Last minute criminality by the Bush FCC on cell towers

Here’s a good way to spot government mischief. Watch for announcements on the days of really big news. For example, on election Tuesday, Nov 5th ‘08, the FCC announced a major change in the regulation of the wireless spectrum.

“Federal regulators on Tuesday approved the largest ever expansion of wireless Internet access, unanimously backing a controversial plan to allow a new generation of devices to use the empty airwaves between television channels to go online” reports the LA Times.

High tech industry call this plan “wi-fi on steroids”, essentially allowing really strong cellphones to be embedded in your computer, that then allow wi-fi access everywhere. The park, the subway, the car, the mountain top, at the bottom of the ocean, no place will be inaccessible for computing pleasure, and everyplace will be equally basking in the waves of cell tower radiation.

This is not good. This is the Bushites administration conspiring with industry for a last gluttonous orgy of regulatory irresponsibility before slithering off. Cellphone towers are cancer causing now. This plan will expand cell tower use, prevalence, and wattage. Essentially, our world will become ever more radiated by the bouncing waves of ever more electronic devices.

The FCC ruling was opposed by TV industry groups, because they said the wireless internet traffic would interfere with TV signals. Theater and concert promoters also complained that there might be interference between a concert-goer’s I-phone and the performer’s wireless microphone. Reasonable concerns. A far bigger concern is that wireless technology causes cancer. Therefore it should be contained and not expanded into new horizons of electrosmog pollution.

Cell towers create electromagnetic radiation, a.k.a. electrosmog pollution. Billions of digital ones and zeros in pulsing waves enter a biological world. Biological life evolved technologies to gather information from waves. Insects use their antenna to gather information from the environment. Bats fly by radar by picking up waves. And now, suddenly, humans are sending vast, unregulated, strong waves into the ecosystems. Increasingly, we’re getting negative feedback.

Here are three snapshots from the emerging story that scientists are recognizing that wireless technology is unsafe. First, the european Interphone study is documenting the link from cellphones to brain cancer. Second, the firefighters unions no longer allow cellphone towers atop firehouse because towers increase cancer rates. Third, the honorable Rep. Dennis Kucinich recently held congressional hearings on cellphone safety, and heard testimony from doctors and cancer victims on the subject.

I have been tracking the issue for a few years now. And it is largely the same story. Citizen’s groups and a few government regulators chasing the runaway train of an unhealthy but widely adopted technology. But the facts are coming in. Cellphones will eventually be widely understood to be as cancer causing as cigarettes. In 20 years, no sane person will give one to their children.
In the meantime, I encourage people not to use cellphones or wireless laptops (especially around me), and to keep track of the issue by reading the online journal www.microwavenews.com.

Cellphone technology was let onto the market without sufficient health tests or regulation. Now cellphones are widely adopted, but this doesn’t mean they are compatible with human biology. It was a great mistake to let this seductive technology out of the box, and humanity will probably suffer huge increases in brain cancer because of it. I think all cellphone towers should be torn down. Cellphones should be turned off permanently and properly recycled. The companies that have gotten rich on this unwholesome technology should pay for a fund to cover the tab on brain cancer patients in the years to come.

I’d like to close with an elegant quote that summarizes the issue well, from Lewis Mumford, who wrote “Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.”

We should say no to a wi-fi planet. I’m no technophobe Luddite. I love the idea of the internet as humanity’s central nervous system. But I want it to be wired. Wireless technology is simply unsafe.

May the communications industry take responsibility for the biological impacts of wireless radiation. May we live in a world where we can ride the bus without being radiated by our neighbor’s e-mail. May we develop an advanced human civilization that keeps technology in harmony with biology.

Theo Talcott