Pure, Concentrated Stupid: English Hippies Complain About WiFi

Glatonbury is a picturesque, friendly little town in southwest England. It purports to be the resting place of King Arthur and hosts the annual Glastonbury Festival, a three-day rock concert. Glastonbury's free municipal wi-fi network went online in May. I'd like you to meet some of the people who call Glastonbury home:

"This place is not appropriate for a Wi-Fi trial," resident Linda Taylor tells the local Fosse Way magazine. "People are complaining of headaches, tingling skin among other symptoms. This makes me wonder what is it doing to the children."

"I don't want my son exposed to risk 24 hours a day, including at his primary school, which is within the Wi-Fi zone," yoga teacher Natalie Fee tells London's Telegraph. "I would be failing in my duty as a parent if I did."

"I have given a number of [orgone crystal hippie] generators to shops in the High Street and hidden others in bushes in the immediate vicinity of the antennae. That way you can bring back the balance," Matt Todd told the Telegraph. "The science hasn't really got into the mainstream because the government won't make decisions which will affect big business, even if it concerns everyone's health."

"The pulsed microwaves feed the pineal gland with false information," local Jacqui Roberts tells the Western Daily Press. "Melatonin fights the free radicals and cancer-producing cells.

In other words, some of the dumbest people ever to walk the face of the Earth. They live in a country of near-universal literacy. They have been provided with more opportunity for education than the majority of people alive today and the vast majority of people who have ever lived. The internet gives them access to more information than has been or ever will be stored in libraries. And still: dumber than a box of rocks.

So this will come as no surprise:

At a raucous town council meeting in late November, one official had to admit that in the six months since the network, which costs about $15,000 per year to operate, had gone on, only 422 people had used it.

As Kevin says, "I'll tell you what's it doing to the children, it's giving them a chance to access real health and science information that might be able to counteract some of the bullsh-t you're feeding into their soft little brains." Yup.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 11:43 AM

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