04.21.10

Cult of EMP Crazy: Rush Limbaugh

Posted in Crazy Weapons, Cyberterrorism, Extremism at 7:39 am by George Smith

Why are you not surprised?

Completely shut out — except on opinion pages and in press releases from the Heritage Foundation — that nugget of the GOP far right known as the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy resorted to lobbying Rush Limbaugh.

Birther Frank Gaffney spoke with Limbaugh who told it this way:

People are utterly unprepared to live and to deal with circumstances that were the norm for humanity up to a hundred years ago. Stop and think about that. I interviewed Frank Gaffney, defense policy expert during the Reagan years, for the next issue of the Limbaugh Letter. I talked to him on Friday. One of his big concerns is that the Iranians could load up a small little nuclear device on a boat and start trolling the East Coast of the United States, there are some 2,000 ships a day out there, how do you know which one is the mullahs cruise ship? They launch a little nuke and detonate it in the atmosphere and cause an EMP, electromagnetic pulse. He said if they took out our electric grid, if they took out our ability for electricity, do you realize the number of mass deaths that would happen very quickly? So dependent are we on all these — What got me to thinking about this is that we live at a time where we’ve had all this modernization, all of these terrific advancements that have enhanced life, improved the quality of life, and lengthened the span of life.

We are being pestered by a bunch of people who have friends in this regime who want to roll all of that back and take us back to the times where life was much more primitive. Now, people did not die en masse because there wasn’t electricity. Life was harder. Nighttime was really dark. You had to have your torches out there or what have you, and that was, you know, only after somebody figured out how to create fire, about which they made a movie. Imagine if that guy had been able to patent it. Can you imagine if that guy had a family, they’d be the richest people in the world, the guy that invented fire, had the patent on it. Every time a fire happened, this guy got the royalty. But they didn’t think about things like that back then. You have all these scions out there like the Sulzberger guy at the New York Times, you’ve got the people from the old Firestone Tire and Rubber, you got the Ford, GM, the Mellons and so forth, and now you’ve got all these fourth and fifth generation offspring that have no idea what their families did to create it living off of it.

Hmmm. So let’s see if DD understands this. Iran could take US back to the time of the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and the Obama administration also wants to take us back to a time “when life was much more primitive.”

Also, the people who control fire at such a time get all the royalties. And the Sulzbergers, “old Firestone Tire and Rubber … the Mellons and so forth,” plus the New York Times, they’re sort of the firemakers now, so they’d benefit. Or something like that.

Therefore, the mullahs and the current US “regime” are somehow connected in this desire.

“All of liberalism is a giant hoax,” Limbaugh concludes.

There’s also some jabber about the volcano and airplanes.

Cult of EMP Crazy is the best sobriquet, don’t you think?

---

DD was once popular with Rush Limbaugh because I had written something he found convenient.

---

It would be remiss of me not to mention one of the chieftains of the Cult of Cyberwar in this post. That’d be Richard Clarke, who is currently flogging his newest book on … cyberwar … at least the second on the topic, the last one being fiction.

Here one observes stiff competition for the meme of who will turn out our lights. It could be Iran or China using hackers. Or it could be Iran, employing electromagnetic pulse.

Iran has a lot of options, apparently. I’m afraid, aren’t you?

Writes the instapundit guy at the Wall Street Journal:

Over the past few decades, American society has become steadily more wired. Devices talk to one another over the Internet, with tremendous increases in efficiency: Copy machines call their own repairmen when they break down, stores automatically replenish inventory as needed and military units stay in perpetual contact over logistical matters—often without humans in the loop at all. The benefits of this nonstop communication are obvious, but the vulnerabilities are underappreciated. The Internet was designed for ease of communication; security was (and is) largely an afterthought. We have created a hacker’s playground.

Worse yet, computer hardware, usually made in China, is sometimes laced with “logic bombs” that will allow anyone who has the correct codes—the Chinese government comes to mind—to turn our own devices against us. [Richard Clarke] and Knake are particularly concerned with risks to the electric grid

Here the enemies, as usual, are Iran and China. A couple months ago it was North Korea.

Clarke’s book — Cyberwar: The Next National Security Threat and What to Do About It — was said to have claimed North Korea was a cyberwar power to be feared because it was primitive and poor. The reasoning being that it was invulnerable to cyber-retaliation. Because it was poor and primitive and so on.

(Clarke repeated the substance of this for Maddow again tonight. Because North Korea is infrastructurally a cybernobody, it’s a cyber superpower).

“Worrying about threats to the electric grid is all the rage these days, with anxious planners troubled by electromagnetic pulse attacks or even solar superflares that could melt down the power net for months or even years, bringing civilization to a halt,” argued the instapundit.

“But Richard Clarke … [warns] in ‘Cyber War’ that if such a calamity occurs, the culprit behind it might not be a high-altitude nuclear burst or strange solar weather but a computer hacker in Beijing or Tehran.”

Permalink