One of the leaders of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy was recently in San Francisco as part of a publicity stunt for the new Homefront video game.
The game is a shooter in which the United States is occupied by North Korea.
A publicity item described it earlier in the week:
The event will give fans an exclusive, in-depth look at the speculative fiction fueled by Homefront’s narrative. Scheduled guest speaker Dr. William Forstchen, a published author and leading expert on Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) blasts, will discuss the little known, yet extremely dangerous threat posed by such an attack. Also scheduled to address the crowd is Tae Kim, a foreign relations expert and former CIA Officer who will present Homefront’s fictional timeline and examine how the United States has come to suffer an oppressive occupation by a nuclear armed Greater Korean Republic in the year 2027. The event is scheduled to conclude with a free live performance by The Dillinger Escape Plan, a leading metalcore band.
The year is 2027. Her infrastructure shattered and military in disarray, America has fallen to a savage occupation by the nuclear armed Greater Korean Republic. Abandoned by her former allies, the United States is a bleak landscape of walled towns and abandoned suburbs …
A previous stunt for Homefront — a North Korean-themed lunch truck — has been given the thumbs down by SF locals.
The most recent, a release of 10,000 red balloons — most of which promptly floated into the bay — was given an even more angry reception.
A publicity stunt for a new warfare-based video game sent local environmentalists to arms when a mass of balloons carrying advertisements for the game cascaded into San Francisco Bay.
“When I looked out the window and saw thousands of balloons dropping straight into the bay, I was flabbergasted,” said Rod Fujita, a senior oceans scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund. “I never expected to see something like this in San Francisco, where there’s such concern about the bay and pollution.”
The release of the 10,000 ill-fated red balloons came courtesy of THQ, a Southern California video game company in town for the Game Developers Conference at Moscone Center.
Because the game is set in a near-future where the United States is invaded by nuclear-armed troops from North Korea, the company staged a mock lunchtime rally at Yerba Buena Gardens where the game’s supporters, in the words of the company’s news release, “will take to the streets to demonstrate against the North Korean regime and the treatment of its citizens.”
The staged rally was capped by the massive balloon launch, designed, the company said, to “simulate a method used by South Korea to send messages of hope to the North.”
The “messages of hope” carried by these balloons, however, amounted to an exclusive offer from GameStop video game store allowing gamers to “receive the resistance multi-player pack, featuring an exclusive weapon.”
Even that message didn’t get too far. While the balloons at first soared into the leaden gray skies above the city, wind and rain quickly sent thousands of them plunging into the bay, only blocks away.
“They were just dropping right out of the sky into the water,” Fujita said.
Pictures of the balloons bobbing on the bay quickly made their way onto social media sites like Facebook and Flickr, as angry environmentalists blasted the stunt in e-mails and on Twitter.
“Obviously, we have a problem with polluting of the bay and this is just polluting and littering,” said Amy Ricard, a spokeswoman for the environmental group Save the Bay.
“Your balloon campaign was a stupid thing to do to a city surrounded on three sides by water,” one San Francisco resident said in an e-mail to GameStop. “You should be held accountable for the waste.”
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy encompasses not only the GOP far right but also US arms manufacturing.
For the latter, the electromagnetic pulse ray (or bomb) has been the weapon that has been coming and coming but never quite arriving for the last twenty years. And it’s always deadeningly promised as innovation and technical revolution, a total turning upside down of the way of war.
Today, we get an army solicitation for electromagnetic pulse weapons, mountable on armored fighting vehicles.
And guess where it comes from?
Warren, Michigan, in Macomb county — the same place profiled on Monday and the home of General Dynamics Land Systems in Sterling Heights, the corporate headquarters and design bureau for the M1 Abrams tank.
Layoffs for teachers, school security guards, policemen, firemen, librarians and people who keep parks and recreations going in Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties.
But paveway for contracts for notional electromagnetic pulse rays to the usual raft of arms developers, yes!
Even as a minor thing it is nauseatingly depressing in what it says about America as a nation.
U.S. Army tank and automotive technology researchers are surveying industry to find companies able to design and build specialized military batteries for high-pulse-power applications in current and future military vehicles.
Officials of the Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) in Warren, Mich., issued a sources-sought notice (W56HZV11R0199) last week for a high power battery system for pulse power applications.
High-power microwave (HPM) and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons could be used for combat, sabotage, and special forces applications …
The Army is looking for companies able to design and build batteries for high-pulse-power applications in military vehicles … Army TARDEC officials are asking industry for information on innovative concepts, component research and development, and control strategies and architectures related to energy storage systems to produce compact, common solutions applicable to several different fleets of vehicles to meet the growing high pulse power demand.
Companies interested should respond by e-mail no later than 1 April 2011 to the Army …
It is a quest that can never be put down. There must always be money for promised miracle weapons. Even if they’re always either pure snake oil or never quite as billed.
The electromagnetic pulse ray gun was also sought. But in almost twenty years it has proven impractical because the power supply must be as big as a freight train. And even then it doesn’t get much done.
And there remains interest in it as a magic wand to defeat IEDs, an initiative which has had mostly indifferent or unnoticeable results.
From 2009:
“It requires a big truck to even bring the unassembled parts to the test army,??? says an Army overseer, a man with an unusually pragmatic air. This particular device “is not a consideration??? for anything, ever.
Why the print space, then?
Well, consider that any theoretical electromagnetic pulse bombs [and rays] are weapons which no longer have much use. Who would the US military sic them on? Somali pirates? The Taliban in Afghanistan? People living in buildings in Swat, Pakistan? Insurgents or rabble and crowds around the globe? Invading Martians?
Hint: Almost all of them involve working for some “US business” selling stuff made in China.
You can quickly go from minimum wage stock boy or girl to sales assistant.
Three — Under Armour, American Eagle Outfitters, Costco — are barely above minimum wage places, fronts for Chinese or east Asian made domestically branded goods.
Or you can be a cook because people still have to eat domestically.
Or you can wait tables and be a gopher for upper middle class shoeshine boys and the wealthy at Royal Caribbean. Visit Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Just remember to tell patrons NOT TO GO BEYOND THE WIRE FENCING surrounding the beach stop.
It’s full of the self-important supremacy-flavored cant peddled by the super-rich. In other words, you can destroy the argument from authority position in a few strokes by examples taken from real life.
Our elected officials would do well to remember that the most prosperous countries are those that allow consumers — not governments — to direct the use of resources. Allowing the government to pick winners and losers hurts almost everyone, especially our poorest citizens.
Yeah, American middle class consumers, not the government, sure do have a lot of influence on what gets made by the top arms manufacturers, almost all of them US.
General Dynamics Land Systems is acutely sensitive to the free market and unusually generous to “our poorest citizens.”
If you just stopped in, that’s a joke.
The US industry of arms manufacturing is the very example of “socialism” for the benefit of the private sector. It is guaranteed and protected by the US government, whatever the cost.
Here’s another Koch brother doozy:
The purpose of business is to efficiently convert resources into products and services that make people’s lives better. Businesses that fail to do so should be allowed to go bankrupt rather than be bailed out.
There’s certainly no doubt that having the biggest share of arms manufacturing in world history produces “services and products” that make some people’s lives better. It’s just not most of ours, at this point.
One salient feature of the US press is the continued fascination with robots that aren’t quite as wonderful as described. The stories and people in them try to convey the impression that innovation and revolution in American technology are everywhere.
The world is always radically changed by the allegedly eye-popping robots and drones produced for the military.
For everyone else, though, it still pretty much sucks.
The economy may be stagnant, the AfPak war conducted forever with the enemy unimpressed and unmoved by US technological might, record numbers of people may be on food stamps. It’s a sci-fi dystopia from the world of paperback novels. But there are always some sucking off taxpayer dough through DARPA, the same agency that tried to bring us the jumping minefield.
Today’s funny is the Aerovironment hummingbird drone. Produced in Monrovia, not too far from DD, they certainly do know what real hummingbirds look like. And their robot is no f—— hummingbird, no matter how they paint it or make it look.
It could just as well have been made to look like a cardboard core from a roll of toilet paper.
Here’s another lousy video of the “hummingbird.” It only looks like a hummingbird in flight if you’ve never spent a couple hours watching a few. “It looks like a magic trick,” comments one of Aerovironment’s employees.
Apt.
Hummingbirds are everywhere in Pasadena. If you have a yard or hanging feeders, they’re there in force.
They don’t whir. And they are blindingly fast. Not at all like the bit of mechanical jerry-bilt rubbish in the videos.
If you hear a hummingbird, it’s the tiny whoosh and thrum of its wings as it zips by your head. Or the high-pitched tweeting it makes when it’s fighting with colleagues or warning you to stay clear of the feeder. Everyone with hummingbirds in the year sees the silent mid-air dead stops from a full sprint. Or the young cat who hasn’t yet seen too many flailing in mid-leap as the bird stops just out of reach, mocks the mammal with a twitter, and then sprints off at an extreme angle to hit the sugar water anyway.
They don’t do rickety buzz like the Aerovironment toy, like a bad little fan that could run out of juice anytime.
And hummingbirds have endurance. They go all day and don’t look like they’re going to crash if some minder with a joystick isn’t there to see they don’t blutz into the business’s wall.
“The success of the hummingbird drone, however, ‘paves the way for a new generation of aircraft with the agility and appearance of small birds,'” said someone prone to a bit of exaggeration at DARPA.
It is also said insects will be changed into robot warriors.
“Lockheed Martin has developed a fake maple leaf seed, or so-called whirly bird, loaded with navigation equipment and imaging sensors,” it reads.
At least the bomb-sniffing bees and Box ‘o Radar don’t make appearances. They didn’t work out.
This time at Human Events, Ted Nugent — parrot for the Tea Party, shoeshine boy for the extreme right plutocracy, and the very poor man’s John Galt — goes at it here.
Usually Nugent can reliably be counted upon to hate on Europe, particularly France.
Curiously, in this column, he does not. Europe and France are given backslaps, apparently because Nugent believes they are becoming more intolerant.
Previously, Nugent has endorsed banning shariah in the US.
Today, the prescription is for Europe:
If Europe really wants to get tough, its countries should outlaw Sharia law in all of its machinations.
And:
The brain-dead politically correct facade of multiculturalism was directed primarily at Muslims, and everyone knows it. European leaders were scared to be labeled as intolerant religious bigots by Muslims. Their fear was misplaced. They should have been vociferously condemning Muslims who wanted to be treated separately.
Perhaps Nugent should invite Frank Gaffney and Jerry Boykin to wild boar hunts on his ranch in Crawford, TX.
If you were in Washington today you were given quite a revelation, courtesy of the WaTimes.
The Great Recession, the economic collapse, perhaps not caused by Wall Street! No, we’ve been looking in the wrong place.
“Financial terrorism suspected in 2008 economic crash,” it reads on-line.
The terrorists here aren’t the banksters. Nope, they’re from China, maybe Russian criminals, and also the forces of “shariah compliant finance.”
“This is a front-page story in the paper, and the headline can be seen in vending machines all over DC,” reports one reader who we will keep anonymous. “I walked past one this morning and thought, ‘Huh?'”
For this piece of mischief, we see a touching upon of some of the hobby-horses of the of the lunatic right, conveniently furnished by a paper we have all unjustly ignored, apparently.
The paper in question was produced by small business contract with the Department of Defense in 2009.
Generally speaking, you can view articles and analyses generated in this manner as nuisances, ways for the small to take on a validation by being paid cash money by the US government for revelations and insights to be eventually tossed in the trash.
Unless someone like Bill Gertz runs across them at the WaTimes.
The paper setting off the story, entitled “Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses” is by one Kevin D. Freeman of Keller, TX. Gertz’s story never actually gets around to mentioning the bit that this isn’t from some inside-the-Beltway think-tanker.
DD is going to skip most of the fine detail of the thing. You can read it on ScribD.
The WaTimes article sums up well enough the intent: To get us looking somewhere else because no one has ruled out a direct attack on Wall Street.
“Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system,” reads the lede graf at the Times.
But here’s what you really want to know.
There’s no proof at all offered for the implication in the WaTimes as to the nature of the 2008 economic collapse.
Much time is devoted to the creeping advance of “shariah-compliant finance” as a danger to capitalism. For this part, notable Islam-o-phobe and kook Frank Gaffney gets cited.
Hugo Chavez and Iran get some space on the marquee, too.
And there are bits one usually finds coming from the Tea Party.
Namely, the “third phase” of an attack on the American economy will come through the printing of too much money and the revenge of bond vigilantes who will magically show up, causing a mass dump of Treasury bonds. The dollar will become worthless.
The “Ah-ha!” moment is furnished by a quick search of the Web for Kevin Freeman in Keller, TX.
