Anxiety-ridden falsehoods: eg. EMF and Spam

[ComputerGuy]

I'm quoting some comments from another thread about the CFE, because it is an interesting topic, but certainly way off topic for that thread.

Posted Today, 09:09 AM

AlanMexicali, on 23 Jul 2014 - 02:09 AM, said:

The current EMF hoax is very standard fare in some communitiies but never the less a hoax with 0 evidence supporting it except "puedo" science. Smart meters are 100% safe as are cell phones, blue tooth, WIFI and close proximity to high tensión power lines etc. I studied electricity and electronics my whole career and know what EMF is and does and does not.

http://www.skepdic.com/emf.html

http://ec.europa.eu/...327_co01_en.pdf

Snowyco said:

Agreed. Based on a 38 year public health, toxicology, environmental health & chemistry background, including teaching electronics, the generic opposition to "EMF" radiation has almost no foundation in reality. The light we use to read a book is EMF. The electric wiring in our homes emits EMF continuously. Our computer screens emit light (EMF) that goes to your eyes to read as you read what is written here. EMF from our local FM stations and AM stations penetrate our bodies 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. EMF from Mexican satellite TV (Sky), US satellite TV (Dish Network & DirecTV), and Canadian Shaw and Bell all irradiate our bodies every time we step outside. Fluorescent lights and incandescent lights - and those new white LED give off lots of EMF (which allows us to see things). The sun blasts massive amounts of EMF 24/7 ... so unless you live in a metal-mesh lined cave, you are exposed to EMF.

As we know from sunburns and skin cancer caused by exposure to too much sunlight, the type (frequency/wavelength) of EMF makes all the difference. (followed by length of exposure and proximity) High energy (high frequency/short wavelength) EMF like X-rays & UV from the sun, damage DNA - causing mutations of genes. Get both of your copies of a gene damaged => get cancer.

EMF energy broadcast by household electricity is simply too low to cause cancer: Compare a flashlight to the sun. You can shine a flashlight (lower-energy low-intensity EMF) on your skin for days, with no burns and no DNA damage. If you stand in direct sunlight (with lots of high-frequency high-energy EMF) for more than 30 minutes or so, you get DNA damage and more than that also causes a sunburn (unless you have nice brown skin - because the "brown" or "black" come from melanin - and lab tests show that if enough melanin is present - it safely absorbs all the harmful UV).

Saying someone gets harmed by EMF from your electric meter is like saying you get harmed by turning on the lights to read the newspaper...

Really, the false worries & very real--but-unnecessary anxiety created by people repeating non-factual false claims about EMF clearly causes much more cellular damage due to stress hormones (cortisol), overworking our adrenal glands, causing near continual "flight or fight" stress creates lots of nasty free-radicals => nasty oxidizers in our bodies - raising our cancer risks.

The false worries & very real--but-unnecessary anxiety created by people repeating non-factual false claims about EMF clearly causes much more damage to our health due to suppressing our immune systems caused by reading false claims - harming us with unnecessary stress.

This means that in very real terms, the people who keep repeating the false EMF myths are causing others much more physical damage to reader's and listener's health than household electricity or the new meters.

================

Real problematic sources of damaging EMF:

- The sun,

- The old high-power "bag" cell phones that had the battery and base-receiver in a bag you set on the car seat.

- Dental X-rays (very minor),

- Medical X-rays,

- Chest X-rays (significant),

- CT scans are the worst: CT scans dose us with 250 to 300 chest X-ray exposures per scan - where more than 3 CT scans per lifetime raise cancer risks by 2X.

- Particle accelerators, (used by scientists)

- Gamma rays/gamma particles from radioactive elements - like in our fired bricks, Coleman lantern mantles, and fireplace ash.

So my comment is not about EMF, but about something else that causes unnecessary stress, and is responsible for a big part of the clogged Internet that we are always going to be dealing with.

When someone gets an email message, which often is something like the "EMF scare", or "a coming virus", or "help this little girl", among others... we send that email scare along to everyone on our mailing list, and everyone that gets it then sends it along to everyone on their mailing list, and so on.

This is, in effect, the real spam: the endless multiplying of junk mail by otherwise well-meaning folks who don't even realize they are perpetuating the problem.

[afgh]

what do you think the delite button is for?

[bournemouth]

Before hitting the forward arrow - check things out: http://www.snopes.com/

although I'm with AFGH on the delete button.

[ComputerGuy]

Ah, but you're both missing the point. I'm not complaining about the amount of spam I get. I'm trying to illustrate how much damage is being done to the Internet and to mailboxes around the world, as a result of fear-based message forwarding... which is the real spam.

[ComputerGuy]

That is a great comment, Ajijic_hiker, and one of the reasons I have never written a book about email etiquette. I tried one year, long ago, to do a "set up your own email, dammit" article for The Chapala Review. I quickly realized I could never do a succinct piece, because there are so many varieties of webmail and email programs (called clients).

Just telling people about bcc is almost impossible. Online webmail pages hide this in oh-so-many ways. All are different. But if anyone has a specific email bcc they'd like to turn on, I'm happy to advise.

For them whats dasn't know, BCC means "blind carbon copy", and when you put all your addresses in that address line, all recipients are hidden from those receiving the message. Which means they can "Reply" and not automatically send their response back to everyone on the list. And better, it prevents everyone else from getting all those addresses, because we do prefer our privacy.