The paws that refresh us

New from the “You’ll Think I’m Joking, But I’m Not” department, I have received word that the Calvary Episcopal Church in Danvers, Massachusetts is offering a worship service for dogs.

The program, called the “Perfect Paws Pet Ministry,” is alleged by Reverend Thea Keith-Lucas to “give area pet owners a greater likelihood of their dogs going to heaven.”  Owners will receive communion at the service, and dogs will receive dog treats and blessings.  Barking will be allowed.

While this has all the hallmarks of a story from The Onion, I assure you that it’s 100% true.

You have to wonder what the bible reading is going to be. Maybe a few verses from the Letter of St. Paul to the Dalmatians: “And the Lord said unto them, ‘To the Good Dogs shalt be given biscuits and squeaky toys and pats on the head, and there will be much wagging and playing of Fetch-the-Stick.  But unto the chewers of shoes, biters of mailmen, and those who pee on carpets shall be said, ‘No! No! Bad dog!’ and they shall they be cast out into the Back Yard, even if it be raining, and lo, there shall be no biscuits.’”

It’s not that I don’t understand the desire of pet owners to hang on to their pets.  If you believe in an afterlife, it’s kind of a sad prospect to think that you are going to live in eternal bliss, and Rocky the Black Lab just… won’t.  Many people feel as close to their pets as they do to their friends, and it’s natural to project onto them our hopes and fears for the future, and to want for them what we want for ourselves.

 

[image courtesy of photographer Noël Zia Lee and the Wikimedia Commons]

It does open up some potentially iceberg-strewn theological waters, however.  If we decide that dogs have an eternal soul, then what about other animals?   I own two dogs and a cat, and I can state that from my perspective, the cat's niche in the religious world seems to fall more into the “Possessed by Evil Spirits” category.  But if pets, why not other animals?  Do cows have an eternal soul?  What about pigeons?  What about slugs?  I don’t know about you, but if there are hornets in the verdant woodlands of heaven, I’d have second thoughts about going there.

The other problem I have with all of this is one that I have with a lot of religious thought, and that’s the idea that because something appeals to you, it’s likely to be true.  A friend of mine once told me, “I can’t imagine a universe where there was no god to guide things and give purpose to life.”  Well, it may well be true that you can’t imagine it, but I can’t see that that has the least bearing on whether or not god actually exists.  Honestly, I’ve found that there seems to be little to no correlation between my finding an idea appealing and its being true.  So it may seem sad to picture heaven without dogs, but it’s hard to see how that has any impact on (1) whether heaven exists, and (2) if it exists, whether dogs are allowed or not.

On the other hand, like many things, I suppose that attending a worship service with your dog isn’t doing any harm, even if the basic theological underpinnings of the idea are a little shaky.  So, if it makes you happy, by all means bring Rex along to church with you.  If it gives him some encouragement to be a Good Dog, all the better.  Me, I think I’ll stay home until Reverend Keith-Lucas hosts a Rite of Exorcism for the cats.

Milk of human kindness

I'm not a big believer in schadenfreude -- taking pleasure in other people's misfortune.  The habit of compassion is just too strongly ingrained in me.  But there are times that a person who richly deserves it receiving swift comeuppance is simply impossible to ignore.

Take, for example, the West Virginia lawmakers who passed a bill last week to legalize the sale of raw milk.  Raw milk was eliminated from the market in 1987, when the FDA mandated the pasteurization of all milk and milk products.  For good reason; there are a lot of bacteria in raw milk, and in fact the consumption of raw milk was a major pathway for the transmission of such horrible diseases as brucellosis and tuberculosis.

The FDA's statement on the topic is unequivocal:

Milk and milk products provide a wealth of nutrition benefits. But raw milk can harbor dangerous microorganisms that can pose serious health risks to you and your family. According to an analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 1993 and 2006 more than 1500 people in the United States became sick from drinking raw milk or eating cheese made from raw milk. In addition, CDC reported that unpasteurized milk is 150 times more likely to cause foodborne illness and results in 13 times more hospitalizations than illnesses involving pasteurized dairy products. 

Raw milk is milk from cows, sheep, or goats that has not been pasteurized to kill harmful bacteria. This raw, unpasteurized milk can carry dangerous bacteria such as Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria, which are responsible for causing numerous foodborne illnesses. 

These harmful bacteria can seriously affect the health of anyone who drinks raw milk, or eats foods made from raw milk. However, the bacteria in raw milk can be especially dangerous to people with weakened immune systems, older adults, pregnant women, and children. In fact, the CDC analysis found that foodborne illness from raw milk especially affected children and teenagers.

But there are always people who are (1) doubters of hard science, and (2) resent any government interference in their god-given right to do stupid stuff.  And when these two characteristics meet, we have problems.

So the lawmakers in West Virginia passed their bill allowing the sale of raw milk, and the delegate who sponsored the bill, Scott Cadle, decided to toast their success by drinking some.

The whole lot of them were laid low a day later by nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

[screen capture from video]

Of course, that's not enough for people who ignored all of the FDA's warnings to begin with.  Delegate Pat McGeehan, in between elbowing his fellow lawmakers out of the way to reach the bathroom in time, said, "I highly doubt raw milk had anything to do with it, in my case."

I think if I had to choose my least favorite common contagious disease, it would have to be stomach flu.  Fortunately, I don't get it often, but the time I had it the worst -- a never-to-be-forgotten twelve hour period of presumed food poisoning in Belize -- I would have happily jumped off a cliff to end my misery, had I had the strength to do anything other than kneel on the floor with my face in the toilet.  But even so, I have to admit I laughed when I read about this.  It's all very well to rail against government regulation, and I actually agree that governments often go way overboard in trying to license and regulate and restrict damn near everything.  (Take, for example, a law still on the books in Philadelphia that requires bloggers to purchase a $300 business privilege license, a practice that puts 99% of bloggers in the red.)

On the other hand, there are some regulations that are there for a reason, and the restrictions on selling unsafe foods are among them.  And as far as the sick West Virginia delegates, I hope they're all feeling better by now.

But I still think it's kind of funny.

Outnumbered by the extremes

Some years ago, I remember being struck by a quote about democracy from C. S. Lewis when I read his book The Weight of Glory.  While I don't accept a lot of his premises, I think his argument has merit:

I believe in political equality.  But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice.  That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy.  On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows.

When the democratic system works, it is because the votes of a few lunatics or extremists are outweighed by the votes of the (presumably more reasonable) average citizen, and good sense prevails.

The problem is, the whole thing falls apart when the extremists become so good not only at spreading their message but at demonizing the opposition that voters pledge themselves to people who are, to put not too fine a point on it, insane.  Then you find the system sowing the seeds of its own destruction, when by some unimaginable co-opting of the process, someone truly horrible ends up getting elected to office.

And no, I'm not talking about who you probably think I'm talking about.  The person I have in mind is Mary Lou Bruner, leading candidate for a seat on the Texas State Board of Education.

Bruner has established over and over again that she has a screw loose.  Below are a few of her more bizarre pronouncements.

On President Obama:

Obama has a soft spot for homosexuals because of the years he spent as a male prostitute in his twenties.  That is how he paid for his drugs.  He has admitted he was addicted to drugs when he was young, and he is sympathetic with homosexuals; but he hasn’t come out of the closet about his own homosexual/bisexual background.

 On the Kennedy assassination:

Many people believe the Democrat Party had JFK killed because the socialists and Communists in the party did not want a conservative president.  Remember who followed JFK as president — (LBJ).  The exact opposite of Kennedy — a socialist and an unethical politician.  It does seem like this might have been the master plan: They sneaked the bad guy (LBJ) into the administration on the coat-tail of a good guy (JFK).  Then they got rid of the good guy; in the end, they got a socialist president which is what they originally wanted.

On paleontology and the geological history of the Earth:

When the flood waters subsided and rushed to the oceans there was no vegetation on the earth because the earth had been covered with water…  The dinosaurs on [Noah’s ark] may have been babies and not able to reproduce…  After the flood, the few remaining Behemoths and Leviathans may have become extinct because there was not enough vegetation on earth for them to survive to reproductive age.

On climate change:

Climate change has nothing to do with weather or climate; it is all about system change from capitalism (free enterprise) to Socialism-Communism.  The Climate Change HOAX was Karl Marx’s idea.  It took some time to “condition” the people so they would believe such a ridiculous HOAX.

On the United Nations:

In regards to a statement I made about the United Nations wanting to reduce the population of the USA from 325 million to 125 million the question was asked to me: So how do you think the government and the UN plan to do away with 200,000,000 people from the United States under the agenda 21 plan? 

This was my answer: when the people die the government does not want them to be replaced.  That is how they propose to reduce the population from 325 million to 125 million.  They plan to use Obamacare to make sure people die a little sooner than they would have died.  When elderly people with heart problems or diabetes have to wait months to see a doctor, they die before their appointment comes around.  When the government says they cannot have the operation or the medicine they need they die sooner than they would have if they had gotten the operation or the medicine they needed.  The government may get to the point where it starts euthanizing people.  Part of Obamacare is to ask elderly people if they think their life is still worth living now that they can no longer get around well, or now that they are in a wheel chair, or now that they can no longer control their bladder or other functions, or now that their hands are not steady enough to feed themselves.  Some people become depressed and say that their life is not worth living under those conditions and that is just what the government wants to hear.  Those elderly people are not going to last long once the government gets their signature on that piece of paper.  There also will be more abortions paid for by the government.  Abortion is a method of reducing the population.

And last but not least, on school shootings:

School shootings started after the schools started teaching evolution.

This woman is now widely expected to win an election to the board that oversees public education in one of the most populous states in the United States.

The problem is, the Republican party has encouraged this sort of free-floating fear talk and religious mania for quite some time.  Witness the angry, America-is-being-destroyed-before-your-eyes railing of people like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. Fox News has for years been notorious for scary talk about Wars on Christmas and President Obama Coming To Steal Your Guns. Only now are there level-headed conservatives who are coming to the horrid realization that the message that they have been pushing has come back to bite the entire party in the ass, in the form of paranoid loons like Bruner standing a good chance at becoming a leading voice in driving educational policy in Texas -- and the Republican nomination for president being a contest between a loud-mouthed, fact-free neo-fascist and a religious nutjob who is so reviled by members of his own party that one of them said, "If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you."

The problem is, now that this snowball has been set in motion, I'm not sure what can be done about it.  The Republican old guard, apparently appalled that they might end up having to face either backing Donald Trump as presidential nominee, backing a Democrat, or not endorsing anyone, have tried to stage a last-ditch effort to block Trump from getting the nod, an effort which is almost certain to fail.  But the problem goes deeper than a man who is politics' answer to a carnival sideshow barker being a stone's throw from the presidency.  This embracing of extremist rhetoric has colored races all the way down to the local level.

How else could you explain that a certifiable whackjob like Mary Lou Bruner is predicted to garner the support of over 50% of Texas voters?

I don't know what could be done to return the United States to a position where rational dialogue was happening, or even possible.  The screeching of the extreme sides of both parties has done nothing but deepen distrust of our fellow citizens -- not to mention making it more likely that Lewis's view of democracy, that the votes of the reasonable majority would outweigh the votes of the unreasonable fringes, is unlikely to be realized any time soon.

We've got your number

As a science teacher, one of the things I find fascinating and perplexing is the phenomenon of innumeracy.

An innumerate person is someone who doesn't understand numbers.  We're not talking about simple ignorance of algebra, here; we're talking about someone who has no fundamental comprehension of quantity.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

As an example, take a student of mine who took physics with me, perhaps 25 years ago.  We were studying electrical force, and there was a problem set up that allowed you, with a few given parameters, to calculate the mass of an electron.  So after working for a time, this kid raised her hand, and asked, "Is this the right answer?"

She'd gotten the answer "36 kilograms."

Now, I'll point out from the get-go that she'd made a simple computational error -- divided when she should have multiplied.  What struck me is that she had no idea her answer was wrong.  When I said, "Doesn't your answer seem a little large, for an electron?" she replied, "Is it?  It's what my calculator said."

What's curious about innumerate people is that they're frequently quite good at rote cookbook math -- they can follow lists of directions like champs.  But they have no real sense of numbers, so they have no way to tell if they've gotten the wrong answer.

What's also interesting is that there are people who are pretty competent with small numbers, but lose it entirely with large numbers.  An exercise I used to do with my physics students to help correct this -- which, allow me to say up front, wasn't particularly successful -- was to have them do order-of-magnitude estimation problems.  Within an order of magnitude, how many ping-pong balls would it take to fill the classroom?  How many 1'x1' floor tiles are in the entire school?  How many telephone books in a stack would it take to reach from the Earth to the Moon?  And so on.  Once again, these kids could do the problems, once you'd established a protocol for how to solve them; but I don't think they really got any better at understanding magnitudes through doing it than they had to start with.

Now, scientists at Imperial College in London have gained an insight into why this big-versus-small number comprehension issue might exist; they have found that big and small numbers are processed in different parts of the brain.

The study, led by Qadeer Arshad of the Department of Medicine, said that the idea for the study came from studying victims of strokes whose damage interfered with very specific abilities apropos of number processing. "Following early insights from stroke patients we wanted to find out exactly how the brain processes numbers," Arshad said.  "In our new study, in which we used healthy volunteers, we found the left side processes large numbers, and the right processes small numbers.  So for instance if you were looking at a clock, the numbers one to six would be processed on the right side of the brain, and six to twelve would be processed on the left."

The team then used a procedure to activate one side of the brain more than the other, and asked the volunteers to do various estimation tasks.  Interestingly, people had a systematic tendency to err in a opposite directions depending on which side of the brain was stimulated.  "When we activated the right side of the brain, the volunteers were saying smaller numbers," Arshad explained.  "For instance, if we asked the middle point of 50-100, they were saying 65 instead of 75.  But when we activated the left side of the brain, the volunteers were saying numbers above 75."

Apparently, the context of the task was also critical.  "If someone was looking at a range of 50-100 then the number 80 will probably be processed on the left side of the brain," Arshad explained.   "However, if they are looking at a range of 50-300, then 80 will now be small number, and processed on the right."

Which at least gives a preliminary explanation of why there are students who do just fine with manipulating small numbers, but fall apart completely when dealing with large ones.  I deal with kids for whom 10,000 years ago, 1,000,000 years ago, and 1,000,000,000 years ago all sound about the same -- "big" -- making it difficult to give them any real sense of the time scale of evolutionary biology.

Anyhow, I think the study by Arshad et al. is fascinating, and gives us a further window into understanding how our brains work.  Which is all to the good.  Although it still doesn't quite answer how someone could think that a 36 kilogram electron sounds reasonable.

Anti-smirk spells

Most of you probably know the name of Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceuticals executive who became notorious for raising the price of an anti-HIV drug his company manufactures from $13.50 per tablet to $750.  Once caught, he was completely unrepentant, claiming that the price hike resulted in cash that could be put into additional research, which would be "a great thing for society."  Not so great a thing for people who are HIV-positive, of course, but he doesn't seem unduly bothered by that.  Morals don't seem to be Shkreli's strong suit; besides his dubiously ethical practice of jacking up drug prices so as to squeeze the maximum profit from the ill, he was also arrested for securities fraud last year and is currently out on bail pending trial.

He is also notable for having a cocky, self-satisfied smirk so infuriating that it would probably induce the Dalai Lama to punch him in the jaw.

The trouble is, his arrest and upcoming trial have nothing to do with his practice of pricing life-saving drugs out of the reach of all but the very rich.  Worse, he's certainly not the only one in the pharmaceuticals industry doing this, he's just the most visible (and irritating) face of the problem.  Whatever happens apropos of his trial for securities fraud, Shkreli and his profit-above-everything-else motive are going to be difficult to eradicate, given that it's not illegal to sell products at an exorbitant rate in a capitalist society, however unethical it might be.

Which is why a group of Brooklyn witches have taken matters into their own hands, and put a curse on Shkreli.

The spokeswitch for the group, who goes by the name  "Howl," said that she doesn't hex people lightly.  "If I do go to this extreme, it’s to ensure that someone who is doing wrong is held accountable and pays for their wrongdoing, rather than because I just don’t like someone," Howl said in an interview with The Daily Dot.  "Like, this person will get away with doing so much harm.  And I can’t do anything in a financial way, the systems of capitalism alienate the poor from any measure of justice or assertion of voice and power, so what can I do?  And this is one method."

Howl and her friends aren't messing around, either.  They made a wax statue of Shkreli, and then let each of the witches take a shot at hexing it.  "We sent the effigy around the circle and each person anointed a different part of the effigy and expressed their desire for the type of hex they’d like to enact,” Howl explained.  "For example, someone anoints the head and says they hope the ego dies, that Martin Shkreli gets over his ego and realizes the damage that he’s done and makes amends.  Or they’d hex where you’d keep your wallet and says they hope he pays financially for the financial damage he’s done to other people."

Me, I'd like to see a spell that would freeze his facial muscles into a permanent scowl, so I'd never have to see him smirking at federal prosecutors again.  Others have suggested that it might be more appropriate to magically teleport HIV into his bloodstream, and then charge him $750 per tablet for his medication.

Unfortunately, I don't think any of this will work, for as Tim Minchin put it, "Throughout history, every mystery that has ever been solved has turned out to be... not magic."  But I have to say, skeptic though I am, if it comes to a choice between Howl and Martin Shkreli, I'm siding with Howl.  However ineffective her methods almost certainly are, her heart is in the right place.  "Some folks I know live with AIDS, and others rely on the medication, so that price tag is absolutely uncalled for and ridiculous," she said.  "I know systemically it’s not only him.  But he is a very visible part of this."

Which is it exactly.  So as far as the Brooklyn witches go, my response is: carry on.  I'd also encourage the Dalai Lama to take a crack at Shkreli, if he's feeling up to it.

Rings, Rome, and relics

In our ongoing effort to consider weird things people believe, today we have: the veneration of Jesus's foreskin.

If you've never heard of this before, you'll probably think I'm making this up, but I'm not.  In Wikipedia's article on the topic, we find out that "At various points in history, a number of churches in Europe have claimed to possess Jesus's foreskin, sometimes at the same time," which raises the awkward question of how many foreskins he had.

The first recorded mention of the relic was all the way back in the year 800 C.E., when the Emperor Charlemagne presented it to Pope Leo III and told him that an angel had delivered it to him while he was praying at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.  And for you doubtful types, allow me to mention that its authenticity was later confirmed in a vision by Saint Bridget of Sweden, so I think we can all agree that the claim is pretty well proven.

Unfortunately, the "holy prepuce" (as the relic is called) was stolen by a German soldier during the Sack of Rome in 1537, but he was captured in the Italian town of Calcata shortly thereafter and thrown into prison.  Somehow he snuck the jeweled reliquary into prison with him (you'd think the guards would have noticed), and no one knew what was going on until miraculous "perfumed fog" repeatedly appeared over the town.  At that point, the game was over, because what other explanation for fog could there be other than there being a preserved piece of Jesus's penis somewhere in town?  So it was recovered from the imprisoned soldier, and afterwards housed in the church in Calcata, which then became a major pilgrimage site.

Things only got more complicated from then.  At some point, foreskins showed up at the Cathedral of Le Puy-en-Velay, Santiago de Compostela, the city of Antwerp, Coulombs in the diocese of Chartres, Chartres Cathedral itself, and churches in Besançon, Metz, Hildesheim, Charroux, Conques, Langres, Fécamp, Stoke-on-Trent, and two in Auvergne.  Which even if you accept that they weren't actually from Jesus, still brings up the troubling question of where they were getting all of these foreskins.  Guys are generally only equipped with one each, so that's a lot of people circumcising their sons, and worse, deciding afterwards that it would be a good idea to save the cut-off bit and give it to the church in a box.

Which I find a tad creepy.

But we're not nearly done with the creepy parts of the story.  Once again turning to the Wikipedia article, we find out that the one in Antwerp was sent there after being purchased by King Baldwin I of Jerusalem following his success in taking back the Holy Land from the Muslims during the First Crusade.  And I'm thinking, "How do you go about buying something like this?"  Did he just cast about for people who were selling random holy body parts until he found one he wanted?  Did he go to Foreskins-"R"-Us?  Or did a relic salesman go up to him and say, "Hey, your majesty, I bet you've never seen anything like this before?"  In any case, Baldwin bought it, and sent it back to Antwerp, where it resided until it mysteriously disappeared in 1566.

But no worries, there were plenty of others to take its place.  And the arguments over which one was the real item were still going on as late as the 1850s, when the Holy Prepuce of Charroux went head-to-head (rimshot) with the aforementioned Holy Prepuce of Calcata, leading to a "theological clash" that was resolved in 1900 by a decree from the Vatican that said that anyone speaking or writing about the foreskin of Jesus would be summarily excommunicated.  (Which after writing this post would put me in an awkward position, vis-à-vis the Roman Catholic Church, if I weren't already there for about fifty other reasons.)

Be that as it may, making a big deal out of the alleged relic persisted well into the 20th century despite the church's injunction.  In 1983, on the Feast of the Circumcision, the jeweled box with the Holy Prepuce of Calcata was taken out and paraded down the street, where a thief stole it.  Contents and all.  It hasn't been recovered, and my impression is that the Vatican isn't really too upset by this.  They seem to be kind of embarrassed by the whole thing, which is certainly understandable.

But by far the oddest claim, and actually the reason I thought about writing this post in the first place, is the one by 17th century theologian Leo Allatius, who thought that all of the relics were fake, because the actual foreskin of Jesus was taken into heaven with him when he ascended, where it became the rings of Saturn.

Once again, I swear I'm not making this up.

[image courtesy of NASA]

Anyhow, that's today's adventure in bizarre beliefs.  I'm not sure what else I could add in the way of commentary, other than to thank the loyal reader of Skeptophilia who ran across the Leo Allatius article, and gave me the tip-off.

So to speak.

Tower of power

When I read woo-woo conspiracy nonsense, one of the first things I often do is to shout at the computer, "Learn some damn science, will you?"

Not that it accomplishes anything.  The writers can't hear me, and my computer has a stress gauge on it that measures my irritation levels and uses that data to decide when would be the optimal time to malfunction so as to get the maximum possible freak-out.  So cluing it in that I'm already frustrated is probably a bad idea, a little like acting scared in front of a potentially vicious dog.

This all comes up because of a post over at the dubiously sane website Nutbarfactor.com, called "Why are WEAPONIZED Cell Towers Popping Up All Over the Country?"  This article raised a number of questions, the first of which is to ask whether the website is "Nut Bar Factor" or "Nut Barf Actor."  Because clearly those aren't the same thing.

Be that as it may, we hear right from the get-go about why you should worry if you live near a cell tower:

WHY DO CELL TOWERS REQUIRE MULTIPLE 300,000 WATT ELECTRIC CABLES? 

SHORT ANSWER?  THEY ARE NOT CELL TOWERS!

Apparently, one of the bad effects is that they cause your computer's caps lock to get stuck on.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But it's worse than that, as he goes on to tell us:

(A) communications satellite uses 2,400 watts of power (about the same as used by 2 hair dryers).  A microwave oven uses 1,000 watts (1 kilowatt) of energy.  The satellite gets the energy from solar panels and the microwave gets it from your electric utility (the electrical power grid)...  (T)he cables leading into a typical cell phone tower, which he describes as “A giant microwave oven on a stick,” capable of releasing 3,000,000 watts (3 megawatts) of output power to the tower’s magnetron – or even more megawatts, if there is an amplifier at the top.

So why would they have such a power capacity?  Surely it can't have anything to do with power transmission intensity dropping off as a function of the inverse square of the distance, or the necessity of broadcasting over a long range, right?

Of course not.

These megawatts of extra power are NOT for data transfer – nothing close to that amount of energy is required for data transfer – which is an important point, because this suggests to him that cell phone towers are easily capable of being switched to Weaponized Mode. 

That cell phone towers are wired with the capability to release millions of watts of microwave radiation makes them veritable of “towers of death”, the perfect weapons against an “invasion” – or the mega-slaughter of the domestic population... (I)f whoever we elect turns out to be so crazy, batshit evil, that they could fake a reason to turn on the ‘Last Line of Defense,’ the ‘Anti-Foreign Invasion’, ‘Anti-Zombie Apocalypse Network’ to cook the entire population within the city limits within an hour, in the middle of the night, with robot armies to mop up the people living in the countryside.

Sure they will.  Because what does government exist for, if not to cook us all like reheating yesterday's leftover pork roast?

Anyway.  Let's look at what people who actually understand physics have to say about the danger.  From an article by Elliott Drucker in Wireless Week, we have the following:

As a worst-case scenario in terms of exposure to RF radiation, consider a cell tower located only 30 meters (about 100 feet) away, and transmitting a total of 500W effective radiated power (ERP).  Of course, if you are only 30 meters from the transmitting antennas, you also are likely well below their horizontal beam centers even if severe downtilt is used. But for the sake of our worst-case analysis, let's assume that the full 500W is aimed right at you.  In that case, the RF power density where you are standing would be 4.4 microwatts per square centimeter.  For comparison, the FCC's mandated power density limits for continuous uncontrolled RF exposure by the general public are 600 and 1,000 microwatts per square centimeter for 900 and 1900 MHz signals, respectively.  Even in our highly unlikely worst-case scenario, RF exposure levels would be well under 1 percent of the maximum deemed safe by the FCC.

Put another way, by a physicist friend of mine, "A common number given for the power output of a cellphone tower is 100 watts.  So in terms of its power output, the tower would be as dangerous as a 100 watt light bulb."

What about his claim that there is a 3 megawatt power consumption rate by cell towers?  Besides the fact that he apparently pulls this number out of thin air, there's the problem that the input power of the cell tower isn't only used for broadcasting the cell signal, it's used for other things -- like lighting.  Most of the lights on cell towers are high-wattage incandescents.  According to my physicist pal, "I'd have to do the math to be certain of this, but my guess is that a significant fraction of the input energy of a cell tower is actually going into peripherals like lighting.  The output signal runs at a surprisingly low wattage."

So unfortunately for the conspiracy-minded, the likelihood that the government is planning on microwaving us all to death is completely unfounded.  It's a pity, especially given that one of the uses that the guy at Nut Barf Actor came up with was as an "Anti-Zombie Apocalypse Network."  Which I have to admit to being a good idea.  You have to wonder how well zombies would deal with being microwaved until they were piping hot on the inside.