05.15.12
Marinated in electromagnetic pulse doom
The crazies are already crazy enough, buddy. Don’t make it worse. A new series created by JJ Abrams — Revolution — illustrates how marinated US popular culture is in electromagnetic pulse doom stories. In the real world it’s solely the property of the extreme right wing. But you can’t have a television show with just those characters. That would be called Doomsday Preppers, an existing niche product designed to monetize the peculiar rather than vend something for network primetime family viewing.
It’s gotten so you can’t turn around without being hit by another JJ Abrams creation. There are so many of them you know he’s now like everyone else in such a production position, an exalted deity who assigns his name to lackeys, allowing them to phone in whatever it is that needs phoning in under his blessings.
And it sure looks it from the trailer. How unique. Another tv series with civilization destroyed, electricity gone, people playing survivalist, down to the various tribes, this time using bows, arrows and muskets.
Is there anyone who doesn’t see “electromagnetic pulse” crap on tv or in movies as plot devices/scenarios/predictions a couple times a month in 2012 USA? Not likely.
What sets Revolution slightly apart, and any other thing like it in the last three or four years, from the kook survivalist craze is that the cast can never be like anyone you see in prepper videos.
Everyone is caught flat-flooted when disaster arrives. Nobody has a years worth of dried corn and pemmican, no basement armories with a quarter ton of ammunition, no gun room with a couple belt-fed weapons. The houses are never built from cast-off shipping containers. And they’re not all camo-dressed right wingers. About half the cast will be visibly worried about falling into a world where only the gun, mercilessness and physical strength rule. The fascists are almost always the bad guys.
While you’ll see the bits about having to fight off others coming for your stuff, those coming for it are never the same types the prepper/survivalists mean when they advise on learning how to shoot moving targets. The progressive, liberals, educated and registered Democrats/Commies aren’t the unprepared targets everyone is hoping they won’t have to shoot up because they’ve come stumbling up the road to the safe house.
Also today, from the Wall Street Journal news section, a bit on the continuing wrangle over preparation against disaster brought on by solar flare:
With a peak in the cycle of solar flares approaching, U.S. electricity regulators are weighing their options for protecting the nation’s grid from the sun’s eruptions—including new equipment standards and retrofits—while keeping a lid on the cost …
They are studying the impact of historic sunstorms …
“This is arguably the largest natural-disaster scenario that the nation could face,” said Mr. Kappenman.
Mr. Kappenman has consulted for companies that make equipment to harden the grid.
Others are more cautious in their predictions …
The private sector and scientists with the US government have now turned wise to what happens when the lobbyists from the Cult of EMP Crazy (or EMPAct America) run wild. And they have successfully shoved off to the fringes the constant assertions that the nation faces an imminent return to the days of the horse and buggy.
That hasn’t stopped the EMP lobby, which is the same as the Bomb Iran lobby. They simply change their name to something that sounds important knowing that reporters won’t check the rosters from the old kook brigades for matches.
And so, one of the chief lobbyists for EMPAct America, Peter Pry, appears in the Journal story as “executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a group that members of Congress designated to track electrical-grid risks and that supports Mr. Kappenman’s conclusions.”
The Task Force on National and Homeland Security is EMPAct America with a second name, the same group of right-wingers that has always been lobbying for ballistic missile defense and bombing Iran before the mullahs send American civilization into the abyss using a missile launched from an offshore barge.
More interesting is Pry’s Noah Project, a sort of high-button version of what looks like a commercial effort to be in the prepper business.
Look! There’s Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen!
The Noah Project is to help save and advise you on the coming Gotterdammerung, possibly by selling you a nice property in a “Certified retreat community,” this one in the Appalachian Mountains.
Far, far away from the unprepared swine (and Democrats) in the cities who will be wanting to take your stuff after the grid collapses.
Cult of EMP Crazy — from the archives.