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Substantial Evidence That Demands a Veto of SB.649

1. This is What We Are Working Hard to Prevent . . . Brain Tumors and More

No one will ever forget that John McCain, just a few days after undergoing surgery to remove as much of his brain tumor as possible (a deadly Glioblastoma), on Fri 7/21/17, shortly before 2 a.m., McCain voted against against a “skinny” plan to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act.

Several days later, McCain delivered an impassioned speech to encourage bi-Partisan health legislation, going forward. You can read his full remarks from 7/25/17, below.

McCain’s prognosis for his Glioblastoma is not good. McCain told 60 Minutes: “They said that it’s very serious. That the prognosis is very, very serious. Some say three percent, some say 14 percent. You know, it’s a very poor prognosis.”

California needs to listen to and learn from John McCain. You might be surprised that John McCain was the only Republican Senator (and only one of five Senators) who voted against the Federal 1996 Telecommunications Act.

Glioblastoma Facts

• The median survival rate (a measure of how long patients on the treatment tend to survive) is 14.6 months
• The percentage of people alive five years after receiving the diagnosis, is just 10%
• Glioblastoma also killed Senator Ted Kennedy, Vice President Joe Biden’s son, 46-year old Beau Biden, and the CA Senate’s own beloved Ira Ruskin, who lasted only three years after his diagnosis

Continue reading “Gov. Brown: Be Smart. Veto SB.649.”

October 12, 2017

The Honorable Governor Jerry Brown
State Capitol, Suite 1173
Sacramento, California 95814
tel 916-445-2841
fax 916-558-3160

Dear Governor Brown:

Veto SB.649 — Fire Hazard

As firestorms rage across California, I implore you to veto a bill that is currently on your desk: SB.649. This bill carries the promise of a hidden and unprecedented fire hazard. In this moment, it is preventable.

This bill has met with increasing opposition as more cities, counties, and residents have come to understand what SB.649 truly represents. As you know, more than 300 cities and 47 of 58 counties have told you they do not want to relinquish the last vestiges of local control over Telecom in exchange for a capped compensation formula.

Many residents are aware of the hazards of 4G LTE/AWS and 5G millimeter waves boosted through previously impenetrable barriers by phased array software. Our own military science and well as Soviet science shows harm: eyes, skin and testes are subject to damage from these high-frequency microwaves.

Continue reading “Open Letter to Gov Jerry Brown”

Governor Brown, please help California by vetoing CA State Bill 649.

This post refutes the words written by SB.649 sponsor Sen. Ben Heuso in an 10/5/17 OpEd Piece in the Sacramento Bee, entitled Jerry Brown can help bring a wireless revolution. Below, we have annotated Sen. Hueso’s words with responses from Scentists for Wired Technology (‘S4WT’).

Hueso: Gov. Jerry Brown can bring the Wireless revolution to California by signing Senate Bill 649.

S4WT: Sorry, Sen. Heueso. The wireless revolution has already occurred over the last 25 years and coverage is already complete for 98% of the US population — including California. As we learned in 3/2/17 Federal testimony at the US Senate, "97.9% of Americans can choose from three newtwork operators [Wireless carriers] and 93.4% can choose from four [Wireless carriers] plus more than a dozen virtual [Wireless carriers]."

There is no need for Gov. Jerry Brown to sign SB.649 and many good reasons for Gov. Brown to veto SB.649 — which is an unjustified power grab by and an unnecessary subsidy for Telecom firms, including AT&T, Verizon/Frontier — firms enjoying the benefits of their ‘Public Utility’ status as Carriers of Last Resort (COLR), without completing the copper to fiber-optic upgrades that were promised and already financed by decades of fees on landline telephone bills. Instead, these firms are looting their regulated Wireline entities to enrich their unregulated Wireless entities and hurting the public good. This is corporate power run amok, and the FCC, State of CA and the CPUC are all enabling and abetting these actions.

Instead of gifts to these Telecom firms, the Governor can protect Californians by vetoing SB.649, and then directing his friend, Michael Picker — the friend that Brown appointed to the position of President of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) in 2014 &mdash to order financial audits and investigations of these Telecomm firms.

Hueso: Telecommunications access is a necessity in the modern world, so much so that governments around the world pay to subsidize wireless deployment.

S4WT: Telecommunications access (by Wireline) has been a necessity since the invention of the telegraph and the telephone — and still is because, unlike Wireless, only Wireline telephones reliably provide 911 automatic address detection and actually work in extended power outages caused by emergency disasters, like the devastating California fires that spread far and wide to over 190,000 acres since 10/8/17 — instantly crippling the fragile, Wireless cellular telephone network . . . while Wireless copper and fiber-optic cables, buried in the ground continued to operate during the disaster.

How many pizza boxes does it take to equal the volume of one so-called "Small Cell" two-way microwave transmitter installation? (Hint: a lot of them.)

Let’s put to rest a prevalent marketing/branding lie – "Small Cells are the size of a pizza box" — repeated by the CTIA, Wireless Carriers, and legislators. Here is the evidence for this hard-to-believe-it-would-ever-work attempt to "fool all of the people all the time".

First, here are some actual pizza boxes:

Domino’s Extra Large: 16.25 in. x 16.25 in. x 2.00 in. = 0.30 cubic feet

Domino’s Small: 10.25 in. x 10.25 in. x 1.75 in. = 0.10 cubic feet

Second, this was said in the US Senate on 3/2/17:

Scott Bergmann, VP, CTIA – The Wireless Association in his 3/2/2017 Testimony to the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation:

"Right now today there are challenges both with the local zoning process and, as you mentioned, with federal agencies, so we would certainly appreciate this committee’s attention to finding opportunities to right size that process so that we exclude small cells where appropriate that are the size of a pizza box or a lunch box. I don’t think anyone thinks it’s a process that applies to a 200-foot tower should apply, when you are putting a lunch box on top of an existing building."

And again in the CA Senate on 4/4/17:

CA Senator Ben Hueso reading a CTIA-provided script, written by lawyers and lobbyists from ALEC in his 4/4/17 testimony to the CA Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee:

"Building the wireless network of tomorrow requires the rapid deployment of small cell [structures] often no larger than a pizza box — and that’s a small pizza box [audience laughter] and you can see it here [more audience laughter]. We brought an example of one.

. . . Which was the only demo prop that Vice Chair Morrell allowed into the 4/4/17 CA Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee Hearing on SB.649; the demo prop brought by Opposition (shown below) was not allowed — an obvious act of discrimination.

Continue reading “How Many Pizza Boxes Does It Take?”

Finally, on Sun Oct 15 @ Midnight, CA Governor Brown vetoed SB.649!

Through Sun Oct 15 @ Midnight, Governor Brown signed 607 Bills and vetoed 101 Bills

Continue reading “Gov. Jerry Brown Watch”

The tanks are rolling forward, over all of us . . . and nobody in the Federal, State and Local governments care. It’s business as usual: if we spin the same fables and self-serving narratives over and over, the people will just believe/accept them.

Ajit Pai, acting FCC Chairman, on-camera, at an FCC open meeting news conference —
hiding behind a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup cup.

Of course, Bruce Kushnick, contributing to the Huffington Post, once again, has the best data and analysis to explain what is really going on here: propaganda from an obviously Captured Agency

The FCC released the "Twentieth Annual Report and Analysis of Competitive Market Conditions with Respect to Mobile Wireless"; a propaganda piece on Wireless competition in America to help AT&T and Verizon. As we will discuss, the statistics and presentation are based on a questionable manipulation of the facts, or more importantly, it is the omission of basic information that is the real problem.

• 9/26/17: FCC Rewrote America’s Broadband History; Covers Up $½ Trillion in Overcharging
• 9/26/17: Part II: Facts Missing from the FCC’s Section 706 Broadband Reports
• 10/9/17: Not happy with your wireless service? Blame the FCC divided the discussion into three parts
  1. Part I is a discussion of how the FCC has manipulated the statistics in their recent 20th wireless report to help AT&T and Verizon over the public and your interests.
  2. Part II: America is 59th in LTE speeds and more expensive for data than 39 other countries, not to mention that 40%+ of your data usage is for adtech and software designed to track your online usage, and even your location.
  3. Part III: Wireless is not a substitute for a wired connection to the home or office. You paid for a fiber optic connection. They manipulated the accounting. Time to start the investigations.

Continue reading “2017 FCC Wireless Competition Report”

If you are not familiar with Piedmont, CA, it is a lovely family-oriented community nestled in the Oakland hills. It is is only 1.7 square miles and contains 11,000 residents who moved there for the great schools and the jewel of the community: Piedmont Park, which is adjacent to the Elementary, Middle and High Schools has the city’s great Piedmont Sports Field (Witter Field) used for organized baseball, football, and soccer.

The city of Piedmont is basically an island, surrounded not by water, but by the City of Oakland, a host to many Verizon cell phone towers that adequately serve the area. At present, there are no Verizon cell towers in Piedmont, but that’s not a problem, because Verizon Wireless customers who live in or travel to Piedmont have adequate cellular coverage for making calls and texts whenever and wherever they want — connecting to the Verizon cell towers already installed in adjacent communities.

The following video is substantial evidence that there is no significant gap in Verizon Wireless Coverage for making calls and text in the residential areas of Piedmont, CA where Crown Castle and Verizon wish to install nine full-power cell towers at the height of second story bedroom windows. Therefore, the Piedmont City Council must defend the CA Constitution and protect their residents by denying all nine of these Crown Castle/Verizon Residential Cell Tower applications. We prepared and delivered substantial testimony to the Piedmont City Council on Mon 10/2/17 (video here).

We applied the correction factor for high-speed, pulsed, digital microwaves from CDMA and 4G/LTE, per the GigaHertz Solutions’ product manual and product video.

Continue reading “Piedmont, CA: Verizon Cell Tower Catastrophe in These Idyllic Neighborhoods”

The National Toxicology Program conducted a seminal $25 million 16-year study on rats and mice on health hazards from wireless, pulsed, data-modulated radiofrequency microwave radiation (RF/MW radiation). The NTP released a report on important study findings on May 27, 2016. The report is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/055699.

Most importantly, the complete results from all the rat and mice studies will be available for peer review and public comment by early 2018. PLEASE HALT all consideration of SB.649 or similar CA legislation, until the NTP releases its findings next year, so the CA Legislators can complete the due diligence on RF/MW radiation exposures before passing legislation which increases RF/MW radiation exposures millions of times where Californians live, work and play.

The Obvious and Common Sense Solution: Fiber-Optic to Every Home and Business

Fiber-optic cables to every home and business is the obvious answer for California: faster speeds (1,000 megabit-per-second) with much higher security and reliablility compared to wireless and without of the many RF/MW radiation hazards from wireless downloads of large data payloads, such as 4k videos — the very goal of the fixed wireless 5G tests at 28GHz (Verizon) and 37 GHz (AT&T). Any Governor who wants to establish a legacy of facing the challenges of climate change with forward-looking legislation, must recognize that moving data from any Point A to any Point B is thousands of times more energy-efficient via fiber-optic cables than via wireless — the latter sprays electrical energy into the air to deliver huge data payloads repeatedly and redundantly because the receiving antennas are only able to catch a small fraction of the RF/MW radiation sprayed into the air — the rest is toxic waste.

Many Scientists Have Written About How Hazards of SB.649 are Not Worth the Benefits

• Experts Worldwide: Lennart Hardell, MD, PhD; Martin Blank, PhD; Anthony B. Miller, MD; Devra Davis, PhD, MPH; Andrew A. Marino, PhD, JD; Jerry L. Phillips, PhD
• Dr. Martin Pall
• Dr. Beatrice Golomb

Key Findings from the May 27, 2016 report from a paper presented at annual meeting of Environmental Mutagenesis and Genomics Society, Raleigh, North Carolina, September 9-13, 2017:

• The nomination for NTP to study cell phone radiofrequency radiation was made by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

May 19, 1999 — William T. Allaban, Ph.D., FDA Liaison to the NTP:

"On behalf of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), I am nominating the following chemicals/agents to the National Toxicological Program: 1) Centerfor Device and Radiological Health (CDRH) – Radio Frequency Radiation Emissions of Wireless Communication Devices with a high priority;"

• These are the largest, most complex toxicology studies ever conducted by the National Toxicological Program.

• For the studies, rats and mice were exposed to frequencies and modulations currently used in cellular communications in the United States. The rodents were exposed for 10-minute on, 10-minute off increments, totaling just over 9 hours a day from before birth through 2 years of age.

• NTP found brain tumors (glioblastoms) and heart tumors (schwannomas), DNA damage and pre-tumors (hyperlplasias) in test rats, but not in control rats,

• NTP has provided these findings to its federal regulatory partners to enable them to have the latest information for public health guidance about safe ways to use cellular telephones and other radiofrequency radiation emitting devices.

BBK Municipal Law Webinar Series

September 20, 2017

Original slides are here. Read the text, below. Presentation by Best Best & Krieger LLP Attorneys, Gail A. Karish and Gerard Lavery Lederer.

Continue reading “BBK Cell Tower and Small Cell Law Primer”

Veto of Cell Antenna Bill, SB.649, Urged By Five California Mayors

September 22, 2017
by Dominic Fracassa, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.
Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com
Twitter: @dominicfracassa

The mayors of five California cities — San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Oakland and Bakersfield — urged Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday in a letter to veto a bill that would shift much of the power to regulate the placement of wireless communication equipment from local municipalities to the state.

Senate Bill No. 649 (SB.649), introduced by Sen. Ben Hueso, D-San Diego, establishes a uniform set of rules that cities and towns would have to follow when considering a company’s request to install small-cell devices — compact antennas usually affixed to street lights and telephone poles [that also include refrigerator-size ancillary equipment boxes on the sidewalk next to every pole with an antenna].

Continue reading “CA Mayors Oppose SB.649”