large parts of their lives watching screen media, the EU must take a serious interest and establish a view on the matter. The following will provide the reasons why.
Statement from Australian neurosurgeon Gautam (Vini) Khurana:
“I believe that in the present decade, a significant increase in primary brain tumor incidence will be detected internationally. The first indication of this phenomenon may be the plethora of high-profile individuals diagnosed with primary brain tumors in the last few to several years: Senator Ted Kennedy, professional golfer Seve Ballesteros, Cable television host Eleanor Mondale, director and producer Dan Curtis, broadcaster Stan Zemanek, high profile attorney Johnnie Cochran, celebrated pilot Dennis E. Fitch, inventor Robert Moog, political pundit Robert Novak, US Senator Arlen Specter, renowned cancer surgeon Professor Chris O’Brien, baseball pro Gary Carter, journalist David Shaw, Stock broker Rene Rivkin, actress Elizabeth Taylor, actor Mark Ruffalo, actor and musician Martin Kemp, singer Sheryl Crow, rock star Doc Neeson, corporate leader Holly Ann Norwick (partner of Chris Gardner, who was played by Will Smith in film The Pursuit of Happyness), actor / model Rona Newton-John (sister of singer and Grease star Olivia Newton-John), actress Valerie Harper (star of the Mary Tyler Moore Show),…
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By Devra Davis,
In science news as in life, timing is everything. As soon as the World Health Organization International Agency for Research on Cancer expert review declaring cell phone radiation a “possible human carcinogen” — just like lead, DDT, and jet fuel — was drafted in 2011, the global multi-trillion dollar cell phone industry set up a quarter of a billion dollar defense fund to produce and promote science that would discredit the WHO. Whenever a report pops up questioning cell phone safety, a contrary report stands ready in the wings to cast doubt about its legitimacy.
Case in point. The WHO published detailed documentation for its year-long 2011 expert review last month. Extending this work, Santosh Kesari, chief of neuro-oncology at the University of California, San Diego, two of Canada’s top physician-epidemiologists, Antony B. Miller and Colin Soskolne, and I have just published a technical report concluding that more recent studies indicate that cell phone radiation constitutes a “probable human carcinogen.”
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