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.