radiation pollution

Dear Commissioners:

Thank you for your patience and persistence in reading these emails. This is the final part of a three-part comment on a change in EWEB’s smart meter policy. 

In the first part we looked at mechanisms of harm—radio frequency radiation and electromagnetic fields—and how the proposed policy change fails to address them. In the second part we looked at the experience of harm, the lack of a productive workflow for reporting harm, and reasons for why no impartial scientific process of evaluating harm has been conducted in the US. In this final part we will look at how social pressures prevent us from acknowledging harm or recognizing the big picture we are participating in, and what a constructive response might be.

First off: What are the social pressures here?

While people are capable of perceiving independently and making independent decisions about what we are perceiving, we tend to do these things in groups. We tend to perceive what those around us give attention and importance to, and stop there—ignoring everything else. We do this in order to cooperate. We also do this because groups determine our survival. If we offend and upset the people around us by perceiving independently, at our job or even in our family, it may put us at risk. The people we cooperate with may decide they no longer want to include us in their activities, and it is very, very difficult to survive as individuals alone. So we act politely, and only direct perception to topics or from angles that those around us seem to be comfortable with.

This helps us individuals feel safe but does not keep our community safe. New threats to group survival need to be identified—threats the group has never noticed, acknowledged, or responded to before. Somebody has to risk their membership in the group to help the group evolve, mature, and survive. In times of great change, this has to happen often. People of courage and clarity have to help those around us recognize the new threats that are endangering us, so that we can cooperate and respond successfully. I encourage you to be these people.

In this case, it is easy to go along with the perceptions of people around us regarding radiation. We cannot see it. We cannot smell it. Most of us can pretend it does not exist. Besides, we have been living in a rapidly intensifying radiation environment for the past twenty-five years, and corporate news has not reported on the dangers of this radiation with any urgency or consistency. It has downplayed dangers and cast doubt on scientists and doctors whose research verified harm, because this research might damage profits from radiation-emitting devices or encourage hesitancy about using them. A mountain of science showing that people, animals, and the environment are being harmed by radiation has been ignored or unfairly discredited. [The Bioinitiative Report summarizes this science, collected from worldwide sources.]

To step out of the guided fantasy we have been living in, our first task is to wipe our assumptions about the people we want to believe are informing and protecting us: Corporate news is not telling us everything we need to know and government regulators are not keeping us safe. As we discussed in Part 2, industries polluting the environment with radiation have made sure that government will not regulate them. The six corporations that control over 95% of news in the US are linked to them financially and cover up for them. Huge stories, like cancer clusters and bee die-offs around cel phone towers worldwide, have been successfully covered up for thirty years, to keep profits flowing to those who lie and kill.

To survive this information warfare, we need to discuss topics we might normally avoid. We need to call into question the reality we normally assume and refocus our group perception more discerningly and decisively. We need to update our reality maps and respond to threats to our community, to our health, and to our sanity that did not exist thirty years ago. And we need to develop workflows for discussing these things respectfully and constructively together, so that we choose paths that honor and empower all of us.

Talking about Smart Meters takes us into scary territory. If we admit that radiation might be harmful, and look at the evidence that it is, we might have to look at other areas of our lives where radiation is affecting us, and the sources of that radiation. Very few of us have personal or intimate relationships with our utility meter. We don’t keep it in our pocket, or in our bra, or press it against our head. We don’t check it dozens of times a day, depend on it to tell us what is happening, rely on it to connect us with our friends and family, or watch or listen to content on it that regulates us emotionally. Admitting that our Smart Meter might be dangerous opens the door to admitting that other things we use might be dangerous, and many of us are desperately avoiding the inner conflict that would create. 

That kind of sneaky conflict avoidance is playing out both inside us and all around us: There was no meaningful public discussion or decision-making about the placement of 5G small cells in residential neighborhoods in Eugene and other towns, and on utility poles throughout the county last year. It was done quietly on an undisclosed number of poles, allowing for overlapping coverage patterns, and along prioritized routes to support the operation of Smart Vehicles. Those who dug into the topic were told that EWEB would receive $1800 per month per pole for hosting these devices. If they were placed on thousands of poles, that would mean millions of dollars per month in new revenues. There was no public discussion or decision-making process about the risks and benefits of signing up for this new revenue stream, who would experience the risks, costs, and harms, or who would experience the benefits. Current policy is not being made transparently, democratically, or with community involvement in cost/benefit analysis. 

This is the second wave of 5G installation, and it was no more transparent than the first. The first wave, of the big and mid-sized towers, occurred mostly during the 2020 lockdowns, when people were ordered to stay home, except on essential business. This happened nationwide in a coordinated plan. The towers were installed in thousands of towns and cities during a unique period when far fewer people were out and about, when far more important things seemed to be happening, so that fewer of us would notice or protest the towers going up.

In Northern Italy during this period, Luciano Gattinoni, a world expert on mechanical ventilation of human lungs, was a leader of the team dealing with the health crisis there. He made an interesting observation: Over half the people who showed up with low oxygen levels were breathing fine and showed no symptoms of respiratory infection. During a crisis believed to be caused by a respiratory virus, the majority of people affected showed none of the common symptoms caused by respiratory viruses. Something else was causing their difficulty breathing. 

A biologist at the University of Barcelona, Bartholomeu Payeras i Chifre, ran an in-depth statistical analysis of areas heavily affected by the pandemic worldwide. In all of them, 5G networks were installed. Only areas that had the networks installed got the concentration of cases characteristic of pandemics. Areas nearby, with no 5G, often had no cases or very few cases, even though their citizens had regular and frequent contact with people from affected areas. The regular transmission of disease between people having human contact was not happening. Illness and death seemed to be occurring due to radiation poisoning that was blocking the uptake of oxygen. Payeras calculated that the statistical fit between networks and cases was so tight, that the chance that their coexistence was just a coincidence was one in 790 million.

Coincidence theorists encourage us to believe that the only problem was a virus, but we should follow the science. We should follow the science even when finding it is blocked by manipulative and predatory corporations, that hide Gattinoni’s and Payeras’ research from us and block all discussion of it. The thorough corporate news blackout on negative stories about radiation-emitting technologies has been extended to social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook, where videos and posts about these technologies and their effects are blocked by algorithm, and to search engines like Google, where they are hidden from search results.

This became increasingly clear in late 2019 and early 2020. At first, videos and posts on radiation-related topics could be published, but were quickly identified and taken down by the platforms. Over a million videos were removed from YouTube in 2020 and over 20,000 podcasts were removed from and cancelled by Soundcloud. Then, as surveillance and censorship technologies improved, content offensive to the tech cartel was blocked before it could be published or posted. If one typed words or shared links that were not allowed, the platform refused to post them. A list of forbidden words, phrases, names, and topics was publicly available, and one could see what they were. “5G causes covid” was on that list. Mentioning that 5G can operate in the oxygen absorption band was also blocked. No one was allowed to speak or write about these things. Billions of posts and shares were blocked.

What is happening is far bigger than we are allowing ourselves to notice. It is possible that we have installed a system with secondary functions we do not know about, that are not for our benefit. How will we evaluate those functions, determine when they are being used, or deactivate them locally? How will we avoid being unconscious victims of technologies we do not understand or control? Currently, there is no way to do that. Once they are installed, other people, somewhere else, decide what functions are activated. 

Methodical safety testing of 5G networks never happened and is not happening now, and research demonstrating human harm from them is being ignored and suppressed. Instead, administrators are urgent to have these technologies up and running as quickly as possible, because they allow us to participate in Smart Cities, and the funding cycles associated with them. Smart Cities are assumed to be the next step in the evolution of environmentalism and living right with the Earth. Wipe those assumptions completely. Use a whole box of wet wipes if you have to. Nothing could be further from reality. 

Smart Cities are a feature of UN Agenda 21, a topic carefully covered in Rosa Koire’s _Behind the Green Mask_. Look up this beautiful, progressive lady and listen to her talk. She will sober you up in minutes. Her book summarizes how an unelected organization, funded by billionaires, that has been calling for global population reduction for decades, is telling us how to be green and pushing specific solutions on us that happen to kill people, plants, and animals at alarmingly high rates. By providing surveillance data from utilities and satellites, they help inventory and track all resources on Earth, all livestock, all crops, all water, all industry, all infrastructure, all energy, and all people, and put us under UN surveillance and control. Billionaires and their UN employees get to decide who gets to live, where we get to live, and how we get to live. It is the absolute end of local decision-making. Most of the US will be off-limits to human use, except to those with special privileges. Most of us will be forced to live in tiny, high-tech cities and corridors. The maps for this plan have been out for a decade. 

Being able to block our access to oxygen any time they want, through our power grid, is just part of the control program. All communities must install the technology that enables our remote control and contains our kill switch. No one can opt out. A person in an all-electric home, with an electric vehicle, whose ability to communicate and conduct transactions is tied to electronic devices, can be completely, immediately, and permanently shut down by unknown people thousands of miles away, at any time, and so can whole communities. That is what is at stake here: Our health, our choices, our freedom, and our lives.

I hope this has expanded your awareness about what is going on. I hope you will put on hold all plans to expand the Smart Grid, carefully examine the known effects of what you have already installed, and develop contingencies for the return to technologies known to be safe. I hope you will reevaluate what you are participating in, and welcome the public into a meaningful, moderated, productive process where we decide together what our priorities as a utility district are and should be. Every one of us is responsible for recognizing and doing what is right and important, even when it is difficult. I hope I have been a good example for you, and ignited you into greater integrity and passion.

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 they 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. 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.

after a careful seven-year process, evaluating pros and cons of smart meters, my utility reached a sane decision. five years later, a new general manager ignored all that. these three letters give a sense of my experience with them and what the stakes have been for others turned on to electrosentience.

Dear Commissioners,

I have spent the last 20 years dealing with damage and sensitization I received from living in a small apartment building with a bank of smart meters. I hope to help you understand how your current opt-out program fails in two ways so that you can update it to protect human health and EWEB and yourselves from legal liability for the harm installation and use of these devices cause.

To do that I will discuss the two kinds of radiation emitted (radio frequency radiation or RFR and electromagnetic frequency radiation EMF or EMR), how these relate to installation scenarios (particularly in multi-unit dwellings), how your mitigation plan fails to address either one, how you can expand your plan to more successfully address both, and what some real life examples tell us. 

Firstly, the meters emit RFR when they are transmitting data about user consumption. You know the cycles these broadcast on and the relative strength of these. You have either carefully researched the dangers of RFR emissions at these levels or not. 

Secondly, they emit EMR due to the Switching Mode Power Supply (SMPS) in the meter that steps down electricity from AC to DC (required to operate the meter but not to deliver power to the residence or business). This power supply emits high-powered spikes throughout the wiring of the building, 24-7. It affects building users whether or not data is being transmitted to the utility.

For all the information you need to understand both of these problems please read Dr.Sam Milham’s Dirty Electricity: Electrification and the Diseases of Civilization and the short document on Smart Meter SMDS EMR emissions attached to this email. Milham is an MD with a Masters in Public Health and his book has been out since 2012.The book covers the mechanisms by which a wide range of diseases, including cancer and diabetes, are caused by RFR and EMR. You are on notice. This information is available to inform your decisions.

Your current policy of allowing customers to opt out of transmitting data only addresses one of the two problems, RFR radiation, and only in single-family residences. In multi-unit residences or businesses, people will still be irradiated by the RFR broadcasts from other residents’ meters. 

This is a known problem. Those whose residence or business is located nearest to the bank of meters are most heavily affected by the RFR of the whole cluster, even if their own meter is not transmitting. They are the most likely to suffer from strokes and other neurological damage. So being able to opt out of transmission does nothing to protect anyone in a multi-unit building from the RFR from their neighbors’ meters, especially if they are positioned close to them.

The situation with EMR is similar. The dirty electricity generated by the meter travels and pulses throughout the building. Everyone in the building is affected by it. This is true whether one is in a single-family home, a free-standing business, or in a multi-unit building. Turning off data transmission does nothing to mitigate this problem, which Milham points out may be the more dangerous of the two in common scenarios.

So, as far as RFR goes, the only true opt-out for a person in a multi-unit residence or business is to have their opt-out count for all the units in that building, because if their neighbors are emitting they are still irradiated, especially if they are positioned near a meter bank. Similarly, for EMR, only if no meters are installed are the users of the building protected from this damaging and disruptive radiation. Residents and businesses need to be able to say no to the new meters entirely. The older, analog meters do not emit either RFR or EMR.

If residents already know they are adversely affected by RFR or EMR, letting them keep their old meters and not be forced to install RFR- and EMR-emitting technology is both respectful of their health and a wise reduction in your liability. In multi-unit buildings, letting a single opt out from meter installation–not just transmission–count for the whole is the only way to protect residents’ health and to protect yourselves from legal liability.

A single damage suit can produce rewards in the millions and a class action suit can produce rewards in the billions. For whatever reason, you are choosing to ignore the mounting health evidence on this topic and to force your customers to be exposed to harm. Know that a tipping point will be reached, where health disruption data is overwhelming and where juries begin to find in the favor of injured plaintiffs. It may come soon, and when it does, you may be sued for ignoring the data available. 

Having a liberal opt-out policy will at least give you legal positioning, as an organization and as individual decision-makers, that show that you tried to give customers the chance to avoid exposure to radiation and the damage it is known to cause. Let people opt-out, both of transmission and installation, and let their opt out count for the whole building they live or work in.

To personalize this: I once lived in a multi-unit building where smart meters were installed half-way through my tenancy; my sleep was disrupted and my health was radically harmed. I have since lived in single-family homes with a single smart meter and my sleep and health were disrupted, even though I slept at the opposite end of the house, over fifty feet from the meter. I have since lived in a duplex with a non-broadcasting smart meters and my sleep and health were still disrupted, even though I slept over fifty feet from those two meters. The proposal I am presenting here take all these scenarios into account. A true opt-out from installation is the only solution that works.

I currently live in a multi-unit building in West Eugene. It has analog meters. This is the first place I have lived in the last 20 years where I can sleep through the night and have no neurological or metabolic symptoms from energy delivery. I would appreciate keeping that. It seems like a basic human right. If you extend your opt out policy, I can.

Thank you for your consideration. I would appreciate a response demonstrating that you have received and understood my input.