Wrap Your Cellphone In Tinfoil

The internet is the land of a million tongues and a thousand truths, many false.

It’s a brightly lit shadowy world where facts are sometimes factual, political agendas are everywhere and everything is coated in a thick sludge of advertising. The internet is where conspiracies go to thrive and multiply.

But it isn’t all lies. To be on the safe side we consult additional unreliable websites to confirm what we want to believe. Who killed JFK skims the surface; the fake moon landing is old news. The Walrus was Paul, Revere. I once waded into a website showing secret underground chambers in Walmart stores all across the nation.

Also, crazy people think crazy things and act on them. It wasn’t the internet that invented free range hippie cults living in fear of radiation, microwaves and voices in their teeth. The internet doesn't make people in Albion, Greenfield Ranch and Planet Jupiter wear tinfoil helmets to thwart cosmic rays beaming from cellphone towers.

We laugh. But we also know it’s entirely possible for cell phone towers to blast invisible cancer-causing radioactive rays at us all the time, every hour, every minute, and that some day my ears might fall off and your frontal lobes turn to oatmeal.

SEMI-RELATED: The Ukiah Daily Journal recently ran a front pager (by Justine Frederiksen) on dwindling Monarch Butterfly populations. Clouds of butterflies no longer illuminate our skies. Andrea Davis, a local, was quoted saying she’s now lucky to spot a single caterpillar per year tucked in among the milkweed, giving her small hope another butterfly may one day take wing.

And you? How many little brown lizards do you see scampering around porches and parks these days, and how many did you see in the 1970s? How robust are frog populations compared to when you were a kid? Where did the banana slugs go? When did you last see a toad?

SEMI-RELATED: A friend I’ve never met emails me threats posed by corporations, progressives, global elites, etc., and last week sent documents from a lawsuit filed in 2001. The case, Murray v. Motorola, is on behalf of 13 people who believed their cancerous tumors were caused by cellphone radiation. All are deceased.

The opposing team: Sony, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, Nokia, Samsung, the FCC and dozens more. Both sides have heavy-hitting lawyers and experts, and they go to war in a Washington, DC. Superior Court come July ’21.

The gist of the lawsuit is that yes, cell phone towers emit microwave radiation at unhealthy levels for humans, and at eradication levels for birds, bees, insects and everything else that flies.

But the twist in the lawsuit is that cellphones themselves are at least as deadly as the towers because there are “only” about three million cell towers, but 14 billion mobile devices. Which cause the most devastation, towers or phones, is a tossup not that it matters to the birds, bees or Monarch Butterflies.

From a supporting document: “Just 25 years ago the average human did no harm to other species or other humans when taking a walk. Today, every human being is a source of radiation wherever he or she goes.”

Also: 5G technology means “any person with a cell phone is even more hazardous … to any bird or insect that flies between their phone and a cell tower.”

Now, comedy relief:

We live in Northern California, the most eco-sensitive spot on the planet. Courageous activists never miss taking shots at corporations threatening whales, spotted owls or redwood trees. They rage against loggers, chemicals, fracking, RoundUp, SUVs, contrails, Big Tobacco, plastic bags, L-P, G-P, Blood for Oil, highway construction, Big Pharma and so on, and on and on. They exist to shriek at those living a less righteous existence than theirs.

But who will they scream at if the lawsuit proves cell phones are destroying animal habitats? When they protest Fridays outside the courthouse whose name(s) will be on the placards they wave? Their own? Who will they jeer at? Themselves?

Will they demand compensation? Who gets it, who pays it?

Who will be Mendo’s first environmentalist to throw away her iPhone and offer weeping apologies for her mindless, decades-long, irreversible, deadly rampage against butterflies, bunnies, birdies and our fragile Mother Earth? Will she demand Justice for Toads Now!?

And who will be the first local journalist to apologize, in writing, to the tinfoil helmet weenies we’ve ridiculed through the years?

(Tom Hine lives in Ukiah and has a big butterfly bush with big purple blossoms in his backyard. TWK has good news and bad news: Your cell phone may give you cancerous tumors, but if you feel one coming on just call 9-1-1.)