The Conspiracy Casserole
What's true and what isn't? (I don't know, other than in the case of 5G. Scroll to the bottom if you only want to read that part).
There is an entity I think of as the ‘conspiracy casserole’ which people are regularly derided for swallowing whole, as a kind of job lot: the Easyjet flying overhead to Majorca is spraying out chemicals designed to kill all of us except for the Rothschilds; the Royals are really lizards (so that’s why they never undo their zips in public!); Michelle Obama is a man; 5G masts caused the pandemic; the virus started not in a meat market but in a virology lab with poor safety standards where gain-of-function research into coronaviruses was being carried out. (Oh wait - cancel that last one, it seems there may have been a cover-up after all, according to the US Committee on Oversight and Accountability. Must keep up).
In my humble and subjective opinion I do not believe this derision is fair or the right way to go about truth-seeking. Truths are often complicated, nuanced, and subject to being seen through the lens of a million different factors including profiteering, politics, PR, which paper you read, who you talk to, who pays your salary, parenting, rhetoric, education, belief systems, vested interests, smoking too much weed, literacy levels, intellectual hubris, etc. And with regard to the royal lizards, unsubstantiated though that belief may be I am reminded of a popular and brilliant professor at my university who, when I made a dismissive noise about how the ‘fairies’ mentioned in a text obviously didn’t exist, said ‘but for all you know they might exist.’ He was of course right, even if it was a philosophical point rather than a serious biological discussion.
There is a sliding scale with absolute fact at one end, absolute fiction at the other, and all of the things we think we know somewhere in between. It cannot be the case that everything written in mainstream media and peer-reviewed journals or announced by governments and their quangos is one hundred per cent objective fact. Neither can everything in the ‘conspiracy casserole’ be one hundred per cent fiction. In order to separate the meat-alike from the real beef we need evidence and that evidence needs to come from sources that are as impartial as possible.
As well as the royal lizards example I have never seen any credible evidence that 5G towers can cause the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and logical deduction would suggest otherwise (people in a microwave-free environment get the virus too; it comes and goes whereas symptoms of excess radiation exposure are chronic, to take two obvious points). However, the rumour may not belong at the 100% fiction end of the scale either, because there is research to show that radio frequency radiation inhibits immune function, and an article in a peer-reviewed scientific journal suggests possible mechanisms by which virus symptoms could be exacerbated by RF radiation. You could therefore say that there is at least one grain of truth to the theory. Of course that’s not what the conspiracy theorists meant - they were being more absolute; but it is possible that highly-irradiated people could be more susceptible to viruses and that if anybody undertook that as an epidemiological study they might find a link with stronger symptoms. (That said, Open Access means that anyone can post fiction in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, with up to 50% of articles being fabricated, according to Lancet editor Richard Horton).
To take some more ‘absolutely crazy’ conspiracy theories: first, ‘chemtrails.’ There may not be any credible evidence that these are real. On the other hand geoengineering and cloud-seeding are actual things, and there are official plans to experiment with blocking out the sun. These techniques may do more good than harm, but they may do more harm than good, and there is an absence of democratic procedure and transparency as well as financial conflicts of interest. The authorities and profiteers are all too often as opaque as the once blue skies they say they plan to experiment with turning white, and that does little to dispel the more extreme theories.
Similarly, whilst it’s a very minority view that OBL did not mastermind the attack on the Twin Towers, (I recommend his son and wife’s intimate account), there are credible-sounding arguments from engineers on both sides about what brought the third building, WTC7, down, with detailed reports like this one from the Institute of Northern Engineering in Alaska countering the claims from the official body NIST. Should the 3,000 architects and engineers and bereaved families that make up the supposedly absolutely bananas Truther movement not be allowed to discuss what they consider to be an engineering impossibility without shouts of ‘you right-wing arnica-chugging anti-Semitic Trumpist tinfoil hatter nut jobs!’, a form of censorship that only causes a pressure cooker of even more false rumours to bubble to the top, if false is what they are? Of course they may be wrong, and the wider implications may be a stretch, but the sneering is counter-productive.
Before we turn to Wikipedia or the ‘fact-checkers’ for the definitive answers to it all, those trusted sources can at times only make the gravy of obfuscation thicker. According to Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger, Wikipedia is influenced by the CIA, whilst ‘fact-checkers’ have been challenged by reputable bodies such as the British Medical Journal in cases such as this one. (See also here for one writer’s frustration with trying to present evidence of biological harm from radio frequency radiation to the fact-checkers). As for mainstream media, when billionaires bankroll major news outlets, is it not fair to question whether those outlets may be subject to editorial bias in favour of said interests?
5G’s place in the conspiracy casserole
In mainstream media opinion pieces, the ‘5G’ issue is often to be found communing with the lizards, aliens, and Easyjet death squadrons. That’s partly fair - there is a swathe of the population that believes unsubstantiated rumours who also believe 5G to be harmful without having seen the evidence that shows that it actually is (some studies are listed here). If they did know, they might well switch their WiFi routers off and use ethernet instead because those frequencies are harmful too (see lists of research studies from physicians and scientists here and here as well as this consensus statement.) Lumping the 5G-ers in with the Easyjet-watchers and tower-hologrammers is at best lazy journalism and at worst a way that salaried ‘misinformation experts’ could be deliberately discrediting genuinely evidence-based concerns about lucrative products whose ultra-wealthy (and therefore powerful) profiteers may have influence over trusted sources of supposedly independent information.
It is the opinion of many highly-qualified radiation scientists working independently of vested interests that it is 100% fact and 0% fiction that radio frequency radiation from 5G, 4G, 3G, 2G and WiFi, from phone masts, routers, small cells, smart meters, phones, tablets, and laptops, is harmful, particularly to children and vulnerable groups. According to them, 5G needs to be taken out of the conspiracy casserole and lumped in where it belongs: with tobacco, lead, asbestos, a range of pharmaceutical products, glyphosate, and all the other toxins ‘they’ told us were safe, but which turned out not to be.
Next week: countries around the world that have replaced WiFi in schools with ethernet in order to protect the health of children (and no food analogies!).
https://patriciaburke.substack.com/p/may-23-28-safe-tech-international mentions you today, thanks for efforts,
Hi ethernet mom, a colleague in the UK told me about your blog. - I publish a newsletter of EMF news and will include you in the next one we send out...I love your sense of humor. best, Patricia in USA