How much of your time goes towards paying for groceries? If you work 40 hours a week, get paid $20 an hour, and spend $200 a week in groceries and eating out, that’s 10 hours a week you spent working for food.

And that’s for store-bought pesticide-laden food that was picked 3 weeks ago in a different country and has lost most of its nutritional value on the way to you. And the sucker-punch? The soil it was grown in is depleted to begin with.

The average store-bought tomato has 1/8th the nutritional value the tomato your grandmother grew.

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What if instead you planted a garden? Raised your own chickens? All of that can be done in less than 10 hours a week.

You could grow your own organic, freshly picked produce.

Ferment it yourself and get probiotics, instead of buying vinegar-soaked shelf-stable pickles that are dead.

You could substitute a significant amount of your own freshly grown produce for what you buy at the store, save money, work less (or save more), and become less dependent on long supply chains.

Better health, more resilience, more money saved, more fresh air and vitamin D from being out in the sun. What’s not to like?

This is a delicious salad we made this morning from our own cucumbers and tomatoes. The olive oil and feta cheese we bought, but we have sheep, and next year I plan to milk them and make my own cheese. We’ll see how that goes!

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Lookout Map has a new feature - Upstream water screening.

Analyze any address and we use USGS data to figure out the contributing watershed upstream of that address, including any rivers or creeks, and then look through EPA data on superfund sites, permitted chemical-releasing facilities, mines, landfill sites, and more - that would dump into that watershed.

You can now at a glance figure out how at-risk your water supply would be.

I’ll start. Today I got 6 quart jars of pickles put away from today’s harvest, 5 cucumber jars and 1 tomato jar. I’m fermenting them in salt and not using vinegar. I like the flavor more and there are probiotics in there (unlike most shelf-stable store-bought pickles). Plus it’s organic because I know exactly what got sprayed on them (nothing).

I had to kill one of my cucumber plants the other day because it was getting really sick with some kind of disease, and I didn’t want it spreading on nearby plants. It worked - seems like the disease didn’t jump. I planted too many cucumber and tomato plants anyway (kind of on purpose) so this allows me to cull them when they become problematic instead of resorting to chemicals.

In other news, I’ve been working on my side-project websites more. Lookout Map is getting a new bug out route feature - you can select an address and the map calculates routes in different directions, primary, secondary, etc. and highlights problematic areas like bridges or dead-ends. The idea is that people will be able to quickly plan evacuation routes and download a printable pdf with turn-by-turn directions.

I’m also working on a site that will document and guide folks towards building their own home servers. I built mine a couple of years ago and it’s been working out very well. I have almost 15 TB of data on it: thousands of books, survival guides, Wikipedia, all of the Stack Exchange websites, Khan academy, a media collection of 300+ movies and dozens of TV shows, and much more. I realized having offline capability like that is a pretty big deal both for resilience and overcoming censorship (you download the thing before it gets disappeared off the internet).

And with modern LLMs, you can run your own AI offline (complete privacy) and give it access to your offline resources. Imagine asking any question and having your offline archive of books, encyclopedias, videos (transcribed with subtitles!) all be searchable.

Anyway, at some point this guide will be ready and I’ll announce it properly :)

Below is Substack’s tutorial for how to use this chat, I’m leaving it in since it might be useful to people.

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1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

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2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

In the West, we’re now several generations into a food system that has suffered no major famine. Nobody in the middle class alive in the West today (outside of WWII in Europe), remembers food insecurity. For all intents and purposes – famine in the West, and most of the rest of the world, has been eradicated.

In the past century, it’s almost entirely due to government action (war, genocide, communism) that people have starved in industrialized nations.

And the sad thing is - the vast majority of people today take it for granted. Most people’s hands have never tilled the soil or planted crops. Most people are so entirely separated from their food production that they’re not even grateful for this state of massive plenty.

Read social media and you’ll find endless people complaining about the quality of food. “It’s poison!” they shout. “Burgers are too expensive!’ they lament. “Monsanto is evil!”

Yes, all of this is true to some extent.

But I bet most of them haven’t gone hungry a single day of their lives – or if they have, it was due to personal financial hardship and not regional famine. And I bet they don’t really understand what’s involved in growing their own food.

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Plenty – but at what cost?

Well, our food quality has gone down in many ways, sure.

There’s junk food galore, mystery ingredients abound, obesity is on the rise. This is all true - but remember that this is all almost entirely by choice. You don’t have to eat those donuts. You choose to. Nobody is forcing you to buy the cheaper non-organic food or eat from Taco Bell. You choose to.

It’s convenient. It’s cheap. It’s plentiful. By historical standards, even with the recent bout of inflation, people today spend far less of their share of income on food than they have in the past.

A subsistence farmer in the 14th century would have woken up before dawn to work the fields, and gotten home in the dark. And some would have still starved.

Throughout most of human history, famine was a serious problem. A drought, a failed harvest, pests, mice getting into your food store - these would decimate entire towns. Millions have died a slow and painful death because the basic need of food production has been fundamentally uncertain for most of human history.

So when I read the endless stream of health bloggers and homesteaders complain about the current state of the food system, I can’t help but wonder where their sense of perspective went.

As much as our current food system is flawed – it’s at least given us food security. Something no peasant has had in millennia.

My Food Production Journey

This year is the first year I’ve tried to seriously produce my own food. We’ve planted the occasional small garden in the past, but always at a very small scale, and not taken it very seriously. This year is the first year I’m actually trying. It’s the first year I can try, really.

This is the first property we own. We had been moving around rental apartments and houses every year for the past decade - and improving the soil in a rental you’ll only stay in for a year just feels like a futile waste of time.

We started our homestead journey on our property a few years ago. First we had to clear enough of the forest to build our house, then we built an off-grid home, then we moved in and spent the next year fixing issues with it, big and small – upgrading our solar system, fixing our rainwater catchment system.

Now we’re fully off-grid. 100% of our energy comes from the sun. We even have a Polaris EV we charge from our solar panels that I use for chores around the homestead. 100% of our drinking, cooking, cleaning, etc. water comes from the rain (and the drought has made us have to ration more than we’d like!). We have three ways to heat our home in the winter, including with firewood I can cut down myself.

But food? We’re completely dependent on someone else to produce our food. Sure – we can stock up on food, but that doesn’t make us independent. It just means we can weather supply chain disruptions better. But if supply chains stopped, we’d still starve.

Chickens

So this spring, when enough of our other needs were taken care of, I decided it was time to focus on food production. We already had chickens, though getting them to lay in a consistent spot has been hard. I built them some wonderful nesting boxes that they completely ignore. Instead they’ve decided to lay in the cat house, our Polaris Ranger, behind the rainwater tanks, under the wood chipper. Pretty much anywhere except where we wanted.

We free range them. Truly free range, we have no fence at all. We feed them a relatively small amount of grain in the morning – the rest of their calories come from bugs and plants they find throughout the day. But I have no idea where they’re laying their eggs the past two weeks. Maybe somewhere in the forest?

Sure – I could confine them so they lay in a consistent spot. But then I’d have to buy more grain from the store, making me more dependent. And then we’d lose the benefit of them eating bugs all around our house.

Getting chickens and then being completely dependent on store-bought feed doesn’t solve the problem of getting your own eggs, it just changes your dependency from one input to another.

The Garden

This spring I also built a large fence around our new garden. It was expensive - it had to be over 6’ tall because we have tremendous deer pressure here. And it had to be rabbit-proof, and hog-proof.

I put down black silage tarps to kill the weeds (adopting the no-till method) and spent weeks producing and spreading around wood chips. I was late to the season because in April when everyone else was planting, I was still building infrastructure. I had to setup my indoor seed starting system with grow lights, too. One day I’ll build a greenhouse. One day…

A fungus almost killed all my tomato plants before I even transplanted them. I had to baby them back to health, meticulously trimming back any sick leaves so it would stop spreading and separate the healthy ones from the sick ones.

I initially planted the wrong cucumbers and had to rush-order the right pickling variety in the mail. The broccoli was too late. The list goes on and on.

In the end I was still able to get a lot of food to grow. Our melons have been fantastic. We pick more cucumbers every day than our family can eat. It’s become my primary snack. Our tomatoes are delicious. My wife made a squash soup that even the kids will eat.

But we’ve had as many failures as successes.

Fermenting

I’ve been trying to pickle cucumbers and tomatoes, and it is hard. I’ve had to throw away so many after they’d start to mold. There’s quite a big learning curve with fermentation. And if you can’t figure out how to ferment and pickle your vegetables, what are you going to eat in the winter?

People today take for granted year-round vegetables, but these are a historical anomaly. In the 18th century if you wanted to eat tomatoes in the winter you had to pickle them. You can’t just walk into a store and buy tomatoes grown 3,000 miles away.

Our supply chains are so long and our dependence on store-bought produce so great that almost all of us have lost the skills required to preserve our own food. I know my parents never taught me. I’m having to learn from scratch, and YouTube makes it seem way easier than it is.

Yes - those store-bought tomatoes only have an eighth of the nutritional value home-grown tomatoes have, but at least they’re consistently there.

Growing your own cucumbers is great – but if they don’t get enough water they turn sour with Cucurbitacins that can make you actually sick. I had no idea I’d have to baby them so much through this drought. “Just water them” – right, but we’re off-grid, remember? We don’t have an endless supply of cheap fluoridated city water. If I want to water my cucumbers I have to haul water from the pond.

Trying to grow my own food has made me far more grateful for the grocery store, as imperfect as it is, than I’ve ever been.

I know the first year is more about learning than volume, but still, the lessons are pretty hard. It sucks having to throw away half a dozen jars of fermenting cucumbers because they went moldy.

I hope over the years I can produce more and more of our food until eventually we’re self-sufficient here, too - but this is definitely a difficult problem to solve. It requires a lot of manual labor, knowledge, and skill.

If you want to have food independence in 5 years, you really need to start growing now.

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This article has a companion website. Check out the Oldest Fear.

Politicians, pundits, priests, and provocateurs would have you fight over your religion, race, gender, sexual preferences, whether you’re an immigrant or not, which way you vote in the fake elections – pretty much anything to keep you distracted from the real war. The battle that we’ve been barely aware of in our subconscious. The battle we’re constantly distracted from by both ourselves and our enemies.

We distract ourselves from it because the truth is almost too hard to acknowledge.

Our enemies distract us from it because if we woke up and acted on the realization, it would spell their doom.

Because this truth sits below our conscious understanding most of the time, it ends up manifesting in myths and children’s stories. We can’t quite muster the courage to look at it directly, so it exists somewhere in the psychological substrate connecting us all.

What truth?

That there is only one real enemy we should be aware of - and it’s probably not who you direct your anger and disdain towards.

It’s the psychopath. I originally wrote about this a few years ago here.

Psychopaths are everywhere. Depending on how you count, they are roughly 1% to 6% of the population, but they disproportionately cluster in positions of power. Whether that’s politicians, bureaucrats, or corporate CEOs and managers, where we find them at a rate about 4x the average population.

The existence of psychopathy is something some are aware of, but only briefly; before they banish the thought from their conscious mind.

The fact that there are those among us who lack the basic fabric of humanity: empathy, remorse, love – in essence, a soul – is so terrifying that even the ones who know about this fact often forget.

We bury it during our daily life - the same way a sheep must bury their knowledge of wolves to venture out into a new field and eat grass.

Hiding in Plain Sight

The truth is that psychopaths are the greatest threat to you and your family, far and above anyone else, and you can find them anywhere.

They’re dangerous precisely because they do not look like enemies. They learn what the people around them respect, then wear it as camouflage.

A uniform can do it. So can a lab coat, a clerical collar, an expensive suit, revolutionary rhetoric, or a long list of credentials. They parasite off of existing reputations and authorities.

But the pattern of behavior remains consistent even as the costume changes.

• They deploy charm when charm gets them access.

• They lie easily and repeatedly, then act offended when questioned.

• They show cruelty when they believe there will be no consequences.

• They impose rules on everyone else while treating themselves as exempt.

• They pursue control long after money, comfort, or any rational objective has been satisfied.

• They never accept responsibility because every failure must belong to someone else.

• Most importantly, they treat other human beings as tools.

This can appear anywhere. A soldier can use “following orders” to excuse cruelty he enjoys. A police officer can use public safety to justify domination. A politician can speak movingly about peace, then bomb children. A scientist or doctor can hide abuse behind expertise and procedure. A revolutionary can promise liberation while positioning himself to become the next ruler.

It’s worth saying that not all of these people are always psychopaths. Normal people can do terrible things (as the Milgram experiments demonstrated) when controlled by other psychopaths, or because they’re afraid, confused, ambitious, or moral cowards.

The way you can tell is by following the pattern. Psychopaths consistently choose deception, domination, and harm; and feel no remorse afterward. Evil is not a one-off with these people, and they don’t apologize (at least, not sincerely).

The Empathy Switch

Psychopaths don’t simply lack empathy, they actually have the ability to turn it on and off at will. It’s a switch.

Is the appearance of having empathy useful to them? Watch them make a rousing speech about something you care about so you vote for them. Once they disappear off the stage, the pretense goes with them.

Transcending the Tribe

Psychopathy is hard to deal with for most normal people not just because it’s terrifying, but also because it crosses the tribal boundaries we’re so used to using to define “our people” and “others”.

There are just as many psychopaths in your Church as there are in the Mosque down the street. And just as many good people in both places, too. And that’s hard to hear, because it means there are people you considered “on your team” who really aren’t on any team but their own – and, even harder to accept – it means you can’t use some obvious visual identifier to distinguish between friend and foe.

The psychopath doesn’t dress in a particular way. They don’t have a certain color of skin, or gender, or religious belief. They could literally be anyone.

It’s much easier to fool yourself into thinking the enemy is going to wear a specific identifier than accept the truth that they hide among us.

The Fallacy of Free Societies

The difficult truth is that we will never be free as long as we allow psychopaths to walk in our midst.

We could build the most elaborate constitution to protect our rights; the most well-balanced system of checks; decentralized organizations. It won’t matter. As long as psychopaths are allowed to walk among us, they will find a way to exploit and control any system for their benefit. They corrupt everything they touch; and many things they build are corrupt from the get go (including your government).

Advocates for self-government and free markets will often talk about aligning incentives so that strangers benefit each other – but these systems only work on normal human beings. Psychopaths work by a different ruleset. They’re not just after money, and they don’t want to live a peaceful life.

They want power, control, authority. Not for any ulterior purpose, but for the sake of power itself. They’ll work outside the free market system. They’ll conspire. They’ll arrogate power to themselves, little by little, until there’s nothing left of your free society.

And they have no moral qualms. You can’t teach the non-aggression principle to someone who sees you as an ant to be stomped on. That’s one of the likely reasons why every decentralized and free society that has ever existed (and there have been many) has been taken over by a government.

It’s not that they couldn’t figure out the perfect institutional arrangement and rules to maintain their society. It’s because they didn’t see the wolves in sheep’s clothing among them.

The only solution is identification and ostracism – but this will not even begin to start if we can’t look at the situation clearly and recognize who the real enemies are.

Psychopaths in Myths

Many cultures on earth have independently realized the same thing, and encoded elements of psychopathy into their myths and stories.

The vampire who hides at night and drinks your blood, and cares so much about keeping their bloodline pure. That’s a metaphor for the parasitical royal class who for thousands of years have valued inbreeding above the health of their children. Why? Because psychopathic traits are heavily heritable.

The Japanese had Kitsunes, foxes who would put on a beautiful human face so they could get close enough to you before you could react.

The Navajo have skin-walkers. Indians have the Rakshasa. Changelings. Reptilians. Werewolves. The list goes on.

It’s always evil wearing the mask of something familiar.

Psychopaths in Children’s Stories

Teaching our children about psychopaths is so important to us, on some level, that we’ve been telling the same stories to them for centuries. A warning passed down from generation to generation.

In the Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf learns to speak like a human, copies the grandmother’s voice, and wears her clothes.

Aesop wrote about the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Hansel and Gretel. Snow White.

We’ve been warning our children about psychopaths through stories and metaphors. Never directly. What are we so afraid of?

Solutions

Decentralization and exit & build are all important, but none of them can substitute for identifying the personality type that will patiently exploit every safeguard you build into your intentional community or fledgling nation.

Today that means watching patterns of conduct and refusing to hand trust or authority to people who repeatedly lie, manipulate, and harm without remorse. In the future, it may also mean using physiological and neurological screening tools built from research we already have (more on that later).

Voluntary communities should be free to use those tools, weigh the evidence, and ostracize people they reasonably conclude pose a threat. I’m not advocating for coercion or any kind of government action. I’m saying free people should show more discretion about who they associate with.

The alternative is to keep pretending every human mind follows the same moral rules, then act surprised when the wolves capture the sheepfold again. We have spent thousands of years warning our children about predators wearing familiar faces. It is time adults stopped treating the warning as a fairy tale.

To trace the myths and stories told about psychopaths, I’ve created a new site called the Oldest Fear. Click on the various cards to learn more about each myth.

Want to support my work? Becoming a supporter unlocks more features on Lookout Map and helps fund free projects like The Collapse Index.

Interested in solutions to the problem of identifying psychopaths? We’ll address that more in future installments of this series on Psychopathy, Ponerology & Power.

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I wanted something that goes beyond debt and financial indicators though, so I built my own. I call it The Collapse Index.

The dashboard tracks 38 indicators, pulling live data from over a dozen sources. The data is all presented in a single dashboard, and each indicators has its own chart. Click into any one of them for more details.

Here’s the data on the strategic petroleum reserve, going back to 1982. You can see we’re at a low we haven’t been at in over 43 years.

But there’s more than just economic indicators here. The index also tracks how much of the U.S. is in severe drought, PFAS in drinking water, sperm counts, port container dwell time, confidence in institutions, grid outage in minutes, and much more.

All the indicators are summed up together, weighted, and you get an overall score, which right now sits at 4.9 out of 10. If it goes up, we’re edging closer to collapse. Lower is better. Right now we’re kind of in the middle.

You can also decide what should matter most for yourself. Open the methodology page and pick a weighted preset, or adjust every slider yourself.

The site is completely free. Explore The Collapse Index.

If you find it useful, send it to someone who might want a clearer picture of where things stand.

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I’ve had an interesting conversation with another user on Substack. I think there are several important lessons here that I want to discuss as it applies to the liberty and skeptic movements as a whole, because until we really internalize these lessons we’re going to be stuck spinning our wheels and, frankly, people will continue to not take us seriously.

I found this user because he was posting some anti-government memes and I thought, oh - this guy gets it! But then everything fell apart. The same person posting anti-government memes also thinks gravity is fake, the earth stands still (no rotation, no orbit around the sun), and basically all of modern physics is a lie. Satellites are fake (they’re just balloons apparently) and every picture from space is a NASA CGI fake.

Why am I sharing my run in with this person? Because this position is fundamentally a self-defeating one and I see it all the time.

The Wrong Rabbithole

There are some serious rabbit holes out there on the internet, that lead down some very uncomfortable truths. For instance, the CIA really did run a secretive program called MKULTRA. The U.S. government really did torture people in Abu Ghraib. Operation Paperclip really did bring thousands of Nazi scientists (many implicated in crimes) to the U.S. instead of putting them in prison. These are documented facts that are well proven, and yet the government tried (and crucially, failed) to keep them secret.

Then there’s the fake rabbit holes. The idea that the earth is flat, gravity isn’t real, or that the government possesses incredible secret spacecraft with anti-gravity tech that nobody knows about.

Why are these a problem?

1. They waste your time.

2. They confuse you and disable your ability to reason. Spend enough time reading this nonsense and you risk actually going crazy.

3. They make everything seem like a lie, which erodes your ability to trust in the basic reality of what’s around you, which in turn stops you from enacting meaningful change in your life.

4. They discredit you when you talk to people who can think and reason, and therefore, unfortunately, often discredit all of the other positions you hold too, even if they happen to be correct. Basically, you get labeled a raving lunatic and the metaphorical baby is thrown out with the bathwater.

5. They make the government seem far more powerful than it really is.

Discrediting Yourself

Let’s talk about point 4 in a bit more detail first.

Imagine you approach a normie friend and tell them “We don’t need a coercive monopoly on violence to have roads. The government is both evil and inefficient and should be abolished. We can figure out how to build roads without violence.”

That’s a tough pill to swallow. What are you really saying? You’re not just making a claim about roads. That would be fairly trivial.

No - you’re actually challenging the fundamental worldview underpinning everything this person believes about society. If the government isn’t necessary, something they’ve been told since they were a small child, then they’ve been lied to. By their parents, by their teachers, by their “elected” “leaders”. The news broadcasts, the books, everything they know about reality.

Man, are they going to fight you hard on this. They will do whatever mental gymnastics are required to disprove you, even if your position is unassailable. You therefore already have a difficult proposition ahead of you; but now imagine that in addition to that you say, “Oh, and the earth is flat.”

Boom. Instant dismissal. Now your normie friend can safely categorize you as a crazy person - as someone who is not to be taken seriously. “Phew - I knew they were wrong about that taxation is slavery thing.”

Your ability to reach people is inversely proportional to how crazy you sound, and libertarians and anarchists already sound pretty crazy just advocating for liberty (as sad as that is).

Government is not omnipotent

But perhaps the bigger problem is not what thinking this way does to others opinion of you - it’s what it does to your own worldview.

If everything is a lie. If everything is a psyop or a false flag, then government becomes this near-omnipotent boogie monster. A leviathan not just in size and evil, but in competence. And that’s a tough pill to swallow.

How can we fight back against an omnipotent power that has super advanced secret anti-gravity ships? That can keep secrets like “gravity is fake” for centuries? We can’t.

And if you believe this, you’re disabling your own abilities before we even get started.

It’s the same kind of position that sees everything as a false flag. “Oh, look, that explosion happened! It couldn’t have been terrorists, it must have been the government!”

Do governments blow stuff up and pretend it was someone else with false flags? Yes, sometimes.

Do actual terrorists exist who also blow stuff up? Yes, sometimes.

Is everything a government false flag or psyop? No.

And in thinking it is, we give the government far more credit than they deserve. In reality, some things are done moderately competently by the government. For instance, they’re pretty good at incarcerating (kidnapping) people. They’ve had a lot of practice, after all.

It’s a bizarre position to be in - to both disclaim the government as a bunch of corrupt, evil and incompetent psychopaths, while also saying they’re exceptionally good at keeping secrets and have all of these super secret technologies.

The “They Admit it!” fallacy

Notice what’s happening in this conversation below.

This person is both using NASA as a source to substantiate his opinion and then immediately after that discrediting NASA as a biased source and saying it proves nothing. He even calls me stupid, for good measure.

You might think I’m just screenshotting this to make fun of this person contradicting themselves; but there is another, bigger reason. I call it the “They Admit It!” fallacy. I see it in the conspiracy theorist community all the time.

They say the government is constantly lying about everything, but as soon as someone in the government happens to say something that they agree with, suddenly it’s trustworthy. “They admitted it!” Oh, the people who are liars admitted something? And now we trust them? But if they contradict us they’re categorically worthless?

A position like this exists in a state of constant cognitive dissonance.

Skepticism is a Method, not a Knee-Jerk Reaction

Real skepticism is not automatically believing the opposite of whatever NASA, the government, or the news says. If an institution makes a claim and you reflexively invert it, that institution is still doing your thinking for you.

The standard you use to determine if something is true should remain the same no matter who is speaking. Just because someone in the skeptic community says something, doesn’t automatically make it true.

The questions we should be asking ourselves are:

What exactly is the claim? What evidence supports it? Can any of that evidence be checked independently? What would prove the claim wrong?

The user who prompted this post would not accept any evidence or logic that contradicted his belief. Every objection became further evidence that the deception was even larger than it appeared. At that point, the belief was no longer a conclusion drawn from evidence. It had become an article of faith.

Extreme certainty in the face of limited evidence is a warning sign, especially when honest questions produce anger instead of answers. Anger does not prove that a claim is false, but it may show that the belief has become part of someone’s identity and is no longer being tested honestly.

Can we trust the government?

The anarchist in me wants to scream, “No!”

But, in fact, that would be too simplistic.

A government source is not true merely because it is official. It’s also not false merely because it is official. The same applies to an anonymous account, a viral video, an alternative-media personality, or a meme. Evidence does not become stronger because it confirms what we already suspect.

The liberty movement cannot afford to replace blind trust in institutions with blind distrust of reality. Our actual argument is already radical: no person acquires the moral right to coerce another by winning an election, wearing a badge, or acting through an agency. We do not need fake physics, omnipotent secret cabals, or a theory that explains every explosion, election, war, and technological development. The documented record of what governments do is damning enough.

Government is dangerous because it holds coercive power, not because it is all-knowing or all-capable. Governments contain rival factions, make mistakes, lose wars, expose their own crimes, leak secrets, and frequently fail at what they attempt. They can also lie, coordinate, conceal wrongdoing, and exploit events they did not create.

That distinction matters because omnipotence produces fatalism. If every event is scripted, every witness is controlled, every photograph is fabricated, and every contrary fact proves the cover-up, then nothing can be known and nothing can be done.

That is not skepticism. It is surrender.

You surrender your judgment, your peace of mind, and your ability to act. The state does not have to defeat you; your belief in its omnipotence has already convinced you that resistance is futile.

Good skepticism should make us harder to fool and more capable of acting. It should help us identify real abuses, protect ourselves, reduce our dependence on coercive institutions, and build voluntary alternatives. If a worldview instead leaves us terrified of an unbeatable enemy and unable to trust anything around us, it has not liberated us. It has merely found another way to disable us.

That is the standard we need: hard to fool, but still willing to learn.

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The Aimless Generations

I see generations of children growing up who never had to do anything as kids. I know because I’m one of them.

I grew up in a city. My parents did everything for me. Besides a handful of minor chores like taking out the trash and cleaning up my room, I was essentially not a helpful member of the household. It’s not because I was lazy - my parents didn’t want my help. And I’m not the only one. This is now the default.

Whole generations are growing up in cities where our lives are of no consequence until we suddenly become adults, and then we encounter the real world - big, scary, and anxiety-provoking. It took me years to overcome that, find my footing, and become a self-actualizing adult.

The real world doesn’t care for incompetent and incapable people. If you can’t look someone else in the eye and maintain a conversation, you will struggle to make friends, find a job, or even just function in society.

That’s why we see so many young adults who grew up not making their own food often default to eating out in college. After 18 years of life on this planet - they never learned the basic skill of cooking for themselves. Never mind critical thinking, map reading, budgeting, carpentry, bushcraft, or any number of other useful skills they should have been learning.

But that’s what childhood is for. It’s for experimenting, learning, doing, playing, and having purpose. That’s not something you’re meant to learn at 18 when you’re thrust into your first job, college, or a special “how to be an adult” program (yes, they’re real).

Our Job as Parents

As parents it’s easy for us to say, “I’ll just do it myself”, and exclude our kids from various tasks. It’s often faster to just get things done myself, right? But then I have to ask myself, why did I bother having kids if I’m just going to be impatient and rush off to do chores myself?

Every day I go to the garden my 3 year-old wants to come with me. He’s cute and I love his enthusiasm - but I also have to be patient as he takes several minutes to put on his shoes, gets distracted several times on the way there, and then whines about how it’s hot.

But when he comes back with a basket of vegetables for our family to eat, he has purpose. He’s learning. He’s helping. His life has meaning. And he gets to hang out with his dad.

The interesting thing is, sometimes he really does help. And if I didn’t give him a chance, he’d never be able to prove his value in the garden. And he’s just 3. Imagine what he could do when he’s 10!

We need to stop babying our children. Stop finishing hard tasks for them, or doing something for them because they’re taking “too long”. I’m not saying don’t help when they genuinely need help (they need to know they’ll get help when they need it and that we love them), but have discernment. Don’t rush in too quickly, let them try to finish a difficult thing first. Overcoming difficulty is how confidence is built.

Every cucumber picked, every screw tightened, every step stool moved - every little thing they do adds up. My kids, as little as they are, can independently go and feed our animals, let out the chickens, collect eggs, pick tomatoes, put on their own bandaids for each other, and so on.

Of course, if you live in a city, you might need to get creative. People aren’t meant to live in concrete boxes on top of each other, produce none of their own food, and be plugged into an endless entertainment machine all day long. They’re meant to wander, explore, build, sow, harvest. All of that requires a homestead. That’s one of the reasons we moved out of the city - I genuinely don’t think children can thrive growing up in that kind of environment.

When they grow up, my kids will have had an almost two-decade long track record of working hard, failing, trying again, and succeeding. Building self-confidence isn’t done overnight. It’s not done with a self-help book or a therapy session. It’s done one step at a time, proving to yourself that you can get things done, that you’re competent, and that what you do matters.

Don’t take that away from your children.

About a week ago, a Federal judge issued an injunction against the NFA, barring the ATF from enforcing the NFA requirements for suppressor purchases and transfers for specific groups of people.

Wondering if you’re covered? I made a quiz.

As a reminder for those unfamiliar, the ATF is the criminal organization responsible for the Ruby Ridge and Waco massacres as well as countless other crimes, and exists in direct violation of the 2nd amendment.

What is the NFA?

The NFA, an unconstitutional piece of legislation, has for 92 years mandated that purchasing a silencer, a device used to reduce hearing damage, required paying a $200 tax stamp, submitting fingerprints to the FBI and ATF, going through a bunch of paperwork, and then waiting for about a year for approval. Oh and of course you’re now in a Federal registry, another unconstitutional monster.

When it was first written in 1934, the $200 tax was a big deal. Back then, new cars cost $450! The law essentially made it completely unaffordable to purchase silencers for the average American. Luckily, the politicians who drafted it were stupid and forgot to account for inflation, and as a side-effect of the Federal Reserve destroying the U.S. currency, $200 in 2026 isn’t unaffordable anymore. See - everything has a silver lining!

For many years now, Gun Owners of America, SilencerShop, and several other organizations and companies have been fighting to repeal the NFA. Last year, Congress removed the $200 tax stamp, and in the last week we had another major victory; since the ATF has been collecting absurd $0 tax stamps and maintaining an illegal registry, the Federal judge in this case has finally issued an injunction and ruled this practice illegal.

The DOJ decided not to appeal, and declared that publicly. Some people think this is a concession from the DOJ, but I suspect they just didn’t want the appeal going to the Supreme Court, which would have struck down the illegal NFA registry at a national level.

Legal Double Standards

Instead, what we now have is a complicated patchwork of who can and cannot purchase silencers without going through the NFA registry. That’s because the injunction only covers certain people. For instance, are you a member of Gun Owners of America? Great, you’re covered. But wait - do you live in California? Sorry, suppressors are still banned there. Do you live in Texas? Great. Georgia? Georgia still has state laws requiring you comply with the NFA and file a Form 4 with the ATF.

Are you in a covered state like Texas but purchasing a suppressor from a local gun store and not a member of Gun Owners of America? You’re also not covered.

This injunction has increased freedom for some Americans while vastly complicating the suppressor legal framework and landscape. And that’s not an accident, folks. The whole point of these laws is to confuse Americans and lay traps for them, so that the average American commits an average of 3 felonies per day without even knowing it. The idea is to criminalize normal behavior so that if the government ever wants to target you, they can.

I Made a Silencer NFA Quiz

So I’ve decided to try to help people figure out if they’re covered by this new injunction or not. I created this guide page which has a quiz. Answer the questions and it’ll tell you if you’re covered (mind you, this is not legal advice!).

I also added a new map layer to Lookout Map that shows suppressor freedom in the 50 states (alongside many other awesome layers like raw milk freedom, homeschooling freedom, and others).

Hopefully these help and we can keep moving towards abolishing these stupid laws that prevent Americans from legally protecting their hearing. A silencer is a tube of metal. You should be able to buy it like anything else and have it shipped to your door. Maybe we’ll get there one day.

I know I’m not generally an advocate for legal or political solutions to problems, but credit where credit is due - GOA has been doing an excellent job of fighting for Americans’ gun rights, and therefore their right to protect their life, liberty, and property, for decades now. And while I urge readers to focus on Exiting & Building, I do appreciate when the other methods move the needle towards freedom, too.

• “Is there an EPA Superfund site near me?”

• “Are there Flock cameras on the way to work?”

• “How much glyphosate is being sprayed near that property I want to make an offer on?”

• And many more.

A Map for People Who Care about Freedom and their Health

I wanted to build a privacy-first routing service too, so Lookout Map runs its own routing server. That means instead of just knowing where the hazards are, you can route around them. This route below offers a way around most cameras in this dystopian town in New York State, going from over 22 cameras along the fastest route to just 6 with the alternative one. You can also choose to prioritize avoiding high crime areas or other hazards. Oh and unlike Google, we don’t store or log the routes or associate them with users.

Some of the layers are free, and some require a subscription. The county comparison feature is free, with 22 map layers comparing everything from crime rates and voting patterns to gas prices and the home value-to-income ratio - a crucial affordability metric. Over 700,000 cell, 5G, TV, and FM towers are free too.

Paid map layers include over 50,000 springs, EMF radiation modeling, nuclear fallout modeling, military bases, detailed LiDAR contours of the entire country (very useful if you want to site a pond, put in a driveway, or figure out if your neighbor’s farm is going to contaminate your future dream property with run-off), and dozens more.

If you do decide to subscribe you’re also supporting The Liberty Lookout, and you get access to other tools like a garden planner and several more that are currently in development (see libertytoolkit.com for all our sites). Most will be free, some will have paid features, and one subscription will cover them all.

More will be going live in the next few weeks, so look out for more announcements.

Why a subscription? Well, I considered trying to make a living from my Substack newsletter, but I just wasn’t sure if there was enough value there. With these tools I feel like I’m providing far more value to people, and I think the world needs more tools for liberty-minded folks to help them exit & build and achieve liberty in their lifetimes - rather than more newsletters (though I have no plans of stopping writing!).

The map is still in development. I’m actively adding more layers and improving functionality. If you want something added or fixed, let me know. I’d love to hear any feedback.

Why I Built The Lookout Map

When my wife and I were deciding where we should live, we had a lot of criteria. Freedom was important, but so was the weather. What were the gun laws like? Could I hunt with a silencer? Could we do a home birth? Will the homeschooling laws be onerous? If our A/C goes down in the summer, will we melt into a puddle of misery and sweat?

Questions like this turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. What about severed estates? Many states have property laws that severed the land from the timber or mineral rights decades ago and buying a parcel you’d often never know. Realtors don’t have the best incentive structure when it comes to selling you land, so don’t expect them to do all the research for you.

You could easily end up with a nice parcel, build a house, and then 10 years later the company that owns the mining rights decides it’s going to come for what’s underground and bulldoze everything in its way. So much for your dream homestead.

What about restrictive covenants that say you can’t have chickens or hang your laundry outside? (No, seriously, we saw several properties like that). Is there an EPA Superfund site nearby that’s contaminating your future well? A nearby military base that would be a target in a major nuclear exchange? Wildfires? Earthquakes? Glyphosate contamination? The list of hazards is almost endless.

Then there’s consideration that must be given to the trappings of modern civilizations. Cell towers and transmission lines. EMF exposure is a serious issue, as I’ve been writing about tirelessly.

It took us a few years to settle on which state we wanted to live in (and we moved a lot before we did), and then another few years to settle on a county and finally buy the property we wanted. Along the way I consulted dozens of maps, data sheets on EMF exposure, and drove around with EMF meters to dozens of properties.

After going through that experience, many of our friends and family have been asking me for advice. How do I check if my property floods? What’s the safe distance to a cell tower? I realized we weren’t the only ones who were so picky! It makes sense. If you’re going to put down roots and build a homestead that you hope your kids will inherit, you don’t want to do that right next to a toxic dump. Spending an extra year or two looking for the right place can save you many headaches later on.

Of course, no place is perfect, and you’ll have to make compromises or you’ll end up like some of our other friends - years into the search and never finding anything. I’d rather be on imperfect land than renting in an apartment in a city.

The truth is every property has something wrong with it, but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Find something that meets enough of your criteria in a state that respects enough of your freedoms, and then start homesteading, plant a garden, get chickens, do your thing, and breathe the fresh air of freedom.

For instance, our property had no streams or running water; so rather than spend far more money on one that did, we just built ponds and collect rainwater from our roof.

I built this mapping tool to help the thousands of liberty-minded people out there looking for a place to call home. And for the people who are already settled in, this’ll make you far more aware of your surroundings and the hazards nearby so that you can better prepare for them.

I’m also a software engineer and a map nerd, so building this was just frankly fun.

Please check out lookoutmap.com and let me know what you think!

If there’s one thing the war with Iran has revealed, it’s that the U.S. government is woefully underprepared for any sustained conflict, despite spending more on its military than China, Russia, and many more countries combined.

In the first few months of the war with Iran, the U.S. military used up over 1,000 tomahawk missiles, leaving only 2,000 in stockpiles. A third of its inventory, for a war with no strategic benefit to the U.S., that Americans are paying for at the pump and Iranians are paying for with their lives.

The U.S. military budget is now over $1.5 trillion dollars for 2027. An eye-watering amount for a nation running an annual deficit of $1.9 trillion, exceeding the entire annual spending of the British government.

You’d think that money would be going towards actual preparations for future wars. Instead, it appears to be largely corruption and graft. It is well known that the Pentagon routinely overpays for everything from missiles to toilets by orders of magnitude. That would be bad enough if at least the average American was getting something out of it.

A Pentagon official said last week, “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that.” They know it, and they’re continuing this pointless war anyway. Trump can’t think more than about a week ahead. Despite saying “America first” in his campaign promises, he’s left the U.S. more vulnerable than it has been in decades.

America’s annual Tomahawk production is about 86 per year. That means in this pointless war with Iran, the U.S. consumed over 10 years of Tomahawk missile production.

And it’s not just Tomahawks. The THAAD interceptors the U.S. military uses to shoot down enemy missiles are in even worse shape. There were exactly zero delivered between July 2023 and now, with none expected until April 2027.

U.S. batteries fired 943 Patriot interceptors in the first 4 days of the Iranian war, using up 1.5 years of Lockheed and Boeing production. There’s such a backlog for missile orders that most of them won’t be getting fulfilled until 2030 and beyond. The stockpile picture is bleak.

Being Israel’s puppet has serious consequences.

The U.S. military is now even more vulnerable to China and Russia. China has been eyeing a ground invasion of Taiwan for years. They run annual drills. Taiwan’s TSMC produces 70% of all the world’s chips. The U.S. military has committed to protecting them, but how would they? They’re tied up on the other side of the world, using up their missiles to fuel Trump’s ego and bravado. China gets to sit back and watch their enemy make a mistake, and as the quote goes - they’re not interrupting.

What happens to all those extremely expensive aircraft carriers the U.S. government likes to intimate other countries with when a barrage of Chinese missiles hits them and there’s no interceptors left to protect them?

China, having spent the past 30 years industrializing, can build 5-6x as many missiles as the U.S., and has a shipbuilding capacity 230x that of the U.S. In any prolonged war the U.S. would run out of supplies in the first few months and then be completely unprotected. Major wars last for years, not months, and neither the U.S. military stockpile nor its industrial base can support this.

The corrupt politicians in D.C. have spent the past few decades invading countries around the world under false pretenses and stealing taxpayer money, while depleting the military’s actual reserves, leaving Americans less secure than ever before; while making everyone around the world hate them.

The U.S. military is a paper dragon, and it won’t take much adversity to knock it over - and with it, the U.S. empire.

Prepare accordingly.

The Exit

We can’t do anything to stop the government’s out of control spending. We can’t vote our way out of this mess. The U.S. will go bankrupt, and its enemies are waiting, patiently.

What we can do is become so independent of the system that when bad things happen, their impact is minimized on us. Move out of the city, grow a garden, start exercising, connect with your neighbors, go off the grid so grid disruptions don’t affect you.

I’m writing a series on prepping here and a series on homesteading here. Don’t wait for things to get bad, by then it’s too late. You can’t buy fencing and get chickens when supply chains snap. You’ve seen what happened during COVID. Don’t let yourself get caught by surprise.

Have you ever tried to talk to a family member about liberty and run into a wall? No matter how good the arguments you make, they just don’t get it. Take the non-aggression principle: it’s so simple! It elevates consent to the primary determination of whether an action is moral or not. It’s probably the simplest, most self-evident moral framework in existence, far simpler to understand than the endless inconsistencies and contradictions found in government or religious law.

And yet - to this day I’ve only ever convinced one person, my wife. Everyone else stubbornly refuses to change their minds. From people who don’t even understand the basics, to the ones who seem to understand and even agree on some surface level, but the next time you talk to them, it’s like the past conversation never happened. They didn’t get enlightened, they just nodded to placate you and then went right back to their regular lives.

For years I assumed I was just not good enough at putting my point across. If only I was a better orator, more charismatic, had better arguments, I could finally “convert” my friends and family to my viewpoint.

It turns out, my approach had been wrong. My entire worldview was a projection of my own desire for freedom unto others. Most people don’t care about freedom. We discussed that in part 1. Those people are essentially immune to arguments.

Robert Kegan, a Harvard developmental psychologist, found that more than half of adults never develop past the “socialized” developmental phase where their identity comes almost entirely from their social milieu.

These people simply haven’t developed the ability to reason for themselves, to form their own opinions. Key & Peele have a fantastic sketch about this here, it’s both funny and true.

When you’re trying to convince them to change their mind and stop supporting another war, more taxes, or some specific regulation that infringes on your liberty, you’re not just asking them to think for themselves and make up their own mind - something they haven’t developed the psychological ability to do - you’re also asking them to go against the grain of the social group they’re in - an unthinkable proposition to the majority, for whom conformism has become a way of life (just look at most people’s reaction to COVID mandates).

Arrested Development

As parents we often worry whether our kids are talking at the right level, if the fact that they repeatedly skip from twelve to fourteen when counting is okay, and so on. Yet we almost never wonder about the development stage an adult is at.

Kegan makes the point that the human mind can stall, in fact, most minds have. In part 1 we went over the different developmental stages. Two thirds of adults never make it past the first three stages. The last two stages, the ones where people can actually form their own opinions and do something independent with their lives? Only about one third make it here.

That’s not to say that people stuck in stage 3 are stupid. I’ve met a staggering number of smart people who cannot think for themselves. They can excel at their jobs, at mathematics, at science, at any number of things, all while not holding a single original thought in their brain.

I had a friend in high school who was academically the smartest kid in our year. He had good grades, excelled at mathematics, and always knew the answer to anything the teacher would ask. But he was deeply Catholic, and I had just started thinking critically about religion at this time. I tried to talk to him, to ask questions, to make arguments, and he would just shut down. I was watching this very smart young man’s brain stall and sputter. He would become so uncomfortable he had to physically excuse himself and leave the room because his brain couldn’t handle the cognitive dissonance created by my questions (which would highlight simple contradictions in the bible) and his beliefs.

I’m not here to pick on Catholics. It’s the same with anyone who holds strongly to any dogma and can’t defend it with reasoning - because they didn’t arrive at it with reasoning. You can’t reason someone out of religion because they were never reasoned into it.

The “trust the science” scientists who don’t want you looking at the studies too closely, they’re the same. The liberals who push the LGBT agenda, the conservatives who push “back the blue”. None of these people realize their thoughts are not their own.

The Exploitable Masses

Because modern life places an ever-increasing number of demands upon us that require independent thought:

• Taking our kids out of school and homeschooling them so they don’t become brainwashed, illiterate automatons,

• Homesteading and growing our own food so we can eat healthy instead of depleted, pesticide-ridden produce,

• Going off-grid to become resilient as the grid continues to degrade,

• Saving for retirement independently without relying on government benefits or dollar-pegged investment funds,

• Finding a partner who will have the willpower to stand up for your kids when the government wants to vaccinate them with yet another cocktail of drugs,

• Making changes to your life and environment so that your body doesn’t become increasingly toxified and infertile,

• etc.

But people stuck in stage 3 cannot accomplish these tasks, and so they have mounting anxiety. This inability to self-actualize combined with anxiety stemming from an ever-increasing number of demands placed by modern life creates the perfect citizen.

Think about this from the government’s perspective. If you’re a psychopath (1-4% of the population) and you want to control others, people stuck in stage 3 are perfect. They’re often agreeable and psychologically cannot fathom challenging authority or straying from their social programming.

This isn’t a political failure. We don’t need a change of government - that won’t solve anything at all.

We need to fundamentally change the way children are raised so that they become self-actualizing adults and not conformist automatons. Everything else is political theater meant to distract us from the fundamental problem. The solution is inter-generational and will take decades. There is no other way to achieve lasting liberty. As long as a large majority of the population want government because they fear freedom and responsibility, we will continue to get government no matter what political “safeguards” are put in place.

No constitution can protect us from this inevitability.

And this goes beyond politics. In one study, the vast majority of managers and executives, 85%, were in stage 3 or lower - above even the average across the population.

You know that manager who wants to delegate but can’t help micromanage everyone because they don’t want to make themselves disposable? I’ve had my share of those.

The Inevitable Failure of Democracy

If you read about democracy in a textbook you’ll get the idealized version: people get a choice. They can research the topics, reason about issues, and vote for who will most likely achieve the promised goals (never mind that politicians have no moral right to do anything whatsoever).

Yet according to Kegan’s research, two thirds of the population aren’t even psychologically capable of doing this - and the third that is are probably the third that doesn’t vote because they know it’s pointless.

In reality, adults stuck in stage 3 or below blindly follow whatever group they’re in. Whenever their group’s position changes, their views change, and they don’t even notice. That’s how you’ll find liberals defending a war that they would have opposed 3 years ago. The hypocrisy is endemic.

This is why the culture war ends up dictating politics, and not reasoned arguments, every time.

In part 3 we’ll cover how childhood manufactures compliance. And why you want your kids to be defiant. As parents all too often we want our kids to just obey us, and then we’re surprised when they go along with the group and government edicts. What did you think would happen if you spent years dictating compliance to authority as a virtue?

Sources:

- Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Harvard University Press.

- Kegan, R. (1982). The Evolving Self. Harvard University Press.

- Kegan, R. & Lahey, L.L. (2009). Immunity to Change. Harvard Business Press.

- Rooke, D. & Torbert, W. (2005). “Seven Transformations of Leadership.” Harvard Business Review.

- Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart.

- DiMaggio, P.J. & Powell, W.W. (1983). “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism.” American Sociological Review, 48(2), 147-160.

- Piaget, J. (1972). “Intellectual Evolution from Adolescence to Adulthood.” Human Development, 15, 1-12.

- Ryan, R.M. & Deci, E.L. (2000). “Self-determination theory.” American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.

A lot of pro-liberty folks have a core assumption in their arguments and worldview - that people want to be free. That if you just show them their chains, they’ll want to shrug them off. That if you lead by example, and show them the tyranny, they’ll go buy land and want to be off-the-grid too. But it’s simply not true.

What’s stopping mass adoption of liberty isn’t lack of knowledge or means, it’s the unwillingness of most people to be free.

Give them the option, and they’ll hand the keys right back. They’ll vote for the next authority figure promising to make their decisions for them, join the next movement that tells them what to think, and feel genuinely relieved when someone else takes the wheel.

This isn’t a political mystery. It’s a psychological one. And several decades of research across completely unrelated fields keep landing on the same uncomfortable answer.

The 1%: Born to Rule

Robert Hare spent his career studying psychopathy. His Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) is the gold standard diagnostic tool: 20 items, scored 0-40, with a score of 30 or higher marking the clinical threshold for psychopathy.

In his 1999 book Without Conscience, Hare estimated that roughly 1% of the general population meets this strict clinical threshold. Broader measures, which flag milder cases the clinical interview would exclude, put the number higher, around 4 to 5%.

The thing is - that 1% doesn’t distribute evenly.

A 2010 study by Babiak, Neumann, and Hare examined 203 corporate professionals who had been selected by their companies for management development programs. These weren’t random employees. These were the ones identified as leadership material. The results: 3.9% scored 30 or higher on the PCL-R - the same strict checklist behind that 1% figure - roughly four times the general population rate. Almost one in twenty-five of the corporate world’s chosen leaders met the strict clinical threshold for psychopathy.

The kicker: psychopathy was positively associated with ratings of charisma and presentation style. The psychopaths weren’t getting flagged as problems. They were getting promoted. The system selected for them.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s watched how power works. Positions of authority are attractive to people who want to control others. Psychopaths are drawn to those positions the way moths are drawn to light. And the traits that make them dangerous (charm, fearlessness, willingness to manipulate) are the same traits that make them look like “leaders” to the people doing the hiring and the voting.

The 80%: Escape from Freedom

If the 1% are the predators, the vast majority are the willing prey. Not because they’re stupid. Because freedom is genuinely terrifying when you lack the psychological infrastructure to handle it.

Erich Fromm figured this out in 1941. A German Jewish psychoanalyst who had watched Hitler’s rise firsthand, Fromm published Escape from Freedom asking a question that haunted him: why did millions of people voluntarily embrace a totalitarian regime? His answer wasn’t propaganda, or economic despair, or national humiliation, though those played roles. His answer was that freedom itself produces anxiety, and most people will do anything to escape that anxiety, including handing their autonomy to a dictator.

Fromm drew a sharp distinction between “freedom from” (liberation from external control) and “freedom to” (the creative capacity to direct your own life). You can have the first without the second. And when you do, the result isn’t liberation. It’s vertigo. You’ve been freed from the old authority, but you have no internal compass to replace it. The ground drops out.

(This is why so many people who become atheists immediately turn around and cling to the state as their god.)

Faced with that vertigo, Fromm identified three escape mechanisms:

Authoritarianism: Surrendering to a new authority. Submit to a leader, a party, a movement, a doctrine. The authoritarian personality contains both masochism (desire to submit) and sadism (desire to control those below you in the new hierarchy). It’s not just obedience. It’s relief.

Destructiveness: What you can’t control, destroy. If the world’s complexity is overwhelming, burn it down. This is the Antifa crowd.

Automaton conformity: The most insidious escape, and the most relevant today. People unconsciously adopt the beliefs, preferences, and behaviors that society expects, and then experience them as their own genuine choices. Fromm’s words from 1941 read like a prophecy for the social media age: “We have become automatons who live under the illusion of being self-willing individuals.”

That third mechanism is the one to sit with. The automaton conformist doesn’t know they’ve surrendered their autonomy. They think they’re thinking for themselves. They genuinely believe their opinions are their own. They just happen to be identical to whatever their social group, media ecosystem, or institutional affiliation demands.

Kegan’s Numbers

Robert Kegan, a Harvard developmental psychologist, spent decades studying how adults actually think. Not what they know, but the structure through which they process reality.

His Constructive Developmental Theory identifies five stages of psychological complexity. The first applies almost exclusively to children. The next four are where most adults live. But in essence, the earlier stages, when manifested in adults, are a sign of arrested development. An adult who didn’t develop past a certain age of intellectual maturity.

Stage 1 (the Impulsive Mind): is an early-childhood stage - roughly ages 2–4, governed by momentary impulses and perceptions with no stable self. Virtually all adults have matured beyond this phase.

Stage 2 (the Imperial Mind): Purely self-interested. Relationships are transactional. Follows rules to avoid punishment. This stage is about what you’d expect a 3-5 year-old to be. By the age of 5-6, children who are developing normally become capable of empathy and start to care about the needs of others (stage 3). That is, unless you abuse them (via spanking or in other ways). About 6% of adults never develop past this stage.

Stage 3 (the Socialized Mind): Identity comes from external sources: relationships, institutions, culture. Gets beliefs, morals, and sense of “truth” from the surrounding environment. Cannot independently answer “What do I want?” because “I” is defined by the group. This is where most adults live, about 58%.

Stage 4 (the Self-Authoring Mind): Has developed an internal compass. Can evaluate the expectations of others against a self-constructed framework. Generates their own understanding of the world. Doesn’t need external validation to know what they think. About 35% of adults get to this stage.

Stage 5 (the Self-Transforming Mind): Can hold multiple frameworks simultaneously and examine them from outside, including their own. About 1% of adults.

In his study of 342 adults, published in In Over Our Heads (Harvard University Press, 1994), Kegan found that roughly two thirds of adults operate at Stage 3 or below. Only about 35% have reached Stage 4. William Torbert independently studied 497 managers and executives using different methods and reached nearly identical conclusions.

In other words, more than half of the adult population has not developed the capacity for psychological self-authorship. Their identity, their beliefs, their values, their sense of what’s true is constituted by external structures: their employer, their party, their church, their peer group, their media diet.

When you give these people “freedom,” you’re not giving them something they want. You’re taking away the scaffolding that tells them who they are.

The 15-20%: The Ones Who Actually Want Freedom

So who does want freedom? Not as an abstract value they’ll nod along with, but as an operating principle they’ll actually live by?

Kegan’s data puts the Self-Authoring population at ~35%, but that includes people in transition between stages and those who demonstrate Stage 4 capacity only in limited domains. The consistently, robustly self-authoring population is smaller. Torbert’s parallel research, published as “Seven Transformations of Leadership” in Harvard Business Review, found that only 15% of leaders operate from post-conventional stages (what he called Individualist, Strategist, and Alchemist).

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs points to the same neighborhood. He estimated that fewer than 2% of people fully achieve self-actualization, though he believed a much larger percentage had the capacity.

Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory, built on decades of experimental research at the University of Rochester, identified autonomy as one of three basic psychological needs (alongside competence and relatedness). Their central finding: human beings can be “proactive and engaged or, alternatively, passive and alienated, largely as a function of the social conditions in which they develop and function.” When autonomy is supported, people thrive. When it’s suppressed, they become dependent, apathetic, and compliant.

But here’s the uncomfortable part of Deci and Ryan’s work: extrinsic rewards for behavior that is intrinsically motivated actually undermine the intrinsic motivation. Pay someone to do what they’d do freely, and they stop wanting to do it. This means most institutional structures (schools, corporations, governments) are actively manufacturing compliance by replacing internal motivation with external rewards and punishments. The system doesn’t just fail to develop autonomy. It actively destroys it, one child at a time.

The Milgram Pattern

Now watch what happens when you line these numbers up against completely different research domains.

Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments at Yale in 1963: participants were told by an authority figure in a lab coat to administer what they believed were dangerous electric shocks to another person. 65% complied all the way to the maximum voltage, which killed the other (pretend) person. They heard screaming. They were visibly distressed. They kept flipping the switch because a man in a coat told them to. 35% defied the authority and stopped.

Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments in 1951: participants were asked to match line lengths, a task with an obvious correct answer. Actors in the room gave obviously wrong answers. 75% of participants conformed to the group’s wrong answer at least once. But 25% never conformed, not even once, across all twelve critical trials.

Now look at the American Revolution. Historian Robert Calhoon’s research found that only 40-45% of the free colonial population actively supported the Patriots, at best “no more than a bare majority.” Paul H. Smith’s 1968 study in the William and Mary Quarterly calculated that Loyalists comprised about 19.8% of free citizens. The rest were neutral or uninvolved. Out of a colonial population of 2.5 million, just over 100,000 served in the Continental Army.

The same ratios keep appearing:

1-4% who seek to control: psychopaths (Hare), corporate psychopaths (Babiak), Kegan’s Stage 5 + Stage 2 combined.

55-80% who conform, obey, or remain passive: Milgram’s obedient 65%, Asch’s conformists, Kegan’s Stage 3, the colonial population who stayed out of the Revolution or supported the monarchy.

15-35% who resist, think independently, or act autonomously: Milgram’s defiant 35%, Asch’s 25% who never conformed, Kegan’s Stage 4 and 5, Torbert’s 15% post-conventional leaders, the active Patriots.

These researchers weren’t coordinating. They were studying different phenomena in different decades using different methods. And they kept finding the same distribution.

What This Means

This isn’t a comfortable framework. It suggests that the liberty movement is not losing an argument. It’s dealing with a species-level distribution of psychological orientation. The majority of the population does not want freedom, not because they’ve been tricked or haven’t heard the right arguments, but because freedom requires a psychological capacity that most adults haven’t developed.

The 1% who seek control and the 80% who seek someone to follow are engaged in a transaction that works for both parties. The psychopaths get power. The socialized majority gets someone to tell them who they are and what to think. Both sides are getting exactly what they want.

The 15-20% who actually want autonomy aren’t losing the debate. They’re outnumbered by people who are playing a completely different game.

This doesn’t mean the percentages are fixed, or that people can’t develop. They can. That’s the subject of the rest of this series. But it starts with seeing the landscape clearly, without the comforting illusion that everyone secretly wants to be free and just needs the right pamphlet.

They don’t. And pretending otherwise is why most liberty activism goes nowhere.

Next in the series: “Children in Adult Bodies,” a deep dive into Kegan’s developmental theory: why most adults never reach psychological autonomy, what keeps them stuck, and what it means for governance.

Sources

- Hare, R.D. (1999). Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. Guilford Press.

- Babiak, P., Neumann, C.S., & Hare, R.D. (2010). “Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk.” Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 28: 174-193.

- Sanz-García, A. et al. (2021). “Prevalence of Psychopathy in the General Adult Population.” Frontiers in Psychology.

- Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart.

- Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Harvard University Press.

- Kegan, R. & Lahey, L.L. (2009). Immunity to Change. Harvard Business Press.

- Rooke, D. & Torbert, W. (2005). “Seven Transformations of Leadership.” Harvard Business Review.

- Ryan, R.M. & Deci, E.L. (2000). “Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being.” American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.

- Maslow, A. (1954). Motivation and Personality. Harper & Row.

- Milgram, S. (1963). “Behavioral Study of Obedience.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378.

- Asch, S.E. (1951). “Effects of Group Pressure.” Groups, Leadership, and Men.

- Smith, P.H. (1968). “The American Loyalists.” William and Mary Quarterly, 25.

- Calhoon, R. (various). Works on Loyalist/Patriot strength. Cited in Journal of the American Revolution.

In the year 2000, an Amish farmer named Amos Miller attended a Weston A. Price Foundation conference with his father. He listened to Sally Fallon talk about traditional food: raw milk, grass-fed meat, fermented vegetables, the way humans ate for ten thousand years before the USDA decided it was dangerous. He went home to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and started selling it.

Twenty-six years later, his farm has been raided by federal agents, subjected to three consent decrees, slapped with $85,000 in fines, and dragged through nearly a decade of litigation across federal and state courts. His products have been blockaded, detained, and ordered destroyed.

He’s still selling. His food club has over 4,000 members nationwide. And an appeals court just ruled that Pennsylvania can’t stop him from shipping across state lines.

This is the story of the underground real food economy, and why the government keeps losing to a man who doesn’t use electricity.

What He Built

Miller’s Organic Farm operates as a private membership association out of Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, deep in Lancaster County’s Amish heartland. For a one-time $35 lifetime membership fee, you gain access to what the farm’s website calls “traditional Amish farm foods... directly to your doorstep.”

That’s not a quaint farm stand selling jars of honey. Miller’s operation sources from multiple Amish farms and ships nationwide via FedEx and UPS. The product catalog reportedly grew to over 1,200 items: raw milk, raw butter, kefir, cream, yogurt, bone broth, grass-fed beef, free-range poultry, fermented vegetables, raw cheese, and eggs from chickens that actually see the sun.

The private membership model is the key innovation. Miller’s farm doesn’t sell to “the public.” You sign a membership contract acknowledging that you understand the products are unprocessed and uninspected by government agencies, and that you’re choosing to buy them anyway. It’s a direct, consensual transaction between producer and consumer, with no middleman and no bureaucratic permission slip.

This is agorism in its purest form: a parallel economy built on voluntary exchange, operating outside the regulatory apparatus that exists, ostensibly to “protect” you from the food you’ve specifically chosen to eat.

What the Government Did About It

The feds noticed Miller around 2016, when the FDA and CDC linked a Listeria outbreak (one death in Florida, one illness in California) to raw milk from his farm. The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service demanded access to inspect his meat and poultry operations. Miller refused. FSIS sued to enforce the subpoena and won access in November 2016.

What followed was a grinding legal war that lasted seven years.

The Department of Justice secured a permanent injunction in 2019, barring Miller from selling non-federally-inspected meat and poultry. Miller kept selling. The government got a consent decree in April 2020. Miller was found in contempt in 2021. A second consent decree followed in December 2022. Then a third, in August 2023, which finally closed the federal case after Miller paid roughly $85,000 in fines and costs.

According to his attorney, internal USDA documents revealed agents laughing about putting the farmer in prison. Federal judges, to their credit, were less enthusiastic about caging a man whose crime was selling milk.

Then the state of Pennsylvania showed up.

The Raid

On January 4, 2024, agents from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture raided Miller’s farm under an administrative search warrant, backed by State Troopers. The trigger: two out-of-state children had gotten sick, reportedly from E. coli in raw eggnog.

The PDA’s evidence was thin. The eggnog tested positive for shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC), but the department never tested whether the strain found in the sick child matched the strain in the eggnog. They didn’t check for other contamination sources. The Michigan child’s family had their Miller products tested independently. Every result came back negative.

No matter. The PDA detained an estimated $100,000 worth of food on Miller’s farm and ordered it all destroyed. On January 25, a judge granted the state an ex parte injunction, meaning Miller and his attorney had no opportunity to present their side before the order was issued. Tyranny.

“Why Doesn’t He Just Get a Permit?”

This is the question everyone asks, and it’s the question that reveals how the regulatory game actually works.

Pennsylvania allows raw milk sales with a permit. There are 114 dairies operating legally in the state under those permits. Judge Thomas Sponaugle, at a February 2024 hearing, asked this exact question: “Why doesn’t he just go get a permit?“

Never mind that peaceful, consenting adults should need no permit to sell farm produce!

Miller’s attorney Robert Barnes explained: a raw milk permit in Pennsylvania limits you to selling only raw milk and aged cheese. No butter. No kefir. No yogurt. No cream. No smoothies. Getting the permit would mean abandoning most of what his 4,000+ members actually want.

The PDA agreed almost five years ago to issue regulations legalizing raw butter sales. They still haven’t done it. The permit system isn’t a reasonable accommodation. It’s a trap: accept the license, lose the business.

This is how regulatory capture works in practice. The rules aren’t written to keep you safe. They’re written to keep you small, compliant, and dependent on a system that processes 10 billion pounds of meat a year through four companies while sending armed agents after an Amish farmer with a butter churn.

The Fight Back

On February 29, 2024, hundreds of supporters rallied outside the Lancaster County courthouse. Barnes submitted 354 written testimonials from food club members and brought four to testify in person about how Miller’s food had improved their health.

Medical biologist Margaret Coleman, who formerly worked for the USDA, reviewed all 33 samples the PDA took from the farm. Eight showed evidence of harmful microbes. But Coleman testified that the percentages present were “well below” harmful limits even by the FDA’s own standards.

The judge kept the raw milk injunction in place for in-state sales, but amended it to allow Miller to sell all other foods. Then, in January 2025, Commonwealth Court Judge Stacy Wallace delivered a significant win: Miller can continue selling raw milk to out-of-state customers while the PA lawsuit proceeds. The reasoning? Blocking out-of-state sales would cause “substantial harm to his business.”

Since the January 2024 raid, Miller’s GiveSendGo campaign has raised over $300,000. His goal is $800,000.

Bigger Than One Farm

Miller’s case landed at a peculiar cultural moment. The Make America Healthy Again movement turned raw milk into a political symbol. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) jumped to Miller’s defense. Donald Trump Jr. said the feds should focus on pedophiles, not dairy farmers. In March 2026, Massie and Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME) introduced H.R. 7880, the Interstate Milk Freedom Act, a bipartisan bill that would prohibit federal interference with interstate raw milk sales. Massie has introduced versions of this bill since 2014. This is the sixth attempt.

The raw milk market doesn’t care whether Congress acts. Weekly sales grew 21% in 2024 over the prior year. Q4 2024 sales were up 18%. Thirty-two states now allow some form of raw milk sales. Consumer demand is building the legal framework from the ground up, one purchase at a time.

But Miller represents something beyond raw milk. His private membership model is a template. The logic is simple: consenting adults don’t need a permission slip to eat. If a farmer raises food and a buyer wants it, the transaction is between them. The government isn’t a party to the contract. It isn’t invited.

Lancaster County, with its dense network of Amish farms operating outside the industrial food chain, is a working proof of concept. They’re families who have been doing this for centuries, feeding their communities real food, raised on real land, traded through real relationships, without asking anyone’s permission.

The state spent a decade and untold taxpayer dollars trying to crush one farmer’s food club. The food club grew from 2,000 members to over 4,000. The farmer is still selling. And the next Amos Miller is already out there, somewhere in America, filling coolers with raw milk and loading them onto a truck.

The government can raid one farm. It can’t raid ten thousand kitchens.

Sources:

- National Agricultural Law Center: Amos Miller and the Regulation of Raw Milk

- Real Milk: Amos Miller Case Updates (Dec 2024)

- Food Safety News: Appeals Court Says Amos Miller Can Sell Raw Milk Across State Lines (Jan 2025)

- DOJ: Lancaster County Farm Agrees to Consent Decree (April 2020)

- Food Safety News: Amos Miller Exits Federal Court (Nov 2023)

- GetRawMilk.com: Amos Miller Interstate Distribution (Oct 2024)

- Rep. Massie: Interstate Milk Freedom Act H.R. 7880 (March 2026)

- University of Delaware: The Rise of Raw Milk (Oct 2024)

Part 1 covered what EMF is and why it matters. Part 2 showed you how to measure it. This piece answers the question both of those left hanging: how does a non-thermal electromagnetic field damage living tissue?

The answer involves a structure in your cell membranes so exquisitely sensitive to electrical forces that it amplifies them 7.2 million times. And the fact that this structure exists, that it’s been studied for decades, that we understand exactly how it works, is what makes the entire regulatory framework not just wrong but irrelevant. They’re measuring the wrong thing. Entirely. On purpose.

I should warn you - this article gets complicated. That’s because our bodies are incredibly complicated. Once you read this, you’ll understand just how naive we’re being by flooding our environment with electro-magnetic fields without the faintest understanding of how our bodies actually use electricity every second of every day to live. You might also get an inkling into why biological health and fertility are dropping so dramatically we’re looking at human extinction in a matter of just a few generations. This is serious stuff.

The Short Version (No Biology Degree Required)

If the science below makes your eyes glaze, here is the whole thing in plain English.

Your body runs on electricity. Not as a metaphor. Every heartbeat, every thought, every muscle twitch is triggered by tiny electrical signals shuttling charged particles in and out of your cells. To manage that, your cells are studded with microscopic gates that snap open and shut in response to the smallest change in electrical charge. They have to be exquisitely sensitive, because the signals they listen for are faint. Think of them as ears tuned to a whisper.

One of those gates controls calcium, the “go” button for a huge share of what your cells do. Because it matters so much, the gate is normally locked tight and only cracks open for a brief, controlled moment when the body says so.

Here is the problem. Precisely because these gates are built to detect the faintest electrical whisper, they are wildly oversensitive to the artificial electromagnetic fields pouring out of phones, routers, and cell towers. The physics works out to roughly a 7 million fold amplification: the force these fields put on the gate’s sensor is about seven million times stronger than what the rest of the cell feels. A whisper to you is a foghorn to the gate.

So the gate gets forced open when it shouldn’t. Calcium floods in. In small, brief doses that flood can actually heal, which is why medical devices use gentle pulses to help mend broken bones. But around the clock, day after day, the flood turns destructive. It drives inflammation, chemical damage, and, in animal studies, catastrophic brain cell death. Young rats exposed to cell tower levels of radiation lost roughly a third of their brain cells in four weeks. Give them a drug that plugs the calcium gate, and the damage almost entirely disappears. That is how we know the gate is the culprit.

Now for the complicated version:

The Gate

Every cell in your body maintains a careful balance of electrically charged particles (ions) between its interior and the fluid outside. The difference between these charges creates a voltage across the cell membrane, typically around -70 millivolts in a resting nerve cell. That’s not much. About one-twentieth of a single AA battery.

But “not much” is relative. The plasma membrane is only about 5 nanometers thick. That -70 millivolts spread across 5 nanometers works out to roughly 14 million volts per meter. The inside of a lightning bolt is about 3 million volts per meter. Your cells, right now, are maintaining electric field gradients that would make a thunderstorm jealous.

(The 14 million volts per meter is a static baseline, not the trigger. Think of the resting membrane as a heavy door held under enormous spring tension, balanced on a hair trigger. That huge tension is always there. It is not what opens the door. What opens the door is a tiny nudge to the trigger. In a real cell, the natural “nudge” is a small shift in membrane voltage, on the order of a few tens of millivolts, riding on top of that giant baseline. The sensor is tuned to detect that small change, not to be overpowered by the whole field. The system sits right at a threshold, poised to flip.)

Living in this intense field are proteins called voltage-gated calcium channels, or VGCCs. They sit embedded in the cell membrane like microscopic drawbridges, and their entire purpose is to detect changes in that membrane voltage and respond by opening or closing. When they open, calcium ions flood into the cell from outside, where the concentration of calcium is roughly 10,000 times higher than inside (Berridge et al., 1998).

Calcium is the most important signaling molecule in your body. It triggers neurotransmitter release. It initiates muscle contraction. It activates gene expression. It regulates cell division and cell death. Scientists call it the “universal second messenger” for good reason. Practically every critical cellular process uses calcium as its “go” signal.

(The “first messenger” is the signal that arrives from outside the cell: a hormone or neurotransmitter that docks onto a receptor on the cell surface but doesn’t actually enter the cell. Classic examples are adrenaline (epinephrine), glucagon, and neurotransmitters. The first messenger delivers the message to the cell, but it stays at the door. When it binds the surface receptor, that triggers the release of a second messenger inside the cell - calcium, cAMP, cGMP, IP3 - which relays the signal onward to the machinery that actually does the work. So calcium being a “second messenger” just means it’s the internal relay, not the original external signal.)

This is why cells keep intracellular calcium so absurdly low (around 100 nanomolar, or one ten-thousandth of the concentration outside). The gradient has to be steep because the signal has to be clear. A tiny controlled pulse of calcium entering the cell means “do this specific thing right now.” Uncontrolled flooding of calcium means catastrophe.

And the gatekeepers controlling that flood are VGCCs.

The Sensor

Here’s where the biology gets beautiful in a terrifying way.

Each VGCC is built around a large alpha-1 subunit protein that forms the actual channel pore. This protein contains four homologous domains (I through IV), each made of six membrane-spanning alpha helices labeled S1 through S6. The S5 and S6 helices from each domain arrange themselves to form the actual hole through which calcium flows.

But the business end, the part that matters for everything that follows, is the S4 helix in each domain. This is the voltage sensor.

The S4 helix carries positively charged amino acid residues (arginine and lysine) arranged in a repeating pattern. Each S4 helix typically carries 4 to 8 positive charges, and the VGCC has four of these sensor helices (one per domain). Adding up the functionally significant charges across all four voltage sensors gives you approximately 20 positive charges that must all be pushed in the same direction to open the gate.

Think of it like this: the VGCC is a lock that requires 20 tumblers to move simultaneously. When the voltage across the membrane shifts, the electrical force pushes all 20 charged groups in the S4 helices outward, the helices physically rotate and slide, and the channel opens. Calcium rushes in. The cell responds.

This is how your nervous system fires. This is how your heart beats. This is how muscles contract. Every thought you’re having while reading this sentence involves VGCCs opening and closing in precise, controlled patterns.

The system is extraordinarily sensitive by design. It has to be. Your entire electrochemical signaling apparatus depends on detecting tiny voltage shifts across the membrane and converting them into chemical signals. Evolution spent hundreds of millions of years optimizing this sensitivity.

Now consider what happens when you flood the environment with artificial electromagnetic fields.

The Amplifier

In 2013, Martin Pall, Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Basic Medical Sciences at Washington State University, published a paper in the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine that laid out the evidence: EMFs act primarily through the activation of voltage-gated calcium channels.

He wasn’t the first to notice. Researchers had been documenting calcium increases in cells exposed to electromagnetic fields for decades. But Pall did something nobody else had done: he compiled all the studies in which calcium channel blocking drugs had been used to test whether VGCCs were the mechanism, and found that in study after study (two dozen of them), blocking calcium channels blocked the EMF effects. Different blockers targeting different types of calcium channels (L-type, T-type, N-type, P/Q-type) all produced protection. Each blocker is highly specific to calcium channels, making alternative explanations, as Pall put it, “highly unlikely.”

Then in 2015, he published a detailed biophysical analysis explaining why VGCCs are so extraordinarily sensitive to EMFs. The argument comes down to three multiplicative factors.

Factor 1: Membrane amplification (~3,000x). The plasma membrane has high electrical resistance. The fluids on either side of it (extracellular and intracellular) are good conductors. So when an external EMF passes through the body, the electric field moves charges easily through the conducting fluids but gets blocked at the membrane. This concentrates electrical forces perpendicular to the membrane surface. Even skeptics of non-thermal effects have acknowledged this produces roughly a 3,000-fold amplification of force on any structures sitting in the membrane.

Factor 2: Dielectric amplification (~120x). The voltage sensor’s charged groups sit inside the lipid bilayer of the membrane. Lipids have a dielectric constant similar to hydrocarbon solvents, which is low. The aqueous fluids surrounding the membrane have a dielectric constant roughly 120 times higher (water alone is ~40x higher than hydrocarbons, and the dissolved salts push it to roughly 2.5 to 3.5x higher than pure water). By Coulomb’s law, the force between electrical charges is inversely proportional to the dielectric constant of the medium between them. So the 20 charged groups on the voltage sensor, sitting in the low-dielectric lipid environment, experience electrical forces roughly 120 times greater than charges floating in the aqueous phase.

Factor 3: Coherent force on 20 charges (20x). An electromagnetic field produces a force in one direction at any given instant. All 20 positive charges on the voltage sensor get pushed the same way simultaneously. Random thermal energy, by contrast, is random in three dimensions. The probability of thermal energy spontaneously pushing all 20 charges in the same direction at the same instant is vanishingly small. EMFs do this every single cycle. At 2.4 GHz (WiFi frequency), that’s 2.4 billion times per second.

Multiply those three factors together:

3,000 × 120 × 20 = 7,200,000

The electrical force exerted on the VGCC voltage sensor by an external EMF is approximately 7.2 million times greater than the force that same field exerts on singly charged groups dissolved in the cytoplasm.

In other words - the structure that evolution designed to be the most electrically sensitive component in your cell is experiencing forces from your WiFi router that are 7.2 million times stronger than what the rest of the cell feels.

This is why Pall concluded that EMF fields “6 to 7 orders of magnitude” below the threshold needed to produce heating can still activate VGCCs and produce biological effects. The thermal threshold is irrelevant. It’s like trying to determine the biological effects of sound by measuring whether it heats the eardrum. Your eardrum doesn’t work by getting hot. It works by vibrating. VGCCs don’t respond to heat. They respond to voltage.

The Two Roads

So EMFs activate VGCCs. Calcium floods in. What happens next?

This is where the biology reveals something both elegant and disturbing. The calcium doesn’t just do one thing. It triggers two competing pathways, and which one dominates depends on how much calcium enters and for how long.

The therapeutic pathway runs like this: a modest, brief increase in intracellular calcium activates a protein called calmodulin. Calmodulin, with calcium bound to it, then activates the constitutive nitric oxide synthases (eNOS and nNOS), which produce nitric oxide (NO). The NO activates soluble guanylyl cyclase, producing cGMP, which activates protein kinase G. This cascade also stimulates a transcription factor called Nrf2, which cranks up the cell’s antioxidant defenses: superoxide dismutases, glutathione synthesis enzymes, peroxynitrite scavengers. The whole system is protective and regenerative.

This is why pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMF) therapy actually works for bone healing and tissue repair. Controlled, brief, low-intensity pulses produce modest calcium increases that kick the therapeutic pathway into gear. Orthopedic surgeons have been prescribing PEMF devices for non-union fractures since the 1970s.

In 2012, researcher Arthur Pilla published a striking study showing that pulsed EMFs produced a nearly 3-fold increase in calcium/calmodulin-dependent nitric oxide synthesis, and the response was nearly instantaneous, occurring in less than 5 seconds. The speed of the response was itself revealing: the calcium increase had to occur almost immediately after EMF exposure, consistent with direct activation of VGCCs (which open and close in microseconds), not some slow thermal process.

The pathological pathway runs differently. When calcium entry is excessive and sustained (chronic exposure, high intensity, or both), the system overloads. Too much NO is produced. Simultaneously, the mitochondria, stressed by excessive calcium, produce superoxide. Nitric oxide and superoxide react to form peroxynitrite (ONOO⁻), one of the most destructive molecules in biology.

Peroxynitrite attacks DNA. It oxidizes lipids. It damages proteins. It depletes tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4), a cofactor that nitric oxide synthase needs to function properly. And here’s where it gets vicious: when BH4 is depleted, the NOS enzymes themselves become “uncoupled” and start producing more superoxide instead of nitric oxide, feeding the very cycle that’s destroying the cell. Peroxynitrite also activates NF-κB, the master inflammatory transcription factor, driving chronic production of inflammatory cytokines.

The final twist: these two pathways inhibit each other. Nrf2 (the protective pathway) raises enzymes that scavenge peroxynitrite. Peroxynitrite (the destructive pathway) oxidizes the components the therapeutic pathway needs to function. Once the peroxynitrite pathway gains the upper hand, it progressively dismantles the cell’s ability to recover.

Brief, controlled calcium increases can heal you. Chronic, excessive calcium increases will destroy you. And the regulatory agencies measuring safety by checking whether your tissue gets warm are capturing exactly none of this.

The Proof: Block the Channel, Block the Damage

Science has a simple test for whether a proposed mechanism is real: block the proposed mechanism and see if the effect disappears.

Pall’s 2013 review compiled two dozen studies in which researchers blocked calcium channels with specific drugs and then exposed cells or animals to EMFs. The result was consistent across all of them: blocking the calcium channel blocked the EMF effect.

The most dramatic example comes from El-Swefy and colleagues at Zagazig University in Egypt. In a 2008 study published in the Journal of Applied Biomedicine, they exposed young rats to cell phone base station radiation (81 milligauss) for just 2 hours per day.

After four weeks, the results were devastating. The EMF-exposed rats showed progressive oxidative damage, prolonged elevated calcium, pro-inflammatory markers (TNFα and CRP), and widespread brain cell death.

34% of the brain cells died in four weeks from an exposure level comparable to living near a cell tower.

But a second group of rats received amlodipine, a calcium channel blocker, alongside the same EMF exposure. In this group, all 11 measured brain changes and all 4 observed behavioral changes were substantially reduced. Amlodipine “restored the EMF-induced apoptosis in brain to near normal.”

Consider what this means. If EMFs damaged tissue through heating, blocking calcium channels wouldn’t make any difference. You don’t prevent a burn by blocking calcium channels. The fact that a calcium channel blocker almost completely prevents EMF-induced brain damage is definitive evidence that the damage pathway runs through calcium channels.

And it wasn’t just amlodipine. Across the studies Pall reviewed, five different classes of calcium channel blockers (targeting different types and different binding sites on VGCCs) all blocked various EMF effects. L-type blockers acting at two different sites. T-type blockers. N-type blockers. P/Q-type blockers. All effective. All highly specific to calcium channels. The probability that all of these specific drugs happen to block EMF damage through some mechanism other than calcium channel blockade is, in Pall’s words, “highly unlikely.”

18 Roads to Alzheimer’s

In 2022, Pall published what may be the most alarming paper of his career: “Low Intensity Electromagnetic Fields Act via Voltage-Gated Calcium Channel (VGCC) Activation to Cause Very Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease: 18 Distinct Types of Evidence” in Current Alzheimer Research.

The calcium hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease isn’t new or controversial. For almost 25 years, researchers have built a robust case that excessive intracellular calcium produces each of the major features of Alzheimer’s: amyloid-beta plaques, hyperphosphorylated tau protein, neurofibrillary tangles, synaptic dysfunction, neuroinflammation, and neuronal death through both apoptosis and destructive autophagy. The Alzheimer’s Association itself published a framework in 2017 integrating calcium dysregulation into a comprehensive theory of Alzheimer’s pathogenesis.

Pall’s contribution was connecting this directly to electromagnetic fields. His 18 types of evidence include:

The mechanistic evidence: EMFs activate VGCCs. VGCC activation floods cells with calcium. Excessive calcium drives both the calcium signaling pathway and the peroxynitrite/oxidative stress/inflammation pathway. Both pathways produce Alzheimer’s-specific pathology. A vicious cycle develops where amyloid-beta protein and intracellular calcium amplify each other.

The genetic evidence: Human genetic studies show that people with elevated VGCC activity (genetic variants that make their calcium channels more active) have increased Alzheimer’s incidence.

The pharmacological evidence: Calcium channel blockers reduce Alzheimer’s risk in clinical populations.

The epidemiological evidence: Twelve occupational exposure assessments found that people with higher occupational EMF exposures have higher Alzheimer’s incidence. A 2019 meta-analysis across multiple studies found a weighted relative risk of 1.33 (33% higher Alzheimer’s incidence) for occupational EMF exposure. Some studies suggest EMFs shorten the normal 25-year latency period of the disease.

The temporal evidence: The age of onset of Alzheimer’s has been dropping over the past two decades, corresponding precisely to the massive increase in wireless communication EMF exposures. Recent studies now report Alzheimer’s cases in people aged 30 to 40.

The animal evidence: This is where it gets truly disturbing.

El-Swefy’s 2008 study (the one with amlodipine) showed universal massive neurodegeneration in young rats from base station radiation. 34% brain cell death in four weeks. Just 2 hours per day.

Jiang et al. (2013) exposed 2-month-old rats to electromagnetic pulses and found apparent universal Alzheimer’s effects by 20 months of age. In human terms, that’s roughly equivalent to 42-year-olds developing universal Alzheimer’s.

A follow-up experiment with daily EMF pulse exposure found Alzheimer’s markers developing at 10 months, as described in Pall’s 2022 analysis. In human terms: 21-year-olds with Alzheimer’s.

“Any of these may produce the ultimate nightmare,” Pall wrote, “extremely early onset Alzheimer’s Disease.”

Beyond Calcium: The Whole System

VGCCs get the most attention because the calcium they control triggers the most dramatic downstream effects. But here’s the uncomfortable broader truth: VGCCs aren’t the only voltage-gated ion channels in your body.

Voltage-gated sodium channels, potassium channels, and chloride channels all share the same fundamental architecture. They all have S4 voltage-sensing helices packed with positively charged residues. They all sit in the plasma membrane, subject to the same amplification factors (membrane concentration of forces, dielectric constant differences, coherent multi-charge activation).

As early as 2002, Dimitris Panagopoulos and colleagues at the University of Athens published a biophysical model predicting that EMFs would cause forced oscillation of free ions near the voltage sensors of all voltage-gated ion channels, not just calcium. Their model predicted that the ion vibrations would irregularly gate these channels, disrupting normal function. Follow-up work in 2021 confirmed this prediction and linked the mechanism to oxidative stress and DNA damage.

The research has focused primarily on VGCCs because calcium produces the most obvious biological effects and because calcium channel blockers are widely available and well-characterized drugs. But the biophysics of the voltage sensor applies to the entire family of voltage-gated ion channels (VGICs). This means EMFs aren’t just disrupting calcium signaling. They’re potentially disrupting the entire electrochemical signaling system of the body: nerve impulse propagation (sodium channels), cardiac rhythm (sodium, potassium, and calcium channels), muscle function (all of the above), and cellular homeostasis (potassium and chloride channels).

The body is, at its most fundamental level, an electrical machine. Every nerve signal, every heartbeat, every muscle twitch, every thought runs on precisely controlled ion flows through voltage-gated channels. We’ve built a civilization that saturates these systems with artificial electromagnetic fields billions of times stronger than the natural background they evolved in.

And nobody is measuring the relevant forces.

The Wrong Ruler

The entire global regulatory framework for electromagnetic field safety is built on a single metric: Specific Absorption Rate (SAR). SAR measures the rate at which the body absorbs electromagnetic energy as heat, in watts per kilogram.

This made a kind of intuitive sense in the 1960s, when the main concern was military radar operators standing too close to high-powered transmitters and literally cooking their tissues. Heat is a real danger at sufficiently high power levels. Nobody disputes this.

But SAR is a thermodynamic measure. It tells you about energy absorbed as heat. It tells you nothing about the electrical forces acting on voltage-gated ion channels. And those forces, as we’ve now seen, are amplified 7.2 million times at the voltage sensor relative to the thermal effects on the bulk of the cell.

It’s as if we tested car safety exclusively by measuring whether the engine catches fire, concluded that all cars driving under 200 mph are safe because no engines ignited, and ignored the entire concept of crash protection. “The engine didn’t catch fire at 120 mph, so 120 mph is safe.” Nobody asks about the humans inside, because the testing framework wasn’t designed for them.

In 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit told the FCC exactly this. The court found that the FCC’s decision to maintain its existing safety standards was “arbitrary and capricious” because the agency had failed to address evidence of non-thermal biological effects. The court specifically noted the FCC’s failure to respond to evidence about harm to children, the environment, and long-term exposures at non-thermal levels.

The FCC’s response since that ruling? More or less nothing. The standards haven’t changed.

Here’s the core of the problem: the question was never “do non-thermal EMFs heat tissue?” That answer has always been “no, not at typical exposure levels,” and it has always been the wrong question. The question is: “do non-thermal EMFs exert biologically relevant forces on structures designed to detect electrical changes?”

The answer, supported by decades of research, two dozen calcium channel blocker studies, animal models showing universal neurodegeneration, epidemiological data showing elevated Alzheimer’s risk, and a biophysical analysis showing a 7.2-million-fold amplification factor, is yes.

What This Means for You

The entire “safe until it heats you” framework collapses once you understand VGCCs. Non-thermal fields don’t need to heat tissue to activate calcium channels, because the voltage sensor amplifies incoming electromagnetic forces by millions. Pulsed fields (which is what every wireless communication device produces) are more biologically active than continuous fields, a fact that was recognized in safety standards as far back as the 1960s and then conveniently forgotten as the wireless industry grew.

The mechanism also explains why “smarter” devices may be worse. Each generation of wireless technology uses more complex pulsation patterns to carry more data. More complex pulsation means more voltage transitions per second. More voltage transitions means more VGCC activations. 5G uses beam-forming, massive MIMO, and extreme pulse modulation. The data throughput goes up. So does the biological damage.

The practical steps in Part 2 (measuring, removing sources, hardwiring) aren’t precautionary theater. They’re directly responsive to a documented mechanism. Every wireless device you remove from your sleeping area is one less source of chronic VGCC activation. Every smart device you replace with a wired alternative is one less stream of pulsed electromagnetic forces acting on the most sensitive electrical structures in your body.

Part 5 will follow the calcium downstream: into the immune system, where chronic VGCC activation doesn’t just damage neurons. It degrades the terrain.

Sources

- Pall, M.L. (2013). “Electromagnetic fields act via activation of voltage-gated calcium channels to produce beneficial or adverse effects.” Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, 17(8), 958-965. PMC3780531

- Pall, M.L. (2015). “Scientific evidence contradicts findings and assumptions of Canadian Safety Panel 6.” Reviews on Environmental Health, 30(2), 103-116. De Gruyter

- Pall, M.L. (2022). “Low Intensity Electromagnetic Fields Act via Voltage-Gated Calcium Channel (VGCC) Activation to Cause Very Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease: 18 Distinct Types of Evidence.” Current Alzheimer Research, 19(2), 119-132. PubMed 35114921

- Pilla, A.A. (2012). “Electromagnetic fields instantaneously modulate nitric oxide signaling in challenged biological systems.” Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, 426(3), 330-333. PubMed 22940137

- El-Swefy, S. et al. (2008). “Calcium channel blockade alleviates brain injury induced by long term exposure to an electromagnetic field.” Journal of Applied Biomedicine, 6(3), 153-163. DOI: 10.32725/jab.2008.019

- Jiang, D.P. et al. (2013). “Electromagnetic pulse exposure induces overexpression of beta amyloid protein in rats.” Archives of Medical Research, 44(3), 178-184. PubMed 23523687

- Catterall, W.A. (2010). “Ion Channel Voltage Sensors: Structure, Function, and Pathophysiology.” Neuron, 67(6), 915-928. PMC2950829

- Panagopoulos, D.J. et al. (2002). “Mechanism for action of electromagnetic fields on cells.” Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, 298(1), 95-102. PubMed 12379225

- Panagopoulos, D.J. et al. (2021). “Human-made electromagnetic fields: Ion forced-oscillation and voltage-gated ion channel dysfunction, oxidative stress and DNA damage.” International Journal of Oncology, 59(5), 92. PubMed 34617575

- Gunnarsson, L.G. & Bodin, L. (2019). “Occupational Exposures and Neurodegenerative Diseases—A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-Analyses.” Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health, 16(3), 337. MDPI

- Berridge, M.J. et al. (1998). “Calcium — a life and death signal.” Nature, 395, 645-648. PubMed 9790183

- Alzheimer’s Association Calcium Hypothesis Workgroup (2017). “Calcium Hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease and brain aging.” Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 13(2), 178-182. PubMed 28061328

- EurekAlert! (2022). “EMFs, calcium and Alzheimer’s disease: A closer link.” Press release

A real problem always grows a fake solution next to it. Wherever there is fear plus money plus something people can’t see for themselves, a market appears to sell them relief. EMF is a nearly perfect case. The harm is real, documented in Part 1 and measurable in Part 2. The fields are invisible. And most people have no instrument to check anything for themselves. That is the exact soil a grift needs, and the grift has grown into an entire aisle of products.

What I want to hand you is the one tool that tells the fake from the real, so you never get scammed again. That tool is a number. Everything below comes back to it.

The One Test

It all comes down to one question. Does the reading on the correct meter drop after you install the product?

That’s it. In Part 2 we covered the four types of EMF and the meters that read each one: an RF meter for wireless radiation in microwatts per square meter, a gaussmeter for AC magnetic fields in milligauss, an electric field meter in volts per meter, and a line meter for dirty electricity in millivolts. Every one of those gives you a number in a unit you can look up.

So take the reading. Install the miracle. Take the reading again. If the number didn’t move, the product did nothing, no matter how good the story was. If a thing cannot lower an objective number, it is not protection. It is a talisman. Hold that test in your head and walk down the aisle with me.

Pendants, Crystals, and Your “Biofield”

The first shelf is jewelry. Shungite pendants. Orgonite pyramids with a swirl of metal shavings in resin. “Scalar energy” necklaces and “bioenergy” discs sold to protect your biofield, harmonize your frequency, or ward off 5G.

There is no mechanism here. A stone hanging on your chest does not absorb, reflect, or cancel a radio wave passing through the room. To attenuate RF you need conductive material, correctly placed, in the path of the signal, and even then you measure the result in decibels. A lump of carbon or a resin pyramid on the nightstand does none of that. You don’t have to take my word for it. DefenderShield, a company that sells EMF-shielding products for a living, says plainly that “Shungite and Orgonite, or any other stone or crystal, cannot scientifically block EMF radiation frequencies from entering the body.” EMF Harmony, another vendor in the space, says “there has not been any real scientific evidence backing claims that orgonite works as an EMF shield.”

Run the test. RF reading before you put on the pendant, RF reading after. Identical. The radiation is still there, at the same power density, doing whatever it does, while a rock sits on your sternum.

The Pendant That Irradiates You

Now it gets worse, and this is the part most people have never heard.

A whole category of these products is sold as “negative ion” jewelry: pendants, bracelets, even sleep masks, promising to flood you with healthful ions and shield you from radiation. To make the “negative ion” claim, manufacturers blend in minerals like tourmaline, zeolite, and monazite sand. Monazite is a rare-earth mineral. It also carries naturally occurring uranium and thorium.

So the product marketed to protect you from radiation is itself radioactive.

This is not a fringe accusation. In December 2021 the Netherlands’ Authority for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection banned ten of these products, including an anti-5G “Quantum Pendant,” several negative-ion necklaces, a sleep mask, and a children’s bracelet. The regulator’s own words: the tested products “contain radioactive materials and therefore continuously emit ionizing radiation, thereby exposing the wearer.” Someone who wore one around the clock for a year could exceed the country’s skin-exposure limit. The agency told sellers to stop immediately and told owners to stop wearing them.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission documents the same thing. Testing by public-health bodies in the Netherlands, China, and Malaysia found measurable, in several cases significant, quantities of uranium (U-238), thorium (Th-232), or radium (Ra-226) in these products. Worn against the skin continuously, the beta radiation can push the local skin dose past the international limit. In 2018 the Illinois Emergency Management Agency tested a pendant at a resident’s request and found thorium and uranium in it. A 2021 study in Applied Sciences estimated that close contact with negative-ion products could add up to 2 millisieverts per year, above the 1 millisievert annual limit for members of the public.

The doses are low. Nobody is claiming a necklace gives you cancer next Tuesday. The point is the direction. You went shopping for less radiation and bought a device that emits ionizing radiation, the even more dangerous kind, the kind that breaks DNA, rather than the non-ionizing kind you were worried about. That is not protection failing to work. That is protection running in reverse.

As Ars Technica put it, slap the word “quantum” on an object and it takes on “an aura of magical mystery.” Behind the aura, in these cases, was a low but real dose of the kind of radiation that even mainstream scientists agree breaks things.

Stickers, Chips, and Patches

The next shelf is the cheapest and the most popular: little dots, chips, and patches you stick on the back of your phone to neutralize, harmonize, or restructure the radiation.

These are the easiest scam to disprove in your own kitchen, because your phone is a strong, constant RF source and any decent meter reads it instantly. Take the reading. Apply the sticker. Take the reading again. It does not change. The power density coming off the phone is exactly what it was. Nothing was harmonized because there is no mechanism by which a sticker restructures a radio wave.

Regulators have said so for two decades. The Federal Trade Commission states there is “no scientific proof that so-called shields significantly reduce exposure from cell phone emissions.” Back in 2002 the FTC charged a company that claimed its patches blocked up to 97 or 99 percent of phone radiation, and in 2003 the marketers of the “WaveShield” patches settled charges that their claims were false and unsubstantiated. These products have been failing the same test since flip phones.

There is a nastier twist. Some of these stickers claim to work by covering part of the antenna. If a shield actually did block part of the antenna, the FTC warns, the phone would sense the weaker connection and crank its transmit power up to reach the tower, putting out more radiation, not less. So the sticker either does nothing, or in the one case where it does something, it does the opposite of what it promised. Either way the meter is your judge, and the meter says no.

Scalar, Tachyon, and Quantum Plugs

Further down the aisle the products get more expensive and the language gets more impressive. Now you’re looking at boxes you plug into a wall outlet that claim to fill your whole home with a protective field. The vocabulary is always the same set of borrowed words: scalar energy, tachyon energy, zero-point, quantum.

None of these words describes anything the device does. Tachyons are hypothetical particles that have never been shown to exist; as the debunking site BeatEMF notes, “tachyon energy is a completely hypothetical theory about light, which means that it’s not real or proven.” “Scalar energy” is not a term from working physics. “Quantum” is marketing paint. A small plastic box drawing a couple of watts in one outlet is not projecting a shield through your walls, and it is certainly not doing it against both gigahertz RF and 60-hertz magnetic fields at once, because those are different physical phenomena that require completely different handling.

You already know how to check. Plug the box in. Read your RF meter. Read your gaussmeter. Read your electric field meter. The plug changes none of them. It draws a trickle of power and emits nothing that affects your exposure.

The Device That Trades One Problem for Another

This is the one I most want you to remember, because it is the trap even careful, meter-owning people fall into. Not every EMF product is a rock with a story. Some of them genuinely do something. They just don’t do what you think, and the “something” can be a new problem.

Dirty electricity is real. It’s the high-frequency noise riding on your home wiring from dimmers, LED drivers, and switching power supplies, and Part 2 covered how to measure it with a line meter in millivolts. So there’s a real market for plug-in “filters” that reduce it, the Stetzer and Greenwave capacitor filters being the best known. Plug one into an outlet, watch your dirty-electricity reading drop, feel like you fixed something.

Here’s what the reading doesn’t show you. These filters work by shunting the high-frequency current from the hot wire to the neutral. That current doesn’t vanish. It now flows through the filter and the wiring right next to it, and a magnetic field is proportional to the current flowing in a wire. So you can lower the number on your line meter while actually raising the magnetic field at the outlet.

This is not a claim from an anti-filter zealot. Create Healthy Homes, a building-biology firm that actually sells Greenwave filters, states flatly that “the capacitor filters on the market today (including the Stetzer and Greenwave filters) can and do aggravate another form of EMF, namely, magnetic field EMFs at 60 Hz.” The electrical engineer Peter Lauritzen wrote in his technical review of dirty electricity that “installing the Stetzerizer filters may even serve to increase the size of the line currents, increasing the stray magnetic” field. The filters also add reactive load to the circuit, which is why both Stetzer and Greenwave warn you to unplug their filters when your house is running on a generator, or the added capacitance can trick the generator into over-volting and damaging things.

So picture the person who buys a boxful of these, plugs one into every outlet in the bedroom, and never picks up a gaussmeter. Their dirty-electricity number is beautiful. Meanwhile the magnetic field a few inches from the headboard, the field that penetrates walls and can’t be shielded away, may be higher than before. They traded a problem they had for a problem they didn’t, and they feel good doing it, because they only measured the field the product was designed to lower.

The lesson is not, “filters are a scam.” Some homes with severe dirty electricity may genuinely benefit, and whether dirty electricity harms health at all is itself unsettled. The lesson is the discipline: measure the field you actually care about, before and after, with the right meter for that field. A device that fixes one number and quietly worsens another is worse than useless if you only ever look at the one number.

Schumann Resonance Generators

One more, because it dresses up nicely. The Earth has a natural electromagnetic resonance around 7.83 hertz, discovered by the physicist Winfried Schumann, generated by lightning in the cavity between the ground and the ionosphere. It’s real. That’s the hook.

The product is a small mains-powered box that claims to recreate this frequency in your bedroom and thereby protect and “ground” you. Set aside whether a synthetic 7.83 hertz field does anything good. Ask instead what it has to do with the problem you’re trying to solve. A 7.83 hertz wave is enormous, with a wavelength on the order of the Earth’s circumference, tens of thousands of miles, which is exactly why the resonance forms around the whole planet in the first place. A plastic box the size of a deck of cards, with no large antenna and no heat to dissipate, is not broadcasting a meaningful version of that across your house. Whatever it emits, it is not a shield. It does nothing to the gigahertz radiation from your router or the magnetic field from your wiring. Reviewers who’ve looked at frequency generators honestly conclude the reported benefits come “mostly through relaxation and placebo, not proof.”

A calming ritual is fine. Selling one as radiation protection is not. And again, the meter settles it: the box changes no reading on any of the four instruments.

Why the Grift Works

Step back and look at why this aisle is so profitable, because understanding the machinery is how you stay out of it.

It runs on three things. First, real fear with a real basis. The underlying harm is documented, which is what makes the mark receptive and the seller’s pitch feel plausible. Second, invisibility. You cannot see EMF, so you cannot see that the sticker did nothing. With most products, a failure is obvious. Here the failure is silent, which means the placebo never gets contradicted by your senses. Third, and worst, the placebo makes people careless. Believing you’re protected, you stop doing the boring things that actually work. You hold the phone against your head longer, keep it on the nightstand, hand the “protected” phone to your kid. Even the FTC and independent testers note this behavioral trap: a false sense of safety can raise your real exposure. The gadget doesn’t just waste thirty dollars. It replaces habits that lowered your exposure with a token that doesn’t.

That’s the whole con. Fear you can’t verify, sold a fix you can’t check, that talks you out of the fixes that work.

What Actually Works

The real playbook is boring, and boring is the tell. It works because it touches the actual field instead of the story about the field.

Distance. Radiation falls off fast with space, and every foot you put between yourself and a source is free attenuation. Hardwiring. An ethernet cable radiates nothing into the room where a WiFi router pushes RF all day. Turning sources off. A router on a timer, a phone in airplane mode at night, a DECT cordless base unplugged. And genuine shielding when you need it: conductive fabric, paint, or window film that measurably attenuates RF, correctly installed and grounded, and verified with a meter that shows the number dropping. That last part is the difference between shielding and decoration.

None of this requires belief. All of it produces a number you can watch fall.

You do not buy your way out of EMF with a gadget. There is no amulet, no chip, no plug, no box that makes the field go away while you carry on as before. The exposure in your home is a set of physical facts, and the only way to change a fact is to change the source, the distance, or the shielding, and then confirm it with a measurement.

So the only “device” worth owning in this entire aisle is the one thing none of the sellers want you to have: a meter that tells you the truth. A real RF meter turns every claim in this article into a two-second experiment you can run yourself. Take the money you were going to spend on the pendant and the stickers and the quantum plug, and buy the meter and a spool of ethernet cable instead. One of them lets you see the problem. The other actually removes some of it. Between them they will do more than every product on the shelf combined, and they will never once ask you to believe.

The grifters are counting on you never picking up the meter. Prove them wrong.

Sources:

- Netherlands ANVS, ban on radioactive “negative ion” and anti-5G products (Dec 2021): autoriteitnvs.nl

- Ars Technica, “Anti-5G quantum pendants are radioactive” (2021): arstechnica.com

- U.S. NRC, Negative Ion Products Containing Radioactive Material: nrc.gov

- Illinois IEMA, radioactive materials found in a pendant (2018): news.wttw.com

- Hassan et al. (2021), radioactivity of negative-ion clothing, Applied Sciences: mdpi.com

- FTC, tips to avoid cell phone radiation scams (2011): ftc.gov

- FTC charges over radiation-protection patches (2002): ftc.gov

- FTC, WaveShield patch marketers settle (2003): ftc.gov

- BeatEMF, EMF protection scams debunked: beatemf.com

- DefenderShield, shungite and orgonite do not block EMF: defendershield.com

- EMF Harmony, no evidence orgonite shields EMF: emf-harmony.eu

- Create Healthy Homes, capacitor filters aggravate 60 Hz magnetic fields: createhealthyhomes.com

- Lauritzen, “Dirty Electricity: What is it? Is it hazardous?” (Stetzer filters can increase stray magnetic fields): jeffpud.org

- HBELC, dirty electricity practical guide (filters can increase magnetic fields): hbelc.org

- Beyond Bohemian, frequency generators work mostly by placebo: beyondbohemian.com

- RF Safe on the behavioral-compensation trap of “shield” products: rfsafe.com

In Part 1, we covered the basics: what electromagnetic fields are, the four types hiding in your home, and why the safety standards are a regulatory joke built on five monkeys and eight rats. If you haven’t read it, start there. Everything in this piece builds on that foundation.

Now we get practical.

This is the article I wish someone had handed me when I first started measuring my house. No jargon mazes, no sales pitches for magic crystals. Just the tools you need, the numbers that matter, and a clear walkthrough of every room so you can find out what’s actually going on in the place where you sleep, work, and raise your kids.

By the end, you’ll know exactly what meters to buy, what the readings mean, and how to fix the most common problems. Most of them are easier and cheaper than you’d expect.

The Meters: What to Buy (and Why There’s No Shortcut)

Here’s the uncomfortable truth from Part 1: there is no single device that accurately measures all four types of EMF. Anyone selling you an all-in-one solution for $30 is selling you a toy that will give you false confidence and miss the exposures that actually matter. This is physics, not marketing. Each type of field has different frequencies, different units, and different measurement techniques.

You need dedicated meters. The good news: you don’t need to spend $10,000 on a professional Building Biology kit. A set of reliable, accurate consumer meters runs between $500 and $1,100 depending on the package you choose. That’s a one-time investment to protect your family for years.

Here’s what to get, starting with the most important.

RF Meter: Safe and Sound Pro II (~$399)

This is your wireless radiation detector. It picks up WiFi, Bluetooth, cell towers, some 5G (sub-6 GHz bands, as “true” 5G bands are still outside the detection range of most affordable meters), smart meters, cordless phones, baby monitors, and every other radio frequency source in your environment, from 200 MHz to 8 GHz.

Why this meter specifically:

- Numerical display showing peak, max hold, and average readings in µW/m² (the unit the Building Biology guidelines use)

- Sound signature analysis: each RF source has a distinct audio pattern. With a little practice, you can hear the difference between a WiFi router, a smart meter, and a cell tower signal. This is incredibly useful for tracking down the source of a reading

- High sensitivity: detects signals down to 0.005 µW/m², which matters when you’re trying to get your bedroom into the “no anomaly” range

This is the meter that Jeromy Johnson at EMF Analysis (one of the most respected independent EMF consultants in North America) recommends as the minimum for professional-level accuracy. It’s also the meter recommended by the EMF Center run by certified Building Biologist Satya Giordano.

Budget alternative: Safe and Sound Classic III (~$139-$169). Same frequency range (200 MHz to 8 GHz), same audio feature for source identification, but uses an LED bar graph instead of a numerical display. You lose the exact numbers, but you get the same detection range and sensitivity for about a third of the price. A solid starting point if money is tight.

AC Electric + Magnetic Field Meter: Gigahertz Solutions ME3830B (~$272)

This single-axis meter from the German company Gigahertz Solutions measures both AC electric fields (in V/m) and AC magnetic fields (in nT or mG) across a frequency range of 16 Hz to 100 kHz. It’s the meter Building Biology consultants train on.

What you’ll use it for:

- AC electric fields from wiring in your walls, extension cords, lamps, and chargers. These are present even when nothing is turned on, because the wiring carries voltage 24/7 as long as the circuit breaker is on

- AC magnetic fields from power lines, appliance motors, and wiring errors that create elevated fields in rooms where you’d never expect them

Important note: you must ground the meter for accurate electric field readings. It comes with a grounding cable. Plug it into the ground pin of any properly grounded outlet before taking electric field measurements. Ungrounded readings will be inaccurate. Jeromy Johnson has a video walkthrough of this process.

The ME3830B is a single-axis meter, which means you’ll need to rotate it in three orientations (X, Y, Z) and take the highest reading, or calculate the composite. This sounds fussy but becomes second nature after a few minutes.

AC Magnetic Field Meter: Alpha Labs UHS2 Gaussmeter (~$389)

If you want to go deeper on magnetic fields, the UHS2 is a true 3-axis gaussmeter that gives you the composite magnitude automatically. No rotating needed. Frequency range: 13 Hz to 75 kHz covering both ELF and VLF magnetic fields. It also has a VLF-only mode (1 kHz to 75 kHz) for isolating higher-frequency magnetic pollution from things like solar inverters and switching power supplies.

The EMF Center calls it “the lowest-cost gaussmeter available with triple-axis antenna, ELF + VLF range, and accuracy you can trust.”

Note for budget-conscious readers: the ME3830B also measures magnetic fields (single-axis). If you’re starting out, the ME3830B alone covers both electric and magnetic, and you can add the UHS2 later if you want faster, more convenient magnetic field measurements. You don’t need both on day one.

Dirty Electricity Meter: Alpha Labs Line EMI Meter (~$165)

Dirty electricity is the one most people don’t know about. These are high-frequency voltage transients (10 kHz to 10 MHz) riding on your household wiring, created by solar inverters, LED dimmers, laptop chargers, and virtually every device with a switching power supply. Your whole house wiring becomes a broadcasting antenna for this electromagnetic noise.

The Line EMI Meter plugs into any wall outlet and gives you a reading in millivolts peak-to-peak (mV p-p). Walk through your house, plug it into every outlet, and you’ll quickly see which circuits and rooms have the highest dirty electricity levels.

Pair it with a cheap AM radio (~$30). Tune the radio to a frequency with no station (just static) and walk around your house. Where the static gets louder and more agitated, you’ve found a dirty electricity source. The AM radio doesn’t give you numbers, but it’s remarkably effective at pinpointing the specific device creating the problem. Jeromy Johnson at EMF Analysis calls it his favorite tool for tracking down EMI sources.

The Upgrade Path: Safe and Sound EM3 (~$649)

This is the newer option from Safe Living Technologies that replaces both the UHS2 and the ME3830B in one device. True 3-axis for magnetic, plus accurate electric field measurement. If you’re buying fresh and want the cleanest setup, the EM3 paired with the Pro II and the Line EMI Meter is the current gold standard for consumer-level accuracy. The Advanced Package from EMF Analysis bundles this combination for about $1,070 after a 10% discount.

Where to Buy

All of these meters are available from Safe Living Technologies (SLT) in Toronto. SLT is one of the most established EMF equipment suppliers in North America, has been in business for years, and ships worldwide. They’re not a random Amazon seller. They also carry shielding materials, remote cutoff switches, and educational resources.

How to Read the Numbers: Building Biology Guidelines

You’ve got meters. Now you need to know whether your readings are cause for concern or whether you can relax.

The Building Biology Institute (originally the Institut fur Baubiologie + Nachhaltigkeit in Germany) has maintained the gold standard for residential EMF guidelines since 1992, now updated to the SBM-2024 evaluation guidelines. Unlike the FCC’s thermal-only standards (which, as we covered in Part 1, are based on whether radiation heats monkey tissue enough to stop them pressing a lever for food), the Building Biology guidelines are specifically designed for long-term exposure in sleeping areas based on precautionary science and decades of real-world home assessments.

The guidelines use four levels of concern. Think of them as a traffic light system with an extra red:

RF (Radio Frequency): Sleeping Areas

For context: a WiFi router at close range can push 10,000+ µW/m². A smart meter on the other side of your bedroom wall can spike into the thousands during its transmission bursts. Your goal for sleeping areas is 10 µW/m² or less. For sensitive individuals or children’s rooms, aim for below 1 µW/m².

AC Magnetic Fields: Sleeping Areas

Note: epidemiological studies have consistently found increased childhood leukemia risk at magnetic field exposures above 3-4 mG. That’s well within the “severe anomaly” range. Many bedrooms read 1-3 mG from wiring errors the homeowner has no idea about.

AC Electric Fields: Sleeping Areas

The Building Biology Institute recommends sleeping area body voltage below 100 mV (measured with a body voltage meter while lying in bed). Most people find their readings are well above 2,000 mV before remediation. The primary tool to bring these numbers down is the bedroom kill switch (more on that below).

If using a standalone electric field meter like the ME3830B, aim for approximately 1-1.5 V/m at your bed.

Dirty Electricity / Line EMI

The Building Biology guidelines don’t provide a separate table for dirty electricity specifically, but note that for electromagnetic fields at frequencies above the standard 50/60 Hz, the biological impact may be more significant and the thresholds should be adjusted more conservatively.

Practical targets for your Line EMI Meter:

• Under 50 mV: Good. Clean power.

• 50 – 100 mV: Moderate concern. Look for sources.

• Over 100 mV: Elevated. Find and address sources.

• Over 500 mV: Severe. Common in homes with solar inverters, certain HVAC systems, or dense LED/CFL lighting.

The Stetzer and Greenwave plug-in meters use slightly different units but publish similar guidance: under 25 = ideal, 25-50 = average, over 50 = undesirable.

Room-by-Room Walkthrough

Here’s where the meters meet reality. Grab your kit and let’s walk through your house.

Bedroom (Start Here)

This is the most important room. You spend roughly eight hours per night here, your body is in repair mode (cellular cleanup, hormone production, immune system restoration), and your defenses against environmental stressors are lower during sleep. If you only optimize one room, make it this one.

What to measure:

1. RF (Safe and Sound Pro II or Classic): Turn the meter on, slowly sweep the room. Check at pillow height on both sides of the bed. Move along each wall. The meter’s audio feature will help you identify sources by their sound signature.

Common culprits:

• WiFi router in the bedroom or on the other side of a wall.

• Smart meter mounted on the exterior wall behind your headboard (a remarkably common finding).

• Cordless DECT phone base station on the nightstand (these transmit continuously, not just during calls).

• Bluetooth-enabled alarm clocks, speakers, or sleep trackers.

• Baby monitor (a constant RF transmitter sitting feet from a sleeping infant).

• Your phone, if it’s not in airplane mode with bluetooth and Wi-Fi turned off.

2. AC Electric Fields (ME3830B, grounded): Hold the grounded meter at mattress level and sweep along the bed surface. Walk along each wall. The wiring inside your walls radiates electric fields 24/7.

Common culprits:

• Extension cords or power strips under or behind the bed.

• Lamp cords running along the headboard.

• Phone/tablet chargers on the nightstand (even if nothing is plugged into them).

• The wiring in the walls, floor, and ceiling surrounding your bed.

3. AC Magnetic Fields (ME3830B or UHS2): Sweep the room at bed height. Pay special attention near walls shared with the breaker panel, the kitchen (refrigerator motor), or a bathroom (if it has electric radiant floor heating).

Common culprits:

• Wiring errors creating net current (the big one; more on this below).

• Clock radio or other motorized device on the nightstand.

• Electric radiant floor heating in an adjacent bathroom.

• Power lines outside the wall.

4. Dirty Electricity (Line EMI Meter): Plug into each bedroom outlet. Note the readings. Compare with outlets in other rooms.

Common culprits:

• Dimmer switches (a major dirty electricity generator).

• LED or CFL bulbs with cheap electronic ballasts.

• Phone chargers and laptop adapters.

• Solar inverter feeding back onto the circuit.

Target readings for your bedroom:

• RF: < 10 µW/m² (ideally < 1 µW/m²)

• AC Magnetic: < 1 mG (ideally < 0.2 mG)

• AC Electric: < 1.5 V/m (body voltage < 100 mV)

• Dirty Electricity: < 50 mV

Home Office

After the bedroom, this is typically the highest-exposure room because of device density. You may spend 6-10 hours here daily if you work from home.

What to measure:

• RF: WiFi router (if hardwired ethernet isn’t your setup yet), Bluetooth keyboard/mouse/headphones, wireless printer. Check the meter at your desk position where you sit for hours.

• AC Electric Fields: Ungrounded laptop or monitor. This is a very common finding: if your laptop charger has a two-prong plug (no ground pin), the laptop radiates significant electric fields into your hands and body. A grounded power cord can eliminate this.

• AC Magnetic Fields: Check around the back of your monitor, near power adapters, and at desk level. Transformers and power bricks are common magnetic field sources.

• Dirty Electricity: Check outlets powering your computer setup. SMPS (switching mode power supplies) in laptop chargers are significant dirty electricity generators.

Quick wins:

• Switch from WiFi to ethernet. USB ethernet adapters are $15-20.

• Replace Bluetooth peripherals with wired.

• Ground your laptop (3-prong power cord).

• Move transformers/power bricks away from your body. A couple feet of distance makes an enormous difference with magnetic fields (they drop off rapidly with distance following the inverse-square law).

Kitchen

Most people don’t linger in the kitchen for eight hours, so it’s a lower priority than bedroom and office. But it’s worth checking because some kitchen appliances produce surprisingly high readings.

Key items to check:

- Microwave oven: Can produce very high RF readings while running (check with your RF meter during operation; stand several feet away). Zero RF when off. The question is how much leaks through the shielded door. Older microwaves leak more, but every microwave I’ve ever tested registered off the scale.

- Refrigerator motor: Produces a magnetic field that radiates several feet. If your fridge shares a wall with a bedroom, check the bedroom side.

- Induction cooktop: Produces very high AC magnetic fields during operation. If you use one, the Building Biology recommendation is to stand at arm’s length when possible, and check readings at waist height.

- Smart appliances: Many modern refrigerators, ovens, and dishwashers have WiFi modules transmitting continuously. Check with your RF meter.

Kids’ Rooms

This section matters more than most people realize.

Peer-reviewed research has consistently found that children absorb significantly more RF radiation than adults. A 2014 review in the Journal of Microscopy and Ultrastructure compiled the evidence: a 1996 study found RF penetrated proportionally deeper into children’s brains. A 2008 French Telecom study found children’s brain tissue absorbed roughly 2x more microwave radiation than adults. A 2009 study found CNS absorption was “significantly larger (~2x)” because the RF source is closer to the brain (thinner skull) and skin and bone layers are thinner. Most striking: bone marrow exposure was approximately 10x higher in children than adults.

A 2018 study in Environmental Research (Fernandez et al.) confirmed that compared with adult models, children experience two- to three-fold higher RF doses to localized brain areas from a cell phone positioned next to the ear, and to the eyes and frontal lobe during screen use.

These aren’t fringe claims. This is published in major peer-reviewed journals and the findings are consistent across multiple independent research groups.

What this means practically:

Apply the Building Biology guidelines more conservatively for kids’ rooms. If “slight anomaly” (0.1-10 µW/m²) is acceptable for an adult sleeping area, aim for “no anomaly” (< 0.1 µW/m²) in a child’s room if at all possible.

Common sources in kids’ rooms:

• Baby monitors. These are continuous RF transmitters, usually placed within a few feet of a sleeping infant. Wired video monitors exist and are the better choice. At minimum, place any wireless monitor as far from the crib as possible

• Tablets and phones. Children holding these devices absorb 2-3x more RF into their brains than adults. Airplane mode when possible. Download content before handing it over. Use wired headphones

• Gaming consoles. WiFi-connected consoles transmit continuously. Ethernet connection is better

• Bluetooth toys. Many modern toys have Bluetooth connectivity for app integration. They transmit RF at close range to a developing brain

Breaker Panel Area

The breaker panel (electrical service panel) is typically the highest magnetic field area in your house. This is normal. It’s where all the current in your home converges.

The concern isn’t the panel itself, but whether a bedroom, office, or living space shares a wall with it. Magnetic fields penetrate walls easily. If your child’s bed is on the other side of the wall from your breaker panel, move the bed or take magnetic field readings to see how far the field extends.

Smart meters are typically mounted on the exterior wall near the breaker panel. They transmit RF pulses throughout the day (some models thousands of times daily). Check the corresponding interior wall with your RF meter. If a bedroom is on the other side of that wall, you have a problem.

Smart meter opt-out: Most states offer some form of smart meter opt-out program, though the process and fees vary widely. Some utilities replace it with a traditional analog meter; others offer a “non-transmitting” digital meter (RF transmitter disabled). Fees can range from nothing to a one-time charge of $75-250, plus monthly fees of $10-75 in some areas. Contact your utility and ask for their opt-out procedure. It’s worth doing, especially if the meter is near sleeping areas.

Common Findings and Easy Fixes

After measuring dozens of homes, certain patterns repeat constantly. Here are the most common findings and what to do about each one.

Wiring Error Creating Elevated Magnetic Fields

The finding: You’re sweeping your bedroom with the gaussmeter and getting readings of 2-5 mG or higher in areas that should be clean. The field doesn’t change when you turn off devices. It may be strongest along one wall or in a specific area.

What’s happening: Somewhere in your house, an electrician (possibly decades ago) made a wiring error that creates what’s called a “net current.” In properly wired circuits, the current flowing out on the hot wire and returning on the neutral wire run alongside each other, and their magnetic fields cancel out. When neutrals are improperly bonded, or current returns on a path other than the paired neutral conductor, the cancellation fails and you get elevated magnetic fields radiating through the house.

The fix: A licensed electrician can identify and correct the wiring error. This is typically a $100-300 fix and the results are permanent. If your readings are significantly above 1 mG in sleeping areas, this is worth investigating. The cost of the electrician’s visit may pay for itself many times over in health value.

Wi-Fi Router in or Near the Bedroom

The finding: High RF readings (hundreds to thousands of µW/m²) that the meter’s audio identifies as WiFi.

The fix: Move the router as far from bedrooms as possible. Better yet, switch to wired ethernet throughout your home and disable WiFi entirely (or use a timer to shut it off at night). USB ethernet adapters for laptops cost $15-20. Mesh WiFi systems can often be connected via ethernet backhaul. The single biggest RF reduction most people can make is getting the WiFi router out of the bedroom area.

Extension Cord or Power Strip Under the Bed

The finding: Elevated electric fields right at mattress level that drop when you move toward the center of the room.

The fix: Relocate the power strip or extension cord. Even unplugging it from the wall eliminates the electric field (because it’s no longer carrying voltage). Simply turning devices off does not eliminate AC electric fields from the cord itself. The cord radiates as long as it’s plugged in.

Cordless DECT Phone

The finding: Constant high RF reading from the base station, even when nobody is on a call.

The fix: Replace with a corded phone. DECT phone base stations are among the strongest continuous RF sources in a typical home. They transmit 24/7, not just during calls. If you must keep a cordless, at minimum move the base station away from any room where people spend extended time.

Smart Meter on Bedroom Wall

The finding: RF spikes on the interior wall corresponding to where the smart meter is mounted outside. These may come in bursts (the meter transmits data to the utility in pulses).

The fix: Request an opt-out from your utility and have the smart meter replaced with an analog or non-transmitting meter. If opt-out isn’t available or the fees are prohibitive, consider shielding the interior wall with RF-blocking material (SLT sells shielding paint and fabric). Moving the bed away from that wall also helps. When using shielding fabric, it’s often helpful to fold the fabric several times - more layers helps attenuate the signal more. You can verify this with your RF meter.

Dimmer Switches Creating Dirty Electricity

The finding: High Line EMI readings on circuits controlled by dimmer switches. Standard dimmers chop the AC waveform to reduce voltage, creating high-frequency transients.

The fix: Replace dimmer switches with standard on/off switches. This is a quick, cheap improvement. If you want variable lighting, some “smart” dimmers produce less dirty electricity, but test with your Line EMI Meter to verify.

Electric Blanket

The finding: Extremely high electric field readings at mattress level when the blanket is plugged in, even if it’s turned off.

The fix: If you use an electric blanket, preheat the bed, then unplug it before getting in. Turning it off is not enough. As long as the cord is connected to a live outlet, the blanket’s wiring radiates electric fields into your body all night. Unplugging completely eliminates this.

Baby Monitor

The finding: Strong, continuous RF signal right next to the crib.

The fix: Switch to a wired video monitor (they exist, and they don’t transmit RF). If you keep a wireless monitor, place it as far from the crib as possible while still being functional. Never right next to the baby’s head.

We always just keep our babies in our bedroom. A dedicated room is often counterproductive to night-time breastfeeding, unless your plan is to ignore them while they’re crying, which you shouldn’t be doing.

The Bedroom Kill Switch: The Single Highest-Impact Fix

If there’s one change that gives the most dramatic improvement to your sleeping environment, it’s this one.

A remote cutoff switch (sometimes called a demand switch or kill switch) is a device installed next to your circuit breaker panel that physically disconnects the electrical wiring to your bedroom circuits at night. You press a button on a remote control at your bedside. The switch disconnects the hot wire (and in the better units, the neutral wire too) of every circuit that affects your bedroom. The voltage disappears from the wires in your walls, floor, and ceiling. The AC electric fields drop to near zero. The dirty electricity on those circuits disappears.

In the morning, you press the button again. Everything comes back on.

The effect is dramatic. EMF consultant Jeromy Johnson reports that many clients say it “feels like camping” once the switch is activated. No electric fields, no EMI from the wiring, just quiet. The body’s nighttime repair processes happen without electromagnetic interference from the building’s wiring.

How It Works

The switch unit installs on the wall next to your breaker panel (by a licensed electrician). Your bedroom circuits are routed through the switch’s contactors. A wireless or wired remote at your bedside communicates with the unit. When you activate it, the contactors physically open, disconnecting the circuits. Your breaker panel is untouched and fully functional, the disconnect happens in the separate switch unit.

This is important: you don’t want to manually flip your breakers every night. Breakers are designed for occasional use and can wear out after 100-200 on/off cycles, at which point they may fail to trip during an actual overload. That’s a fire hazard. The remote cutoff switch is purpose-built for daily cycling and doesn’t stress your breakers at all.

The NP vs. PO Distinction

There are two types of remote switches:

• PO (Power Only): Disconnects only the hot wire. Reduces AC electric fields significantly, but the neutral wire remains connected to your home’s wiring network (and the neighborhood grid). Any dirty electricity (EMI) riding on the neutral still radiates into your bedroom.

• NP (Neutral + Power): Disconnects both the hot and neutral wires. Eliminates electric fields AND most dirty electricity. This is the recommended option, especially if you’re electrically sensitive or want the most thorough disconnection. An NP switch is the closest you can get to being completely disconnected from the local power grid while still having power available at the press of a button.

Products

Two main options in North America:

• EMFSafe Switch (Oregon): UL-approved, available in NP and PO configurations, 2-8 circuit NP or 4-16 circuit PO models. The NP version is what most EMF consultants recommend. They also offer a PQFilter whole-house dirty electricity filter that can be installed alongside the switch.

• Safe Living Technologies Remote Cut Off Switch Kit (Toronto): Long-established product from one of the most trusted names in the EMF space.

Installation Process

1. Map your circuits. You need to figure out which breakers control the wiring in and around your bedroom. This takes a helper: one person at the breaker panel turning off breakers one at a time, another in the bedroom with an electric field meter (or body voltage meter) watching for the reading to drop. Typically 2-4 circuits affect a bedroom, but it can be more depending on how your house was wired. Don’t forget circuits for rooms above, below, and beside the bedroom, as wiring in adjacent spaces can radiate electric fields through shared walls

2. Order the right size switch. Add up the total circuits across all bedrooms you want to cover. The switches come in various sizes (2, 4, 6, 8+ circuits)

3. Hire a licensed electrician. Installation typically takes 1-2 hours. The switch comes in a ready-made enclosure that’s straightforward for an electrician to work with. Make sure the equipment is UL-approved so your homeowner’s insurance isn’t affected

4. Test after installation. Use your electric field meter to verify that the fields in your bedroom actually drop when the switch is activated. You should see readings drop to approximately 1 V/m or body voltage below 100 mV

Can Multiple Bedrooms Get Their Own Zones?

Yes. Most switch systems allow for multiple zones. You can turn off the kids’ bedroom circuits at 8:00 PM and keep your own circuits live until you go to bed later. Each zone can have its own remote.

What NOT to Buy

Let’s talk about what doesn’t work, so you can save your money for what does.

Cheap Amazon “EMF Detectors” ($20-50)

The multifunction EMF meters flooding Amazon, AliExpress, and eBay for under $50 are, broadly speaking, not accurate enough to trust. The RF measurement capabilities are particularly poor on combination meters. They’ll give you false positives, miss real exposures, and create a distorted picture of your actual situation that’s potentially worse than measuring nothing at all.

Jeromy Johnson at EMF Analysis tested many of these devices and found consistent issues with accuracy and quality, especially the multi-purpose meters attempting to measure all three field types in one instrument.

The TriField TF2 (~$170) is a step up and can be considered a learning tool, but it still lacks the sensitivity, frequency range, and audio features of the dedicated meters recommended above. It’s better than the $30 Amazon specials, but it’s not going to catch everything you need to catch. Especially for RF, where digital signals pulse in microsecond bursts that cheap meters can’t properly capture.

A Word on “EMF Protection” Products

The moment you start measuring, you will also start seeing the ads: stickers that “harmonize” your phone’s radiation, pendants that “protect your biofield,” plugs that “restructure” the EMF in your home, little boxes that generate a “protective field.” There is an entire industry built on EMF fear, and almost all of it is snake oil. Some of it quietly makes things worse.

The meter you just learned to use is also the tool that exposes the grift. There is exactly one question that separates real protection from a talisman: does the reading drop after you install it? Take a measurement, add the product, measure again. If the number doesn’t fall, the product did nothing, no matter what the packaging says.

That is worth more than one sentence, because the scams are clever and the real danger is not the wasted money but the false confidence that makes people careless. Part 3 will take the whole snake oil aisle apart: the pendants, the stickers, the scalar and tachyon plugs, the devices that trade one kind of EMF for another, and how to spot the tell every time.

The key point is that electromagnetic fields are real fields that can be explained with physics and measured with consumer devices, and attenuating them (for instance with RF shielding) has scientifically explainable (and measurable) effects. If there’s no scientific explanation for how a “talisman” protects you from EMF, it’s almost certainly a scam.

What You’ll Probably Discover

Here’s what I want you to know before you start: almost everyone finds surprises. The meter makes visible what was invisible. That’s the whole point.

You’ll probably find 2-3 sources you had no idea about. A wiring error creating a magnetic field hot spot. A smart meter dumping RF into your kid’s bedroom. An extension cord under the bed radiating electric fields into your body all night. A dimmer switch flooding your bedroom circuit with dirty electricity.

And you’ll find that fixing most of these problems is straightforward. Move a cord. Replace a switch. Plug in an ethernet cable. Call an electrician. Press a button at bedtime.

The Building Biology approach isn’t about perfection. “No anomaly” levels are effectively impossible in a modern home. The goal is reduction. Every source you identify and address is a step toward a cleaner electromagnetic environment. Your bedroom doesn’t have to be an anechoic chamber. It just has to be meaningfully better than the unexamined default.

Start with the bedroom. Get that right. Then work outward. The meters will guide you. The numbers don’t lie, and once you can see them, the changes are obvious.

In Part 4, we go deep on the biology: the specific cellular mechanism (voltage-gated calcium channels) that explains why these non-thermal fields produce biological effects, and why the “it doesn’t heat you so it can’t hurt you” framework was wrong from the start.

This is Part 2 of the ongoing EMF series from The Liberty Lookout investigating electromagnetic fields, biological mechanisms, and practical steps for protection. Part 1: “The Field You Can’t See” covers the foundation.

Sources

- Building Biology SBM-2024 Evaluation Guidelines: buildingbiology.com

- Create Healthy Homes, Building Biology Standards overview: createhealthyhomes.com

- EMF Analysis, Recommended EMF Meters: emfanalysis.com

- EMF Analysis, Remote EMF Switch installation guide: emfanalysis.com

- EMF Center, Safe and Sound Pro II review: emfcenter.com

- EMFSafe Switch product guide: liveemfsafe.com

- Safe Living Technologies product pages: safelivingtechnologies.com

- Morgan et al. (2014), “Why children absorb more microwave radiation than adults”: ScienceDirect

- Fernandez et al. (2018), “Absorption of wireless radiation in the child versus adult brain and eye”: ScienceDirect

- Gandhi et al. (2012), “Exposure limits: the underestimation of absorbed cell phone radiation, especially in children”: PubMed

- NCSL, Smart Meter Opt-Out Policies: ncsl.org

- BeatEMF, EMF Protection Scams debunking: beatemf.com

- Gigahertz Solutions, SBM-2015 overview: gigahertz-solutions.com

- SLT EMF Exposure Guidelines for Sleeping Areas: safelivingtechnologies.com

You can see smog. You can taste contamination in water. You can smell a chemical spill.

You cannot see, taste, or smell the electromagnetic fields saturating every square inch of your home, your office, your child’s school, and the air between them. They pass through your walls, your skull, and every cell in your body, twenty-four hours a day. And the agency responsible for ensuring they’re safe hasn’t updated its safety standards since 1996, based on research from the 1980s involving five monkeys and eight rats.

This is Part 1 of the new EMF series covering the invisible infrastructure all around us.

What EMF Actually Is

Electromagnetic fields are invisible fields of energy produced wherever electricity flows or radio waves transmit. That’s not exotic physics. It’s the fundamental operating principle of modern civilization. Every wire, every antenna, every motor, every screen, every charger, every “smart” device produces them, mostly intentionally to operate as it needs to, and sometimes spuriously due to insufficient precautions or poor engineering.

The word “electromagnetic” tells you what you’re dealing with: coupled electric and magnetic fields that radiate outward from their source. Some are natural. The Earth generates a magnetic field. The sun emits the full electromagnetic spectrum. Lightning strikes (about 50 per second globally) sustain the Schumann resonance: a set of ultra-low frequency peaks centered at 7.83 Hz that form the planet’s natural electromagnetic heartbeat. Life evolved in this environment over billions of years.

Then, in the geological blink of an eye, we changed the game.

The Scale of Change

Professor Olle Johansson of the Karolinska Institute (Sweden’s Nobel Prize-granting medical university) and Professor Einar Flydal of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have calculated that man-made electromagnetic pollution now exceeds Earth’s natural electromagnetic background by a factor of roughly one quintillion. That’s 10^18, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. A one with eighteen zeros after it.

A 2022 peer-reviewed paper in Reviews on Environmental Health documented that “ambient levels of electromagnetic fields have risen sharply in the last 80 years, creating a novel energetic exposure that previously did not exist,” with “exponential increases in nearly all environments, including rural/remote areas and lower atmospheric regions.”

Let that land. Not double. Not ten times. Not a thousand times. The human-generated electromagnetic environment is roughly a quintillion times stronger than the one every living organism on Earth evolved to function in. And this happened in about 120 years.

No other environmental change in human history comes close.

The Four Types of EMF (and Why This Matters)

Most people, when they hear “EMF,” think of cell towers and WiFi. That’s one type. There are actually four distinct categories of electromagnetic pollution in a typical modern home, each with different sources, different behaviors, and different measurement tools. Understanding the distinction matters, because you could turn off every wireless device you own and still be swimming in three other types of EMF.

1. Radio Frequency (RF) Radiation

This is the one everyone talks about. RF covers frequencies from about 3 kHz to 300 GHz: the range used by WiFi routers, cell phones, cell towers, Bluetooth, cordless phones, smart meters, baby monitors, and 5G antennas. It’s measured in microwatts per square meter (µW/m²) or milliwatts per square meter (mW/m²).

Sources you probably already suspect: your WiFi router, your phone, the cell tower down the street. Sources you might not suspect: your neighbor’s smart meter, your baby monitor (which is a continuous RF transmitter sitting next to your infant’s head), your wireless security cameras, your Bluetooth earbuds.

2. AC Magnetic Fields

Wherever electrical current flows through a wire, a magnetic field radiates outward. These fields are measured in milligauss (mG) or microtesla (µT). They penetrate walls, floors, and most building materials. You can’t shield against them easily - what helps here is distance.

Sources: power lines, electrical panels, wiring errors (net current from improperly bonded neutrals), appliance motors, transformers, dimmer switches. The sneaky one: if an electrician miswired something in your house years ago, you could have elevated magnetic fields in rooms you’d never suspect. This is more common than you’d think.

3. AC Electric Fields

This one surprises people. AC electric fields exist wherever voltage is present in a wire, even when no current is flowing and nothing is turned on. If a lamp is plugged in but switched off, the cord and wiring still radiate an electric field. Measured in volts per meter (V/m).

Sources: every wire in your walls (carrying 120V at all times), extension cords, power strips, lamp cords, chargers. The key realization: you spend roughly eight hours sleeping surrounded by live wiring embedded in the walls, floor, and ceiling of your bedroom. Those wires radiate electric fields into your body the entire time.

4. Dirty Electricity

The weirdest one. Your home’s electrical wiring is supposed to carry clean 60 Hz AC power (50 Hz in Europe). In practice, modern electronics dump high-frequency voltage transients and harmonics back onto the wiring, creating what epidemiologist Samuel Milham called “dirty electricity”: “high frequency voltage transients and harmonics riding along on the 50 or 60 Hz wave form and contaminating the electricity delivered to users.”

Most generators, for instance, produce such dirty electricity that charging your laptop with them can break it - you need special inverter generators to produce a clean-enough sine wave for modern electronics.

Sources: LED dimmer switches, CFL and some LED bulbs, switch-mode power supplies (every laptop charger, phone charger, and USB adapter you own), solar panel inverters, variable-speed motors (modern washing machines, HVAC systems). Dirty electricity rides along your house’s wiring and radiates outward, effectively turning your entire home into a low-grade antenna broadcasting kilohertz-range electromagnetic noise. Measured in millivolts peak-to-peak (mV p-p).

It’s Complicated

The point is - the EMF soup we’re all swimming in is complicated. There is no single meter that measures all four. The popular TriField TF2 handles RF, AC magnetic, and AC electric, but not dirty electricity. For dirty electricity, you need a dedicated line EMI meter.

And here’s the kicker: you could live in the middle of nowhere, off-grid from cell towers, with your phone in airplane mode and your WiFi off, and still have dangerous levels of AC magnetic fields (from wiring errors), AC electric fields (from the wiring in your walls), and dirty electricity (from your solar inverter). RF is the one that gets all the press. It’s not the only one that matters.

The “Thermal Only” Dogma

Now for the question that should be obvious: if we’ve increased the electromagnetic environment by a factor of a quintillion, how did regulators decide this was safe?

The answer is a masterclass in institutional capture.

The story begins in the 1980s, when US Navy researchers trained food-deprived rats and monkeys to press levers for food pellets, then blasted them with RF radiation to see how much it took to disrupt their behavior. The answer: enough to raise their body temperature by about 1°C, which corresponded to a whole-body specific absorption rate (SAR) of about 4 watts per kilogram (W/kg).

That’s it. That’s the foundation.

The entire edifice of American RF safety regulation rests on 40-60 minute exposure sessions with 5 monkeys and 8 rats in the early 1980s, measuring whether the radiation got hot enough to make them stop pressing a lever for food.

Not DNA damage. Not cancer. Not reproductive harm. Not neurological effects. Not chronic exposure over years. Just: did it heat them up enough to change their behavior in the next hour?

From that 4 W/kg threshold, regulators applied a 10x safety factor for workers (0.4 W/kg) and an additional 5x for the general public (0.08 W/kg whole body). For localized exposure from cell phones held against the head, the FCC set the limit at 1.6 W/kg.

These limits were formally adopted by the FCC in 1996, the same year Congress passed the Telecommunications Act. They have not been updated since.

The assumption baked into these limits is explicit and extraordinary: the only way RF radiation can harm you is by heating your tissue. If it doesn’t cook you, it’s safe. Everything else, every biological effect that doesn’t involve measurable temperature increase, does not exist in the regulatory framework.

This is like declaring that the only way a car can hurt you is if it catches fire. It ignores the crash, the whiplash, the airbag deployment, and the slow buildup of exhaust fumes in your garage. But the model was clean, the math was simple, and the telecom industry liked it. So it stuck.

The Telecom Act: Locking the Door Behind Them

The 1996 Telecommunications Act didn’t just happen to coincide with the FCC adopting thermal-only limits. Section 704 of the Act explicitly prohibited local governments from opposing cell tower placement on the basis of health or environmental concerns, as long as FCC exposure limits were met.

Read that again. Congress didn’t just set weak safety standards. It made it illegal for your town to use health concerns as a reason to keep a cell tower away from your kid’s school. As long as the tower meets FCC guidelines (the ones based on whether it heats 8 rats enough to disrupt lever-pressing), your community has no legal standing to object.

The health agency that was supposed to be managing this, the EPA, was defunded and stripped of its authority over RF safety standards. The job went to the FCC, an agency whose mission is to promote the communications industry it’s theoretically regulating.

The $30 Million Study They Wish Didn’t Exist

In the early 2000s, the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) launched the most comprehensive study of cell phone radiation and cancer ever conducted. It would take over a decade and cost $30 million of taxpayer money.

The NTP exposed thousands of rats and mice to RF radiation at 900 MHz (a standard cell phone frequency) at various SAR levels for two years, which is roughly a rat’s full lifespan. The results, released in draft form in 2016 and finalized in November 2018 after expert peer review, were unambiguous.

The peer review panel’s final conclusions:

• “Clear evidence” of carcinogenic activity: malignant schwannomas of the heart in male rats (both GSM and CDMA modulations)

• “Some evidence” of malignant gliomas of the brain in male rats

• “Some evidence” of tumors of the adrenal glands in male rats

“Clear evidence” is the highest classification in the NTP’s evidence scale. The peer review panel actually upgraded the conclusions from the draft report, where NTP staff had initially listed the heart tumors at “some evidence.” The independent reviewers looked at the data and said: no, this is clear.

The tumor types are significant. Schwannomas (tumors of Schwann cells that wrap nerve fibers) and gliomas (tumors of glial cells in the brain) are the same types of tumors found at elevated rates in epidemiological studies of heavy cell phone users. The animal data matched the human data. Different methodology, same result.

For context, “clear evidence” of carcinogenicity from the NTP is the kind of finding that, for any other substance, would trigger immediate regulatory action. When the NTP found “clear evidence” that a food additive or industrial chemical caused cancer, agencies moved. When the substance was RF radiation, the regulatory response was silence.

Then it got worse.

In 2024, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) announced that the NTP would no longer study cell phone radiation at all. The most expensive, most rigorous animal study on RF radiation ever conducted found clear evidence of cancer, and the government’s response was to shut down the research program.

The stated rationale: the technology had advanced faster than the science could follow. Which is a bit like finding out the bridge is structurally unsound and responding by firing the bridge inspector.

The Ramazzini Replication

If the NTP study were the only evidence, you could make arguments about methodology, about high-dose exposure, about rats not being people. The telecom industry tried.

Then the Ramazzini Institute in Bologna, Italy, published its results.

The Ramazzini study, published in Environmental Research in 2018, was the largest long-term animal study on RF radiation ever conducted: 2,448 rats, exposed from prenatal life until natural death to 1.8 GHz GSM radiation (representative of cell tower emissions), 19 hours per day.

The critical difference from the NTP study: Ramazzini used far-field exposure (simulating living near a cell tower) at real-world exposure levels. The three exposure groups received 5, 25, and 50 V/m, corresponding to whole-body SARs of approximately 0.001, 0.03, and 0.1 W/kg. For reference, the FCC’s localized SAR limit for cell phones is 1.6 W/kg. The lowest Ramazzini dose was 1,600 times below that limit. These are the exposure levels millions of people experience daily from cell towers.

The results: a statistically significant increase in malignant schwannomas of the heart in male rats at the highest dose. The same tumor type, in the same organ, as the NTP study. Different country, different lab, different exposure method, different power levels, same result.

The study’s authors were explicit: “The RI findings on far field exposure to RFR are consistent with and reinforce the results of the NTP study on near field exposure, as both reported an increase in the incidence of tumors of the brain and heart in RFR-exposed Sprague-Dawley rats.”

This was independent replication at environmental exposure levels. In any normal scientific process, this would be the point where regulators sit up and pay attention.

The Court Ruling Damning the FCC

On August 13, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a ruling in Case 20-1025 (Environmental Health Trust et al. v. FCC) that should have been front-page news. It wasn’t.

The court found that the FCC’s 2019 decision to maintain its 1996 exposure limits was “arbitrary and capricious.” The agency had failed to provide a reasoned explanation for keeping guidelines that were a quarter-century old, in the face of thousands of pages of submitted scientific evidence documenting harm.

The court’s mandate ordered the FCC to:

1. Explain why it retained its outdated testing procedures for cell phones and wireless devices,

2. Address the impacts of RF radiation on children, long-term exposure, the ubiquity of wireless devices, and technological developments since 1996,

3. Address non-cancer health effects: impacts on the immune, endocrine, nervous, and reproductive systems,

4. Address environmental impacts on wildlife, plants, and animals.

A federal court looked at what the FCC was doing, looked at the evidence the FCC was ignoring, and told them to explain themselves.

As of this writing, the FCC has not responded to the court mandate. Not partially. Not inadequately. Not at all. A federal appeals court ordered a federal agency to justify its safety standards, and the agency simply... didn’t. For over four years. And counting.

The Gap Between the Standards and the Science

Let’s put some numbers next to each other.

The FCC’s maximum permissible RF exposure for the general public from cellular towers is approximately 580 µW/cm², which converts to 5,800,000 µW/m².

The Building Biology SBM-2015 guidelines, developed by practitioners who actually study biological effects of EMF in living environments, classify RF exposure for sleeping areas as:

• Below 0.1 µW/m² - No concern

• 0.1 - 10 µW/m² - Slight concern

• 10 - 1,000 µW/m²- Severe concern

• > 1,000 µW/m² - Extreme concern

The FCC says 5,800,000 µW/m² is fine. Building Biology says anything over 1,000 is “extreme concern.”

The FCC’s limit is 5,800 times higher than what Building Biology considers “extreme concern” and 58 million times higher than the “no concern” threshold. These are not rounding differences. This is a gap that can only exist when the standard-setters are measuring the wrong thing, on purpose, because they are evil and corrupt.

In 2011, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified radiofrequency radiation as Group 2B: “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” The same category as chloroform and gasoline engine exhaust. Since then, multiple researchers have argued the evidence now warrants an upgrade to Group 1: “carcinogenic to humans.”

Where This Leaves You

Here’s what we’ve established:

The electromagnetic environment has changed by a factor that’s difficult to even comprehend, in a timeframe that’s instantaneous by evolutionary standards. Life didn’t evolve for this. Nothing did.

The safety standards are based on the wrong measurement. They test for heating. The damage mechanisms are non-thermal: oxidative stress, DNA damage, calcium channel disruption, immune interference. Measuring thermal effects and declaring everything else safe is like testing food for radiation and declaring it free of pesticides.

The most expensive government study on the subject found clear evidence of cancer at the highest classification level. The government’s response was to cancel the research program.

An independent lab in Italy replicated the cancer findings at real-world exposure levels, far below the FCC’s already-weak limits.

A federal court told the FCC its standards were “arbitrary and capricious” and ordered it to explain itself. The FCC hasn’t bothered to respond in over four years.

The law makes it illegal for your community to object to cell tower placement based on health concerns, as long as the (arbitrary and capricious) FCC limits are met.

This is the structure. The telecom industry sets the terms. A captured regulator rubber-stamps them. Congress locks out local dissent. And the electromagnetic environment keeps intensifying.

This is the quintessential exit-and-build problem. The regulatory system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed, just not for you.

The good news: you don’t need the FCC’s permission to protect yourself. You can measure the fields in your home. You can understand what’s generating them. You can reduce your exposure systematically, with tools and strategies that cost less than your monthly cell phone bill. You can choose where you live, how you wire your home, and what devices you keep near your family.

That’s where this series goes next. Part 2 is the practical guide: the meters, the numbers, the room-by-room walkthrough, and the surprisingly simple fixes that make the biggest difference.

The field you can’t see is the one you most need to understand. Now you’ve started.

See also how this ties into declining fertility and the reproductive collapse that might lead to the extinction of our species, in our Biology & Survival series.

Sources:

- NTP Cell Phone Radiation Study (official page): ntp.niehs.nih.gov

- Falcioni et al. (2018), Ramazzini Institute: DOI: 10.1016/j.envres.2018.01.037

- EHT v. FCC, DC Circuit Case 20-1025 (2021): cases.justia.com

- Melnick et al. (2022), “Scientific evidence invalidates health assumptions underlying the FCC and ICNIRP exposure limit determinations”: PMC9576312

- IARC Press Release, Group 2B classification (2011): iarc.who.int

- Levitt, Lai, Manville (2022), “Effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields on flora and fauna”: DOI: 10.1515/reveh-2021-0026

- FCC SAR limits: fcc.gov

- FCC RF exposure guidelines for cellular sites: fcc.gov

- Telecommunications Act Section 704 (47 U.S.C. § 332(c)(7)): law.cornell.edu

- Environmental Health Sciences case summary: ehsciences.org

- Building Biology SBM-2015 guidelines: buildingbiologyinstitute.org

When a debilitating condition goes from 1 in 150 children to 1 in 31 in 20 years, you are looking at a civilizational event.

In its latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring report, the CDC put autism prevalence among American 8-year-olds in 2022 at 32.2 per 1,000, or 1 in 31. And this is not simply a larger population of eccentric math kids who hate eye contact. In the same report, 39.6% of the children identified with autism were also classified as having an intellectual disability.

No industrial society produces this many neurologically damaged children by accident. It does not happen because teachers got better at spotting it, and it does not happen because a few pediatricians sat through a seminar.

Diagnosis did change. Screening got better, definitions broadened, and doctors got faster at identifying kids who would have been missed a generation ago. That part is real, and it explains some of the rise.

It does not explain the whole rise.

A California study by Peter Bearman and Marissa King found that diagnostic change accounted for about 26.4% of the increase in autism caseload between 1992 and 2005 through one documented pathway. Another California analysis found that younger age at diagnosis could explain about 12% of the increase, and the inclusion of milder cases about 56%, so better paperwork accounts for a chunk of it. Something else accounts for the rest. Which leaves the question no institution wants to answer: what changed in the developmental environment?

Vaccines are not the whole picture

The autism debate has spent years stuck on one topic: vaccines.

But I know a very autistic child whose parents never exposed him to a single vaccine. So what happened?

A 2017 evidence-based review in Molecular Autism concluded that 40% to 50% of autism liability may be environmental, and in the same breath found that the evidence did not support vaccination or thimerosal as drivers of autism risk.

Of course, there are countless flawed studies on the topic - they test one piece at a time, MMR, thimerosal, aluminum, and each comes back clean, but nobody has run the obvious study: fully vaccinated children against completely unvaccinated ones, across the whole schedule, with real medical records. That comparison is missing, and the institutions that could fund it would rather not know.

The developmental environment got more hostile

The environmental signals that keep showing up in the autism literature are not dramatic. They are the everyday exposures modern life treats as background scenery, but it all adds up.

Air pollution

A 2021 meta-analysis in Environmental Pollution found that maternal exposure to air pollutants was associated with higher autism risk in newborns, and that each 5 μg/m3 increase in PM2.5 raised the risk across every model the authors ran. A 2016 systematic review in PLoS One rated the overall evidence as “moderate” and found the strongest link between prenatal particulate matter exposure and autism.

This is the air. Not some chemical spill in a river town, but the ordinary air a pregnant woman is expected to breathe without a second thought. We have normalized poisoned air so thoroughly that you smell exhaust, shrug, and keep walking. A developing fetus has no such option.

Heavy metals and mercury

A 2023 systematic review found that children with autism carried higher concentrations of cadmium, lead, arsenic, and mercury than controls across several sample types, while noting substantial variation between regions and specimen types. A 2017 mercury meta-analysis found significantly higher mercury in whole blood, red blood cells, and brain tissue in autistic patients than in controls.

Children are exposed to stacks, not single causes

Children are not exposed to one thing. They are exposed to stacks.

Air pollution. Pesticides. Plastics and plasticizers. Heavy metals. Ultra-processed food. Pharmaceutical residues. Chronic maternal stress. Metabolic dysfunction. Indoor chemical soup. Bad sleep, bad light, and too little sunlight. Then we act surprised when a vulnerable subset of children comes out developmentally impaired.

Pollute the developmental environment in ten different ways and the result will not announce itself in one clean press release. It shows up as a generation of children who are more fragile, more dysregulated, more delayed, more overstimulated, and more chemically burdened across a dozen different measures. Autism is one of the most visible forms that damage takes.

The money is in management, not prevention

Once the damage is here, the incentives get worse.

A rising autistic population means rising demand for evaluations, aides, speech therapy, occupational therapy, behavioral therapy, classroom accommodations, special-education bureaucracy, psychiatric oversight, and in many cases lifelong care. An entire administrative economy grows up around that demand, and it grows fast.

And that economy protects itself. Captured systems do not like upstream explanations, because upstream explanations are expensive for the wrong people. If the real fix is cleaner air, cleaner water, cleaner food, cleaner building materials, and less chemical exposure during pregnancy, then a lot of powerful institutions turn out to be standing inside the crime scene instead of outside it. Expanding services is easier than admitting the economy itself is producing damaged children.

None of that makes therapists or teachers the villains. Most of them are trying to help families survive a disaster they did not create. The villain is a social order that poisons upstream, bills downstream, and calls the arrangement “care.”

The rise in autism is yet another biological warning, one more sign that the mainstream lifestyle is not just decadent or spiritually empty but physically hostile to the development of healthy children.

What a family can actually do

1. Treat preconception and pregnancy as the window that matters most

If you can only reduce exposures in one stretch of life, reduce them here. Cleaner food, cleaner water, fewer fragrance products, less plastic touching food, and as much distance from obvious spray and exhaust as your life allows.

2. Filter the water you drink and cook with

If a family can make only one infrastructure upgrade, this is near the top. You have already seen in this series what turns up in municipal water and consumer products stream.

3. Cut the household chemical load

Fragrance-heavy products, vinyl, plastic food storage, aggressive cleaners, stain-resistant coatings, and cheap synthetics are exposure routes, not just decor. See part 10 of the series.

4. Take indoor air seriously

Open windows when the outdoor air is good and filter it when it is not. Pay attention to traffic corridors, industrial neighbors, and sealed modern buildings that trap everything inside. Better yet, move out of the cities.

Sources

- CDC, ASD Prevalence Among Children Aged 4 and 8 Years, ADDM Network, 2022 (MMWR, 2025)

- King & Bearman, Diagnostic change and the increased prevalence of autism (2009), Intl. Journal of Epidemiology

- Hertz-Picciotto & Delwiche, The Rise in Autism and the Role of Age at Diagnosis (2009), Epidemiology

- Modabbernia et al., Environmental risk factors for autism: an evidence-based review (2017), Molecular Autism

- Taylor et al., Vaccines are not associated with autism: a meta-analysis (2014), Vaccine

- Hviid et al., MMR Vaccination and Autism: A Nationwide Cohort Study (2019), Annals of Internal Medicine

- Hviid et al., Thimerosal-containing vaccine and autism (2003), JAMA

- Dutheil et al., Autism and air pollution: a systematic review and meta-analysis (2021), Environmental Pollution

- Lam et al., Multiple Airborne Pollutants and Autism (2016), PLoS One

- Wang et al., Maternal Exposure to Pesticides and Autism Risk (2022), J. Autism Dev. Disord.

- Philippat et al., Prenatal organophosphate exposure and autism (2018), Intl. J. Hygiene & Environmental Health

- Ding et al., Heavy metals exposure and child autistic disorder (2023), Frontiers in Pediatrics

- Jafari et al., Mercury levels and autism: a meta-analysis (2017), J. Trace Elements in Medicine & Biology

- Shin et al., Prenatal phthalates and autism in the MARBLES study (2018), Environmental Health

This was a good week for people who build. Communities pulled surveillance cameras off the poles, the highest court in the land told police to get a warrant, encryption survived a Brussels ambush, more Americans won the right to fix what they own, and the tools to run frontier AI and generate your own power kept getting cheaper. Here are five places where the ground shifted toward you.

Towns Are Ripping the Cameras Off the Poles

The Flock revolt went mainstream this week. On July 11 the LAPD suspended its use of Flock automated license plate readers after residents spent months in front of headquarters demanding it. A day earlier, Westland, Michigan voted to rip out all ten of its Flock cameras when the contract expires. They join at least 30 localities that have killed their contracts this year, and the ACLU’s Get the Flock Out campaign has receipts showing the company repeatedly lied to city councils and police departments about how its network really works.

The legal ground moved too. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Chatrie v. United States that geofence warrants, the ones that vacuum up every phone near a location, are Fourth Amendment searches requiring probable cause. Attorneys challenging Flock say the same logic points straight at license-plate dragnets next. A camera that logs every car in town, forever, is not “public safety.” It is a warrantless memory of your movements sold back to whoever buys access.

Exit and build: Check deFlock.me to map the readers near you, then show up when the contract renews, because these programs die at the local level when enough neighbors say no. Pay cash on the road, skip the toll transponder, and treat your car’s own telematics as the next thing to unplug.

Brussels Couldn’t Kill Encryption (It Tried)

The EU spent this week proving how little “democracy” it actually practices. Parliament had already rejected “Chat Control,” the scheme to scan the private messages of half a billion Europeans, back in March. So the Council repackaged the same text and forced a re-vote on July 9, on the last sitting day before summer recess. A clear majority of voting members, 314 to 276, rejected it again. Under a second-reading quirk that counts every empty chair as a yes, the scanning regime survived anyway.

Here is the part they would rather you miss. End-to-end encrypted messages were explicitly carved out of the law’s scope. Brussels can pressure the unencrypted middlemen all it wants, but math it cannot read stayed off the table. Anything sent in the clear is fair game for scanning, and anything sealed properly is nobody’s business but yours.

Exit and build: Move your conversations to Signal or another end-to-end encrypted app and turn on disappearing messages. Encrypt what you store, not just what you send, and stop treating SMS and plain email as private. When the scanners come for the soft targets, be a hard one.

You Are Allowed to Fix Your Own Stuff Again

You own it, so you should be able to fix it. That used to go without saying. Then manufacturers found a government tool to erase it: the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rule, a federal law that makes bypassing a software lock a crime even on hardware you bought outright. Apple, John Deere, and the appliance makers built those locks into everything, so a cracked screen or a dead sensor meant a new device instead of a cheap fix. That is the captive repair economy, and it did not grow in a free market. It grew behind a federal statute.

The new repair laws are the state prying its own fingers loose. Connecticut’s took effect July 1, making it one of roughly seven states (alongside California, Colorado, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, and Washington) where owners and independent shops can get parts, tools, and diagnostics again. Good news, sort of: one arm of government is rolling back a lockout another arm of government built. The clean fix was never a new mandate. It was repealing the lock and letting you fix what you own. Don’t hand the legislature a medal for loosening a grip it never had the right to take.

Exit and build: Before you replace anything, look it up on iFixit and try the fix yourself. Buy from repairable brands (Framework laptops, tools with published parts diagrams), find your local repair cafe, and learn to solder. A drawer of spare parts and a screwdriver kit is quiet independence from the upgrade treadmill.

Frontier AI Now Runs on Your Desk, Not Their Cloud

The quiet story of 2026 is that you no longer need Big Tech’s servers to use serious AI. Open-weight models kept shipping this month, and the open-source leaderboard now runs on models like Qwen 3, DeepSeek R1, and openly released weights that a decent gaming laptop can handle. Tools like Ollama turn a one-line command into a private assistant that never phones home.

This matters because every prompt you type into a cloud chatbot is logged, profiled, and one subpoena away from someone else’s file on you. A model running on your own hardware answers only to you. No terms of service, no usage tracking, no quiet training on your questions. The frontier is still ahead of what runs locally, but the gap that actually matters for real work is closing fast, and the local option costs nothing per query.

Exit and build: Install Ollama and pull a model that fits your machine this week. Route your sensitive drafting, journaling, and research through the local one and save the cloud for throwaway questions. Owning your compute is the AI-era version of growing your own food.

The Grid Is Becoming Optional

Energy independence stopped being a prepper fantasy and became an install date. Home battery installations hit a record in early 2026, and solar quietly passed coal as a source of US electricity in April. Panel and lithium-iron-phosphate battery prices have fallen far enough that a modest rooftop setup now pays for itself and keeps the lights on when the utility cannot.

A house that makes and stores its own power is a house that stops asking permission. Rolling blackouts, rate hikes, and the utility’s priorities become someone else’s problem. You are not off the hook for maintenance or upfront cost, but the math has tipped from luxury to leverage, and every kilowatt you generate is one the grid cannot ration or price-gouge out of you. Plus you can finally rip out that smart meter that’s been tracking and irradiating you with EMF.

Exit and build: Start small with a single battery and a few panels sized to your essentials, the fridge, the well pump, the router, then expand. Learn your own load before you buy, price a LiFePO4 system that survives 6,000-plus cycles, and treat backup power as insurance you actually control. We went fully off-grid two years ago, realized the system was a bit under-sized, upgraded it the next year, and are now running unlimited A/C in the summer for free.

Next Steps

- Map the cameras near you at deFlock.me and show up when the local contract comes up for renewal.

- Move one conversation to Signal this week and turn on disappearing messages.

- Fix one broken thing with an iFixit guide instead of replacing it.

- Run one AI model locally with Ollama and keep your prompts off corporate servers.

- Price one home battery sized to your essential loads and start the energy-independence math.

Over the past couple of months I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus. I wrote a post about it earlier in which I talked about my new garden and how I was going to get sheep. Since then I’ve planted melons, watermelons, pumpkins, corn, beans, squash (the three sisters), parsley, cilantro, tomatoes, different kinds of cucumbers, peppers, asparagus, artichoke, rhubarb, onion, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. I’ve been busy!

Our homestead also has a new flock of sheep, and I’ve spent most of my free time building them fences and rotationally grazing them before they succumb to the parasites in their poop. And yes, sheep will happily eat grass covered in their own feces if you don’t literally force them off it with fencing.

At some point the fencing infrastructure will be established and I’ll finally have more time for other things, but until then I’m still pretty short on time and so have had to drop the ball on posting here.

I did notice one disappointing thing though that I wanted to write about - if you don’t post every day, the Substack algorithm drops you. You disappear. Existing posts are never again shown to anybody, and your publication stalls.

When you first register for a Substack and they tell you “posting regularly is the key to growing your Substack” - they’re not kidding, that’s literally how they’ve built their algorithm. Recency trumps everything else.

Here’s my subscriber chart over the last 3 months. You’ll notice a big drop in early April, that’s when I deleted almost 100 subscribers who had never opened an email or engaged with any posts (I figure if people don’t want to see my emails, no need to spam them).

I quickly gained as many subscribers back over the following month of almost daily posts.

Then I stopped posting and my subscribers, views, and comments all plateaued and stopped.

Before Substack, many years ago, I had a Wordpress publication, and it worked very differently. Older posts would develop good SEO rankings, and Google and other search engines would bring in more traffic, not less, over time. Writing back then felt like an investment - anything I wrote would keep getting read for years to come.

Substack works differently. Like social media, it prioritizes recency. If you haven’t posted today, your publication basically doesn’t exist.

Substack makes writing throwaway.

All those articles I wrote in the Biology & Survival series about the imminent extinction of the human species? Invisible. Possibly the most important writing I’ve ever published is hidden, never to be found by anyone again, unless they specifically look through my publication’s archive. I get zero traffic from search engines because Substack apparently sucks at SEO.

I like Substack, mostly. There’s a lot of smart people on here and it feels like a corner of the internet that isn’t as toxic as some places like Reddit, for instance. But the fact that anything older than a few days old gets effectively memory-holed is awful, and I’m putting this post out there as a sort of PSA for folks to know how this works, in case you decide you want to start a new publication or move from somewhere else. Don’t do it unless you’re prepared to spend hours writing every day and being consistent. And be aware that all your existing posts will get zero views. Literally zero.

I moved my other publication, libertarianprepper.com to Substack from Wordpress about 3 years ago. With it came the entire archive of posts - some of which used to get thousands of clicks from Google every year. After the move? These older posts have had literally zero views over a three year period.