Year: 2020

For years, I’ve been appalled to see so many people with their cell phones pressed against their ears, or in their pants pockets, risking several kinds of cancer, from all that “microwave radiation at point blank range,” as Arthur Firstenberg puts it in The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life. The carcinogenicity of that practice has been proven; but such proof is hard to find, and overwhelmed by many sloppy studies that purport to show there’s no cause for concern. The awful truth is further clouded by the fact that all the data on cell phone usage is controlled by the cell phone giants, who, naturally, will not let any independent scientists study it; and since “our free press” makes millions off that industry, in advertising revenues, it’s (naturally) not interested in going there, except to highlight those exculpatory “studies.”

As frustrating as it’s been to see so many people blithely yakking into cellphones clamped against their heads, that sense of watching helplessly as people put themselves at mortal risk is not as troubling as the sight of healthy people—even little children—wearing masks in public (some of them with cell phones clamped against their heads). This craze is even worse, not just because so many wearing masks are kids as young as 2, but, worse yet, because, unlike cell phone use, masking has been urged upon us as an urgent measure to protect the public health, to keep us “safe” from the coronavirus, or whatever, when it really has the very opposite effect. 

I’m therefore sending out just this one section of my epic essay, “Masking Ourselves to Death,” which also includes sections summarizing the scientific evidence that masks are (a) ineffective against flu-like respiratory viruses, and (b) bad for us. Those of you who’ve had the time to read that opus will have read this, and those other sections; but I know that many of us just don’t have the time to read so long a piece, so I am sending this one section by itself, because this masking has to stop, and this overview of real-world instances of death and injury by masking is evidence more vivid than those scientific studies, and therefore make a more convincing case. 

I should add that, while I know one person who apparently died of COVID-19, and have another friend who nearly died of it, I also recently lost yet another friend who I believe would be alive today if he did not vigorously exert himself, out in the summer heat, always with a mask on. (I have no evidence to prove this, but I wonder if some other well-known activists who have now prematurely died weren’t sickened, or weakened, by gratuitous masking.)

It’s also worth asking whether the driver who sped the wrong way onto the Southern State Parkway on Long Island just the other day, and drove at speed for a full two minutes before colliding with an SUV, killing himself and three others, was masked, and had either passed out or gone foggy at the wheel. There was a similar mishap in New Jersey a few months ago, when a masked driver lost consciousness and crashed into a tree—the only such story that’s made national news (as I note in this section of my essay). How many other drivers have done likewise? It’s not the kind of data anyone’s collecting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/nyregion/long-island-wrong-way-crash.html