This is a wind turbine in Uruguay. The fact that it's in Uruguay is somewhat irrelevant
to this story, but I'm currently in Uruguay, and it is sort of relevant in one respect. The respect that unlike where I'm from in
Ontario, this turbine doesn't make you sick. In the early 2000’s, a woman started feeling
ill in a way that nobody had ever felt before. Which was in a sense fortuitous,
because this wasn’t just any woman. This was Dr Nina Pierpont. A medical doctor who went to both Princeton
and Yale, and did residency at Johns Hopkins. If anybody could get to the bottom of a medical issue,
surely it would be someone with a pedigree like that. And her self-diagnosis was that she was fine. Physically, anyway. And yet the problem was persisting. So therefore, she decided that if that
wasn't a problem of her being, it must be a result of changes to her environment. And as she’d recently moved back to New England
after years spent in remote rural regions, there were a lot of things to target
as potential problems. And one of those things that seemed to trigger
the illness most of all was something that had been a bit of a problem for her for years. Wind turbines. She and her husband absolutely hated them. Publicly hated them. I mean after all, she was a bit of a...
I'm going to say nature person. She is the type of person whose website to this day has
a header of a native woman with a butterfly on its nose and a canoe picture of herself. To her this was like a visual symbol of
our dominance over the natural world. Of our modern excesses or of our
disassociation from the planet. And what’s more, because of the way they are set up
in areas that have to have sweeping windy fields, they often seem like they are only ever put up
where the view was nice to begin with. A place to ruin. So she took out an ad in nearby
newspapers, I believe. She might have even put up in nearby
grocery stores' bulletin boards. Advertising that if anyone had been feeling
negative effects from these turbines she wanted to hear from them. She put up a phone number and conducted interviews,
leading questions to everybody who called in. And not surprisingly, she found a number of
people who backed up everything she said. Not just them either, but oh,
their families, their friends. Everybody is getting sick out here. She found thirty eight cases from a total
of only twenty three interviews. People were offering up everyone else to her. I mean it's not many people, granted. But it was enough for her to feel comfortable publishing
this small, obviously non-scientific statement. Almost like a pamphlet. The first public mention of what would then
become known as wind turbine sickness. It was a hit. Well, I wouldn’t say that it went viral or anything, within
a certain community of what I’m going to politely call alternative thinkers, it caught on well enough. And soon, no matter where a new tower went
up, protestors would just be there in advance. They always knew and they always cared. They’d hold town halls, they'd
knock on doors, they'd put up signs. They were helping. They wanted to tell everyone just how
bad these things made them feel. To catch it before it was too late. And like prophecy, every town they warned
found people catching that disease. The further they investigated, the more
they’d find stories of suffering. Symptoms included nausea, malaise, random aches
and pains, dizziness, sore joints, so much more. Virtually everything. It was the perfect storm of symptoms, experienced
in upwards of ten percent of the people who they canvassed. But the thing is, there’s one small issue
with wind turbine sickness, it isn’t real. It’s psychosomatic. It’s mass delusion. Every symptom that's attributed to it
already existed in that person, or was created out of a belief that it should exist. Almost a desire for it to exist. It's kind of like deciding that six is your lucky
number and all of a sudden seeing it everywhere. Yes, Dr. Nina Pierpoint is a medical professional,
and she’s pediatrician. But the thing her supporters somewhat gloss over is
that she’s a doctor of behavioural psychology. She is not the sort of medical professional
that term would, I don't know, naturally bring to mind when you hear it. Her degrees are a shield propping up
a very cleverly written deception. That said, while there may not be a wind turbine
sickness, there is a wind turbine syndrome. The first two cases, at least that we know
of, are Dr Pierpont and her husband. People who hated these things with such a
passion that it quite literally made them ill. And in turn, their hatred and their fear of this
symbolic change has started to resonate in others. They call it the nocebo effect. A placebo that can hurt you. But it really just relies on human suggestibility. Humans are so suggestible that if you take a class room
of children who have brown eyes and blue eyes, split them and tell them that
blue-eyed children will do worse on a test. They'll do worse on a test. We're just built that way. Both for better and worse. And wind turbine syndrome spread between communities because people were told what to expect in advance. In a way, they’ve created a form of mass
panic to harm themselves. And I should note that this is even true regardless
of their feelings towards the windmills themselves. Regardless of their feelings
towards this nocebo. While the original doctor and her husband
may have driven themselves to self-harm, many of the people suffering downstream are
simply reacting to the panic of the herd. They may not even believe that
windmills are causing it. So when doctors went in to study this syndrome,
they found patients were self-recording increased suffering levels despite the turbines
having been turned off secretly, simply because they were mentioning
the turbines at an increased rate. In towns where communities had seen
outsiders come in to warn of the dangers, nearly a tenth of the people would find themselves feeling ill from these turbines. And yet, in towns where no outsiders
came to tell them about the dangers, zero people recorded issues. Even those living directly underneath
the towers themselves. And yet, it is spreading. It continues to grow to this day. And it isn’t growing by accident. It's growing because of this push. And what's more than that it's growing
because of malicious intent. At some point, the greater energy industry
caught wind - hah, caught wind - of the protests and started working to support the spread
of the disease. In Australia, seeing the success it had achieved
in hindering Canadian turbine growth, competing energy companies started to form a front organization hiring a non-practicing doctor to be basically mimic Nina Pierpont. To be their frontperson and lie about
this wind turbine sickness. She is the Nina Pierpont of Australia. Her name is Sarah Laurie. And soon, Sarah would be spreading
the disease across an entirely new continent. Infecting people an entire world away from
where it began. A pandemic. Which leads me to the ultimate question
I have of this episode. Yes, this is a disease of the mind. Yet, for those who feel its effects, there’s
no denying that they are suffering from it. The reality is that everyone who complained
to Nina did so because Nina injected that complaint into them. Because they felt the same way as her,
and she brought it to the surface. As her nocebo spreads across this world, every
single person who is now affected by that work can trace the source of it back to her. She caused their pain. Not the turbines. So isn't she guilty… Of something at least? If she were willingly spreading a virus,
a real virus, we would quarantine her. But I suppose she doesn’t even really
realize she's doing this. Even though she's been told. At least not in a way you can
ever prove it in court. I think she earnestly believes every word,
and that’s what’s causing her to spread it. So how can we create a law that muzzles
her disease spewing mouth without allowing the government to shut
anyone down who they don’t like. It’s a very slippery slope. But then what about Sarah in Australia
and her sociopathic overlords? They surely know what they’re doing. Their intent is so blindingly clear. They are bringing in a fake disease that has
real symptoms to harm hundreds if not thousands of people of people
in the hopes that doing that will trick them into fighting against renewable energy. And they know they can get away with it
because they know it's not real. Shouldn't they be brought to heel? There must be something illegal in there. And all of that said, what about me? By making this video, I’m also
spreading this disease. This is a disease of information. The more people who watch this, the more likelihood
that it will trigger this disorder in somebody’s mind. Statistically, this video will sicken somebody. And I know that making it. So am I not guilty as well? Sure, much like Dr Pierpont, I came
with good intentions, but unlike her I actively know that I’m going to cause harm. So who is the Typhoid Mary here? One step further, by watching this video,
this dilemma has been passed on to you. Because just having this knowledge
makes you an asymptotic carrier. If you tell people, the more you do,
the worse this problem gets. Even if you’re telling them to
beware of the problem. So why does this make people in my town
sick and not here in Uruguay? Because we were told it would. And they weren't. This is Rare Earth. From my perspective, the takeaway
from this video is very clear. Wind turbines cause typhoid.
R1: Not applicable, as it's about bad science.
Thanks. I like this guy and this vid (even better at 1.25Ă— playback). Not that showing it to a believer is likely to enlighten, but perhaps it might plant a seed and lead them to consider a little bit further than the woo they desperately cling to in their current Dunning-Kruger worlds.
Snapshots:
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