“It’s not the law, it’s the custom,” Brandow says. “It was about public education and changing our perception of what our individual duties were.”
Webster’s dictionary defines a paradigm shift as: “an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way.”
One recent example of a paradigm change transpired in the 1970s when dog owners were suddenly expected to pick up after their pets. Previously, little attention had been paid to dog doo. In her very entertaining article, “The Messy History of Poop Scooping,” Linda Lombardi outlined some of the steps and missteps of the pick-up-the-dog-doo paradigm shift that took place in New York.
No one enjoyed stepping in a steaming pile on the sidewalk, but that was the only point of agreement. Humane organizations like the ASPCA were against the law, believing it would make people get rid of their dogs. And pet owners feared it would be the first step on a slippery slope to banning dogs in the city.
“People were terrified that the city was going to come into their homes and take their best friends away,” Brandow says — and with some reason, given the public discussion at the time. One book, titled The Dog Crisis, argued that dogs didn’t belong in cities; one councilman introduced a law to ban dogs from multiple-unit buildings, which is where most New Yorkers live. And one well-known activist tried to convince people that dogs were a serious health hazard despite little scientific support. The result was that being pro-dog meant being anti-picking-up.
Other approaches were proposed, some of which now seem absurd. Some argued that dogs should never go on public property, but only on paper in their owners’ bathrooms. Another idea, impractical for a cash-strapped city, was to hire special workers to clean up, at an estimated expense of a million dollars.
The most complicated scheme would have the city provide trainers to teach dogs to go only over sewer drains, which the Department of Sanitation would flush out twice a day. Owners of dogs who couldn’t be persuaded to stand on the open gratings would be provided with paper that they could spread out nearby; then they could toss the droppings in the drain. But, again, budget constraints intervened and a pilot program was canceled.
Seven years after the original proposal in 1970, the law seemed to be at a dead end. “City politicians shied away from it because elected leaders were threatened by dog-owning groups that if they supported this, they shouldn’t bother seeking re-election,” Brandow says. “It got that ugly.”
“Credit for breaking the impasse is usually given to Ed Koch, who as mayor-elect in 1977 decided to take the law to the state government level. But credit is also due to the assemblyman who, during hearings, demonstrated a pooper-scooper device consisting of a bag on a stick that snapped shut. Brandow says that the show caused “a lot of laughter,” but it also convinced legislators that the elderly wouldn’t have to bend down, and no one would have to use their hands.
Just passing the law, of course, was only the first step, because police could never write enough tickets to persuade everyone to scoop. “It’s not the law, it’s the custom,” Brandow says. “It was about public education and changing our perception of what our individual duties were.”
SOURCE: Vet Street
In this age of rapid innovation and transformation towards 5G fifth-generation telecommunications, utility, and energy infrastructure, increased connectivity and convenience is being promoted as the cure to nearly all of society’s challenges.
Linda Lombardi wrote:
But dog poop marches with the times like anything else, and both enforcement and encouragement have gone high-tech. It’s now possible to identify an individual dog’s droppings by DNA, and a company called PooPrints offers its services to property management companies so they can determine who’s neglecting to clean up after their dog in common areas.
This might sound like a reasonable forensic approach for a frustrating issue.
But here is the problem.
There are unacknowledged concerns about health, the environment, surveillance, privacy, cost, the consumption of resources, and abuse of power. [1]
In the present age of intoxication with 5G and big data, the current thinking would be to pummel the airwaves by monitoring every time every dog goes for a walk and monitoring the DNA of all of their dogs and their owners and mapping out poop locations using wireless sensors, everywhere, around the clock, long after people were already picking up after their dogs.
Maybe the sensors could even be incorporated into dog food! And when the dog poops, we could track it!
We could be transmitting and collecting and analyzing and storing all of the data in air-conditioned data centers to support policy and decision-making!
This plan for “collecting it all” for data underlies the current thinking as well as funding and policy for smart meters and smart grids, which may be one of the most wasteful and polluting initiatives ever perpetrated on the planet, under the banner of sustainability. [2]
In truth, your utility company and your government does not need a record of every toilet flush or cooked meal prepared in your home in the name of energy efficiency or water conservation, any more so than we need a historical log of your dog’s excrement.
The focus of smart meters is on monitoring the behavior of the customers, and not on the question of electricity-as-an essential-service itself. When dog poo became a concern, some of the proposed solutions were outlandish, crazy and impractical.
So is the current thinking regarding the electrical grid.
We are at the point where we need to question the need to remotely control our lives at a distance from the convenience of our cellphones, now.
Because if we don’t, a 5G tower is coming to your neighborhood to accommodate the constant chatter of our always-on networks, for example, for the smart meter that may transmit 10,000 to 190,000 times per day.[3]
There are many other ways of moving towards a more ecological lifestyle, but they may not be able to double as a surveillance network, or to be monetized.
Use a Timer That is NOT Wireless
Many energy-wasting and electrosmog-polluting behaviors could be replaced by the use of a programmed timer in the home, for example, to manage heat or air conditioning. A timer device does not need to study your behavior to learn how to manager your environment. There may be a few times per year when you work late unexpectedly, but the energy wasted in that scenario will be far less than the energy wasted creating an invisible overlay of antennas and sensors for a remote controlled system blanketing the planet. And, the timer will be more secure than any wireless system. For example, McAfee just demonstrated that Mr. Coffee can be hacked.
McAfee researchers have uncovered two new vulnerabilities within connected devices that allow hackers access to the personal lives of consumers. A vulnerability within BoxLock smart padlock enables hackers to unlock the device within a few seconds, and a vulnerability within the Mr. Coffee brand coffee maker with Wemo grants hackers access to home networks.
SOURCE: The Daily Nonpareil
Continuing to roll out a wireless grid is the equivalent of writing a blank check for security, which will never be achieved for wireless. Hard-wiring is far more secure.
Plan Ahead and Pay Attention
Continuing to expect that we do not need to plan ahead, and that we need the convenience of an always-on remote control system for our appliances and devices is a cultivated greed.
The smart grid scenario assumes that individuals are routinely consuming more electricity than they need at times when they don’t really need it, and that the utility needs access to personal usage data in order to customize targeted education about energy savings.[4] The Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative, which includes no consumers, will manufacture evidence for the need for on-going customer education in order to cultivate certain behaviors through its white papers and surveys by implying that in 10 years when your frig starts to fail, they need to let you know and also sell this information to appliance companies, because you are too inept to manage this without assistance.
This line of reasoning assumes that customer education is an on-going carrot-and stick dynamic involving an uncooperative public and an omniscient utility industry that must constantly provide data to support decision-making, regardless of the cost.
The data itself is the product.
Customers should have the right to decide how they want to access guidance to adopt a more ecological lifestyle, without it being a condition for access to electricity.
Don’t Fall for Propaganda
Is it possible that public sentiment away from fossil fuels and towards increased conservation is running far ahead of utilities?
Utilities and regulators initially justified smart meters in order to increase the integration of renewables into the grid, and then decimated solar net metering and added punitive fees including demand surcharges in many states.
Should we fall for this again, now that smart meters are being linked to the adoption of electric vehicles? Does managing electric vehicle use mandate that every single customer must have all of their usage monitored 24/7/365?
Accompanying the drive for data by government and industry is the cultivation of an attitude of entitlement by consumers for faster, more powerful, more ubiquitous connectivity, regardless of the emergence of evidence of harm to human health and the environment.
By increasingly expecting that our wants and wishes are indulged via energy expenditure of the universe bringing its resources to us, we are moving away from, and not towards saving planet earth, while ignoring the not-so-hidden agendas of monetization of the data, and surveillance.
It was a remarkable achievement for economic interests to monetize the core values of the emerging masses who seek to move away from polluting fossil fuels and to lower their carbon footprint, by shifting fossil fuel consumption to a massive burgeoning wireless footprint [5] that starts and ends with human rights abuses in poorer nations, from mining of conflict minerals to e-waste.
The promotion of smart grids in the New Green Clean Deal is not a paradigm shift, it is a fiasco.
As younger and younger customers adopted cellphones, thereby consuming resources every waking minute and well as while sleeping, we are now embracing the idea that our devices themselves need to be part of a 24/7/365 consumption plan.
We Need Another Paradigm Shift Away From Tech As the Answer to Everything
The picking-up-the-dog-doo paradigm shift was an incomplete paradigm shift, as dog owners who pick up their doo wring their hands over the un-ecological solution of using plastic bags for a biodegradable substance ending up in landfills. Biodegradable bags are one strategy.
Linda Lombardi writes about a local, truly ecological solution:
…perhaps the most forward-thinking approach is happening at a dog park in Arizona with a specially designed device that converts dog waste to electricity to power a light. Created by graduate students at Arizona State University, the technology is playfully named Energy Transformation Using Reactive Digestion, or E-TURD. There’s still work to be done to educate dog owners to use it, and it may sound crazy now, but remember: At first, so did the poop-scoop law.
SOURCE: Vet Street
There are many challenges facing humanity at this juncture; including being subjected to manipulation of core values. The times require undivided attention, compassion, inclusion, and new vision.
We have an abundance of evidence that our circadian rhythm is tied to our health. [6]
We need to restore balance between our lifestyle choices and the laws of nature, which govern our sleep and rest, digestion, and elimination. Smart meters and enabled time of use billing will pressure consumers towards unhealthy choices, such as eating a cold sandwich for dinner in the middle of winter. Transmissions of data are causing harm to health and the environment.
Conservation, energy efficiency, insulation, energy storage and other initiatives have the potential to eliminate the need for smart meters and punitive time of use billing, but unlike smart meters, they must be tested and monitored for health and environmental impacts.
Customers cannot be pressured financially or otherwise to adopt unhealthy behaviors, and reports of harm due to wireless exposures deserve as much scrutiny as complaints from fossil fuel pollution.
Customer education can achieve tremendous success if it is directed toward ethical choices. Smart meters are not ethical choices.
Dog owners have a duty to deal with their dog doo.
Awake and conscious individuals have a duty to deal with the doo-doo that is circulating about 5G, smart meters, and smart grids.
CELLPHONES: Nugget of Knowledge: How cell phones work
Thousands of cellular towers make a network to connect your call
NOTES:
[1] Total Data Domination: 5G, IoT, AI Surveillance And The Smart City
As to today, 5G is about to deliver the ultimate tool for total control over Americans, and it has nothing to do with your cell phones getting a speed upgrade.
https://eagleforum.org/publications/efr/feb19/smart-cities-enslaved-citizens.html
[2] http://www.electronicsilentspring.com/primers/energy/
[3] http://www.freedom2sayno2smartmeters.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Flyer-Long-Version-08-11-18.pdfQ. Pacific Power stated that Smart Meters only make only four transmissions a day, and that they broadcast less RF in a year than a cell phone does in 15 minutes.9 Did they lie? A. Yes. Pacific Power has made a number of false statements about Smart Meters, and in this case, they flatly contradict information on Smart Meter RF output provided by both the OPUC1 and by Silver Spring Networks, 10 who makes the Smart Meters Pacific Power installs. With respect to the number of transmissions per day, Pacific Power makes the same claim that Pacific Gas & Electric made, before a court order forced them to disclose the truth11 that Smart Meters do not transmit signals only a few times a day as PG&E claimed, but because of how a Smart Meter mesh network operates, transmit on average 10,000 times a day. And “downstream” Smart Meters that serve as final transmission points can send out over 190,000 transmissions a day, 20x that average. And, since the RF power unit of a Smart Meter has twice the wattage of a cell phone12 when it does transmit, it sends out a far more powerful signal than a cell phone does.
[5] http://www.electronicsilentspring.com/primers/energy/
Patricia Burke works with activists across the country and internationally calling for new biologically-based microwave radio frequency exposure limits. She is based in Massachusetts and can be reached at [email protected].
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