Saturday, April 09, 2016

More on ICNIRP from Dariusz Lesczcynski

More on ICNIRP from Dariusz Lesczcynski


As written by DL on Between A Rock and A Hard Place on April 8, 2016

Is ICNIRP reliable enough to dictate meaning of science to the governmental risk regulators?

Excerpt

This post is a follow up to my posts published on April 4 and April 5.

*****
In my two last blog posts, last two blog posts ‘ICNIRP did it again…’ and ‘Mike Repacholi responds to ICNIRP did it again…’, I presented several reasons why the current modus operandi of ICNIRP is prone to provide unreliable and skewed evaluation of the scientific evidence on EMF and health.

I was strongly opposed by Mike Repacholi, Chairman Emeritus of the ICNIRP, scientist who is responsible for the “birth” of this organization.

In my opinion the major problems of ICNIRP are: SNIP

Read the post here.

Urgent Action Needed: AT&T on Warpath to Destroy California's Landline Network

URGENT ACTION NEEDED: AT&T on Warpath to Destroy California’s Valuable Landline Network 

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Josh Hart

Apologies if you are not in California, but landlines are under attack everywhere, so get informed, get involved and defend this safer mode of communication locally!
AT&T lobbyists are hard at work trying to leave the landline network in tatters, forcing people to use cell phones. Check out this article, AT&T Wants to Decommission Landlines in California, published yesterday on Techwire.
AB 2395, currently before the CA Assembly, poses a serious threat to the health and safety of Californians, and will be heard before the California State Assembly Committee on Utilities and Commerce in Sacramento this coming Wednesday, April 13, at 1:30pm.
If you can’t make it to the hearing (and even if you can) please make some calls (while you still can) and write letters, spread the word and speak out about why we need analog landlines to be maintained for our health and safety
Talking points:
• Landlines provide an important resilient communication network when electricity and cell service goes out (which is more likely with the “smart grid”)
• Many millions of people rely solely on landlines for their communication needs, and cutting people's communication is a violation of human rights and a step backward
• Call quality is far superior on a copper landline- is it progress or “moving into the 21st century” to make Californians suffer through static and dropped calls?
• Corded landlines are far safer than mobile phones, which emit radiation associated with brain tumors, and other health problems.
• As a resident of California, I am committed to taking meaningful personal action to defend our landline network, and not allow AT&T to put profits above service, access and safety.
We will post updates on this urgent issue on our website as they develop. Take action today or in 3 1/2 years the cord may be cut, as unbelievable as that might seem…..

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Thursday, April 07, 2016

Councils respond to relaxation of planning rules for phone masts (UK)

Councils respond to relaxation of planning rules for phone masts


Responding to the announcement in today's Budget that planning laws will be relaxed to allow taller phone masts to be built, Cllr Mark Hawthorne, Chairman of the Local Government Association's People and Places Board, said:

"People should be able to have their say on whether a phone mast is put up near their homes or not. Planning controls exist to give them that power and protect residents from developments that could negatively impact on their quality of life.

"Instead, relaxing planning rules in this way will mean mobile network operators being able to build huge masts, more than 50ft in height, in places where local residents and councils will have no say.


"Councils are committed to boosting mobile phone coverage in remote communities and bridging the digital divide. However this must not come at the expense of the views of local people and to the detriment of local communities. Councils are keen to work with network providers to ensure local areas get the best possible coverage in a way that residents are happy with."

http://www.local.gov.uk/web/guest/planning/-/journal_content/56/10180/7749468/NEWS

Military and marine life

Military and marine life

PMRF, researchers meet to discuss possible effects of base’s activity on coral, other sea life

Posted: Sunday, April 3, 2016 2:00 am
BARKING SANDS — Representatives from Kauai’s conservation community recently met with representatives from the Pacific Missile Range Facility to discuss concerns that electromagnetic radiation coming from the high-powered radar and antennas could be the cause of coral’s decline.
“I walked away from the meeting today with a good understanding of the path we can now take to study and understand why we are suffering a massive die-off of our coral reefs here in Kauai,” marine biologist Terry Lilley said Wednesday.
Lilley has been documenting the decline of the coral reefs off Kauai since 2012, and is raising concerns about the military’s use of electromagnetic radiation and its effect on the reef.
Capt. Bruce Hay pointed out that PMRF is renowned for world-class training and testing, “but also recognized for environmental excellence.”
“Meetings such as the one that occurred this week only reinforce that we’re good neighbors and share the same values as our extended ohana, the community,” Hay said. “A positive dialogue was established between certified scientists and concerned citizens during the meeting.”
Stewart Simonson, an Atlanta-based senior chemical engineer who surveyed Kauai’s reef in 2014 and has been studying the area’s coral since then, said he thought the meeting was a step in the right direction.
“It has taken way too long — your reef is devastated,” Simonson said. “I have not seen a concrete plan of action from the meeting.”
Both he and Lilley said further studies on the root cause of the reef’s disintegration are desperately needed, but they have a few ideas on the cause of the disappearing coral.
After spending time underwater on Kauai and studying the reefs, Simonson’s theory is that the answer is accelerated corrosion — caused by an electrical current in the ocean.
Simonson said he’s found “hundreds of tons of calcium carbonate” dissolved in the sea where thriving reefs used to be on Kauai, “and that’s pretty impressive.”
“In the industry, if someone asked me to do that, I’d need tanker trucks of hydrochloric acid in concentrated form to get that much to dissolve,” Simonson said.
Corrosion, also known as oxidization or rusting, is a natural process, especially in the ocean. It’s one of the natural breakdown processes of nature and is well known to mariners, who will sometimes line their vessels with zinc to prevent corrosion of the boat’s metal.
“The zinc corrodes first, but that protects your steel propeller and steel parts from corrosion,” Simonson said. “You replace the zinc once it corrodes off.”
One of the easiest minerals to corrode is calcium, which is the main stuff of coral skeleton.
Normal corrosion rates wouldn’t cause the current reef destruction, Simonson said, but accelerated corrosion would — and to get accelerated corrosion, you just need to add a jolt.
“It only takes a very small amount of electrical current flowing in the atmosphere or in the water to speed up corrosion,” Simonson said.
Radar towers
PMRF has about 20 radar towers on North Kauai. They work by bouncing electromagnetic radiation off of things — that’s how they detect objects.
Electromagnetic radiation is composed of waves — just like light is, except that electromagnetic radiation isn’t visible to the human eye. According to scientific models, the radiation covers much of the northwest part of the island.
“If we could see the radiation like we can see light, the entire island would be lit up 24/7,” Lilley said. “That’s now much we’re exposed to every day.”
A lot of the electromagnetic radiation is soaked up by the environment or dissipates into the atmosphere. When there’s cloud cover, most of it is reflected back to the Earth, saturating everything.
“I think that when it gets absorbed in sea water, which is a good conductor, it goes to ground and I think it’s grounding out on the reef,” Simonson said.
That low-level electrical current in the water breaks everything down, and it speeds corrosion up by hundreds of thousands of times, he said.
“The primary driver might be voltage and the voltage is coming from all these antennas and the military is the biggest user,” Simonson said. “Especially when you have RIMPAC in town.”
RIMPAC
Rim of the Pacific occurs biennially on even-numbered years in June and July in the waters around Hawaii and California. It is the world’s largest multi-national maritime exercise and has been happening every two years since 1971.
RIMPAC lands 45 warships off the coast of Kauai, each with 50 to 100 antennas that pulse radar from the vessels, and all the electromagnetic radiation form those antennas compounds the native radiation.
“When RIMPAC is in town, you have probably at least two times the amount of radiation coming off the warships as you do off the top of the mountain at PMRF,” Simonson said.
Electrocution of sea life
It’s not just the reefs that are suffering off the coast of Kauai. During the 2014 RIMPAC games, Lilley reported dead whales, sharks, turtles and other sea life.
One turtle he found had all four of its fins badly mangled.
“Something blew off all of her fins and it was obvious that it wasn’t something that had just bitten off the edges of her fins,” Lilley said. “Another of the turtles I found was completely blind.”
Simonson’s electromagnetic radiation theory could explain this mystery as well.
He said electromagnetic fields (EMF) produce electromagnetic radiation and trigger an electrical current near the surface of the salt water — which is usually a great conductor.
The turtle “is poking his head up and floating around a bit near the surface and getting juiced a bit near the surface,” Simonson said.
Animals are bioelectric beings, meaning electric processes within the cells is partly what keeps them alive. Too much electric potential can interfere with the body’s natural electrical processes and can damage DNA. When that’s replicated, it repeats the damage and creates a tumor.
Simonson further theorizes that when it’s raining, the water’s conductivity drops near the surface and near lava tubes — making the path of least resistance a nearby turtle or other animal, instead of the water itself.
“I think the chance of electric shock is the highest and that’s where Terry is seeing the highest disease rates,” Simonson said.
Human effects
Lilley said it’s much more difficult to show a connection between electromagnetic radiation and human disease than it is to document the effect on marine life because of the secrecy of medical records.
“I don’t have to get a release to give out data on dying coral, turtles or whales,” Lilley said. “I just need the agreement of the critter and I have their agreement.”
Human biology uses the same bioelectric processes within cells to drive life and scientists theorize the effects of chronic exposure to high-powered electromagnetic radiation can cause tumors in human bodies, too.
As of now, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, there aren’t federal standards limiting electromagnetic fields, and the agency maintains there “is no clear scientific evidence that electromagnetic fields affect health.”
According to Lilley and Simonson, agreements were made between scientists and the representatives from PMRF to exchange information and work together to further study Kauai’s struggling coastal environment.
Hay said he and his staff are open to future possibilities.
“Additional positive benefit is yet to be determined, but certainly within the realm of possible,” Hay said.
PMRF did not respond to numerous questions from TGI regarding concerns expressed in this story about military activities and their impacts on marine life.


Wednesday, April 06, 2016

Mike Repacholi responds to “ICNIRP did it again…” (recommended reading!)

Mike Repacholi responds to “ICNIRP did it again…” (recommended reading!)


My comment to the below blog from Dariusz Lesczcynski:

Mike Repacholi’s response to Dariusz Lesczcynski’s blog posting on ICNIRP is clear evidence of the international influence that Dariusz’s blog is having. Repacholi does not like criticism of the creature (ICNIRP) he created in order to maintain the disingenuous paradigm that the only hazardous biological effect of radiofrequency/microwave EMR is thermal. I note that Repacholi states that “ICNIRP Main Commission members are selected for their scientific integrity, no industry conflict of interest, range of expertise to cover all scientific disciplines to review EMF research, as well as excellent and reliable scientific publications themselves.” The current commission members are here: http://www.icnirp.org/en/activities/news/news-article/membership-2016-2020.html

Repacholi’s definition of “scientific integrity” means a firm adherence to ICNIRP’s orthodoxy as well as a viewpoint that all the claimed health effects of exposure are psychosomatic, a chant which ICNIRP Main Commission member Rodney Croft knows all too well. As for “no industry conflict of interest”, perhaps Repacholi hopes that if he repeats that falsehood often enough it somehow transmogrifies into being true.

SNIP

Read the post here.

WI-FRIED! "Teachers At Risk from Wi-Fi"Letter from a teacher to BCTF Magazine, March 22, 2016

WI-FRIED! "Teachers At Risk from Wi-Fi"Letter from a teacher to BCTF Magazine, March 22, 2016

" . . . The committee also agreed that children in schools should be protected from unnecessary exposure to wireless technology, particularly when alternative technologies exist, and that the potential risks of exposure to RF fields are a serious public health issue that needs to be brought to the attention of Canadians so that they have the knowledge to use wireless devices responsibly, and are able to make decisions about the use of wireless devices in a manner that protects their health and the health of their families.

"Wouldn't it be prudent at this point in time that Canada's school boards who are entrusted with the care of young children implement the precautionary principle, heeding Dr. Magda Havas' advice from page 16 of this report:

"Safety Code 6 should follow example by protecting the most sensitive people within our population."