Reproduction
Bats / Bets on Hold -Wow Wavula Dot Com
Unexpected as it was the response to the new party (L.(A)L.P.) was overwhelming. True to the Linux tradition one of the first requests from the new party members was to launch a new web site. My response was an overt enthusiasm but soon I was overcome by the difficulty in finding a suitable name.
The traditional Peradeniya, hoo (hoot) and ha hoo have been hijacked by the yahoo and all the animal of the species including the Kaputa (Raven, Crow and the Cockerel) and Fox (Lion-Fox) have been designated by the IT people and politicians, I was left with only a few choices (options).
It was with few sleepless nights and gazing at the sky in the night of the Sun’s eclipse, I hit upon the new name.
Wow! wavula.dot.com!
You may not be surprised that it was unanimously accepted by the executive committee which is unusual in Linux tradition. With so many nuances in our tradition conformity is exception to the rule. Our political think tanks were able to see the vision and its future.
With the election fever catching up feverishly so many docile bats (Political Wavulas are coming out of hibernation) are coming to perch on the big money trees, there is no room left for the fruit bats. There are so many bats around the major money trees that they almost kill each other to reach a branch or a leaf and many of them have decided to go out in day time instead of at night to relieve the congestion.
So our tree at L. (A) L..P head quarters was good landing site for the undecided Wavulas (Staggering 20% according to our latest estimates in day time polling but this varies at night.
Why we do not know?).
At our tree (site) there are hardly any at night, only night visitors are few political spies and drop outs that just visit us to recuperate their lost energies while trying to cling to the major money trees in the day time.
Barring them our site is bustling with activity.
Our new recruitment drive without any false promises is a true success story.
We in fact, do not have any promises.
Our Widow’s (windows) friends are so tired of the staled stories and boredom, visiting our site day or night is a real retreat to sanity and serenity.
We have made all entries automated and we have decided not to demand any identity or sanity to keep ourselves sane.
Our only requirement (drive) is each one of them learn to laugh loudly even if they have heard the same joke umpteenth time.
Our research team has found startling discoveries.
The bats can be trained to (especially the Political Wavulas) spread there wings by opening their webs even in resting stage to catch any jokes that come out of the mouth of the Presidential Candidates or by email even without opening their (even if they open their eyes with the degree of inebriation they are in, it make no sense to them) eyes. We can make these bats to go totally blind. Hearing only what one wants to hear, the fables or the fallible. Other advantage of resting upside down with the webs weaved (unlike the spiders) is that one can catch a punch or pun instantaneously without even opening the eyes. (Funny thing about these guys are that they think the voters are also doped and sleepy like them).
By turning upside down one is relived of disorientation in time, place and person.
How these people get disorientated of history of our nation is unbelievable. If our politicians can do this once a year instead of once in every six years, their disorientation of the real polity (that set in soon after elections) can be remedied without foreign experts. They do not need to go on foreign sojourns frequently to replenish new ideas. They only have to rest upside down at our site once in a way and the flow of blood to the vital centers are reestablished instantaneously. Only for the disorientated we have a special fruit aroma therapy.
Since our Vedamahattaya in on the campaign run our Aroma Therapy is fast catching up with the Wavulas.
So becoming a Political Wavulas is a welcome change to our polity.
Another research finding is that our Political Wavulas tend to piggy-back on other political Wavulas (whom they consider the heavy weights on both sides of the divide) and because of their own weight they drop down to earth every fraction of a second losing balance and the hold on the political wing.
Some of them of course have split brains and flight of ideas (strictly speaking a psychiatric phrase but appropriate for Sri-Lankan politicians) they even do not know which tree they are hanging on specially of the bilingual variety. They are darting from one to the other the inherent disorientation is a common symptom. Some of these varieties have one side of the brain devoted to one affiliation and the other side of the brain to the other affiliation and split brain is the manifestation of this duality not seen elsewhere in the whole universe. Their split brain is a genetic mutation to accommodate all the views in one brain.
With one side of the brain they shake hand and with the other side they stab you on the back.
The trilingual variety are so confused they happen to land on our site completely disorientated (we have a special treatment center for orientation- to say they are all Sri-Lankans) and release them immediately to their own freedom, free will and luck. The returning rate we have not yet been estimated. They are so elated that they think that they have won the big match on a plate for the finale.
We had an opportunity to scan one of their brains and found and there is an appendage growing forward in the neo-brain. We are hopeful that we get a specimen (going by the previous elections) after the election as a free gift for postmortem examination.
We have devoted a whole section in our laboratory for post election postmortems and we need volunteers to help us.
So please visit our site at wow.wavula.dot.com and be trained to become a winner every time you hit on the world wide web of lies, damn lies.
Postscript;
We need research assistants (plenty of them to analyze all the lies after the poll) to help our research team who are currently tabulating the probable profile of lies in the following categories.
1.notorious
2.consummate
3.inveterate
4.congenital
5.chronic
6.pathological
7.glib
8.incorrigible
9.unconscionable
10.egregious
11.double dealing
12.double crossing
13.wheeler dealing
14.mendacity
15.perjury
16.make believe
17.spurious
18.bloomer
19.fifth column
20.lead up the garden path.
I have added new category called nicampop lies of Sri-Lankan origin.
It is the latest to hit the web market and next president to be of US is eagerly waiting our results.
6th October, 2005
Wednesday, February 7, 2018
Introduction to Abhidhamma
Introduction to Abhidhamma
Abhidhamma is colossal and any attempt at simplifying it is difficult, simply because of the fact that Abhidhamma in Buddhist terminology is an attempt to finely describe the working of the Mind.
It is a conceptual framework of “phenomena of existence” of physical and mental formations; i.e; analysis of mental phenomena and their conditioning.
This analysis is the basis for expounding the very nature of existence of the being (Bhava) conditioned by Anitta (impermanence), Dukka (unsatisfactoriness based on impermanence) and hence Anatma (selflessness).
The expression of this at fine mental formation is Upppada (beginning), Thithi (rising to a peak) and Bhanga (dissolution) of one thought moment to another with similar beginning, crescendo and dissolution; i.e; in other words “a state of flux” of mental formation and dissolution.
This formation does not end at physical death but extends into the next round of existence in Bhava. The mental process is described as a stream (Bhavanga Sota) which invariably accompany the being.
One experiences only one thought moment at any particular time. No two thought moments coexist. Each thought moment hangs onto some kind of object. No consciousness arises without an object either physical or mental.
When a person is fast asleep and is in a dreamless state he experiences a kind of consciousness which is more passive than active (note no mention about subconsciousness in Abhidhamma akin to Freudian analysis). It is similar to consciousness at the time of conception and at the final moment of death.
This type of consciousness in Abhidhamma term is Bhavanga. Like any other consciousness it consists of genesis (Uppada) steady state or static (Thiti) and cessation (Bhanga). Arising and perishing it flows on like a stream not remaining the same for two consecutive thought moments. According to Abhidhamma, two types of (conscious and subconscious) of consciousness does not exist.
Bhavanga is not a sub-plane but a continuous stream of existence.
In Abhidhamma the word that aptly describe the state of the mind is Javana (running, no exact English rendering). This Javana thought moment lasts seven thought moments or at times of death five thought moments. Javana state is arrested by Thadarammana when an object (physical or mental) of attention is registered by the thought process and consists of two thought moments.
The death occurs immediately after the Cuti consciousness.
Cuti and Patisandhi are continuous, within the same thought moment and there is no room for Untharbhava in Abhidhamma!
It lapses into Bhavanga sota of enormity (of Samsara) which each one owns of his own, with neither beginning nor end.
A super being cannot pardon actions (Kusala or Akusala) of a being or arrest this process.
Though, with death, the physical body disintegrates and the flow of consciousness temporarily ceases yet the stream is not annihilated as the Kammic force that propels it remains.
Death is only a prelude to rebirth.
As Patisandhi (relinking) is the initial thought moment of life so Cuti the final thought moment. They are the entrance and exist of a particular life. Cuti occurs between Javana and Patisandhi, Thadarammana and Patisandhi and Bhananga and Patisandhi.
So the Samsara is the conditional existence (sort of cause and effect process) of beings, all inclusive (not only human but Deva and Preta included) and the goal of Buddhist Practice is to strive for Unconditional Existence of the Mental Culture (not a zero sum game or state) of Bliss without attachment (Tanha).
Way to achieve this is by one’s own effort of Meditation (not just meditation) with clear understanding of the above premises of Anitta, Dukka and Anatma.
Mind’s response to sense organ’s perception of an impulse as part of an object (Kaya/Rupa) of attention sets in a chain reaction.
1. Impulse has to be above the threshold value.
2. That causes to arise sensation from the sense object.
3. Perception of that sensation as agreeable, disagreeable or neutral.
4.Volitional (Cetana) attachment (Tanha) to that Citta (i.e; awakening of the life stream (Bhavanga sota) of continuity).
5. Momentary focus of attention to that state of Mind.
6. Brings to life the mental phenomenon associated with that state of mind (within the Mind or arise from sense organ).
7. Attention to the same until another (Citta) thought process begins.
Upppda, Thiti and Bhanga process recurs in an undulating form in each thought moment of the present. In terms of the life process, Patisandhi, Bhavanga and Cuti operate, in the ever recurring Samsara Cycle.
Javana is the most important of all where the free will operates and the action (good or bad) falls into either Kusala or Akusala Kamma. One owns or inherits the merits or demerits of his or her action or deed.
Thought process has 17 thought moments and Javana has 7 thought moments and Tadarammana has two thought moments and the rest of the eight thought moments are given separate names starting from Atita Bhavanga to Votthappana ending in Javana and Tadarammana.
This in essence embodies the basic tenets of Abhidhamma but does not include all the finer classifications.
Summary;
1. Bhavanga sota
2. Bhavanga uppaccheda
3. Bhavanga calana
4. Avarjana (focus of attention)
5. Tadarammana (focus of attachment)
6. Javana (there is no proper English rendering of this word)
7. Kusala and Akusala (or Kriya of the Arhaths)
Uppada, Thiti and Banga of the thought moment or process ensues with extreme rapidity.
8. Bhavanga sota.
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Radiation From Cell Phones and WiFi Are Making People Sick- Are We All at Risk?
Reproduction;
This is for Quorora writer to read;
This should be read in conjunction with the experimental evidence of brain tumour Schwanoma in rats and mice!
Radiation From Cell Phones and WiFi Are Making People Sick-
Are We All at Risk?
We are now exposed to electromagnetic radio frequencies 24 hours a day. Welcome to the largest human experiment ever.
December 2, 2011
Consider this story:
It's January 1990, during the pioneer build-out of mobile phone service. A cell tower goes up 800 feet from the house of Alison Rall, in Mansfield, Ohio, where she and her husband run a 160-acre dairy farm. The first thing the Rall family notices is that the ducks on their land lay eggs that don't hatch. That spring there are no ducklings.
By the fall of 1990, the cattle herd that pastures near the tower is sick. The animals are thin, their ribs are showing, their coats growing rough, and their behavior is weird -- they're agitated, nervous.
Soon the cows are miscarrying, and so are the goats.
Many of the animals that gestate are born deformed. There are goats with webbed necks, goats with front legs shorter than their rear legs. One calf in the womb has a tumor the size of a basketball, another carries a tumor three feet in diameter, big enough that he won't pass through the birth canal.
Rall and the local veterinarian finally cut open the mother to get the creature out alive. The vet records the nightmare in her log: "I've never seen anything like this in my entire practice... All of [this] I feel was a result of the cellular tower."
Within six months, Rall's three young children begin suffering bizarre skin rashes, raised red "hot spots." The kids are hit with waves of hyperactivity; the youngest child sometimes spins in circles, whirling madly. The girls lose hair. Rall is soon pregnant with a fourth child, but she can't gain weight. Her son is born with birth defects -- brittle bones, neurological problems -- that fit no specific syndrome. Her other children, conceived prior to the arrival of the tower, had been born healthy.
Desperate to understand what is happening to her family and her farm, Rall contacts the Environmental Protection Agency. She ends up talking to an EPA scientist named Carl Blackman, an expert on the biological effects of radiation from electromagnetic fields (EMFs) -- the kind of radiofrequency EMFs (RF-EMFs) by which all wireless technology operates, including not just cell towers and cell phones but wi-fi hubs and wi-fi-capable computers, "smart" utility meters, and even cordless home phones. "With my government cap on, I'm supposed to tell you you're perfectly safe," Blackman tells her.
"With my civilian cap on, I have to tell you to consider leaving."
Blackman's warning casts a pall on the family. When Rall contacts the cell phone company operating the tower, they tell her there is "no possibility whatsoever" that the tower is the source of her ills. "You're probably in the safest place in America," the company representative tells her.
The Ralls abandoned the farm on Christmas Day of 1992 and never re-sold it, unwilling to subject others to the horrors they had experienced. Within weeks of fleeing to land they owned in Michigan, the children recovered their health, and so did the herd.
Not a single one of the half-dozen scientists I spoke to could explain what had happened on the Rall farm. Why the sickened animals? Why the skin rashes, the hyperactivity? Why the birth defects? If the radiofrequency radiation from the cell tower was the cause, then what was the mechanism?
And why today, with millions of cell towers dotting the planet and billions of cell phones placed next to billions of heads every day, aren't we all getting sick?
In fact, the great majority of us appear to be just fine. We all live in range of cell towers now, and we are all wireless operators. More than wireless operators, we're nuts about the technology. Who doesn't keep at their side at all times the electro-plastic appendage for the suckling of information?
The mobile phone as a technology was developed in the 1970s, commercialized in the mid-80s, miniaturized in the '90s. When the first mobile phone companies launched in the United Kingdom in 1985, the expectation was that perhaps 10,000 phones would sell. Worldwide shipments of mobile phones topped the one billion mark in 2006. As of October 2010 there were 5.2 billion cell phones operating on the planet. "Penetration," in the marketing-speak of the companies, often tops 100 percent in many countries, meaning there is more than one connection per person. The mobile phone in its various manifestations -- the iPhone, the Android, the Blackberry -- has been called the "most prolific consumer device" ever proffered.
I don't have an Internet connection at my home in Brooklyn, and, like a dinosaur, I still keep a landline. But if I stand on my roof, I see a hundred feet away, attached to the bricks of the neighboring parking garage, a panel of cell phone antennae -- pointed straight at me. They produce wonderful reception on my cell phone. My neighbors in the apartment below have a wireless fidelity connection -- better known as wi-fi -- which I tap into when I have to argue with magazine editors. This is very convenient. I use it. I abuse it.
Yet even though I have, in a fashion, opted out, here I am, on a rooftop in Brooklyn, standing bathed in the radiation from the cell phone panels on the parking garage next door. I am also bathed in the radiation from the neighbors' wi-fi downstairs. The waves are everywhere, from public libraries to Amtrak trains to restaurants and bars and even public squares like Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, where the Wall Street occupiers relentlessly tweet.
We now live in a wireless-saturated normality that has never existed in the history of the human race.
It is unprecedented because of the complexity of the modulated frequencies that carry the increasingly complex information we transmit on our cell phones, smart phones and wi-fi systems. These EMFs are largely untested in their effects on human beings. Swedish neuroscientist Olle Johansson, who teaches at the world-renowned Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, tells me the mass saturation in electromagnetic fields raises terrible questions. Humanity, he says, has embarked on the equivalent of "the largest full-scale experiment ever. What happens when, 24 hours around the clock, we allow ourselves and our children to be whole-body-irradiated by new, man-made electromagnetic fields for the entirety of our lives?"
We have a few answers. Last May, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, a branch of the World Health Organization), in Lyon, France, issued a statement that the electromagnetic frequencies from cell phones would henceforth be classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans." The determination was based in part on data from a 13-country study, called Interphone, which reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell phone use, the risk of getting a brain tumor -- specifically on the side of the head where the phone is placed -- goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Israeli researchers, using study methods similar to the Interphone investigation, have found that heavy cell phone users were more likely to suffer malignant tumors of the salivary gland in the cheek, while an independent study by scientists in Sweden concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. According to a study published in the International Journal of Cancer Prevention, people living for more than a decade within 350 meters of a cell phone tower experience a four-fold increase in cancer rates.
The IARC decision followed in the wake of multiple warnings, mostly from European regulators, about the possible health risks of RF-EMFs. In September 2007, Europe's top environmental watchdog, the EU's European Environment Agency, suggested that the mass unregulated exposure of human beings to widespread radiofrequency radiation "could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking and lead in petrol." That same year, Germany's environmental ministry singled out the dangers of RF-EMFs used in wi-fi systems, noting that people should keep wi-fi exposure "as low as possible" and instead choose "conventional wired connections." In 2008, France issued a generalized national cell phone health warning against excessive cell phone use, and then, a year later, announced a ban on cell phone advertising for children under the age of 12.
In 2009, following a meeting in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, more than 50 concerned scientists from 16 countries -- public health officials, biologists, neuroscientists, medical doctors -- signed what became known as the Porto Alegre Resolution. The signatories described it as an "urgent call" for more research based on "the body of evidence that indicates that exposure to electromagnetic fields interferes with basic human biology."
That evidence is mounting. "Radiofrequency radiation has a number of biological effects which can be reproducibly found in animals and cellular systems," says David O. Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the State University of New York (SUNY). "We really cannot say for certain what the adverse effects are in humans," Carpenter tells me. "But the indications are that there may be -- and I use the words 'may be' -- very serious effects in humans." He notes that in exposure tests with animal and human cells, RF-EMF radiation causes genes to be activated. "We also know that RF-EMF causes generation of free radicals, increases production of things called heat shock proteins, and alters calcium ion regulation. These are all common mechanisms behind many kinds of tissue damage."
Double-strand breaks in DNA -- one of the undisputed causes of cancer -- have been reported in similar tests with animal cells. Swedish neuro-oncologist Leif Salford, chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at Lund University, has found that cell phone radiation damages neurons in rats, particularly those cells associated with memory and learning. The damage occurred after an exposure of just two hours. Salford also found that cell phone EMFs cause holes to appear in the barrier between the circulatory system and the brain in rats. Punching holes in the blood-brain-barrier is not a good thing. It allows toxic molecules from the blood to leach into the ultra-stable environment of the brain. One of the potential outcomes, Salford notes, is dementia.
Other effects from cell phone radiofrequencies have been reported using human subjects. At Loughborough University in England, sleep specialists in 2008 found that after 30 minutes of cell phone use, their subjects required twice the time to fall asleep as they did when the phone was avoided before bedtime. EEGs (electroencephalograms) showed a disturbance of the brain waves that regulate sleep. Neuroscientists at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia discovered in 2009 a "power boost" in brain waves when volunteers were exposed to cell phone radiofrequencies. Researchers strapped Nokia phones to their subjects' heads, then turned the phones on and off. On: brain went into defense mode. Off: brain settled. The brain, one of the lead researchers speculated, was "concentrating to overcome the electrical interference."
Yet for all this, there is no scientific consensus on the risks of RF-EMFs to human beings.
The major public-health watchdogs, in the US and worldwide, have dismissed concerns about it. "Current evidence," the World Health Organization (WHO) says, "does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields." (The WHO thus contradicts the findings of one of its own research units.) The US Federal Communications Commission has made similar statements. The American Cancer Society reports that "most studies published so far have not found a link between cell phone use and the development of tumors." The cell phone industry's lobbying organization, CTIA-The Wireless Association, assures the public that cell phone radiation is safe, citing studies -- many of them funded by the telecom industry -- that show no risk.
Published meta-reviews of hundreds of such studies suggest that industry funding tends to skew results. According to a survey by Henry Lai, a research professor at University of Washington, only 28 percent of studies funded by the wireless industry showed some type of biological effect from cell phone radiation. Meanwhile, independently funded studies produce an altogether different set of data: 67 percent of those studies showed a bioeffect. The Safe Wireless Initiative, a research group in Washington, DC that has since closed down, unpacked the data in hundreds of studies on wireless health risks, arraying them in terms of funding source. "Our data show that mobile phone industry funded/influenced work is six times more likely to find 'no problem' than independently funded work," the group noted. "The industry thus has significantly contaminated the scientific evidence pool."
The evidence about the long-term public health risks of exposure to RF-EMFs may be contradictory. Yet it is clear that some people are getting sick when heavily exposed to the new radiofrequencies. And we are not listening to their complaints.
Take the story of Michele Hertz. When a local utility company installed a wireless digital meter -- better known as a "smart" meter -- on her house in upstate New York in the summer of 2009, Hertz thought little of it. Then she began to feel odd. She was a practiced sculptor, but now she could not sculpt. "I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't even finish sentences," she told me. Hertz experienced "incredible memory loss," and, at the age of 51, feared she had come down with Alzheimer's.
One night during a snowstorm in 2010 her house lost power, and when it came back on her head exploded with a ringing sound -- "a terrible piercing." A buzzing in her head persisted. She took to sleeping on the floor of her kitchen that winter, where the refrigerator drowned out the keening. There were other symptoms: headaches and nausea and dizziness, persistent and always worsening. "Sometimes I'd wake up with my heart pounding uncontrollably," she told me. "I thought I would have a heart attack. I had nightmares that people were killing me."
Roughly one year after the installation of the wireless meters, with the help of an electrician, Hertz thought she had figured out the source of the trouble: It had to be something electrical in the house. On a hunch, she told the utility company, Con Edison of New York, to remove the wireless meter. She told them: "I will die if you do not install an analog meter." Within days, the worst symptoms disappeared. "People look at me like I'm crazy when I talk about this," Hertz says.
Her exposure to the meters has super-sensitized Hertz to all kinds of other EMF sources. "The smart meters threw me over the electronic edge," she says. A cell phone switched on in the same room now gives her a headache. Stepping into a house with wi-fi is intolerable. Passing a cell tower on the street hurts. "Sometimes if the radiation is very strong my fingers curl up," she says. "I can now hear cell phones ringing on silent. Life," she says, "has dramatically changed."
Hertz soon discovered there were other people like her: "Electrosensitives," they call themselves. To be sure, they comprise a tortured minority, often misunderstood and isolated. They share their stories at online forums like Smartmeters.org, the EMF Safety Network, and the Electrosensitive Society. "Some are getting sick from cell phones, some from smart meters, some from cell towers," Hertz tells me. "Some can no longer work and have had to flee their homes. Some are losing their eyesight, some can't stop shaking, most cannot sleep."
In recent years, I've gotten to know dozens of electrosensitives. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, I met a woman who had taken to wearing an aluminum foil hat. (This works -- wrap a cell phone in foil and it will kill the signal.) I met a former world record-holding marathoner, a 54-year-old woman who had lived out of her car for eight years before settling down at a house ringed by mountains that she said protected the place from cell frequencies. I met people who said they no longer wanted to live because of their condition. Many of the people I talked to were accomplished professionals -- writers, television producers, entrepreneurs. I met a scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratories named Bill Bruno whose employer had tried to fire him after he asked for protection from EMFs at the lab. I met a local librarian named Rebekah Azen who quit her job after being sickened by a newly installed wi-fi system at the library. I met a brilliant activist named Arthur Firstenberg, who had for several years published a newsletter, "No Place to Hide," but who was now homeless, living out of the back of his car, sleeping in wilderness outside the city where he could escape the signals.
In New York City, I got to know a longtime member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) who said he was electrosensitive. I'll call him Jake, because he is embarrassed by his condition and he doesn't want to jeopardize his job or his membership in the IEEE (which happens to have for its purpose the promulgation of electrical technology, including cell phones). Jake told me how one day, a few years ago, he started to get sick whenever he went into the bedroom of his apartment to sleep. He had headaches, suffered fatigue and nausea, nightsweats and heart palpitations, had blurred vision and difficulty breathing and was blasted by a ringing in the ears -- the typical symptoms of the electrosensitive. He discovered that his neighbor in the apartment building kept a wi-fi transmitter next door, on the other side of the wall to his bedroom. When Jake asked the neighbor to shut it down, his symptoms disappeared.
The government of Sweden reports that the disorder known as electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS, afflicts an estimated 3 percent of the population. A study by the California Department of Health found that, based on self-reports, as many as 770,000 Californians, or 3 percent of the state's population, would ascribe some form of illness to EMFs. A study in Switzerland recently found a 5 percent prevalence of electrosensitivity. In Germany, there is reportedly a 6 percent prevalence. Even the former prime minister of Norway, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, until 2003 the director general of the World Health Organization, has admitted that she suffers headaches and "strong discomfort" when exposed to cell phones. "My hypersensitivity," she told a Norwegian newspaper in 2002, "has gone so far that I react to mobile phones closer to me than about four meters." She added in the same interview: "People have been in my office with their mobile hidden in their pocket or bag. Without knowing if it was on or off, we have tested my reactions. I have always reacted when the phone has been on -- never when it's off."
Yet the World Health Organization -- the same agency that Brundtland once headed -- reports "there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF exposure." WHO's findings are corroborated by a 2008 study at the University of Bern in Switzerland which found "no evidence that EHS individuals could detect [the] presence or absence" of frequencies that allegedly make them sick. A study conducted in 2006 at the Mobile Phone Research Unit at King's College in London came to a similar conclusion. "No evidence was found to indicate that people with self-reported sensitivity to mobile phone signals are able to detect such signals or that they react to them with increased symptom severity," the report said. "As sham exposure was sufficient to trigger severe symptoms in some participants, psychological factors may have an important role in causing this condition." The King's College researchers in 2010 concluded it was a "medically unexplained illness."
"The scientific data so far just doesn't help the electrosensitives," says Louis Slesin, editor and publisher of Microwave News, a newsletter and website that covers the potential impacts of RF-EMFs. "The design of some of these studies, however, is questionable." He adds: "Frankly, I'd be surprised if the condition did not exist. We're electromagnetic beings. You wouldn't have a thought in your head without electromagnetic signals. There is electrical signaling going on in your body all the time, and the idea that external electromagnetic fields can't affect us just doesn't make sense. We're biological and chemical beings too, and we know that we can develop allergies to certain biological and chemical compounds. Why wouldn't we also find there are allergies to EM fields? Shouldn't every chemical be tested for its effects on human beings? Well, the same could be said for each frequency of RF radiation."
Dr. David Carpenter of SUNY, who has also looked into electrosensitivity, tells me he's "not totally convinced that electrosensitivity is real." Still, he says, "there are just too many people with reports of illness when chronically near to EMF devices, with their symptoms being relieved when they are away from them. Like multiple chemical sensitivity and Gulf War Syndrome, there is something here, but we just don't understand it all yet."
Science reporter B. Blake Levitt, author of Electromagnetic Fields: A Consumer's Guide to the Issues, says the studies she has reviewed on EHS are "contradictory and nowhere near definitive." Flaws in test design stand out, she says. Many with EHS may be simply "too sensitized," she believes, to endure research exposure protocols, possibly skewing results from the start by inadvertently studying a less sensitive group. Levitt recently compiled some of the most damning studies of the health effects from cell towers in a report for the International Commission on Electromagnetic Safety in Italy. "Some populations are reacting poorly when living or working within 1,500 feet of a cell tower," Levitt tells me. Several studies she cited found an increase in headaches, rashes, tremors, sleep disturbances, dizziness, concentration problems, and memory changes.
"EHS may be one of those problems that can never be well defined -- we may just have to believe what people report," Levitt says. "And people are reporting these symptoms all over the globe now when new technologies are introduced or infrastructure like cell towers go into neighborhoods. It's not likely a transcultural mass hallucination. The immune system is an exquisite warning mechanism. These are our canaries in the coal mine."
Swedish neuroscientist Olle Johansson was one of the first researchers to take the claims of electrosensitivity seriously. He found, for example, that persons with EHS had changes in skin mast cells -- markers of allergic reaction -- when exposed to specific EM fields. Other studies have found that radiofrequency EMFs can increase serum histamine levels -- the hallmark of an allergic reaction. Johansson has hypothesized that electrosensitivity arises exactly as any common allergy would arise -- due to excessive exposure, as the immune system fails. And just as only some people develop allergies to cats or pollen or dust, only some of us fall prey to EM fields. Johansson admits that his hypothesis has yet to be proven in laboratory study.
One afternoon not long ago, a nurse named Maria Gonzalez, who lives in Queens, New York, took me to see the cell phone masts that irradiate her daughter's school. The masts were the usual flat-paneled, alien-looking things nested together, festooned with wires, high on a rooftop across from Public School 122 in Astoria. They emitted a fine signal -- five bars on my phone. The operator of the masts, Sprint-Nextel, had built a wall of fake brick to hide them from view, but Maria was unimpressed with the subterfuge. She was terrified of the masts. When, in 2005, the panels went up, soon to be turned on, she was working at the intensive care unit at St. Vincent's Hospital. She'd heard bizarre stories about cell phones from her cancer-ward colleagues. Some of the doctors at St. Vincent's told her they had doubts about the safety of their own cellphones and pagers. This was disturbing enough. She went online, culling studies. When she read a report published in 2002 about children in Spain who developed leukemia shortly after a cell phone tower was erected next to their school, she went into a quiet panic.
Sprint-Nextel was unsympathetic when she telephoned the company in the summer of 2005 to express her concerns. The company granted her a single meeting that autumn, with a Sprint-Nextel technician, an attorney, and a self-described "radiation expert" under contract with the company. "They kept saying, 'we're one hundred percent sure the antennas are safe,'" Maria told me as we stared at the masts. "'One hundred percent sure! These are children! We would never hurt children.'" She called the office of Hillary Clinton and pestered the senator once a week for six months -- but got nowhere. A year later, Gonzalez sued the US government, charging that the Federal Communications Commission had failed to fully evaluate the risks from cell phone frequencies. The suit was thrown out. The judge concluded that if regulators for the government said the radiation was safe, then it was safe. The message, as Gonzalez puts it, was that she was "crazy ... and making a big to-do about nothing."
I'd venture, rather, that she was applying a commonsense principle in environmental science: the precautionary principle, which states that when an action or policy -- or technology -- cannot be proven with certainty to be safe, then it should be assumed to be harmful. In a society thrilled with the magic of digital wireless, we have junked this principle. And we try to dismiss as fools those who uphold it -- people like Gonzalez. We have accepted without question that we will have wi-fi hotspots in our homes, and at libraries, and in cafes and bookstores; that we will have wireless alarm systems and wireless baby monitors and wireless utility meters and wireless video games that children play; that we will carry on our persons wireless iPads and iPods and smart phones. We are mesmerized by the efficiency and convenience of the infotainment appendage, the words and sounds and pictures it carries. We are, in other words, thoughtless in our embrace of the technology.
Because of our thoughtlessness, we have not demanded to know the full consequences of this technology. Perhaps the gadgets are slowly killing us -- we do not know. Perhaps they are perfectly safe -- we do not know. Perhaps they are making us sick in ways we barely understand -- we do not know. What we do know, without a doubt, is that the electromagnetic fields are all around us, and that to live in modern civilization implies always and everywhere that we cannot escape their touch.
1. Training my Virtual Medical Secretaries (V.M.A)
I love the idea of using a Virtual Medical Assistant (V.M.A for short.).
Thank god I am in my twilight years and listening to birds singing is one of my natural pastimes and trying to figure out which bird is calling and which bird is answering is not an easy task.
But the idea of voice activated cellphone is a welcome addition to an armory of medically offensive gadgets that are springing by numbers.
Dictaphone was in my armory when working abroad. I could do a very good dictation without punctuation marks and my secretaries never bothered to phone back and ask me for any clarifications. That was a very positive effort on my part and my superiors very much like my approach except a few, since I did not try to show off any accent but pure and simple Queen's English, I dictated.
Mind you I was taking to a voice machine and not a person.
The idiot, the Dictaphone does not have any emotions and only records my voice.
I tell them that putting fullstops, commas, semicolons and apostrophes are her job and not mine.
When things were difficult unlike S.M.S. I wrote down the specific stuff clearly to save their time.
I hope and prey that smart-phone becoming intelligent and telling me back you are creepy and some sort of a sob.
Advantages.
1. After some time smart-phone will instantly know what you are trying to do.
2. Unlike human secretaries who make the same mistakes over over again smart-phone would never repeat mistakes.
3. One can take home the Virtual Secretary unlike the human with bizarre consequence at home boundary.
4. One can switch off the VMA with just a push of a button unlike a jabbering soul with money / home problems.
5. At worse I can thrash it on the floor.
I have to think of the 6 to 10 as and when my lateral thinking make me to do so.
For me it is a smart innervation.
6. If I see a guy/girl I hate (on my war-path) to meet or talk or exchange any greetings I can pretend I am very busy talking to it (of cause switched off and with so many adversaries including politicians I do not want to run dry the battery life) and escape harmlessly. I see this happening evry day of my life since i do not still carry a smartphone.
We have a few answers. Last May, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, a branch of the World Health Organization), in Lyon, France, issued a statement that the electromagnetic frequencies from cell phones would henceforth be classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans." The determination was based in part on data from a 13-country study, called Interphone, which reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell phone use, the risk of getting a brain tumor -- specifically on the side of the head where the phone is placed -- goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Israeli researchers, using study methods similar to the Interphone investigation, have found that heavy cell phone users were more likely to suffer malignant tumors of the salivary gland in the cheek, while an independent study by scientists in Sweden concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. According to a study published in the International Journal of Cancer Prevention, people living for more than a decade within 350 meters of a cell phone tower experience a four-fold increase in cancer rates.
2. Training my Medical Secretaries
Oh, for the Good Old Days of Rude Cellphone Gabbers
By NICK WINGFIELD
Published: December 2, 2011
Is talking to a phone the same as talking on it?
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Illustration by The New York Times
Jimmy Wong, of Los Angeles, called an overheard conversation with Siri on an iPhone “creepy.”
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The sound of someone gabbing on a cellphone is part of the soundtrack of daily life, and most of us have learned when to be quiet — no talking in “quiet cars” on trains, for example.
But the etiquette of talking to a phone — more precisely, to a “virtual assistant” like Apple’s Siri, in the new iPhone 4S — has not yet evolved. And eavesdroppers are becoming annoyed.
In part, that is because conversations with machines have a robotic, unsettling quality. Then there is the matter of punctuation. If you want it, you have to say it.
“How is he doing question mark how are you doing question mark,” Jeremy Littau of Bethlehem, Pa., found himself telling his new iPhone recently as he walked down the street, dictating a text message to his wife, who was home with their newborn. The machine spoke to him in Siri’s synthesized female voice.
Passers-by gawked. “It’s not normal human behavior to have people having a conversation with a phone on the street,” concluded Mr. Littau, 36, an assistant professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University.
The technology behind voice-activated mobile phones has been around for a few years — allowing people to order their phones around like digital factotums, commanding them to dictate text messages, jot down appointments on their calendars and search for nearby sushi restaurants. Apple, though, has taken it to another level with Siri.
“Happy birthday smiley face,” was what Dani Klein heard a man say to his phone on the Long Island Rail Road, using the command to insert a grinning emotion into a message.
“It sounded ridiculous,” said Mr. Klein, 28, who works in social media marketing.
Talking to your phone is so new that there are no official rules yet on, say, public transportation systems.
Cliff Cole, a spokesman for Amtrak, said the train line’s quiet-car policy applied to any use of voice with cellphones, though it explicitly bans only “phone calls,” not banter with a virtual assistant. “We may have to adjust the language if it becomes a problem,” Mr. Cole said.
Voice-activated technology in smartphones first appeared a few years ago when mobile phones running Google’s Android operating system and other software began offering basic voice commands to do Web searches and other tasks.
Apple’s Siri, introduced this fall, is a more sophisticated iteration of the technology; it responds to natural-sounding phrases like, “What’s the weather looking like?” and “Wake me up at 8 a.m.”
Apple gave Siri a dash of personality, too, reinforcing the impression that the iPhone’s users were actually talking to someone. Ask Siri for the meaning of life, and it responds, “I find it odd you would ask this of an inanimate object.”
Technology executives say voice technologies are here to stay if only because they can help cellphone users be more productive.
“I don’t think the keyboard is going to go away, but it’s going to be less used,” said Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellular phone while at Motorola in the 1970s.
Another irritant in listening to people talk to their phones is the awareness that most everything you can do with voice commands can also be done silently. Billy Brooks, 43, was standing in line at the service department of a car dealership in Los Angeles recently, when a woman broke the silence of the room by dictating a text message into her iPhone.
“You’re unnecessarily annoying others at that point by not just typing out your message,” said Mr. Brooks, a visual effects artist in the film industry, adding that the woman’s behavior was “just ridiculous and kind of sad.”
James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers, said people who use their voices to control their phones are creating an inconvenience for others — noise — rather than coping with an inconvenience for themselves — the discomfort of having to type slowly on a cramped cellphone keyboard. Mr. Katz compared the behavior with that of someone who leaves a car’s engine running while parked, creating noise and fumes for people surrounding them.
While Apple has tried to enable natural-sounding conversations with Siri, they are often anything but. Nirav Tolia, an Internet entrepreneur, was riding a crowded elevator down from his office in San Francisco recently when a man tried to use Siri to find a new location of a cafe, Coffee Bar. The phone gave him listings for other coffee houses — the wrong ones — forcing him to repeat the search several times.
“Just say ‘Starbucks,’ dude,” another passenger said, pushing past the Coffee Bar-seeker when the elevator reached the ground floor.
When talking to their cellphones, people sometimes start sounding like machines themselves. Jimmy Wong, 24, was at an after-hours diner with friends in Los Angeles recently when they found themselves next to a man ordering Siri to write memos and dictate e-mails. They found the man’s conversation with his phone “creepy,” without any of the natural pauses and voice inflections that occur in a discussion between two people.
“It was very robotic,” he said.
Yet the group could not stop eavesdropping.
People who study the behavior of cellphone users believe the awkwardness of hearing people in hotels, airports and cafes treating their phones like administrative assistants will simply fade over time.
“We’ll see an evolution of that initial irritation with it, to a New Yorker cartoon making fun of it, and then after a while it will largely be accepted by most people,” said Mr. Katz from Rutgers.
But, he predicted, “there will be a small minority of traditionalists who yearn for the good old days when people just texted in public.”
This is for Quorora writer to read;
This should be read in conjunction with the experimental evidence of brain tumour Schwanoma in rats and mice!
Radiation From Cell Phones and WiFi Are Making People Sick-
Are We All at Risk?
We are now exposed to electromagnetic radio frequencies 24 hours a day. Welcome to the largest human experiment ever.
December 2, 2011
Consider this story:
It's January 1990, during the pioneer build-out of mobile phone service. A cell tower goes up 800 feet from the house of Alison Rall, in Mansfield, Ohio, where she and her husband run a 160-acre dairy farm. The first thing the Rall family notices is that the ducks on their land lay eggs that don't hatch. That spring there are no ducklings.
By the fall of 1990, the cattle herd that pastures near the tower is sick. The animals are thin, their ribs are showing, their coats growing rough, and their behavior is weird -- they're agitated, nervous.
Soon the cows are miscarrying, and so are the goats.
Many of the animals that gestate are born deformed. There are goats with webbed necks, goats with front legs shorter than their rear legs. One calf in the womb has a tumor the size of a basketball, another carries a tumor three feet in diameter, big enough that he won't pass through the birth canal.
Rall and the local veterinarian finally cut open the mother to get the creature out alive. The vet records the nightmare in her log: "I've never seen anything like this in my entire practice... All of [this] I feel was a result of the cellular tower."
Within six months, Rall's three young children begin suffering bizarre skin rashes, raised red "hot spots." The kids are hit with waves of hyperactivity; the youngest child sometimes spins in circles, whirling madly. The girls lose hair. Rall is soon pregnant with a fourth child, but she can't gain weight. Her son is born with birth defects -- brittle bones, neurological problems -- that fit no specific syndrome. Her other children, conceived prior to the arrival of the tower, had been born healthy.
Desperate to understand what is happening to her family and her farm, Rall contacts the Environmental Protection Agency. She ends up talking to an EPA scientist named Carl Blackman, an expert on the biological effects of radiation from electromagnetic fields (EMFs) -- the kind of radiofrequency EMFs (RF-EMFs) by which all wireless technology operates, including not just cell towers and cell phones but wi-fi hubs and wi-fi-capable computers, "smart" utility meters, and even cordless home phones. "With my government cap on, I'm supposed to tell you you're perfectly safe," Blackman tells her.
"With my civilian cap on, I have to tell you to consider leaving."
Blackman's warning casts a pall on the family. When Rall contacts the cell phone company operating the tower, they tell her there is "no possibility whatsoever" that the tower is the source of her ills. "You're probably in the safest place in America," the company representative tells her.
The Ralls abandoned the farm on Christmas Day of 1992 and never re-sold it, unwilling to subject others to the horrors they had experienced. Within weeks of fleeing to land they owned in Michigan, the children recovered their health, and so did the herd.
Not a single one of the half-dozen scientists I spoke to could explain what had happened on the Rall farm. Why the sickened animals? Why the skin rashes, the hyperactivity? Why the birth defects? If the radiofrequency radiation from the cell tower was the cause, then what was the mechanism?
And why today, with millions of cell towers dotting the planet and billions of cell phones placed next to billions of heads every day, aren't we all getting sick?
In fact, the great majority of us appear to be just fine. We all live in range of cell towers now, and we are all wireless operators. More than wireless operators, we're nuts about the technology. Who doesn't keep at their side at all times the electro-plastic appendage for the suckling of information?
The mobile phone as a technology was developed in the 1970s, commercialized in the mid-80s, miniaturized in the '90s. When the first mobile phone companies launched in the United Kingdom in 1985, the expectation was that perhaps 10,000 phones would sell. Worldwide shipments of mobile phones topped the one billion mark in 2006. As of October 2010 there were 5.2 billion cell phones operating on the planet. "Penetration," in the marketing-speak of the companies, often tops 100 percent in many countries, meaning there is more than one connection per person. The mobile phone in its various manifestations -- the iPhone, the Android, the Blackberry -- has been called the "most prolific consumer device" ever proffered.
I don't have an Internet connection at my home in Brooklyn, and, like a dinosaur, I still keep a landline. But if I stand on my roof, I see a hundred feet away, attached to the bricks of the neighboring parking garage, a panel of cell phone antennae -- pointed straight at me. They produce wonderful reception on my cell phone. My neighbors in the apartment below have a wireless fidelity connection -- better known as wi-fi -- which I tap into when I have to argue with magazine editors. This is very convenient. I use it. I abuse it.
Yet even though I have, in a fashion, opted out, here I am, on a rooftop in Brooklyn, standing bathed in the radiation from the cell phone panels on the parking garage next door. I am also bathed in the radiation from the neighbors' wi-fi downstairs. The waves are everywhere, from public libraries to Amtrak trains to restaurants and bars and even public squares like Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, where the Wall Street occupiers relentlessly tweet.
We now live in a wireless-saturated normality that has never existed in the history of the human race.
It is unprecedented because of the complexity of the modulated frequencies that carry the increasingly complex information we transmit on our cell phones, smart phones and wi-fi systems. These EMFs are largely untested in their effects on human beings. Swedish neuroscientist Olle Johansson, who teaches at the world-renowned Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, tells me the mass saturation in electromagnetic fields raises terrible questions. Humanity, he says, has embarked on the equivalent of "the largest full-scale experiment ever. What happens when, 24 hours around the clock, we allow ourselves and our children to be whole-body-irradiated by new, man-made electromagnetic fields for the entirety of our lives?"
We have a few answers. Last May, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, a branch of the World Health Organization), in Lyon, France, issued a statement that the electromagnetic frequencies from cell phones would henceforth be classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans." The determination was based in part on data from a 13-country study, called Interphone, which reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell phone use, the risk of getting a brain tumor -- specifically on the side of the head where the phone is placed -- goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Israeli researchers, using study methods similar to the Interphone investigation, have found that heavy cell phone users were more likely to suffer malignant tumors of the salivary gland in the cheek, while an independent study by scientists in Sweden concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. According to a study published in the International Journal of Cancer Prevention, people living for more than a decade within 350 meters of a cell phone tower experience a four-fold increase in cancer rates.
The IARC decision followed in the wake of multiple warnings, mostly from European regulators, about the possible health risks of RF-EMFs. In September 2007, Europe's top environmental watchdog, the EU's European Environment Agency, suggested that the mass unregulated exposure of human beings to widespread radiofrequency radiation "could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking and lead in petrol." That same year, Germany's environmental ministry singled out the dangers of RF-EMFs used in wi-fi systems, noting that people should keep wi-fi exposure "as low as possible" and instead choose "conventional wired connections." In 2008, France issued a generalized national cell phone health warning against excessive cell phone use, and then, a year later, announced a ban on cell phone advertising for children under the age of 12.
In 2009, following a meeting in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, more than 50 concerned scientists from 16 countries -- public health officials, biologists, neuroscientists, medical doctors -- signed what became known as the Porto Alegre Resolution. The signatories described it as an "urgent call" for more research based on "the body of evidence that indicates that exposure to electromagnetic fields interferes with basic human biology."
That evidence is mounting. "Radiofrequency radiation has a number of biological effects which can be reproducibly found in animals and cellular systems," says David O. Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the State University of New York (SUNY). "We really cannot say for certain what the adverse effects are in humans," Carpenter tells me. "But the indications are that there may be -- and I use the words 'may be' -- very serious effects in humans." He notes that in exposure tests with animal and human cells, RF-EMF radiation causes genes to be activated. "We also know that RF-EMF causes generation of free radicals, increases production of things called heat shock proteins, and alters calcium ion regulation. These are all common mechanisms behind many kinds of tissue damage."
Double-strand breaks in DNA -- one of the undisputed causes of cancer -- have been reported in similar tests with animal cells. Swedish neuro-oncologist Leif Salford, chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at Lund University, has found that cell phone radiation damages neurons in rats, particularly those cells associated with memory and learning. The damage occurred after an exposure of just two hours. Salford also found that cell phone EMFs cause holes to appear in the barrier between the circulatory system and the brain in rats. Punching holes in the blood-brain-barrier is not a good thing. It allows toxic molecules from the blood to leach into the ultra-stable environment of the brain. One of the potential outcomes, Salford notes, is dementia.
Other effects from cell phone radiofrequencies have been reported using human subjects. At Loughborough University in England, sleep specialists in 2008 found that after 30 minutes of cell phone use, their subjects required twice the time to fall asleep as they did when the phone was avoided before bedtime. EEGs (electroencephalograms) showed a disturbance of the brain waves that regulate sleep. Neuroscientists at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia discovered in 2009 a "power boost" in brain waves when volunteers were exposed to cell phone radiofrequencies. Researchers strapped Nokia phones to their subjects' heads, then turned the phones on and off. On: brain went into defense mode. Off: brain settled. The brain, one of the lead researchers speculated, was "concentrating to overcome the electrical interference."
Yet for all this, there is no scientific consensus on the risks of RF-EMFs to human beings.
The major public-health watchdogs, in the US and worldwide, have dismissed concerns about it. "Current evidence," the World Health Organization (WHO) says, "does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields." (The WHO thus contradicts the findings of one of its own research units.) The US Federal Communications Commission has made similar statements. The American Cancer Society reports that "most studies published so far have not found a link between cell phone use and the development of tumors." The cell phone industry's lobbying organization, CTIA-The Wireless Association, assures the public that cell phone radiation is safe, citing studies -- many of them funded by the telecom industry -- that show no risk.
Published meta-reviews of hundreds of such studies suggest that industry funding tends to skew results. According to a survey by Henry Lai, a research professor at University of Washington, only 28 percent of studies funded by the wireless industry showed some type of biological effect from cell phone radiation. Meanwhile, independently funded studies produce an altogether different set of data: 67 percent of those studies showed a bioeffect. The Safe Wireless Initiative, a research group in Washington, DC that has since closed down, unpacked the data in hundreds of studies on wireless health risks, arraying them in terms of funding source. "Our data show that mobile phone industry funded/influenced work is six times more likely to find 'no problem' than independently funded work," the group noted. "The industry thus has significantly contaminated the scientific evidence pool."
The evidence about the long-term public health risks of exposure to RF-EMFs may be contradictory. Yet it is clear that some people are getting sick when heavily exposed to the new radiofrequencies. And we are not listening to their complaints.
Take the story of Michele Hertz. When a local utility company installed a wireless digital meter -- better known as a "smart" meter -- on her house in upstate New York in the summer of 2009, Hertz thought little of it. Then she began to feel odd. She was a practiced sculptor, but now she could not sculpt. "I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't even finish sentences," she told me. Hertz experienced "incredible memory loss," and, at the age of 51, feared she had come down with Alzheimer's.
One night during a snowstorm in 2010 her house lost power, and when it came back on her head exploded with a ringing sound -- "a terrible piercing." A buzzing in her head persisted. She took to sleeping on the floor of her kitchen that winter, where the refrigerator drowned out the keening. There were other symptoms: headaches and nausea and dizziness, persistent and always worsening. "Sometimes I'd wake up with my heart pounding uncontrollably," she told me. "I thought I would have a heart attack. I had nightmares that people were killing me."
Roughly one year after the installation of the wireless meters, with the help of an electrician, Hertz thought she had figured out the source of the trouble: It had to be something electrical in the house. On a hunch, she told the utility company, Con Edison of New York, to remove the wireless meter. She told them: "I will die if you do not install an analog meter." Within days, the worst symptoms disappeared. "People look at me like I'm crazy when I talk about this," Hertz says.
Her exposure to the meters has super-sensitized Hertz to all kinds of other EMF sources. "The smart meters threw me over the electronic edge," she says. A cell phone switched on in the same room now gives her a headache. Stepping into a house with wi-fi is intolerable. Passing a cell tower on the street hurts. "Sometimes if the radiation is very strong my fingers curl up," she says. "I can now hear cell phones ringing on silent. Life," she says, "has dramatically changed."
Hertz soon discovered there were other people like her: "Electrosensitives," they call themselves. To be sure, they comprise a tortured minority, often misunderstood and isolated. They share their stories at online forums like Smartmeters.org, the EMF Safety Network, and the Electrosensitive Society. "Some are getting sick from cell phones, some from smart meters, some from cell towers," Hertz tells me. "Some can no longer work and have had to flee their homes. Some are losing their eyesight, some can't stop shaking, most cannot sleep."
In recent years, I've gotten to know dozens of electrosensitives. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, I met a woman who had taken to wearing an aluminum foil hat. (This works -- wrap a cell phone in foil and it will kill the signal.) I met a former world record-holding marathoner, a 54-year-old woman who had lived out of her car for eight years before settling down at a house ringed by mountains that she said protected the place from cell frequencies. I met people who said they no longer wanted to live because of their condition. Many of the people I talked to were accomplished professionals -- writers, television producers, entrepreneurs. I met a scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratories named Bill Bruno whose employer had tried to fire him after he asked for protection from EMFs at the lab. I met a local librarian named Rebekah Azen who quit her job after being sickened by a newly installed wi-fi system at the library. I met a brilliant activist named Arthur Firstenberg, who had for several years published a newsletter, "No Place to Hide," but who was now homeless, living out of the back of his car, sleeping in wilderness outside the city where he could escape the signals.
In New York City, I got to know a longtime member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) who said he was electrosensitive. I'll call him Jake, because he is embarrassed by his condition and he doesn't want to jeopardize his job or his membership in the IEEE (which happens to have for its purpose the promulgation of electrical technology, including cell phones). Jake told me how one day, a few years ago, he started to get sick whenever he went into the bedroom of his apartment to sleep. He had headaches, suffered fatigue and nausea, nightsweats and heart palpitations, had blurred vision and difficulty breathing and was blasted by a ringing in the ears -- the typical symptoms of the electrosensitive. He discovered that his neighbor in the apartment building kept a wi-fi transmitter next door, on the other side of the wall to his bedroom. When Jake asked the neighbor to shut it down, his symptoms disappeared.
The government of Sweden reports that the disorder known as electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS, afflicts an estimated 3 percent of the population. A study by the California Department of Health found that, based on self-reports, as many as 770,000 Californians, or 3 percent of the state's population, would ascribe some form of illness to EMFs. A study in Switzerland recently found a 5 percent prevalence of electrosensitivity. In Germany, there is reportedly a 6 percent prevalence. Even the former prime minister of Norway, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, until 2003 the director general of the World Health Organization, has admitted that she suffers headaches and "strong discomfort" when exposed to cell phones. "My hypersensitivity," she told a Norwegian newspaper in 2002, "has gone so far that I react to mobile phones closer to me than about four meters." She added in the same interview: "People have been in my office with their mobile hidden in their pocket or bag. Without knowing if it was on or off, we have tested my reactions. I have always reacted when the phone has been on -- never when it's off."
Yet the World Health Organization -- the same agency that Brundtland once headed -- reports "there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF exposure." WHO's findings are corroborated by a 2008 study at the University of Bern in Switzerland which found "no evidence that EHS individuals could detect [the] presence or absence" of frequencies that allegedly make them sick. A study conducted in 2006 at the Mobile Phone Research Unit at King's College in London came to a similar conclusion. "No evidence was found to indicate that people with self-reported sensitivity to mobile phone signals are able to detect such signals or that they react to them with increased symptom severity," the report said. "As sham exposure was sufficient to trigger severe symptoms in some participants, psychological factors may have an important role in causing this condition." The King's College researchers in 2010 concluded it was a "medically unexplained illness."
"The scientific data so far just doesn't help the electrosensitives," says Louis Slesin, editor and publisher of Microwave News, a newsletter and website that covers the potential impacts of RF-EMFs. "The design of some of these studies, however, is questionable." He adds: "Frankly, I'd be surprised if the condition did not exist. We're electromagnetic beings. You wouldn't have a thought in your head without electromagnetic signals. There is electrical signaling going on in your body all the time, and the idea that external electromagnetic fields can't affect us just doesn't make sense. We're biological and chemical beings too, and we know that we can develop allergies to certain biological and chemical compounds. Why wouldn't we also find there are allergies to EM fields? Shouldn't every chemical be tested for its effects on human beings? Well, the same could be said for each frequency of RF radiation."
Dr. David Carpenter of SUNY, who has also looked into electrosensitivity, tells me he's "not totally convinced that electrosensitivity is real." Still, he says, "there are just too many people with reports of illness when chronically near to EMF devices, with their symptoms being relieved when they are away from them. Like multiple chemical sensitivity and Gulf War Syndrome, there is something here, but we just don't understand it all yet."
Science reporter B. Blake Levitt, author of Electromagnetic Fields: A Consumer's Guide to the Issues, says the studies she has reviewed on EHS are "contradictory and nowhere near definitive." Flaws in test design stand out, she says. Many with EHS may be simply "too sensitized," she believes, to endure research exposure protocols, possibly skewing results from the start by inadvertently studying a less sensitive group. Levitt recently compiled some of the most damning studies of the health effects from cell towers in a report for the International Commission on Electromagnetic Safety in Italy. "Some populations are reacting poorly when living or working within 1,500 feet of a cell tower," Levitt tells me. Several studies she cited found an increase in headaches, rashes, tremors, sleep disturbances, dizziness, concentration problems, and memory changes.
"EHS may be one of those problems that can never be well defined -- we may just have to believe what people report," Levitt says. "And people are reporting these symptoms all over the globe now when new technologies are introduced or infrastructure like cell towers go into neighborhoods. It's not likely a transcultural mass hallucination. The immune system is an exquisite warning mechanism. These are our canaries in the coal mine."
Swedish neuroscientist Olle Johansson was one of the first researchers to take the claims of electrosensitivity seriously. He found, for example, that persons with EHS had changes in skin mast cells -- markers of allergic reaction -- when exposed to specific EM fields. Other studies have found that radiofrequency EMFs can increase serum histamine levels -- the hallmark of an allergic reaction. Johansson has hypothesized that electrosensitivity arises exactly as any common allergy would arise -- due to excessive exposure, as the immune system fails. And just as only some people develop allergies to cats or pollen or dust, only some of us fall prey to EM fields. Johansson admits that his hypothesis has yet to be proven in laboratory study.
One afternoon not long ago, a nurse named Maria Gonzalez, who lives in Queens, New York, took me to see the cell phone masts that irradiate her daughter's school. The masts were the usual flat-paneled, alien-looking things nested together, festooned with wires, high on a rooftop across from Public School 122 in Astoria. They emitted a fine signal -- five bars on my phone. The operator of the masts, Sprint-Nextel, had built a wall of fake brick to hide them from view, but Maria was unimpressed with the subterfuge. She was terrified of the masts. When, in 2005, the panels went up, soon to be turned on, she was working at the intensive care unit at St. Vincent's Hospital. She'd heard bizarre stories about cell phones from her cancer-ward colleagues. Some of the doctors at St. Vincent's told her they had doubts about the safety of their own cellphones and pagers. This was disturbing enough. She went online, culling studies. When she read a report published in 2002 about children in Spain who developed leukemia shortly after a cell phone tower was erected next to their school, she went into a quiet panic.
Sprint-Nextel was unsympathetic when she telephoned the company in the summer of 2005 to express her concerns. The company granted her a single meeting that autumn, with a Sprint-Nextel technician, an attorney, and a self-described "radiation expert" under contract with the company. "They kept saying, 'we're one hundred percent sure the antennas are safe,'" Maria told me as we stared at the masts. "'One hundred percent sure! These are children! We would never hurt children.'" She called the office of Hillary Clinton and pestered the senator once a week for six months -- but got nowhere. A year later, Gonzalez sued the US government, charging that the Federal Communications Commission had failed to fully evaluate the risks from cell phone frequencies. The suit was thrown out. The judge concluded that if regulators for the government said the radiation was safe, then it was safe. The message, as Gonzalez puts it, was that she was "crazy ... and making a big to-do about nothing."
I'd venture, rather, that she was applying a commonsense principle in environmental science: the precautionary principle, which states that when an action or policy -- or technology -- cannot be proven with certainty to be safe, then it should be assumed to be harmful. In a society thrilled with the magic of digital wireless, we have junked this principle. And we try to dismiss as fools those who uphold it -- people like Gonzalez. We have accepted without question that we will have wi-fi hotspots in our homes, and at libraries, and in cafes and bookstores; that we will have wireless alarm systems and wireless baby monitors and wireless utility meters and wireless video games that children play; that we will carry on our persons wireless iPads and iPods and smart phones. We are mesmerized by the efficiency and convenience of the infotainment appendage, the words and sounds and pictures it carries. We are, in other words, thoughtless in our embrace of the technology.
Because of our thoughtlessness, we have not demanded to know the full consequences of this technology. Perhaps the gadgets are slowly killing us -- we do not know. Perhaps they are perfectly safe -- we do not know. Perhaps they are making us sick in ways we barely understand -- we do not know. What we do know, without a doubt, is that the electromagnetic fields are all around us, and that to live in modern civilization implies always and everywhere that we cannot escape their touch.
1. Training my Virtual Medical Secretaries (V.M.A)
I love the idea of using a Virtual Medical Assistant (V.M.A for short.).
Thank god I am in my twilight years and listening to birds singing is one of my natural pastimes and trying to figure out which bird is calling and which bird is answering is not an easy task.
But the idea of voice activated cellphone is a welcome addition to an armory of medically offensive gadgets that are springing by numbers.
Dictaphone was in my armory when working abroad. I could do a very good dictation without punctuation marks and my secretaries never bothered to phone back and ask me for any clarifications. That was a very positive effort on my part and my superiors very much like my approach except a few, since I did not try to show off any accent but pure and simple Queen's English, I dictated.
Mind you I was taking to a voice machine and not a person.
The idiot, the Dictaphone does not have any emotions and only records my voice.
I tell them that putting fullstops, commas, semicolons and apostrophes are her job and not mine.
When things were difficult unlike S.M.S. I wrote down the specific stuff clearly to save their time.
I hope and prey that smart-phone becoming intelligent and telling me back you are creepy and some sort of a sob.
Advantages.
1. After some time smart-phone will instantly know what you are trying to do.
2. Unlike human secretaries who make the same mistakes over over again smart-phone would never repeat mistakes.
3. One can take home the Virtual Secretary unlike the human with bizarre consequence at home boundary.
4. One can switch off the VMA with just a push of a button unlike a jabbering soul with money / home problems.
5. At worse I can thrash it on the floor.
I have to think of the 6 to 10 as and when my lateral thinking make me to do so.
For me it is a smart innervation.
6. If I see a guy/girl I hate (on my war-path) to meet or talk or exchange any greetings I can pretend I am very busy talking to it (of cause switched off and with so many adversaries including politicians I do not want to run dry the battery life) and escape harmlessly. I see this happening evry day of my life since i do not still carry a smartphone.
We have a few answers. Last May, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, a branch of the World Health Organization), in Lyon, France, issued a statement that the electromagnetic frequencies from cell phones would henceforth be classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans." The determination was based in part on data from a 13-country study, called Interphone, which reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell phone use, the risk of getting a brain tumor -- specifically on the side of the head where the phone is placed -- goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Israeli researchers, using study methods similar to the Interphone investigation, have found that heavy cell phone users were more likely to suffer malignant tumors of the salivary gland in the cheek, while an independent study by scientists in Sweden concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. According to a study published in the International Journal of Cancer Prevention, people living for more than a decade within 350 meters of a cell phone tower experience a four-fold increase in cancer rates.
2. Training my Medical Secretaries
Oh, for the Good Old Days of Rude Cellphone Gabbers
By NICK WINGFIELD
Published: December 2, 2011
Is talking to a phone the same as talking on it?
Enlarge This Image
Illustration by The New York Times
Jimmy Wong, of Los Angeles, called an overheard conversation with Siri on an iPhone “creepy.”
Readers’ Comments
The sound of someone gabbing on a cellphone is part of the soundtrack of daily life, and most of us have learned when to be quiet — no talking in “quiet cars” on trains, for example.
But the etiquette of talking to a phone — more precisely, to a “virtual assistant” like Apple’s Siri, in the new iPhone 4S — has not yet evolved. And eavesdroppers are becoming annoyed.
In part, that is because conversations with machines have a robotic, unsettling quality. Then there is the matter of punctuation. If you want it, you have to say it.
“How is he doing question mark how are you doing question mark,” Jeremy Littau of Bethlehem, Pa., found himself telling his new iPhone recently as he walked down the street, dictating a text message to his wife, who was home with their newborn. The machine spoke to him in Siri’s synthesized female voice.
Passers-by gawked. “It’s not normal human behavior to have people having a conversation with a phone on the street,” concluded Mr. Littau, 36, an assistant professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University.
The technology behind voice-activated mobile phones has been around for a few years — allowing people to order their phones around like digital factotums, commanding them to dictate text messages, jot down appointments on their calendars and search for nearby sushi restaurants. Apple, though, has taken it to another level with Siri.
“Happy birthday smiley face,” was what Dani Klein heard a man say to his phone on the Long Island Rail Road, using the command to insert a grinning emotion into a message.
“It sounded ridiculous,” said Mr. Klein, 28, who works in social media marketing.
Talking to your phone is so new that there are no official rules yet on, say, public transportation systems.
Cliff Cole, a spokesman for Amtrak, said the train line’s quiet-car policy applied to any use of voice with cellphones, though it explicitly bans only “phone calls,” not banter with a virtual assistant. “We may have to adjust the language if it becomes a problem,” Mr. Cole said.
Voice-activated technology in smartphones first appeared a few years ago when mobile phones running Google’s Android operating system and other software began offering basic voice commands to do Web searches and other tasks.
Apple’s Siri, introduced this fall, is a more sophisticated iteration of the technology; it responds to natural-sounding phrases like, “What’s the weather looking like?” and “Wake me up at 8 a.m.”
Apple gave Siri a dash of personality, too, reinforcing the impression that the iPhone’s users were actually talking to someone. Ask Siri for the meaning of life, and it responds, “I find it odd you would ask this of an inanimate object.”
Technology executives say voice technologies are here to stay if only because they can help cellphone users be more productive.
“I don’t think the keyboard is going to go away, but it’s going to be less used,” said Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellular phone while at Motorola in the 1970s.
Another irritant in listening to people talk to their phones is the awareness that most everything you can do with voice commands can also be done silently. Billy Brooks, 43, was standing in line at the service department of a car dealership in Los Angeles recently, when a woman broke the silence of the room by dictating a text message into her iPhone.
“You’re unnecessarily annoying others at that point by not just typing out your message,” said Mr. Brooks, a visual effects artist in the film industry, adding that the woman’s behavior was “just ridiculous and kind of sad.”
James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers, said people who use their voices to control their phones are creating an inconvenience for others — noise — rather than coping with an inconvenience for themselves — the discomfort of having to type slowly on a cramped cellphone keyboard. Mr. Katz compared the behavior with that of someone who leaves a car’s engine running while parked, creating noise and fumes for people surrounding them.
While Apple has tried to enable natural-sounding conversations with Siri, they are often anything but. Nirav Tolia, an Internet entrepreneur, was riding a crowded elevator down from his office in San Francisco recently when a man tried to use Siri to find a new location of a cafe, Coffee Bar. The phone gave him listings for other coffee houses — the wrong ones — forcing him to repeat the search several times.
“Just say ‘Starbucks,’ dude,” another passenger said, pushing past the Coffee Bar-seeker when the elevator reached the ground floor.
When talking to their cellphones, people sometimes start sounding like machines themselves. Jimmy Wong, 24, was at an after-hours diner with friends in Los Angeles recently when they found themselves next to a man ordering Siri to write memos and dictate e-mails. They found the man’s conversation with his phone “creepy,” without any of the natural pauses and voice inflections that occur in a discussion between two people.
“It was very robotic,” he said.
Yet the group could not stop eavesdropping.
People who study the behavior of cellphone users believe the awkwardness of hearing people in hotels, airports and cafes treating their phones like administrative assistants will simply fade over time.
“We’ll see an evolution of that initial irritation with it, to a New Yorker cartoon making fun of it, and then after a while it will largely be accepted by most people,” said Mr. Katz from Rutgers.
But, he predicted, “there will be a small minority of traditionalists who yearn for the good old days when people just texted in public.”
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Advanced Civilizations
Advanced Civilizations
Reproduction
By
Nigel Calder and John Newell
The
Lifespan of Advanced Civilizations
A very short
lifespan for advanced civilizations may be a realistic probability
because as our own case shows, technology mushrooms very rapidly and
is accompanied by many dangerous effects such as;
1. Overpopulation
2. Depletion of
natural resources
3. Pollution and
worse of all
4. Rapid escalation
of nuclear stockpiles which can easily reach the level where they are
capable of wiping out the whole population of a planet.
By the same token,
if we were to find significant number of other advanced civilizations
in our galaxy it would mean that some at least had been able to
overcome the dangers that are now looming over our own civilizations.
If they have reached
this advanced stage, it would mean that they have been able discard
all of their animistic (BARBARISM) attributes such as materialism,
selfishness, territoriality, dominance over others and killing
instincts which in a technological civilizations are likely to lead
to self destruction.
They would have been
able to to mature into higher levels of cosmic intelligence
characterized by spirituality, altruism, respect of others, adherence
to peace and love for each other.
Joining such a
galactic society would indeed be a colossal step forward in the
intellectual and ethical evolution of our civilization.
This might
also be the reason why we have not yet heard from any such advanced
civilizations as may exist.
There must be a galactic rule that says
that before a new civilization is invited to join the galactic
society it must show that it is able to overcome the major crisis
that probably befall all new technological civilizations.
Since we are still
in the midst of this evolutionary problem, there may be advanced
civilizations waiting to see how we do before inviting us to join the
galactic society of advanced civilizations.
The Place of Animals in Buddhism
Reproduction
It is worth reproducing in entirety.
He was a pioneer in Insight Meditation.
Visit his site.
He has written very little on other subjects.
I love this article, in the sense, the animals are part of this planet and they have the right to exist on their own domain.
They are not gift of god or created by god for the man to PLUNDER, elephants and ants included.
THE PLACE OF ANIMALS IN BUDDHISM
Anagarika P. Sugatananda (Francis Story)
Vol. VIII, No. 3, 1961
In an article on evolutionary ethics, Sir John Arthur Thomsom, Regius Professor of Natural History, Aberdeen University, makes the striking observation that 'Animals may not be ethical, but they are often virtuous'. If this opinion had been expressed by a Buddhist writer it might have met with skepticism from those who hold 'commonsense' practical views on the nature of animals. Perhaps even more so from those whose religion teaches them to regard man as a special creation, the only being with a 'soul' and therefore the only one capable of noble and disinterested action. Scientific evidence that man differs from animals in quality, but not in essential kind, has not yet broken down the age-old religious idea of man's god-bestowed uniqueness and superiority. It is a view that is both flattering and convenient to homo sapiens, and so will die hard, if it dies at all, in the popular mind. To be quite fair to theistic religious ideas, the anthropocentric bias is quite as strong among people who are pleased to consider themselves rationalists as it is among the religiously orthodox.
But Prof. Thomson's verdict is that of an unbiased scientific observer and student of behaviour, and most open-minded people would endorse it.
Its full implication lies in the distinction between 'ethical' and 'virtuous'.
Ethical conduct is that which follows a code of moral rules and is aware, to some extent of an intelligible principle underlying them.
Virtue, on the other hand, is the source from which spring unpremeditated acts of kindness, self-abnegation and heroism, prompted by love or some other primal and instinctive urge.
It is not an ethical sense that makes the female animal defend her young with her life, or a dog remain with its unconscious master in a burning house rather than save itself.
When as Prof. Thomson points out animals 'are devoted to their offspring, sympathetic to their kindred, affectionate to their mates, self-subordinating in their community, courageous beyond praise', it is not because they are morally aware or morally trained, but because they have another quality, which can only be called virtue.
To be ethical is man's prerogative because it requires a developed reasoning faculty; but since virtue of the kind found in animals takes no account of rewards or punishments it is in a certain sense a higher quality than mere morality.
Moral conduct may be based on nothing more than fear of society's criticism or sanctions, or the expectation of reprisals from a punitive god.
In morality there may be selfishness; in virtue there is none.
No one is benefited by having extravagant claims made for him, and what has been said is not intended to deny that for the most part animals are rapacious and cruel. It cannot be otherwise when they live under the inexorable compulsions of the law of survival.
But what of man, who has been called the most dangerous and destructive of animals?
Would the majority of human beings be much better than animals, if all restraints of fear were removed? Just as there are vast differences between one man and another in nature and conduct, so there are between animals. Anyone who has taken pleasure in feeding monkeys in a wild state will have noticed that there is usually one old male who tyrannizes over the females and their young, greedily snatching more than he needs himself rather than let the weaker members share the dana. But that does not mean that all monkeys are egoistic bullies.
A few years ago it was reported from India that a monkey had jumped into a swollen river and saved a human baby from drowning at great peril to its own life.
The incident is noteworthy because it concerns a wild animal; such actions by domesticated animals are so frequent that they often pass unnoticed. It suggests a special relationship between animals and those human beings who live at peace with them; perhaps a rudimentary sense of gratitude or even a dim idea of the need for mutual help against the forces of nature. Monkeys are treated with kindness by the Indian villager, and all the higher animals are well able to distinguish between kindness and enmity.
But now one wonders sadly whether Hanuman-ji will be able to prevail over the demand for polio vaccine.
Prof. Thomson has something to say regarding the human-animal relationship also, and it has a special significance for Buddhists. He writes that although there is no warrant for calling animals moral agents, for the reason we have seen, 'a few highly-endowed types, such as dog and horse, which have become man's partners, may have some glimpse of the practical meaning of responsibility', and that there are cases in which possibly 'ideas are beginning to emerge'. That there is the possibility of such ideas being formed in the animal mind, and that they can be encouraged and cultivated, is nothing strange to Buddhist thought.
Buddhism takes into full account the animal's latent capacity for affection, heroism and self-sacrifice. There is in Buddhism more sense of kinship with the animal world, a more intimate feeling of community with all that lives, than is found in Western religious thought. And this is not a matter of sentiment, but is rooted in the total Buddhist concept of life. It is an essential part of a grand and all-embracing philosophy which neglects no aspect of experience. The Buddhist does not have to ask despairingly, 'Why did God create obnoxious things like cobras, scorpions, tigers and Mycobacterium tuberculosis?' The kitten on the lap and the possible cobra in the bed are all part of a world which, while it is not the best of all possible worlds, could not be different, since its creator is craving.
So in the Buddhist texts animals are always treated with great sympathy and under standing. Some animals, such as the elephant, the horse and the Naga, the noble serpent, are used as personifications of great qualities, and the Buddha Himself is Sakya Siha, the Lion of the Sakyas. His Teaching is the Lion's roar, confounding the upholders of false views.
The stories of animals in the canonical texts and commentaries are sometimes very faithful to the nature of the beasts they deal with. Thus the noble horse Kanthaka pined away and died when its master renounced the world to attain Buddhahood. That story has the ring of historical truth. In a later episode an elephant, Parileyyaka and an intelligent monkey were the Enlightened One's companions when He retired to the forest to get away from quarrelling Bhikkhus.
(Here one is reminded of Walt Whitman: 'Sometimes I think that I could live with animals... )
Then there was the case of the elephant Dhanapala, which suffered from homesickness in captivity and refused food for love of its mother.
The Buddha immortalized it in the stanza:
Dhanapalako nama kunjaro
Katukappadhebano dunnivarayo
Baddho kabalan na bhunjati.
Sumarati nagavanassa kunjaro.
Dhammapada, verse 324.
Also from the Dhammapada Commentary is the tale of Ghosaka, the child who was laid on the ground to be trampled on successively by elephants and draught-oxen, but was saved by the compassionate beasts walking round instead of over him. The suckling of this child by a she-goat is reminiscent of other stories, such as that of Romulus and Remus, suckled by a wolf, and Orson, by a bear. These may or may not be legendary, but there have been well-attested cases in recent times of human children being nurtured and raised by animals.
Majjhima Nikaya, Mulapannasa Pali, 2. Sihanada-vagga, 2. Mahasihanada Sutta, p. 100, 6th Syn. Edn.
Dhammapada-Atthakatha Book. II, page 128, 6th Syn. Edn.
Dhammapada Atthakatha, Book 1, page 321, 6th Syn. Edn.
Dhammapada-Atthakatha, Book II, page 314, 6th Syn. Ldn. Meaning of the verse: (The elephant named Dhanapalaka, which is in rut and is hard to control, being in captivity eats no morsel, but longs for the elephant-forest.)
Buddhist Legends Part 1, Burlingame, p. 256.
The good qualities of animals is the subject of several Jataka stories, the best known being that of the hare in the moon (Sasa Jataka) and the story of the heroic monkey-leader who saved his tribe by making his own body part of a bridge for them across the Ganges (Mahakapi Jataka). Less well-known stories of the same kind are the Chaddanta Jataka, in which the Bodhisatta appears as a six tusked elephant, Saccamkira Jataka, which contrasts the gratitude shown by a snake, a rat, a parrot which the ingratitude of a prince, and the curious tale of the Mahasuka Jataka, where a parrot out of gratitude to the tree that sheltered it refuses to leave the tree when Sakka causes it to wither. There is even an elephantine version of Androcles and the lion in the Alina Citta Jataka, where a tusker gives itself and its offspring in service to some carpenters out of gratitude for the removal of a thorn from its foot.
Jataka Atthakatha, Book III., page 48, 6th Syn. Edn.
Jataka Atthakatha, Book III., page 349, 6th Syn. Edn
Jataka Atthakatha, Book V, page 37, 6th Syn. Edn. Six-tusked here means "Six-worer tusked'
Jataka Atthakatha, Book 1, page 341, 6th Syn. Edn.
Jataka Pali, page 72, 6th Syn. Edn.
Jataka Pali , page 37, 6th Syn. Edn.
Whether we choose to take these last examples literally, as events that occurred in previous would-cycles when animals had more human characteristics than now, or as folk-tales of the Pancatantra type, is immaterial.
Their function is to teach moral lessons by allegory, but they are also important as illustrating the position that animals occupy side by side with men in the Buddhist world-view.
By and large the Jatakas do not exalt animals unduly, for every tale of animal gratitude or affection can be balanced by another showing less worthy traits which animals and men have in common. There is at least one, however, which satirises a peculiarly human characteristic, hypocrisy. In the Vaka Jataka, a wolf, having no food decides to observe the Uposatha fast. But on seeing a goat the pious wolf decides to keep the fast on some other occasion. If the story were not intended to be satirical it would be an injustice to wolves. Whatever other vices it may have, no animal degrades itself with sham piety, either to impress its fellows or to make spiritual capital out of an involuntary deprivation.
Buddhism shows that both animals and human beings are the products of Ignorance conjoined with Craving, and that the differences between them are the consequences of past Kamma.
In this sense, though not in any other, 'all life is one'. It is one in its origin, Ignorance-craving, and in its subjection to the universal law of causality.
But every being's Kamma is separate and individual.
So long as a man refuses to become submerged in the herd, so long as he resists the pressure that is constantly brought to bear upon him to make him share the mass mind and take on the identity of mass activities, he is the master of his own destiny. Whatever the Kamma of others around him may be, he need have no share in it. His Kamma is his own, distinct and individual.
In this sense all life is not one, but each life is a unique current of causal determinants, from lowest to highest in the scale.
The special position of the human being rests on the fact that he alone can consciously direct his own personal current of Kamma to a higher or lower destiny. All beings are their own creators; man is also his own judge and executioner. He is also his own saviour.
Then what of the animal? Since animals are devoid of moral sense, argues the rationalist, how can they be agents of Kamma? How can they raise themselves from their low status and regain human birth?
The answer is that Buddhism views life against the background of infinity.
Samsara is without beginning, and there has never been a time when the round of rebirths did not exist.
Consequently, the Kammic history of every living being extends into the infinite past, and each has an unexpected potential of Kamma, good and bad. When a human being dies, the nature of the succeeding life-continuum is determined by the morally wholesome or unwholesome mental impulse that arises in his last conscious moment, that which follows it being his Patisandhi-vinnana, or rebirth-linking consciousness.
But where no such good or bad thought-moment arises the rebirth-linking consciousness is determined by some unexpended Kamma from a previous existence. Animals, being without moral discrimination, are more of less passive sufferers of the results of past bad Kamma, as are morally irresponsible human beings, such as congenital idiots and imbeciles. But the fact that the animal has been unable to originate any fresh good Kamma does not exclude it from rebirth on a higher level. When the results of the Kamma which caused the animal birth are exhausted some unexpended good Kamma from a previous state of existence will have an opportunity to take over, and in this way the life-continuum is raised to the human level again.
How this comes about can be understood only when the mind is divested of all belief in a transmigrating 'soul'.
So long as there is any clinging, however disguised or unconscious, to the idea of a persisting self-entity the true nature of the rebirth process cannot be grasped.
It is for this reason that many people, although they maintain that 'all life is one', fail to understand or accept the Buddhist truth that life currents oscillate between the human, the animal and many other forms. However comforting it may be to believe that beings can only ascend the spiritual ladder, and that there is no retributive fall for those who fail to make the grade, that is not the teaching of the Buddha.
It is now necessary to introduce a qualification to the statement that the higher rebirth of animals must depend upon unexpended good Kamma. Within the limitation we have noted it is certainly possible for animals to originate good Kamma, notwithstanding their lack of moral sense.
As Prof. Thomson suggests, contact with human beings can encourage and develop those qualities which we recognize as virtue in the higher animals, and even bring about in them a dawning consciousness of moral values.
When the compulsions of the law of are removed, as in the case of animals which show examples of those endearing, and even noble qualities in animals which have some times put human beings to shame, and have even caused non-Buddhists to ask them selves uneasily whether man really is a special creation of God, and the only being worthy of salvation.
Jataka Pali, page 91, 6th Syn. Edn.
This kamma is known as Acinnaka-kamma.
This kamma is called aparapariyaya-vedaniya-kamma. (Kamma ripening in future births).
Recorded (but not substantiated0 Alien History of Visitation
Recorded (but not substantiated0 Alien History of Visitation
1947-06
Roswell UFO crash about 30 mi north of
Roswell, New Mexico United States
United States Army Air Forces allegedly
captured a crashed flying saucer and its alien occupants.
The find was soon explained to be a
weather balloon but regained attention since 1978 after investigation
of S. T. Friedman.
1961-09-19
Betty and Barney Hill abduction South of
Lancaster on Route 3, New Hampshire United States.
The first widely publicized alien
abduction experience. The Hills saw a huge flying disk while driving
home in their car at late evening and were abducted and medically
examined by small extraterrestrials.
1972-06-27
1972 UFO sightings in the eastern
Cape Fort Beaufort South Africa
A craft was observed near Fort Beaufort
in the eastern Cape, which attracted the attention of the military.
1972-11-12
1972 UFO sightings in the eastern
Cape Rosmead South Africa
A school headmaster seems to have
arrived at a still smouldering UFO landing site in the town of
Rosmead.
1973-05
The Judy Doraty Abduction at a road from
Alta Loma to Texas City, Texas United States
While under hypnosis, Judy Doraty
claimed to have been abducted by aliens and to have witnessed a
cattle mutilation.
1973-10
Jeff Greenhaw Alabama United
States
Alabama policeman Jeff Greenhaw claims
he encountered a creature dressed in a shiny metal costume while
investigating a UFO report.
1973-10-17
Eglin Air Force Base
Sighting Florida United States
An unidentified object was tracked by a
Duke Field radar unit during the same time period, and within the
same area, that 10 to 15 people observed four strange objects flying
in formation between Milton, Florida, and Crestview, Florida, along
Interstate 10, according to Eglin officials. Reports from the base
indicated that a bright glowing ball of light could be seen
travelling parallel with an Air Force C-130 aircraft but at a much
higher altitude.
1978-10 C
larenville UFO Sighting Clarenville,
Newfoundland Canada
Constable Jim Blackwood of the RCMP
responded to reports of a flying saucer hovering over a harbour near
the town of Clarenville. When he arrived at the scene the UFO was
present and visible. The craft stayed in the area for approximately
an hour and a half, during which Blackwood switched on the roof
lights of his police cruiser leading the craft to mimic the flashing
lights. The craft took off like a shooting star high in the sky and
disappeared.
1980-12-29 Cash-Landrum
incident
On state highway FM 1485 in New Caney,
Texas United States A huge diamond-shaped object expelling flame and
emitting heat irradiated three witnesses on an isolated road in dense
woods; all required treatment for radiation poisoning. The UFO was
escorted by military helicopters including CH-47 Chinooks.
The victims have since sued the United
States Government.
1986-11-17
Japan Air Lines flight 1628 incident
From eastern to south central
Alaska United States First two square-shaped, then one very large
craft witnessed by the crew flew alongside Japan Air Lines Flight
1628 for 50 minutes above Alaska. One of the objects trailing the
Boeing 747 was detected by military radar.
1990-03-30
Belgian UFO wave Ans, Wallonia Belgium
Reports of large, silent, low-flying
black triangles, allegedly investigated by Belgium's military.
1994-09-16
Ariel UFO incident Ruwa, East
Mashonaland Zimbabwe
62 children saw a landed round aircraft
and a small man next to it near their school.
1997-03-13
Phoenix Lights
Phoenix, Arizona
United States Lights and craft of
varying descriptions, most notably a V-shaped pattern, were seen by
thousands of people between 19:30 and 22:30 MST, in a space of about
300 miles, from the Nevada line, through Phoenix, to the edge of
Tucson.
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