There is lately an inexplicable trend among politicians of the left-leaning variety to insist that cellphones need some sort of radiation warning. The latest to fall for it is hilarious muppet Dennis Kucinich.
Thankfully he’s on the way out — due to redistricting he lost his primary and come January 2013 he’ll have to retire to a life of public advocacy with his wife, who looks like this. Yeah, we’re not sure he’s really sad about that either.
So he’s decided to spend his last few months in office throwing said wife a bone. No, not that way. Instead he’s introduced HR 6358 to the House. It’s a bill that would require strict labeling on cell phones about how much radiation you’re absorbing.
“It took decades for scientists to be able to say for sure that smoking caused cancer. During those decades, the false impression created by industry supporters was that there was no connection between smoking and cancer, a deception which cost many lives. While we wait for scientists to sort out the health effects of cell phone radiation, we must allow consumers to have enough information to choose a phone with less radiation.”
It is, in short, a reminder of why we all found him incredibly annoying during those Presidential primaries.
Why should you care? Because this is just as stupid and anti-science as any far-right loon screaming about how evolution makes teenagers get gay-married and abort their babies. Note how Kucinich chose smoking as his example. That’s a deliberate choice, because he’s trying to scare people to help out his wife, who works for a bunch of self-righteous vegan trolls calling themselves the Physicians Comittee for Responsible Medicine.
The underlying belief here that they’re trying to promote is that cell phones somehow give you brain cancer. Cell phones do not give you brain cancer. They are essentially little radios. If radio waves gave you cancer, most of the First World would be dead by now. We are regularly blasted with radio waves of power and strength that make your cell phone look puny by comparison. Anybody with a basic understanding of physics understands this. In fact, it’s how the CTIA, a cellphone lobbying committee, got a similar law in San Francisco struck down. Not helping is the fact that if you actually crunch the numbers cell phones have had zero effect on brain cancer rates. Hence the “decades” cop out. Oh, it won’t happen now. We’ll be right later. Honest.
The reality is that it didn’t take decades to find a link between cigarettes and cancer. It took decades to figure out what the cigarette industry knew about the cancer link. How dumb do people think doctors were back then anyway? You think none of them looked at people inhaling smoke, something we know has killed people for the entire history of the human race, and didn’t make the logical jump that holy crap there might be a problem here?
Seriously, this is a waste of both time and money, but at least it’ll get struck down in committee. Maybe Kucinich should have also said cell phones make people believe in evolution.
image courtesy AndrewBrownNWA on Flickr