The more I think about cell phones, the more I want to throw mine onto some kind of radioactive bonfire at the center of the universe. I recently got an earpiece because I’ve become paranoid about years of use ruining my health (although I’m sure my intense computer usage will get me way beforehand). But it still doesn’t seem like enough.

I know this is old news at this point, but I was thinking about it a bit tonight, and collected some resources on the topic of how sucky cell phones are (I mean, besides high prices and poor service quality).

1. Swedish scientists last year did experiments which found that cell phone radiation burned holes in the brains of rats. Of course this study received little to no coverage and was appropriate squashed by both the media and the Federal Drug Cartel.
2. The same study found that rats exposed to cell phone radiation lost brain cells in areas relating to memory, learning and movement. Some scientists are hypothesizing that cell phone use among teenagers today could lead to the onset of Alzheimer’s or other senility as early as their middle thirties. I mean, that’s just fucking crazy.
3. The year before that, a Maryland neurologist filed suit claiming that cell phone use caused a tumor in him. His case was thrown out of court by the judge.
4. Also from last year, studies were done which suggested that people who talk on the cell phone at least an hour a day have a one third higher risk of developing brain tumors, and the risk of acoustic neuroma, another type of tumor was increased by 30 percent.
5. Another scary item: if you commute on the train, you’re being subjected to well above the “safe” recommended allowance of cell phone microwave radiation, thanks to the fact that so many people concentrated in one place are using their phones.
6. As if all that really bad health stuff wasn’t enough, the FCC is supposedly also mandating that over the next few years, all cell phones will be equipped with GPS location detection technology. Ostensibly, this is for “rescuers” to be able to locate “911 calls” but we all know that it’s going to be used for tracking people’s whereabouts, who they are associating with, and building customer profiles. (Combine that with a little creative RFID tracking, and BAM! It’s all over.)

Ah, it’ll be a great day. We’ll all be so senile from our phones that we’ll actually be happy when they are tracking us constantly through them so they we don’t get lost on the way to our jobs that we hate, so we can pay for ever more expensive technology that is going to kill us faster. And then turn around and bleed money out to a medical industry which gives us even more radiation and poison, and tells us it’s for our benefit. God bless America!

UPDATE!

Avi pointed me to a copy of the rat-brain-fry study which resides on the National Institute of Health website. Now all you people who think this is all just some kind of zany left-wing conspiracy can go eat your hats. Here is the abstract for the paper:

The possible risks of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields for the human body is a growing concern for our society. We have previously shown that weak pulsed microwaves give rise to a significant leakage of albumin through the blood-brain barrier. In this study we investigated whether a pathologic leakage across the blood-brain barrier might be combined with damage to the neurons. Three groups each of eight rats were exposed for 2 hr to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) mobile phone electromagnetic fields of different strengths. We found highly significant evidence for neuronal damage in the cortex, hippocampus, and basal ganglia in the brains of exposed rats.