MARTIN PLACE has plenty; George Street pulses from moderate to high; the QVB is surprisingly low, but parts of Market Street are swimming in it. It’s radiofrequency radiation, and according to consumer advocate Lyn McLean, “we are essentially living in a sea of it”.
Ms McLean, who advises federal and local government on “electropollution” and runs her own company, EMR Australia, recently took the Herald on a tour of the city centre, together with a radiofrequency detector that measures levels of radiofrequency radiation.
“Because of the proliferation of mobile phone technology, cordless phones and wireless networks, most people are continuously exposed to low-level radiofrequency radiation,” Ms McLean said.
Chronic background exposure, like that routinely experienced by city workers, was thought to be harmless as it was below the limits set by regulatory agencies, including the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency. In May, however, the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer issued a statement saying radiofrequency radiation was “possibly carcinogenic”, classifying mobile phones as a category 2B carcinogen, similar to the pesticide DDT and engine exhaust.
Ms McLean said the agency’s statement was important because it underscored what she regarded as the deficiencies of the standards governing RF exposure. “Mobile phones currently comply with the safety standards, but if mobile phones are possibly carcinogenic, what does that say about the standards? she said. ”The standards only protect against short-term, high-intensity exposure, enough, for example, to heat the body by one degree Celsius.”
The Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association regards the exposure standards as sufficient.
In the CBD, low-level RF radiation is continuously emitted from a range of sources. Even standing on the Town Hall steps, Ms McLean’s Acoustimeter RF detection device registered 1000 microwatts per square metre. This was well below the Australian agency’s uppermost limits for mobile phones and wi-fi usage, which are between 4.5 to 10 watts (10 million microwatts) per square metre. But as Ms McLean pointed out, “This device shows ambient levels - what you’re exposed to on top of your own mobile phone or wi-fi usage.”
Walking south on George Street, the level jumped to 2500 outside Woolworths then up 5000 outside the police station and Energy Australia. Heading north, through the QVB, it dropped to 25 to 50, but leapt to 25,000 at the corner of Market and Kent streets. The readings in Martin Place varied from 5000 to 10,000.
The highest levels Ms McLean sees are in people’s homes. “Cordless phones can be the worst. If you have it by your bed you’re basically being irradiated the entire night. Same goes for baby monitors.”
Mr Elliott did not consult any real scientists for this story, instead allowed himself to be guided by a complete con-artist with no qualifications whatsoever in the field where she claims expertise. Consequently, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that this story is shot through with errors and distortions which serve only to alarm the reader.
Let’s unpick them all, one by one.
First and foremost, there is no reliable, peer-reviewed evidence that exposure to non-ionising radiation in the form of radio waves is harmful to humans. None. Ever. In fact, there’s solid evidence to the contrary, as revealed by the Interphone study. There’s 6 billion mobile phones in service at present and no evidence that the prevalence of cancers (or any other malady) has increased in correlation with the explosion in numbers of mobile phones and other radio signal sources.
The WHO’s classification of radio signals as ‘2B’ or ‘possibly carcinogenic’ also includes coffee and pickled vegetables. ‘2B’ is NOT a class of known carcinogens. It is a list of substances or effects which WHO scientists think may merit further investigation to find out if they are carcinogens, though no evidence indicates they are known carcinogens at this time.
Ms. McLean’s “Acoustimeter” is not a standard piece of test equipment. The name of the device would seem to suggest that it measures sound. The measurement scale of this device is designed to produce very scary sounding numbers. 25,000 MICROWATTS PER SQUARE METRE? Terrifying, right? It’s supposed to be. Consider that one microwatt is .000001 watts, a vanishingly small figure.
Common AM radio receivers (yes, receivers, not transmitters) have a device in them called a ‘local oscillator’ which generates a very small signal which is used to demodulate the audio component from an over-the-air received radio signal for amplification and playing through a speaker. Local oscillators normally generate about 500 microwatts (normally expressed as 0.5 milliwatts). Bear in mind that there’s no evidence that exposure to non-ionising radiation, especially in the form of radio signals, poses any health hazard, so what’s the point in measuring such minuscule field strengths anyway? Yep, no point at all.
Did you know that there’s 4928.9 microlitres in a teaspoon? OH NO! RUN FOR THE HILLS!
Lyn McLean is a charlatan- a plain old con-artist. She has convinced herself that radio signals are a hazard and has gone looking for evidence to support her conclusion, precisely the reverse of how the scientific method works. Worse, McLean earns a crust by selling books describing her false conclusions, which are specifically designed to frighten people who do not have the technical knowledge to understand her falsehoods. Once they’re scared enough, McLean will happily sell RF field-strength meters (which produce meaningless readings) and ‘RF shielding paint’ to these poor, frightened people. Both articles stand a very high probability of doing nothing at all- aside from lining the pockets of the snake-oil seller. CHA-CHING!
Tim Elliott completely failed as a journalist in this story by not consulting actual experts in physics and biological effects of non-ionising radiation. Instead, he allowed a well-known con-artist to write his copy. Nice free-kick for the charlatan, though. SMH could have at least charged McLean standard advertising rates!
This is utterly shameful journalism, normally only seen on News Ltd. outlets. The Sydney Morning Herald is usually above this manner of fearmongering rubbish. How on earth did Elliott get this story past the edotirs?
Credibility is the only product of a news op- yet this is the very sort of nonsense which completely destroys the credibility of otherwise reliable news sources.
Screw you, Barry, for ever having considered doing the wrong thing. You’re the freaking Premier, Baz. Even making noises about nobbling the Solar Bonus Scheme shakes the earth under the solar and renewable energy industry.
So far, O’Farrell is demonstrating all the political nous of a hand grenade in a Swarovski shop.
Gonna be a long few years until the next election in NSW.
A comment from a random on Twitter has brought to my attention that some folks don’t quite understand the limitations imposed by sending data via radio links. This lack of understanding is aided by misinformation about NBN and fibre optics from shock-jocks and Ltd News.
While I could go into the nuts-n-bolts of why wireless can’t ever match the data capacity of optical fibre, I’m going to simplify this as much as possible for the lay audience.
First, let’s talk about radio signals. Any radio transmitter, whether it will eventually send TV, audio or data, begins with an oscillator which generates a carrier wave on the operating frequency. However, the carrier doesn’t occupy only the operating or centre frequency. It has a character known as bandwidth, as well:
An unmodulated carrier is quite narrow, only a few tens of Hertz wide. When modulation is added, the signal becomes wider. A carrier which has been amplitude modulated with low fidelity voice information, as in CB or ham radio, is about 3kHz wide, or 1.5kHz above and below the centre frequency. An AM broadcast band signal is 15kHz wide- 7.5kHz above and below the carrier frequency. An FM broadcast band signal is about 150kHz wide- that’s right, 75kHz above and below the carrier frequency.
The more information you modulate onto a carrier wave, the wider the signal will become. This is why high-fidelity FM radio sounds better than AM- a broader range of audio frequencies is modulated onto the carrier. Better quality sound, but a much wider signal. A single analogue TV signal, with video and audio, is 6MHz wide- that’s 6 times the width of the roughly 1MHz wide AM radio band (550kHz-1600kHz).
If two stations try to transmit on the same frequency, they will interfere with one another and neither signal will be intelligible at the receiving end. The same will occur if the skirts of the transmitted signals (known as sidebands) overlap. Consequently, radio signals’ carrier frequencies must be coordinated so there is enough separation between them to prevent interference.
The same thing happens when you modulate a carrier wave with digital data. A slow data rate will produce a rather narrow signal. Digital data sent via packet radio at 9600 baud will be about the same width as a voice signal- around 3-5kHz wide. The faster you go, the wider the signal.
Radio spectrum is a finite resource. You can only put so many stations on the AM or FM band before they interfere with one another. Same with digitally modulated radio signals- there’s only so much radio spectrum bandwidth available. Similarly, there is a finite limit to how many wireless data streams will fit into each MHz of radio spectrum bandwidth.
Yes, it’s possible for two wireless data users to share a single frequency- but not at the same time. Station 1 sends and receives a few packets of data, then goes silent. Station 2 is then free to use the frequency. If they both try to transmit and receive at the same time, they will interfere with one another and neither will successfully exchange packets with the greater (or wide-area) network (WAN), aka internet. This is called time-division multiplexing. The downside is that with each station sharing the frequency equally, each station can only transmit and receive, at best, 50% of the time. The stations might be capable of 300Mbps (as in 802.11n WiFi), but their effective maximum rate will be 150Mbps. Start adding more stations on the same frequency and you quickly see what happens- data rates drop like a rock as all stations try to share the frequency (or ‘channel’). Wide-area wireless (3G) users are already well and truly familiar with this problem.
It is possible for users to share the same frequency if there’s a large physical separation between the systems and the range of the systems is limited. Low power wireless systems can be set up on microwave frequencies, which have a very short range, so that a user on one city block won’t interfere with a user on the next block, who happens to be using the same frequency.
Don’t be confused by generation identifiers such as 2G, 3G, 4G, etc. It’s all data via radio link. The modulation method or frequency used doesn’t get around the issue of co-channel interference. The co-channel interference problem is a function of physics and has nothing to do with and will not be resolved by upcoming wireless data communication standards, such as 4G. If you need to provide fast network access to a large number of users in a small physical area, over-the-air radio spectrum bandwidth is a bottleneck which must be eliminated. The solution is modulated lasers, with their light ducted through optical fibre.
In optical systems, a laser is modulated with data and the data is decoded on the receiving end. However, laser light passing through free air is readily blocked or diffused by airborne moisture- rain, fog, etc. While it’s possible to send data on a laser light beam through air, it’s not very reliable. The solution is to contain the laser light within a glass optical fibre.
The greatest thing about a glass optical fibre is that you can jam more than one laser light signal through it. Lasers can produce light of different wavelengths, or colours. These can either be generated in a single multi-coloured laser, or the light from several lasers of different colours can be combined with a prism and fed into a single fibre. The different coloured, modulated laser light streams are then separated on the far end of the optic fibre and fed into decoders so the data can be extracted and sent on to its intended destinations. This means is known as wavelength-division multiplexing. It permits multiple parallel data streams to co-exist on the same fibre, as well as provides future expansion capability. The number of different coloured lasers is limited only by the precision of the prisms.
By now, you’re beginning to see why wireless, aka data over radio links, is not a suitable solution for many thousands of network users in a small geographic area. A wide-area optical fibre network, as is being built for Australia’s NBN, is not only the best solution, but the only solution for providing connectivity as is needed now- and into the future, as it is highly scaleable.
This is not terribly complex stuff. Anyone with enough on the ball to use the internet can understand these concepts. If anyone is trying to convince you that some new wireless communications standard will magically solve the problem of co-channel interference or dramatic slowing due to time-division multiplexing, they either don’t know what they’re talking about or are trying to confuse you for the purpose of driving their political goals (I’m looking at you, Alan Jones and News Ltd).
Victoria’s Premier Ted Baillieu has apparently solved all the other problems in the state, as he now has time and money to waste on criminalising speech.
The Victorian Government plans to introduce laws this week that will give police permanent power to issue on-the-spot fines to people who swear.
Under the proposed legislation, people could be fined close to $240 for language that is considered indecent or offensive.
Attorney-General Robert Clark says the changes mean police will not have to use the courts to deal with people who use bad language.
“We’re going to be confirming the power of police to issue on-the-spot infringement notices for these sorts of offences, which will free up police resources,” he said.
“It will also enable them to more effectively act against the sort of loud-mouthed, obnoxious behaviour that can make going out to public places unpleasant for other members of the public.”
Lovely! Government by fiat- no trials needed to determine nor appeal ‘indecency’ or ‘offensiveness’ of the speech. The arbiter will be the Victoria Police. Perhaps the police operating manual will be upgraded to include what words are indecent and/or offensive. We can have no moral relativism- speech will be indecent/offensive or it won’t.
However, classification at kerbside may be a bit problematic for the officers. For example, exhorting Ted Baillieu to ‘ram a jam jar up his poop chute’ may indeed be indecent, offensive or both, while not using any the more or less standard list of indecent/offensive terms such as shit, piss, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. Fart, turd and twat have certainly been decriminalised in recent times as one can normally hear all three on commercial television in Australia. Consequently, asserting that ‘Ted Baillieu is a turd farting twat,’ could not be prima facie deemed to be either indecent or offensive.
There appears to be no mention of whether it will be indecency or offensiveness expressed in English which will be criminalised or whether one will have sufficiently violated the law by uttering epithets in, for example, Hebrew, eg. ‘טד Baillieu מבאס הפין של סוס בגלל שהוא אוהב את הטעם.‘ As such, there may be some discrimination issues afoot, as well as the expense of hiring on-demand translators for all of the 300 languages spoken in Melbourne.
This video was uploaded to YouTube by liberalnsw on Jul 13, 2009. Reposted for truth, since O’Farrell now is deleting anything he can to hide his former support for the Solar Bonus Scheme.
O’Farrell: “Gross feed-in tariffs make environmental sense. They make economic sense. They help the environment and they help create jobs. The gross feed-in tariff system provides a real incentive for people to install solar electricity systems. The gross feed-in tariff system can help businesses like this to expand the number of jobs available at this time.”
All quite true- except when O’Farrell, once in power, wants to use inflated scheme cost figures to make the former Labor government look even worse (than they made themselves look) and attempt to justify retrospectively slashing the feed-in tariff from 60c/kWh to 40c, screwing mum & dad solar scheme investors and devastating the solar power industry, not just in NSW but in other states and territories as well.
That didn’t take long. After just two months as Premier, Barry O’Farrell has shown that he is entirely capable of the shameless political trickery he denounced so piously in opposition.
We’re talking the Solar Bonus Scheme and the decision to cut the household tariff rebate from 60¢ to 40¢ per kilowatt. In one stroke, O’Farrell has dudded about 100,000 punters who stuck solar panels on their roofs in the belief they had a solid contract with government, any government.
It is a grubby stunt worthy of his Labor predecessors, and if he is taking political pain for it, then good. He deserves to. Panicky fiddling at the edges with hardship compensation is lipstick on the pig.
Hypocrisy is never a good look, Baz. Being a welcher is even uglier.
While the term ‘radiation’ is commonly associated with gamma ray emissions from radionuclear materials such as uranium, plutonium, caesium, etc., what ‘radiation’ really means is ‘the emission of something from a single point.’ When you throw a stone in a pond, there is a ‘radiation’ of ripples in the water. When you light a candle, there is a ‘radiation’ of heat and light from the flame. No sane person to date has implicated pond ripples and candle flames as causations of cancers.
There’s clearly more than one kind of radiation. The dangerous sort is ionising radiation.
image source: US Environmental Protection Agency
When an emission has the ability to knock electrons off of atoms, it has the ability to damage DNA in living cells. Damaged DNA can cause the cell to improperly replicate, sometimes expressing as cancers. Ionising radiation can come from a number of different sources beside radionuclear materials. Ultraviolet (UV) light, x-rays and cosmic rays from objects in space are all sources of ionising radiation.
However, non-ionising radiation does not have the ability to knock electrons off of atoms and thus damage DNA. As you see in the above illustration, non-ionising radiation includes all types of electromagnetic radiation, from magnetic fields around a wire carrying DC (direct current, as from a battery) through to violet-coloured light. Way, way down on the scale are radio waves, which include signals from mobile phones and baby monitors (which are quite close to the FM broadcast band, commonly around 72MHz).
Consequently, anyone trying to tell you that you need a special headset to keep your mobile phone away from your head or some sort of ‘radiation shield’ for your phone isn’t trying to keep you from getting brain cancer. They’re trying to sell you headsets and useless stickers.
Some mobile phone makers include with their products instructions to keep your phone a few millimetres away from your ear when using them. Why this is done is a total mystery to me. Their products do not emit ionising radiation. Keeping the phone a few mm away from one’s ear will not do anything significant to reduce the strength of the radio frequency (RF) field in the vicinity of one’s head. SAR ratings also are equally unnecessary.
Some users of mobile phones remark that the side of their head feels warm after extended periods of phone use and attribute this to the RF energy being emitted from the device. It’s simpler than that. When you discharge a battery, it will warm up due to current passing through the battery’s internal resistance. Also, the components in most electronic circuits, notably amplifiers, also warm up as currents are passed through them. If you held a warm brick to the side of your head, you’d get the very same result- and this can hardly (rationally) be thought to be carcinogenic.
As of 2008, there were 4.1 billion mobile phones in service on this planet. Strong low-frequency electromagnetic fields have been around as long as there has been an AC mains electrical grid (1920s). RF signals have been around since Marconi sent long-distance and trans-Atlantic radio signals from 1899-1901. Multi-hundred-thousand watt radio signals have been around since the 1930s, megawatt-level TV signals since the 1950s. Cellular telephony has been around since the late 1970s. Handheld mobile phones have been ubiquitous since the mid-1990s. Everyone born since about 1935 has lived their entire life bathed in LF and RF fields.
If electromagnetic fields and radio signals cause cancer, where are there billions of brain cancers? They don’t exist. The 10-year Interphone study looked at millions of mobile phone users and found no correlation with mobile phone use and brain cancer.
If you anyone tells you that mobile phones, their associated base stations and towers, baby monitors, microwave ovens or other radio signal emitting devices cause cancer, they’re a) ignorant of the science involved, b) trying to inflate their self-importance by being too helpful by half or c) trying to turn a buck off your own lack of information. Fear of the unknown is curable with just a little education.
Relax and phone up a friend for a good, long chat. It’s safe!
Do you do business with or have contracts with the State of NSW? Do you own bonds in the NSW Government? Would you have done so if you knew the NSW Government would unilaterally rip up your contract or change the terms of your agreement without your consent? Barry O’Farrell has done just that with the Solar Bonus Scheme.
The NSW Solar Bonus Scheme worked like this: You invest a few thousand dollars out of pocket in a solar power generation system which is connected to the NSW AC mains power grid through an inverter, which converts the panels’ DC output into 240V AC power. The AC power your system feeds into the grid is bought by the State of NSW at the contractually agreed feed-in tariff rate of 60c per kilowatt-hour (kWh). If your system generates more power than you use in your home, your power bill is zero and the NSW Government sends you a cheque for the difference. If you use more kilowatt-hours than your solar panels feed into the grid, the value of the amount you generate is taken off of your electricity bill.
I’m a pensioner, which means I have next-to-no disposable income and certainly no savings. My savings account has a $0 balance twice each month, on the same day my pension payment is received, as it all goes out on bills and living expenses. You might say my budget is extremely tight- it’s calculated to the penny every month.
When former NSW Premier Kristina Keneally announced on 27 October 2010 that she was cutting the feed-in tariff on the Solar Bonus Scheme from 60c to 20c/kWh as of midnight on that date, I had to make a snap decision as to whether or not to participate. I searched around a bit and found that Origin Energy was offering a 1.5kW solar package for $2990 on a 2-year, interest-free basis with a $299 down payment and repayments of $112 per month. The 1.5kW system was described as producing an annualised average of 6kWh per day. At a feed-in tariff of 60c/kWh (and barring an excessive amount of cloudy weather), the system would produce about $108 worth of feed-in tariff (FiT) income per month, coming within $4/month of paying for itself. The cost of the feed-in tariff meter and installation would be $300, over and above the cost of the installed solar panels and inverter.
Given that I believed the NSW Government had a contractual obligation to maintain the 60c/kWh FiT rate for those who signed up for installation before midnight on 27 October 2010, for the life of the scheme (until July 1 2016), I decided, in good faith, to bite the bullet and borrow money for the $299 down payment and $300 FiT meter and installation cost. The system’s estimated $108/month output would come very close to covering the 24 months worth of $112/month repayments to Origin. My $599 capital outlay would be covered by about 8-9 months of FiT income. Any FiT income thereafter would go towards offsetting my electricity costs, until the end of the scheme in 2016.
However, despite his explicit pre-election promise to honour all existing Solar Bonus Scheme contracts if elected, new Liberal NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell has now decided unilaterally to breach existing Solar Bonus Scheme contracts. O’Farrell plans to retrospectively cut the FiT rate to 40c/kWh, which means that my solar generation system can produce no more than $72/month worth of FiT income. Instead of being $4/month in the red ($108/mo FiT income, less $112/mo repayments to Origin), I’ll be $40/month in the red.
When your total monthly income as a pensioner is less than $1460- and it’s ALL committed, every single month- $40 less per month means something! What it means is $10/week less for groceries- and I only spend about $40/week on groceries now. BAM, 25% cut in my food budget! Would Mr O’Farrell have me supplant my now dented grocery budget from the local food bank? Perhaps sit with a tin cup and beg for coins in front of Roza Sage’s office? Dr Sage has already replied to a letter I emailed to her last evening, with her clear sentiment that she doesn’t give a damn about my problems and the present NSW Government is going to retrospectively screw anybody on the Solar Bonus Scheme, no matter how much they have invested and no matter their financial situation.
If bonds rating agencies are not considering revising the rating applied to NSW Government bond issues, they should be. Anyone who is party to a contract with the NSW Government should hedge their bets because the NSW Government is simply not trustworthy.
* Wireless gadgets emit radiation - study
* Differs to WHO’s advice of little to no risk
* Jury still out on cancer, mobile phone link
EXPERTS have called for internet-connected mobile phones and wireless laptop computers to be banned in schools.
A major new study has found cancer-causing electromagnetic radiation generated by wireless gadgets - including baby monitors and cordless phones - may be harmful for children’s developing brain, reports the Herald Sun.
The influential Council of Europe examined evidence that wireless technologies had “potentially harmful” effects on humans and found that immediate action was required to protect children.
The respected body’s findings contrast sharply with advice from the World Health Organisation that exposure to electromagnetic fields posed little or no risk to human health.
Glen Iris mother of three Donna Latter Jones said the news was a concern given our wireless world.
Home-based Ms Latter Jones sells devices such as children’s aeroplane safety harnesses through kids travel essentials website www.littlesomethingoranother.com.au. [spammy link redacted -Ed.]
She said a combination of cordless phone, iPhone, desktop computer and laptop running all day meant her young children - Hayden, 4, Carly, 3 and Matthew, 2 - had grown up running freely through a field of potentially harmful magnetic radiation.
“Both my husband and I have definitely had concerns for a while over mobile phones and radiation, and try not to keep them close to our body,” she said.
She said the risks of internet-connected devices such as laptops to children was a cause for concern.
“I wouldn’t go as far as to support them being banned from classrooms, but if it turns out there are significant problems, then it should definitely be looked at,” she said.
“Parents should be able to make up their own minds based on what is important to their own families, but we are bombarded with so much information these days, it’s hard to know what to believe.”
After decades of often inconclusive research, the jury is still out on a link between mobile phones and cancer.
Sydney University professor Bruce Armstrong was among an international panel of researchers who participated in a decade-long investigation into the health effects of mobile phones.
Carried out by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, on behalf of the World Health Organisation, the Interphone Project found no clear evidence of mobile phones causing ill-health.
Experts did, however, establish a possible link with brain tumours.
The Hun’s story is based on this Council of Europe document, which, first and foremost, is not a study. It’s a draft report which collects of a bunch of rumours and ‘public concerns,’ but it is most definitely not a scientific study. It contains no hypothesis, no data, no analysis, no discussion, no conclusions… and most importantly, no evidence- not of ‘cancers caused by electromagnetic radiation’ (as claimed by The Hun) nor of anything else, for that matter. It’s a fact-free ‘preaching the controversy’ bit, designed to freak out non-critical thinkers.
Someone out there is benefiting from News Ltd publishing rubbish like this, but I can’t imagine who that may be. Could News Ltd be fishing for some cash to stop running scare stories about mobile phones? Lawsy sure lightened up on certain businesses after they ponied up some coin. Blackmail works- until you getbusted.
Brigadier Jim Wallace, Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby is apparently a good Christian. You’d think he’d have to be a good one to head the organisation which purports to represent the interests of Christians to the Australian Federal Government.
Good Christians don’t like gays or Muslims, so the Brigadier felt obligated, on Anzac Day, to tweet:
“Just hope that as we remember servicemen and women today we remember the Australia they fought for - wasn’t gay marriage and Islamic!”
Wallace was nearly immediately called to account by numerous news ops. Shameless Jim apologised for making such statements on Anzac Day, a celebration of the service of Australian war veterans where politicisation is considered to be in gravely poor taste, but in no way apologised for his offensive remarks.
After about 10,000 Twitterers let the Brigadier have it with both barrels over his homo- and islamophobia, he deleted the tweet, which is preserved here for posterity. Of course, the internet never forgets. It certainly didn’t forget when Wallace insinuated that being gay causes priests to rape children.
On the day after Anzac Day, Wallace appeared on Sunrise on 7 to clarify how he had been ‘misinterpreted’ by ‘a few Twitter activists’:
Wallace isn’t just into distorting and prevaricating, he also digs an outright lie. In the Sunrise bit, Jimbo begs off with the excuse, “If you just accept that I’ve been on Twitter seriously for one week.”
If you haven’t been following the story of the people’s revolt against GOP/teabagger government in Wisconsin, you’re missing one of the most riveting tales of democracy on the hoof since the American Revolution.
Despite mainstream media (with the exception of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow), either ignoring this story or providing unwarranted favourable coverage to teabaggers and the GOP, as well as active interference on Twitter by Koch Brothers funded professional astroturfing trolls, ‘Sconnie democracy activists are taking back their government.
The story so far:
* A complacent electorate and unlimited corporate political funding (due to the Citizens United case, where corporations were deemed by the US Supreme Court to have the same 1st Amendment speech rights as actual people) from the oil billionaire Koch brothers allowed extreme-right GOP candidates to take over the Wisconsin state Senate and governorship.
* Newly elected Governor Scott Walker decided the time was right to enact corporation-driven legislation that stripped collective bargaining rights from unionised public employees and did so with dubious if not outright illegal parliamentary procedures. Walker pretended that union-busting was necessary to ‘repair’ the debt-ridden Wisconsin state budget. 14 Democratic senators fled the state to deny Walker a quorum and thus halted the passage of the ‘budget repair’ legislation. GOP senators attempted to intimidate the 14 by (illegally) calling for their arrest to bring them to the Senate chambers to force a vote on Walker’s union-busting bill.
* Walker eventually modified the ‘budget repair’ bill to remove all fiscal components, leaving in the stripping of collective bargaining rights from unionised state employees- an admission that union-busting has no effect on the state budget. The legislation could purportedly then be passed by GOP senators in absence of a quorum. However, the Walker administration failed to provide appropriate notice to all legislators under Wisconsin’s Open Meetings law, which may render the legislation void. A lawsuit filed on the basis that the union-busting legislation violates Wisconsin’s Open Meetings law has resulted in Dane County Judge Marianne Sumi issuing a temporary restraining order preventing the union-busting legislation from taking effect. Walker has since been forced to admit under oath during testimony before the US Congress that the union-busting had no effect whatsoever on Wisconsin’s state budget.
* Judges are elected in Wisconsin. A ‘non-partisan’ April 5 election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court between incumbent Walker sympathiser David Prosser and challenger Joanne Kloppenburg turned into a referendum on the Wisconsin GOP’s union busting and has become quite the cause celebre for Wisconsin Democrats and unionists. In the primary election leading up to the actual election, Kloppenburg got 25% and Prosser got 55%. On the morning of April 6, the Wisconsin election board announced Kloppenburg as the victor with a razor-thin margin of about 200 votes. 2 days later, Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus, who has a decade-long history of dubious practises in managing elections in her county and a prior employment relationship with Prosser, announced that she had ‘found’ some 14,000 untabulated votes, resulting in a roughly 7300 vote lead for Prosser. Nickolaus explained she had ‘failed to hit save’ in Microsoft Access (which automatically saves data without user intervention) when recording the votes for one burg in her county. This resulted in a 0.488% margin of victory for Prosser. Wisconsin law provides for recounts when the margin is under 1%. When the margin is under 0.5%, the state will pay for the recount. Kloppenburg has now exercised her right to ask for a recount, the details of which are under negotiation as we speak, but in many wards, votes will be recounted by hand to eliminate any errors introduced by electronic tabulation methods.
* Wisconsin law provides for citizen initiated recalls of elected officials. Once a legislator has been in office for one year, petitions may be filed for a recall election. Volunteer Democrats and unionists have so far succeeded in obtaining signatures and filing petitions for recall of 5 of 8 eligible GOP senators, in each case obtaining 130-160% of the number of signatures needed for the state to conduct a recall election. In retaliation, paid GOP activists attempted to obtain signatures to recall some of the 14 Democratic senators who left the state to deny Walker a quorum. Absent genuine public support for recalling the ‘Fab 14,’ GOP activists have resorted to some truly nefarious tactics to obtain signatures to recall Democratic senators, including buying shots of liquor in exchange for signatures and misleading people about what they were signing. Petition signatures may be challenged- and that’s exactly what the Democrats are doing right now. A call was put out on Twitter via the #wiunion hashtag for volunteers to come to Democratic HQ with their laptop computers for the purpose of validating the signatures on petitions to recall Democratic senators. So many people turned up that Dem HQ ran out of workspace and had to turn people away. Ian’s Pizza is again taking orders for pizzas to be donated to the ‘#datadefenders’ at Dem HQ.
The Democrats need to gain 3 seats in the Wisconsin Senate to take back majority control- and at this point, it’s a sure thing that recall elections against at least 5 GOP senators will be held. A large majority of the signatures required have been obtained for the recall of a 6th GOP senator- and Walker himself becomes eligible for recall in January 2012.
If you’re on Twitter and want to follow the action, watch the #wiunion hashtag.
I’ll be utterly dumbfounded if someone doesn’t step up and make a documentary film about the Pepperoni Revolution. Definite Oscar potential. You listening, Mike Moore?
image source: US Environmental Protection Agency
thousand dollars out of pocket in a solar power generation system which is connected to the NSW AC mains power grid through an inverter, which converts the panels’ DC output into 240V AC power. The AC power your system feeds into the grid is bought by the State of NSW at the contractually agreed feed-in tariff rate of 60c per kilowatt-hour (kWh). If your system generates more power than you use in your home, your power bill is zero and the NSW Government sends you a cheque for the difference. If you use more kilowatt-hours than your solar panels feed into the grid, the value of the amount you generate is taken off of your electricity bill.
tariff on the Solar Bonus Scheme from 60c to 20c/kWh as of midnight on that date, I had to make a snap decision as to whether or not to participate. I searched around a bit and found that Origin Energy was offering a 1.5kW solar package for $2990 on a 2-year, interest-free basis with a $299 down payment and repayments of $112 per month. The 1.5kW system was described as producing an annualised average of 6kWh per day. At a feed-in tariff of 60c/kWh (and barring an excessive amount of cloudy weather), the system would produce about $108 worth of feed-in tariff (FiT) income per month, coming within $4/month of paying for itself. The cost of the feed-in tariff meter and installation would be $300, over and above the cost of the installed solar panels and inverter.
If you haven’t been following the story of the people’s revolt against GOP/teabagger government in Wisconsin, you’re missing one of the most riveting tales of democracy on the hoof since the American Revolution.
