
Mast fire probe amid 5G coronavirus claims - frereubu
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-52164358
======
jacquesm
There are tons of gullible people out there. Twitter for instance is rife with
accounts that spread this nonsense around as though it is gospel. Social media
has been weaponized to get people to distrust anything they see or read
online, alternatively to believe nonsense to the point that the real news
starts to feel like nonsense too.

This is the flip side of the coin, universal access to information and
universal capability to generate information is a power that comes with a lot
of responsibility and so far we are failing at that.

Similar things are happening here on HN, there are accounts whose sole purpose
it seems to be to derail any normal conversation or to bait others in to
crossing the rules so they can be eliminated resulting in a lower signal:noise
ratio.

It's up to all of us to call this nonsense out and to relentlessly aim to stop
it from spreading because at some level this is a fight with consequences
reaching much further than just out little fora and comment sections of blogs.
It is a war for mindshare of bogus ideas vs ideas with a basis in fact, the
final prize is the votes of the gullible and to paralyze societies to be able
to respond to crisis, man made or natural.

The funny thing is that as soon as you go down that rabbit hole far enough the
conspiracy theories end up being peddled by the ones who are _actually_
conspiring. See for instance pizzagate.

~~~
nabla9
[https://euvsdisinfo.eu/](https://euvsdisinfo.eu/) official site of European
External Action Service that tracks and responds Russian Federation’s ongoing
disinformation campaigns.

It's just amazing how much of all disinformation you can be tracked back to
Russian sources. Russian disinformation is not trying to create consistent
counter-narrative to the West. They just throw out stuff wildly to sow
confusion, doubt and distrust. You can see people in HN who have been caught
into this net of disinformation and start parroting same narrative.

Throwing coronavirus disinfo at the wall to see what sticks
[https://euvsdisinfo.eu/throwing-coronavirus-disinfo-at-
the-w...](https://euvsdisinfo.eu/throwing-coronavirus-disinfo-at-the-wall-to-
see-what-sticks/)

~~~
tim333
I wonder what the Russians are hoping to achieve apart from annoying everyone?

~~~
throw0101a
Introducing chaos and disrupting the internal cohesion of their adversaries:

> _Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United
> States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-
> American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into
> internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic,
> social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements –
> extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal
> political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to
> support isolationist tendencies in American politics".[9]_

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics)

~~~
tim333
Ah that explains quite a lot thanks.

------
jakub_g
I used to be somehow in the middle regarding "is X dangerous" discussions
because while probably generally not an issue for large majority people, there
is probably a small .% of people who are legitimately oversensitive to various
stuff (like, say, some people are allergic to certain foods). And it sucks to
be the ignored "edge case" person and not be able to do anything about it
(think any time your bug report was rejected).

However I came across this thread that made me realize, many people come up
with claims out of thin air (perhaps not even being malicious, just doing fake
correlations etc.):

[https://twitter.com/sTeamTraen/status/1245814828079427585](https://twitter.com/sTeamTraen/status/1245814828079427585)

> an anecode that was told to me when I visited the operations centre of a
> large French mobile phone operator a few years ago.

(after installation of new tower)

> everyone who can see the tower, calls the mayor and says they have headaches

> the mayor demands to know what we're going to do to make the headaches stop.

> And we say, well, we haven't switched the mast on yet.

~~~
jacquesm
I had a house up for sale for a long time. One day a man and his wife from
Amsterdam came to view it. They brought with them a little box. The lady was
allergic to 'radiation', and the box would tell her if this house was the one
or not. She walked to-and-fro with the box pointing it all all kinds of bits
mumbling to herself, and then walked out into the garden. After two hours of
this she came back to us and said that it was all very nice but it wouldn't
do, just too much radiation.

I asked her if I could look at the box. It was a field-strength meter with a
built in amplifier hooked up to a variety of possible antennae, an open dipole
and a small loop. She didn't understand the first thing about electromagnetic
waves (polarization, for instance). The thing was set to its most sensitive
setting amplifying the crap out of any background noise and picked up all
kinds of interesting sources, one of which was _the sun_ , essentially turning
it into a complex detector for something you didn't need a field-strength
meter for in the first place: to tell you where our life giving star is in the
sky.

I pointed this out to her and she went to sit in the car in a huff while her
husband hung around for a bit. Apparently they'd been seeing 100's of houses
and none of them ever were good enough.

Meanwhile, they lived in Amsterdam, right opposite of the microwave support
tower next to RAI, a spot so bad that whenever I would pass it my cellphone
would spontaneously reboot because of the strength of the electrical field.

I never knew if she was serious or whether she imagined the whole thing or was
just looking for a way to get some quality time with her husband. But I highly
doubt she ever found a house that was good enough short of a mountain cave.

But that house, about 300 meters away from the German border was about as
isolated from anything radiation related you're going to find in Western
Europe and if she wasn't making it up then for the life of me I do not
understand what mechanism would underpin that sort of sensitivity.

~~~
madaxe_again
I had an “electrosensitive” housemate at university - no phones allowed, and
she’d go around unplugging everything, even taking the batteries out of wall
clocks - and would microwave herself a meal twice daily, nose pressed to the
glass of the door. She wouldn’t be told that the microwave was a much greater
emitter of EM radiation than anything else around her - said the frequency was
in tune with the human body, which was why it made such nutritious food, and
was why she liked to be close to it while it ran for its “positive energy”.

We don’t keep in touch.

~~~
jacquesm
Missed opportunity, I never thought of asking her if she had a microwave oven.
Apparently their whole apartment had been covered in copper mesh, but they
still had a regular electrical system and were looking at the kitchen
appliances as well so I assumed they wanted to keep those.

------
fit2rule
Every time this whole conspiracy theory comes up in my circles, I ponder on
the means by which it might be true, even though it (probably) isn't.

<tinfoil> Perhaps there are microwave frequencies which are conducive to
agitating bacterial/microbial/viral activity - I could imagine a scenario,
though I have no idea of the science/math involved, where the structures of
the targeted vector are 'assisted' by remote stimulation.

Like, you can give flagellum a little 'kick' in the thrashing-around
frequencies, which make it more violent against cell-wall structures, and so
on.

Think, magnetohydrodynamics at pico scale.

Were such a thing feasible, I'm quite sure DARPA discovered it decades ago.
_That 's what its for, right?_

Either way, there is a way to approach this subject which doesn't encourage
hand-waving and woohoo thinking, but I'm not capable of it. I'm sure there are
ways that microwaves can be applied against biological targets that we, the
non-scanning-electron-microscope-using general public, probably don't quite
get, just yet, has been weaponised ..

</tinfoil>

~~~
downshun
> every time (conspiracy) comes up I ponder on the means by which it might be
> true

Wrong. [1]

Try to falsify.

"Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular
reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of evidence for
it are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth, whereby the conspiracy becomes
a matter of faith rather than something that can be proved or disproved." [0]

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory)

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability)

~~~
fit2rule
Sure there are scientific ways to go about things. But the idea that there is
'safe thought' and 'dangerous thought' is just plain batshit lunacy. A lot of
amazing stuff we take for granted today started off with "hmm.. I wonder if
<x> is possible somehow" ..

Nobody is being paid to conjecture "what if there _were_ a way to do it.."
unless, they actually are.

~~~
downshun
> But the idea that there is 'safe thought' and 'dangerous thought' is just
> plain batshit lunacy.

No one said that...

And it would be clearly false: It can be dangerous to be wrong, such as
thinking that drinking concentrated bleach will somehow cure you from a
disease. Or, you know, destroying infrastructure based on unsubstantiated
fears.

------
crocal
It is inevitable that in such an atmosphere unlikely targets are picked as
scapegoats. If it stops at 5G antennas I guess we can consider ourselves
fortunate.

~~~
heavenlyblue
Also a bunch of young people forced sitting at home

~~~
learnstats2
In my (unfortunately much greater than I would like) experience of people
engaged with 5G conspiracies, they are not generally young.

~~~
heavenlyblue
You’re right, but even these older people are not the ones who would be
starting fires. They are usually the ones motivating the younger ones.

~~~
cbg0
> these older people are not the ones who would be starting fires

Are you basing this off of something other than conjecture?

~~~
heavenlyblue
Yes. Older people who would do that usually are already a part of some sort of
organised crime ring.

Younger however have a higher tendency of working for the idea (just the same
way as younger people tend to work for startups).

Or are you go tell me that younger people are statistically wiser than older
ones?

------
montalbano
Another smaller HN discussion on a related article from yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22778815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22778815)

------
tzs
RT.com has run a story calling these 5G coronavirus links "baseless conspiracy
theories" [0]. In another story they say the same thing, and talk about
"expert scientific studies repeatedly concluding that the high-speed
communications system does not pose a threat to humans" [-1].

This is interesting because RT.com in 2018 and 2019 was one of the major
source of baseless anti-5G health stories. Examples:

• 5G Wireless: A Dangerous 'Experiment on Humanity' [1]

• Could 5G put more kids at risk for cancer? [2]

• How To Survive Dangers of 5G [3]

• Cancer risk? 5G wireless speeds could be dangerous [4]

• ‘Totally insane’: Telecomm Industry ignores 5G dangers [5]

RT.com videos on YouTube average over 1 million viewers per day, which is
higher than any actual news outlet, and their claims are then repeated by many
blogs and social media sites and other websites and then others pick it up
from there, often losing the attribution to RT.com along the way so [6].

I wonder what caused RT.com's apparent flip on 5G?

[-1] [https://www.rt.com/sport/484967-coronavirus-5g-amir-
khan/](https://www.rt.com/sport/484967-coronavirus-5g-amir-khan/)

[0] [https://www.rt.com/uk/484877-5g-coronavirus-conspiracies-
moc...](https://www.rt.com/uk/484877-5g-coronavirus-conspiracies-mocked/)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_f9gpg4t6c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_f9gpg4t6c)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXEyP0WMrk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXEyP0WMrk)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO1gZhwqCvI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO1gZhwqCvI)

[4]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLwuM0_MJg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLwuM0_MJg)

[5]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML7wx_5n2z8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML7wx_5n2z8)

[6] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-
safety-h...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-
health-russia.html)

------
tyingq
I'm surprised there's enough flammable material on a mast to set it on fire.
Antenna radomes and wire insulation maybe?

~~~
jacquesm
Lots of foam inside HF coax, outer mantle will burn, paint will burn,
electronics will burn very nicely and the are a lot of plastics that would
sustain a fire. Nasty stuff coming off that too when burning (dioxins).

~~~
tyingq
Surprised they don't put all that in some sort of conduit though.

------
FriendlyNormie
How is anyone supposed to read the text on this page on a mobile device when
the ads above the current scroll location keep loading and unloading with
random heights that suddenly shift all the text on the page up and down by a
large amount every few seconds?

~~~
severine
Firefox + uBlock Origin?

[https://www.mozilla.org](https://www.mozilla.org)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/ublock-
origin/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/)

------
joaomacp
This pandemic is certainly providing lots of opportunity for behavioral and
social studies.

------
wanda
this is the way I'm looking at it, someone please correct me if I don't grasp
the situation.

definitions:

• "ionising radiation" broadly refers to particles (alpha/beta particles;
cosmic rays) and EM radiation types that are sufficiently energetic to
directly or indirectly (respectively) displace electrons in the atomic
structure of matter they pass through. there is no single definition of what
counts as ionising radiation when it comes to human cells. it's normally said
to be around 10eV – 30eV, but we'll come up with a catch-all definition for
argument's sake later. we want to avoid ionisation of DNA, white blood cells,
that sort of thing.

• _f_ = _v_ / _λ_ (Hz)

• _c_ = 3 × 10⁸ (m/s)

• _h_ = 6.62607015 × 10⁻³⁴ (J⋅s)

• _E_ = _hf_ = _hc_ / _λ_ (eV)

___________

premises:

• EM rays of high frequency have proportionately high photon energy

• ionisation by EM radiation requires higher photon energy

• the lowest threshold for ionisation of an atom of any element is caesium, at
3.9eV (low end ultraviolet)

• the lowest energy EM radiation that can affect, damage or ionise bare DNA in
a vaccuum will be greater than 3.9eV (or 3900meV) [1][2][3]

• the highest frequency _officially proposed_ for 5G to date is 86 GHz (λ ≈
3.5 × 10⁻³m) [4]

• an 86GHz microwave would have photon energy of 3.6×10⁻⁴eV (or 0.36meV)

    
    
      (8.6 × 10⁻¹⁰) × (6.62607004 × 10⁻³⁴) ≈ 5.7 × 10⁻²³J ≈ 0.00036eV
    

• 0.36meV is a lot less energy than 3900meV

___________

conclusion:

EM radiation in proposed 5G range is unable to ionise — and very unlikely to
cause any damage to — organic molecules like DNA in a vacuum, without even
contemplating absorption/attenuation or the fact that the vast majority of 5G
is going to be even lower freq than 86 GHz.

this is just ionisation we're talking about here, i.e. the shredding of your
cells by penetrative, energetic radiation. 5G will not be used at anywhere
near the kind of wattage as your microwave oven puts out. even if you put
yourself in a microwave, yes you get cooked but this is because you absorb the
EM radiation and it induces kinetic energy in you, as it would a bowl of
porridge. similarly, if you sit yourself in front of a radar you'll probably
feel pretty damn hot as well.

___________

I've seen some crazy people yelling about how 5G is almost the same frequency
as crowd-dispersal microwave weapons use — but again, this weaponised form is
a focused BEAM. if you use enough visible light you can cook yourself as well.
incidentally, even with 5G masts all over the place (and they will be because
it has a shorter effective range than 4G LTE) you won't be subjected to
anywhere near the wattage a microwave oven or a military radar put out.

if low energy EM waves damage DNA, your immune system, or cause anything
related to cancer, it is not by any known physical mechanism [5]

interestingly enough, I caught this on wikipedia:

    
    
      An international appeal to the European Union made on 
      September 13, 2017 garnered over 180 signatures from
      scientists representing 35 countries. They cite unproven 
      concerns over the 10 to 20 billion connections to the 5G
      network and the subsequent increase in RF-EMF exposure 
      affecting the global populace constantly. The appeal 
      also references the International Agency for Research on
      Cancer's (IARC) conclusion in 2011 that frequencies 
      30 kHz – 300 GHz are possibly carcinogenic in humans.
    

this seems like something that will blow up in paranoid people's minds, and
will make purveyors of fake news lick their lips, but consider that the entry
on the list cited is

 _" radiofrequency electromagnetic fields such as, but not limited to, those
associated with wireless phones"_

so not just 5G at all, but also your granddad's radio, your 3G burner phone,
your bluetooth headphones, your kid's remote-controlled car, your drone, etc.

the spectacular list of "possibly carcinogenic things" in question [6]
includes _aloe vera_ and the _occupation of carpentry /joinery_. hey, maybe
electromagnetic radiation causes cancer — but then again, so does interacting
with pretty much everything else on the planet!

also haven't we been using mm-λ waves in radars for ~50 years now? not seen
any super mutants yet.

_______________

[1]:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC20415/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC20415/)

[2]:
[http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Folkard,%20M.,%...](http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Folkard,%20M.,%20Int.%20J.%20Radiat.%20Biol.,%20Vol.76%202000.pdf)

[3]:
[http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Prise,%20K.M.,%...](http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Prise,%20K.M.,%20Int.%20J.%20Radiat.%20Biol%20Vol.%2076,%20No.%207,2000.pdf)

[4]:
[https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/97023/5...](https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/97023/5G-update-08022017.pdf)

[5]: [https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-
prevention/risk/r...](https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-
prevention/risk/radiation/electromagnetic-fields-fact-sheet)

[6]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2B_Agents_-...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2B_Agents_-
_Possibly_carcinogenic_to_humans)

~~~
tzs
> "ionising radiation" broadly refers to particles (alpha/beta particles;
> cosmic rays) and EM radiation types that are sufficiently energetic to
> directly or indirectly (respectively) displace electrons in the atomic
> structure of matter they pass through

"Detach" would be better than "displace" there.

~~~
wanda
Thanks! You're right, displace was definitely the wrong word. Unfortunately
can't edit now.

If that's all I'm wrong about, I'm happy.

------
tannhaeuser
What's the story with 5G mast torching? Is it entirely in paranoid territory
(eg. 5G causing infections) or is it based on a rational cause (5G causing
health issues due to density, or that ubiquitous 5G critically helps mass
surveillance due to low-cost, always-on receivers)?

~~~
cbg0
> rational cause

> 5G causing health issues due to density

There's no link between health problems and 5G networks at this time. The UK
has actually tested radiation levels in the field
[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51613580](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51613580)

