Editor’s note:  The following satire is copied from a new and wickedly delightful Australian website, “Stop These Things:  The Truth about Wind Farms in Australia.”

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Maybe it’s because it’s the end of the year.

But today we are, for some reason, reminded of Monty Python. Black is white. Up is down. The Ministry of Silly Walks and a dead parrot.

So in this spirit, here’s our contribution. It’s called the Department of Wind Farms.

Let’s call our two characters … um … Simon and Noel.

Knock! Knock!

Simon: Yes? Come in. Sit down.

Noel: I’m sick.

Simon: No you’re not.

Noel: Since the wind turbine started next door I’ve been feeling crook.

Simon: You’re imagining it.

Noel: No, I’m really sick.

Simon: What are your symptoms?

Noel: Headaches, nausea. And I can’t get to sleep.

Simon: Bollocks!

Noel: What do you mean?

Simon: You’re jealous

Noel: Jealous? Of what?

Simon: All the money your neighbors are making.

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Click here to continue . . .

For the sake of the redemptive promises of Green Energy, we self-righteously torture and torment people even as we pretend it’s not happening. As the epidemic of systematic torture unfolds, physicians turn a blind eye and deaf ear to people’s pleas for medical intervention—medical common sense—to stop it. Physicians who speak out are vilified, threatened with harm, and defamed, while their medical colleagues by the thousands stand silently by—uninvolved, indifferent, frightened.

This disturbing yet brilliant image is borrowed, with appreciation,
from the website, fenbeagleblog.

Consider the following testimony from the Michaud family, Ontario, Canada

September 4, 2011
  Six years ago we moved our family from the city, thought maybe it would be nice to live closer to nature, maybe grow our own fresh food, live off the land. It was beautiful, the night sky, the wildlife. We worked hard, built a home and a hobby farm. Then one day we found a letter in the mailbox that read “Occupant.”  It was a notice about the Wind farm proposal. Little did we know it was the last of many planning meetings discussing this event. We attended but realized that these things were coming no matter what we had to
 say!

Two years later here we are. All four members of our family are each experiencing devastating adverse effects! Illnesses that do harm our lifestyle, effects that take away our enjoyment of life, and interfere with our work, effects that are impacting how we live day to day and how we interact with others around us. Our peaceful country home is no more!

We did not know anything about this wind syndrome until we all started getting sick and only now have I been becoming educated in this phenomenon. In reading all the controversy on this subject sickens me, how can a doctor whose oath is “do no harm” stand there and say there is no harm here? 
I do not understand anyone can bush off someone’s suffering so easily!

We did not ask to have these Wind Turbines placed in our back yard, nor did we ask for the illnesses you call an “Annoyance”. I believe that the symptoms that my family and I have been living with the past 5 months are real and in fact life threatening, not only to ourselves but to others. If one of us suffers a bout of Vertigo while operating a motor vehicle, that results in an accident, then it becomes pretty damn adverse, especially if we injure or kill 
someone! If we go to our place of employment after too many sleepless nights, and make a
mistake or get injured, that may result in our job loss or again loss of life—that seems pretty adverse as well! 
It is a sad state we live in when we cannot trust those hired and elected to protect the little people!

Sick of being sick on the Dew Drop we call home!”

September 14, 2011
  Thank you for sticking by us … we really need to raise public awareness … we were all so affected the day they filmed that piece … with the nausea and vertigo … the past two weeks our heath has declined to a constant state of unbalanced fatigue, vertigo, nausea, disorientation, unusual stomach cramps … medicated by SERC
my daughter is so tired and feels unwell but still works up 6 days a week, she’s a real trooper… 
my husband and son have had to leave work early a number of times in the last two weeks … 
my son is so upset that his health has declined so much and he has no balance, it has affected his work ability and his musical talent is suffering … 
his greatest fear is that his hearing will be affected and he will no longer be able to play or write music … it might take 6 months for him to see an audiologist and vertigo specialist.

I never thought I would hear from either of them that they are considering moving if they don’t start feeling better soon … they both have worked so hard here and love this place so much.
  It’s just no fair to be run off our home & land … Canada is better than this, or so I thought.

Oh,  and today I got a nose bleed … I hope I don’t get more.

Oh, and I think one of my goats had a false pregnancy … she looked pregnant and acted so then,  nothing, no baby … It’s so weird.

We hope to remain strong, but I can see now why some people leave their homes and hopes and dreams behind them,  and why some turn to suicide … it eats at your soul!

P.S.  The wind is so strong today and the turbine behind me has been so loud, I called the MOE [Ministry of the Environment] twice in 12 hours … I have been sitting in my beautiful sunroom for about 20 minutes and I feel like throwing up  … this was my favorite room in the house… my happy place but it is slowly becoming a storage area, that I have to retreat from that retreat too!”

June 27, 2012  
We are unsure what to do … I have spoken to people who are in [the] direct path of these monsters … they are 
suffering but wish to remain out of the battle … for various reasons … part of me gets it, but part of me doesn’t … we know we need to continue to take a stand, but at the same time, unless there is a show in numbers, then is it really worth the violence that could ensue?
  But then, again, this area is soon to be overwhelmed with the numbers of turbines coming … it’s sickening and maddening and disheartening … what can we do?

I’m sure there will be another ERT set up for this area, but will anything come of it? So many around here are beaten down and losing hope, and that’s exactly what the MOE, the Government and the Wind Industry are waiting for! I have heard that “the head-hunters” have been out in force in our area, attempting to sign up more leaseholders … soon there will be nowhere for any of us to live!

THIS IS SO WRONG!!! WE ARE ALL BEING ABUSED IN OUR OWN HOMES … HOW LONG ARE WE GOING TO BE EXPECTED TO JUST SIT HERE AND TAKE IT?
  I WONDER IF THE MAYOR WILL BE IN ATTENDANCE? I THINK WE SHOULD GET TOGETHER AND LAY A LAWSUIT ON HIS DOORSTEP!

The following is from the New England Journal of Medicine review of “The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation,” ed. George J. Annas & Michael A Grodin (NY:  Oxford Univ. Press, 1992).  We feel it has relevance for the Michaud’s testimony, above.

In August 1947, 15 Nazi physicians were convicted by one of the Nuremberg tribunals of immersing concentration-camp inmates in freezing solutions, exploding them in low-pressure chambers, infecting them with typhus, forcing them to drink sea water, and killing them in order to study their defleshed skeletons, all in the name of science. In deciding the case, the tribunal enunciated a set of ethical principles for experimentation with human subjects that came to be known as the Nuremberg Code.

The first and central principle of the code states, “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” But Jay Katz, perhaps the most insightful contributor to this unusual collection of essays and documentation on the code, points out that the tribunal erroneously assumed that the principle of voluntary consent had been firmly embodied in medical ethics up to that time (which it had not) and that it was the gravamen of the doctors’ offenses. On the contrary, as is excruciatingly evident from the detailed accounts of the “experiments,” the doctors committed these crimes against humanity because they were able to deny the humanity of their subjects and even, at some level, must have been satisfying bizarrely sadistic impulses.

Another essayist, Leonard Glantz, observes: “These matters [informed consent] were of no concern to the Nazi doctors. From their perspective [it] was more akin to animal research . . . [although it] would violate current animal research regulations.” Consent was not even an issue.

Other contributors suggest the inadequacy of the Nuremberg Code’s provisions to address issues such as those in the Nancy Cruzan case and those in the controversy over the use of fetal tissue for research. Indeed, the code is not helpful in drawing distinctions between clinical research and therapy. What seems to me too sharp a focus in the book on the informed-consent principle results in an inadequate treatment of the recent court case on the propriety of a Food and Drug Administration waiver of the informed-consent requirement for use of an investigational new drug; in that case the drugs covered by the waiver might have been needed to protect troops in combat against the effects of Iraqi-dispensed poison gas.

Yet an examination of the post-Nuremberg record by still other contributors suggests that the informed-consent issue is still alive. The medico-legal community in the United States has not been without sin. Examples cited include the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, continued until 1972; experiments conducted at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in which live cancer cells were injected into chronically ill and debilitated patients in 1963; the administration by the Central Intelligence Agency of mind-altering drugs to unwitting subjects beginning in 1953; and the Supreme Court-sanctioned exposure by the Army of a serviceman to lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) while telling him he was testing the effectiveness of protective clothing against chemical warfare.

The book is rich in data both on the Nazi doctors’ trial and on the subsequent history of the informed-consent doctrine in clinical research. It contains the full documentation on the Nuremberg tribunal, including the impressive opening statement of Brigadier General Telford Taylor, chief counsel for the prosecution; the 1931 Reich Circular on human experimentation (as well as the 1933 law against cruelty to animals); and the text of the World Medical Association declarations on clinical research adopted in 1964, 1975, 1983, and 1989 (Helsinki I, II, III, and IV). It also contains full documentation on the FDA waiver of informed consent in the Gulf War situation described above.

For anyone interested in the problems of clinical research on human subjects, this compendium should be a valuable reference work and a source of insights as well as relevant facts. Because it addresses a complex problem from the perspective of what may be the most extreme cases imaginable, it casts deep shadows, even while illuminating parts of its subject. But at the same time it serves to remind the reader of the temptations to which even the most scrupulous physicians, operating on the frontiers of clinical research, are exposed.

Question:  Do the physicians in Ontario and Nova Scotia, Canada, and in Massachusetts and Maine, USA, and public health specialists in Australia who openly deny Wind Turbine Syndrome—who in some instances go out of their way to publicly ridicule and persecute physicians like Drs. Pierpont, Laurie, and Harry—do these people, through their denial and outright ridicule of WTS and the physicians documenting it, qualify as enablers of what Dr. Pierpont has pointedly and disturbingly called the “natural experiment” of Wind Turbine Syndrome?

The following is quoted from Pierpont’s book, “Wind Turbine Syndrome:  A Report on a Natural Experiment” (2009), pp. 5-6.  Bear in mind as you read it that this “natural experiment” is no longer a mystery; Wind Turbine Syndrome has been unequivocally proven in clinical case crossover studies like Pierpont’s.  Voluminous testimony from around the world by victims like the Michauds, above, amply documents what is going on.

Wind energy’s “natural experiment” might have been, at one time, inadvertent and thus excusable; now, it can no longer claim to be either of these.  Now, its dirty little secret has been “outed,” exposed, as outrageously immoral and medically unethical, and it is medical doctors who should be loudest and most vehement in demanding that this torture be stopped—now.  (See also here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.)  To quote Pierpont:  “Natural experiments . . . have an important role in clarifying the impacts of potentially toxic, man-made exposures.”  The “natural experiment” known as Wind Turbine Syndrome has been demonstrated, ad nauseum, to be a toxic, man-made exposure. 

“Doctors, why the hell are you not enraged that this toxic, man-made exposure continues, unabated?”

Which brings us to what is known in science as a “natural experiment”: a circumstance wherein subjects are exposed to experimental conditions both inadvertently and ecologically (within their own homes and environments). Obviously, it would be unethical to expose people deliberately to potentially harmful interventions. Hence natural experiments, while less controlled, have an important role in clarifying the impacts of potentially toxic, man-made exposures.

The ecological dimension in the phrase natural experiment is worth emphasizing, since many elements of an exposure may not be reproducible in a laboratory, such as round-the-clock exposure, exposure over months, or impacts on customary activities. For symptoms related to wind turbine sound there are also technical difficulties in reproducing in a laboratory the types of sound, air pressure variation, and vibration that my subjects’ observations suggest are involved. Failure to provoke the same symptoms in a laboratory setting may tell us more about the limitations of the laboratory situation than about real-world effects.

Editor’s note:  The following article, by American noise engineer Rick James, is currently in press. Click here to access the website for the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, from where, hopefully, you can access the full article.  (We are not allowed to post the entire article, since it is proprietary.)

Abstract

Industrial wind turbines are frequently thought of as benign. However, the literature is reporting adverse health effects associated with the implementation of industrial-scale wind developments. This article explores the historical evidence about what was known regarding infra and low-frequency sound from wind turbines and other noise sources during the period from the 1970s through the end of the 1990s. This exploration has been accomplished through references, personal interviews and communications, and other available documentation. The application of past knowledge could improve the current siting of industrial wind turbines and avoid potential risks to health.

Photos of 17 storks who reportedly ran “afoul” of industrial wind turbines in Poland.

Editor’s note:  Click here for the source of these photos.  The text accompanying them has been (clumsily) translated from Polish to English, using on online service called “Google Translate.”

More than 17 dead storks in power line near wind turbines in ditches

During our conversations with residents girls performed at the beginning of November 2012 we learned about the mass death of several young storks (photo below taken in August 2012).  Residents of females mówiili us also about the many dead storks and birds of prey found in the field during haymaking. According to eyewitnesses, young storks fell while learning to fly in a gust of wind turbine blades, and many of them have been “thrown” in the direction of medium-voltage lines where Razon died shock. Witnesses also told us about the direct collisions of storks and birds of prey with blades of windmills. Carina witnesses also spoke about it in public during gołdapski conference—video report.

The photos below, together with information the inspector personally handed the security department in the county gołdapskim środowiaska. Now we are waiting for an answer/explanation/investigation/intervention …

Here is the Polish original.

Ponad 17 martwych bocianów pod linią energetyczną w pobliżu turbin wiatrowych w Suczkach

Podczas naszych rozmów z mieszkańcami Suczek przeprowadzonych na początku listopada 2012 dowiedzieliśmy się o masowej śmierci kilkunastu młodych bocianów (zdjęcia poniżej wykonane w sierpniu 2012), Mieszkańcy Suczek mówiili nam także o wielu martwych bocianach oraz ptakach szponiastych znajdowanych w polu podczas sianokosów. Według relacji naocznych świadków młode bociany podczas nauki latania wpadały w podmuch śmigieł elektrowni wiatrowej i wiele z nich zostało “rzucanych” w kierunku linii średniego napięcia gdzie ginęły rażone prądem. Świadkowie mówili nam także o bezpośrednich kolizjach bocianów oraz ptaków szponiastych ze śmigłami wiatraków. Kilu świadków mówiło o tym równiez publicznie podczas gołdapskiej konferencji—relacja wideo.

Poniższe zdjęcia wraz z informacją osobiście przekazaliśmy inspektorowi wydziału ochrony środowiaska w powiecie gołdapskim. Czekamy teraz na odpowiedź /wyjaśnienie /dochodzenie /interwencję…

“Based on my recent experiences and interactions with such affected individuals, I am satisfied that this WTS condition is real. . . .This syndrome is not, in my view, a psychosomatic illness or a nocebo effect.”

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Editor’s note: The following statement was formally submitted to the Australian Federal Senate as it ponders a bill to curb excessive wind turbine noise. The bill currently goes by the name, Renewable Energy (Electricity) Amendment (Excessive Noise from Wind Farms) Bill 2012. Whether the Senate passes such a bill remains to be seen, of course.

Click here to read Mr. Trask’s testimony in the original (submission #162 in the list).

—Peter Trask, MA Applied Psychology, Licensed Clinical Psychologist

I support the proposed amendments to the Renewable Energy Act (Excessive Wind Farm Noise 2012). Whilst there is much unknown about why people are becoming unwell in the environs of large industrial wind turbines, anything which increases the transparency of the wind industry with respect to actual noise emissions will assist with better understanding of the dose of sound energy being received by the residents.

At present it is my understanding that the noise and wind mast [tower] data is not made available, and therefore it is impossible for the residents to know what they are exposed to, or whether the wind turbines are compliant with state government noise regulations.

The consequences of non-payment of renewable energy certificates in the absence of evidence of compliance would seem to be appropriate, given the gravity of the known effect of excessive noise on human health.

Throughout human history, well-intentioned, innovative, creative, insightful and determined individuals have been ridiculed, sometimes demonised and often criticised for discoveries that challenged institutionalised behaviour and the related contemporary beliefs and and/or theories. It was not necessarily that these people were wrong but rather that they revealed what Al Gore more recently popularised as being ‘an inconvenient truth’. To this very day, this condemnation of such ‘messengers’ continues and as history demonstrates, we have not always learned well from these experiences of the past. Indeed, vested interest of times past and now use many means to deny, deflect, avoid, distract and resist those individuals and groups revealing such emergent discoveries of ‘inconvenience’.

I believe that this process of obfuscation is now occurring in Australia regarding those affected by the so-called ‘wind turbine syndrome’ (WTS). Presently in Australia there is a quite vicious and dismissive attitude toward those people allegedly being affected by WTS. Rather than seeing such people as akin to the ‘canary in the coal mine’, they are dismissed as misguided, disingenuous, dishonest or mentally unstable. Of course, for those so affected, this vilification compounds an evolving trauma experience, and as a leading neurosurgeon recently said, what is worse than people disliking you is when they dismiss you.

As a practising psychologist, I have only recently become aware of this WTS first-hand, although for some years I have had some peripheral exposure, via the mainstream media. More recently, however, I have met many individuals directly affected by WTS, and have had the privilege to be providing two individuals with psychological treatment and support.

Based on my recent experiences and interactions with such affected individuals, I am satisfied that this WTS condition is real.  This conclusion of mine is based upon both hearing the stories of affected individuals and being aware of and having access to the limited yet growing scientific body of evidence highlighting this deleterious syndrome.

This syndrome is not, in my view, a psychosomatic illness or a nocebo effect. If this syndrome was primarily a psychosomatic condition, the genesis of the WTS would be rooted in inappropriate or irrational cognitive processing and my assessment of affected individuals elicits no evidence to support this. Moreover, psychosomatic conditions require a level of conscious awareness of adverse stimuli to activate somatic symptoms in the body. Conversely, I believe that the WTS affects people at a sub-conscious level, creating somatic symptoms without a conscious (or cognitive) awareness of why. Accordingly, this WTS is potentially a very insidious syndrome as the usual cognitive associations are not established till much later. At this later stage, psychosomatic responses may emerge, similar to people affected by post-traumatic stress disorder, but only retrospectively.

With regard to the nocebo effect (believing that one will be adversely affected in exposure to specific stimuli previously labelled as toxic or dangerous), the various theories of motivation ought to be acknowledged. Clearly, motivation among humans is a complex phenomenon. Nevertheless, for those affected by WTS that I have met and treated, there is no plausible motivation-based explanation for why they would want to be sick nor expect to be so, based on their prior life and medical histories. Furthermore, these are people who have possessed a very close affinity and love for their homes and locations, and so, have endured this syndrome for extended periods, and then in desperation, like environmental refugees, have had to leave their homes, with substantial regret.

I shall leave the scientific and/or neurological theories and explanations to the experts. Nevertheless, the existence of low frequency sound energy, produced by wind turbines, and inaudible to the human ear, may be the reason for this syndrome. While this low frequency noise or sound energy (aka infrasound) may be inaudible and thus not able to be consciously perceived by the human ear, it does appear that the ear’s vestibular system is still capable of perceiving the presence of this infrasound, and so send signals to the central nervous system for processing, in this case without the conscious awareness of the affected individual. Despite this, it appears that this infrasound stimuli activates the automatic survival response, more commonly known as the fight/flight/freeze response. Consequently, somatic symptoms are experienced by affected individuals. These symptoms include hyper-arousal, anxiety, racing heart, nausea, muscle tension, panic, concentration and attention problems, memory difficulties, and more. At night, these symptoms can lead to insomnia and sleep disturbance, and consequent stress and emotional instability in the waking hours.

On the basis that this syndrome is not a psychosomatic illness (in the first instance) or nocebo effect, relief for affected people may only be achieved by removing them from the environment apparently responsible for catalysing their symptoms. Dialogue with affected people provides anecdotal evidence of the efficacy of this approach. Sadly however, chronic exposure to infrasound over an extended period, may more permanently alter the neurological state of affected people, and in such cases, we observe trauma-like symptoms among this cohort.

In my opinion, this is a serious health issue affecting a relatively small number of people in rural areas only, and so they lack the critical mass to adequately advocate for their rights. Vested interests, including government, business, environmental groups and communities want wind energy generation to be accepted and propagated across our country. Nonetheless, it is incumbent on governments at all levels to ensure the safety of fellow Australians. To this extent I appeal to the Senate of Australia to investigate this health issue, to allocate funds to undertake further research into the apparent WTS, and to consider a moratorium of further wind farm development until adequate and robust research is concluded and analysed. In the meantime, I would also ask that our elected representatives listen with open minds and hearts to those people currently substantially and chronically affected by a health problem that remains poorly understood.

Editor’s note:  The following image has been shamelessly “pinched” from fenbeagleblog, a UK satirist and artist worthy of a Nobel Prize—in Literature, maybe?  The man (woman?) behind fenbeagle is a mystery with, alas, no contact information.  (Otherwise, I would have contacted him/her and asked if I could borrow the drawing, below.  I added the famous Churchill text.)

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end.

We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

—Winston Churchill, June 1940

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From time to time—truth be told, quite often—we get a comment which is, well, “off the charts” for eloquence and cogency.  This posting catalyzed one of those.  I have moved it from Comments to an editorial in its own right.  Read on.

Now, we fight.

There is the great void of difference between what we want to do and what we had to do. There is a universe of things we wish to do. To follow one’s heart’s delight, to give from one’s heart with endless passion—that is the golden ideal.

But every time we did what we had to do, we lost a bit of our free will.  Every time we were forced to compromise on our dreams, to give ground to the powerful, the inevitable, we surrendered a little, died a little inside.

Now I am older. Maybe it is not wise to keep fighting. Maybe it is not wise to resist, to refuse to take one step backward.

You see, I can’t. All my ancestors and all my heroes in spirit stand behind me. I’m at the edge of my cliff.

Do you remember what General George Patton, that huge pain in Gen. Eisenhower’s ass, said to the Stars and Stripes reporter after his triumphant rescue of the paratroopers at Bastogne after the battle of the Bulge in Belgium?

The reporter asked, “General, Sir, how do you account for your amazing military success?”

And Gen. Patton answered him in French. He looked him in the eye and said, “L’audace. L’audace. L’audace. Toujours, l’audace!”

Now, in this lopsided David and Goliath fight, we must pick up the sling and the pebble. We must stride out in front of the gathered armies. We must ask for guidance. We must act with audacity.

It is the last armament left in our hearts.

—Marshall Rosenthal (Massachusetts)