This hasn’t been the first gas attack on a school, and it’s unclear what kind of non-persistent industrial chemical was pumped into the schools. But it’s a far cry from the feared terrorist use of chemical warfare agents that most DHS scenarios warn about.
In another way of looking at it, one could draw a good conclusion that the Taliban have absolutely zero capability with poison gas. And this kind of attack is a benchmark in pathetic lows.
While it’s a small item, US forces could benefit from a press campaign in area making the point that it’s the cruelest and lamest of things to spray insecticides at girls. However, treatment of women is abominable there, under any circumstance.
Predictably, Raytheon’s pain ray has generated quite a bit of bad publicity along with the usual brief corporate news pieces in which a local TV station or paper sends a reporter to be a trial gimp.
The reporter invariably giggles and jumps out of the way as Raytheon technicians or jailers look impishly on. See the wonder that’s taken a decade for the US military, in conjunction with an arms developer, to come up with! It’s a revolution.
A device designed to control unruly inmates by blasting them with a beam of intense energy that causes a burning sensation is drawing heat from civil rights groups who fear it could cause serious injury and is “tantamount to torture.”
The mechanism, known as an “Assault Intervention Device,” (or AID) is a stripped-down version of a military gadget that sends highly focused beams of energy at people and makes them feel as though they are burning. The Los Angeles County sheriff’s department plans to install the device by Labor Day, making it the first time in the world the technology has been deployed in such a capacity.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California criticized Sheriff Lee Baca’s decision in a letter sent Thursday, saying that the technology amounts to a ray gun at a county jail. The 4-feet-tall weapon, which looks like a cross between a robot and a satellite radar, will be mounted on the ceiling and can swivel.
It is remotely controlled by an operator in a separate room who lines up targets with a joystick.
The ACLU said the weapon was “tantamount to torture,” noting that early military versions resulted in five airmen suffering lasting burns. It requested a meeting with Baca, who declined the invitation.
What much of the news has missed is that Raytheon has been trying to peddle the pain ray into prisons for years. And it has long had a big influence in the LA Sheriff’s Department, where Sid Heal presided over a long career as the local point man for bringing stupid applications in cutting edge technology, rays and various gadgets, into the force.
The folks who keep planes from crashing into one another over at the FAA were none too pleased to read about that little UAV demo conducted by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department this weekend, with the agency telling Sheriff Lee Baca and company to keep their drone grounded pending the result of an investigation. What’s more, the department could actually face disciplinary action for the SkySeer’s inaugural flight — FAA spokesperson Laura Brown commented that although the agency wasn’t “peeved,” they were “definitely surprised” that authorization had not been requested for the trial. Commander Sid Heal, point man for this program tasked with spying on Angelinos locating criminal suspects …
In 2008, Heal retired but not before indicating to New Yorker magazine that he was interested in a Raytheon consulting offer, based on peddling the pain ray. Here, from earlier this week.
Those who’ve followed the ADS story know that Heal and, by extension — the Sheriff’s Department, have longed for the pain ray for some time.
If you read the AP piece to its conclusion, you see the now standard assertions — built up over the years — that the pain ray can’t possibly hurt anybody. Plus it will only be used by people who are trained to exquisite fineness in its use, never afflicted with the cloudy or bad judgment which is usually part of the human condition.
Sure they’re intelligence-insulting, but it’s the way of the p.r. campaign for the thing.
Many authoritarian Americans are always keen to believe whatever rubbish is presented to them, as long as its couched in magical terms which assure that breakthroughs in technology have made a burning weapon something that doesn’t physically burn. It’s all in your mind. Or your nerve endings. Or the top layer of your skin.
Whatever, who cares, its prisoners we’re talking about and if you’re in jail in the US, you deserve everything bad that comes your way. And this is a good flavor of bad, its chief scientists/engineers at Raytheon — all of them — say so.
The pain ray is a weapon for using in cases where people can’t shoot back or launch any kind of counterattack. It’s critical the target be helpless. Like many reporters sent by news agencies for testing.
The ADS — or AID — is not a survivable piece of gear and it’s why it was peddled to the US military for use against unarmed crowds. The US military brought it back from Afghanistan without firing a shot, for logical reasons.
Winning hearts and minds is not the pain ray’s strong suit.
Paradoxically, when the Active Denial System was first marketed it was called the Sheriff and part of the idea was that it was great because it wouldn’t actually kill people, thus pissing off victims and civilians less.
“Sell the Sheriff to the sheriffs!” was probably on a Raytheon sales memo somewhere.
What makes individuals like Newt Gingrich and other GOP cronies so repellent is their use of fear to enrich themselves. According to them, the future is always filled with many all-powerful external threats. The collapse of the US economy, mass unemployment and the destruction of the Middle Class is of no concern.
In John Dean’s Broken Government book from a few years back (yes, John Dean, of all people), he names one of the central aims of GOP power: “Line your own pockets.”
Gingrich and others are featured prominently.
And today’s post, on a discussion of Gingrich’s new book, To Save America, you get the official DD laundry list of GOP predictions about external threats. And all of the industries involved in protecting from such potential threats are those discussed on this blog.
In Newt Gingrich’s latest book, To Save America, he reflects on the five potentially catastrophic threats to the United States. Gingrich lists the threats as “Terrorists with nuclear weapons, Electromagnetic pulse attack, Cyber warfare, Biological warfare, and the potential gap between Chinese and American capabilities.”
Or any noting of the unpleasant fact that the corporate interests in America seem not to have yet realized when you beggar your US shoppers by firing as many as possible, relentlessly compressing wages and removing all benefits, there is not even enough leftover anymore for anything but essentials. Chinese crap notwithstanding.
Nevertheless, it’s time to drop everything and worry about China’s military, or electromagnetic pulse doom, or the usual ant-like countries allegedly developing magical ways with biological weapons:
Frances Townsend, former Bush and Fox News flunky Homeland Security Advisor, felt that electromagnetic pulse weapons are “a big deal and we are solely unprepared for it. I think Gingrich is right.”
===
Currently we can try to prevent this threat, but there is no way to defend against it because society is so interconnected, particularly in the delivery of food, water, and medicine. It appears that this is a threat that falls under the radar, with little time or energy spent on solutions. The death toll would climb in unexpected ways. Clare Lopez, a former CIA official who is currently a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, told of a scary scenario where people would “no longer be able to buy groceries or gasoline.
There is also concern — not that al-Qaeda terrorists will become biologists, but that the biologists of Iran, Syria, and Pakistan will become terrorists. These countries, as well as North Korea, are working on synthetic biological weapons.
Naturally, the only way to counter these threats is the standard mantra: A cooperative alliance between the national security industry and big government is always needed.
This almost sounds acceptable, until you’ve been around long enough to know what it really means. I’ll rely on another quote from Dean’s book, by way of a fellow named Alan Wolfe at the University of Pennsylvania:
[If] government cannot be made to disappear, at least it can be prevented from doing any good. [So one purpose] is to build a political machine in which business and the Republican Party can exchange mutual favors; business will lavish cash on politicians … while politicians will throw the cash back at business (called public policy).
The people who regularly tout this rubbish, and often noted here, are genuinely despicable. But in 2010, despicable is virtue.
One imagines very few sane US military leaders would want to see their careers incinerated upon publicized or leaked news on use of the wonderful pain ray on civilians in Afghanistan.
However, the ADS redeployment to a Los Angeles jail, where it can be used on prisoners who can’t launch a counterattack against it, is an industry thing.
Specifically, Ratheon’s, which has long wanted to peddle a commercial version of the ADS into US prisons and police forces. Where, presumably, it can argue behind closed doors that the American public won’t care if prisoners are burned with it. And so they won’t step up suicide attacks and miscellaneous bombings in retaliation for employing it.
Although the Fox News segments on the thing — renamed the AID (you just have to laugh at the cartoonish evil of it) for Assault Intervention Device — participated in the usual stunt, sending a reporter out to be burned, the bloom is well off the weed.
Even Megyn Kelly had to admit the pain ray was a publicity disaster for the US military. And now only a moron, or someone paid to stand still and get burned, thinks getting shot by the pain ray while Raytheon’s technicians perform the test, is great stuff.
So what’s the connection with the Los Angeles jail?
Probably Sid Heal, although the stories didn’t mention him.
For longer than DD can remember, Sid Heal — who retired from the LA County’s Sheriff Department in 2008, has been trying to pitch the pain ray in Los Angeles.
In January, Heal gave notice that he would retire from the Sheriff’s Dept. on March 31st. At that point, he had received at least sixteen job offers. The offer he finds most interesting involves consulting with Raytheon on the Active Denial System — the pain ray.
Raytheon desperately wants to peddle the pain ray into the US correctional system, a task they’ve been at for at least half a decade.
And while the US can’t use the blighted thing overseas for obvious reasons — the reputation for torturing the unarmed being one, the corporation presumably feels there is no such squeamishness in prisons. Where shooting penned up out-of-sight undesirables means out-of-mind undesirables.
Just picture it: Prison guards — big guys, often obese and/or hyper-muscular from a mixed regimen of weight-lifting and steroids, working in a jail — Pitchess — notorious for its bad conditions, and the pain ray.
I just can’t think of a more humane and reasonable combination, can you?
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy parasitized the New York Times opinion page today. The courtesy was handed to Lawrence E. Joseph who has been relentlessly peddling books on apocalyptic disaster slated for 2012.
The latest Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy jag is the story of the angry sun.
The sun is waking up from a long period of quiet — which is true — and erupting solar storms and mass ejections may shatter advanced civilization, it goes.
Just like in “The Road,” the movie nobody went to see (or maybe “The Book of Eli,” another apocalypse-themed flop).
——
You’ll see it everywhere because it panders to entrenched American extremist beliefs in tech superstitions and catastrophism. (Bubbling underneath are messages that white people will lose their piles to ravening hordes unleashed by the fall.) And the entertainment industry and parts of the corporate national security biz can monetize this by peddling titillation and fear, respectively.
And so it goes, the coming sun strike being far worse than Katrina, so give taxpayer money to the private sector so risk can be mitigated. What the various gobble-wallahs of the cult fail to add are that there are many pressing problems confronting the US right now, all as bad as Katrina, but that they are of our own devise, not the sun’s. And that the Cult of EMP Crazy is just another special interest posse raid on the middle class.
Here’s the standard line, repeated as necessary, in the newer Cult opinion pieces:
DESPITE warnings that New Orleans was unprepared for a severe hit by a hurricane, America was blindsided by Hurricane Katrina, a once-in-a-lifetime storm that made landfall five years ago this month. We are similarly unready for another potential natural disaster: solar storms, bursts of gas on the sun’s surface that release tremendous energy pulses.
Let’s imagine for a moment someone with the interests of the middle class at heart, besides Paul Krugman, writing similarly for the New York Times opinion page:
DESPITE warnings that the middle class was being systematically beggared and then destroyed by predatory financial policy and the sending of production to slave-labor countries, America was seemingly blindsided by this once-in-a-lifetime perfect storm of economic catastrophe. We are similarly unready for another even worse disaster: The putting down of the American way of life permanently when China puts the US in the rear view mirror as its economy passes ours in the coming decade.
Just for perspective, you see.
Last week, one of the chieftains of the Cult of EMP Crazy, Roscoe Bartlett in the US House of Representatives, was greatly dismayed when his legislation to protect from EMP doom was penciled out of similar legislation in the Senate.
And so the Cult of EMP Crazy quickly marshaled its forces. In the New York Times, it is warned:
Earlier this year the House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow the White House to require utilities to put grid-protection measures in place, then rip off recoup the costs from customers. Unfortunately, the companion bill in the Senate contains no such provision.
It’s not a lost cause, though; lawmakers can still insert the grid-protection language during conference.
Joseph uses [2012] prophecy as a starting point, but claims that his interest lies in more substantial scientific threats to the planet—including cracks in Earth’s magnetic field, the eruption of supervolcanoes and flareups of sunspot radiation. On the other hand, he also gives credence to planetary alignments and The Bible Code before veering into a rant about how the real problem is Christian fundamentalists who want to manipulate the Middle East into Armageddon. When he sticks to science journalism, Joseph is a lively tour guide, introducing readers to Mayan shamans and Russian scientists with equal aplomb. But when he encourages readers to start praying they survive the coming apocalypse, he comes off as exactly the sort of crackpot he claims to eschew. Still, there’s less kookery than in other 2012 books …
Good to know. So get it now, used copies for $0.77.
Over at Armchair Generalist, J notes the US military has withdrawn the Active Denial System, formerly known as the Sheriff, aka the Hummer mounted millimeter wave pain ray — from Afghanistan.
He’s not entirely pleased with the decision for reasons made perfectly clear if you go to AG. It’s supposed to be a non-lethal weapon, after all.
Be that as it may, I’ve written about the pain ray off and on for a long time, starting at the Village Voice in the old Weapon of the Week column. And the tale of the ADS escaped DoD’s very stage-managed publicity. In observing how this story unfolded, the reasons for the weapon’s withdrawal become clear.
The Department of Defense’s bland name for this electronic heat ray is the Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial (VMAD) system, a mouthful of jargon that yields few clues about the weapon’s nature. Allegedly designed for an Orwellian task—”humanitarian missions”—the VMAD is a giant version of your microwave oven, without the safety box surrounding it. The generals want to move it around on a humvee.
Official propaganda on the device is that it makes one’s skin only lightbulb hot, enough to force a person to run but not enough to cook him. Of course, there is no proof this can be achieved, because the results of tests on people are classified. It’s safe, insist the inventors, the air force’s Directed Energy Directorate in Albuquerque.
But anyone with first-hand experience broiling hot dogs and other non-robust meats in their tabletop microwave might be chary of such an assertion. Struck by the heat ray, “Sssss,” went the eyeball.
What is the microwaver’s target? It must be unarmed civilians, because as described, the VMAD wouldn’t seem to offer much against terrorists or regular soldiers ready to fire back with conventional weapons. What is certain is that the Pentagon’s microwave projects lack oversight and common sense. In one manic, grandiose claim, the Defense Department calls VMAD “the biggest breakthrough in weapons technology since the atomic bomb.”
The lust for military microwaving has also been a sinkhole for tax dollars. While much of the work remains deep in the shadows, the Directed Energy Directorate (DED) does allow that $40 million went out the door for the VMAD over the last decade. An additional $15 million was awarded to ITT Industries for research on high-power microwaving applications in bombs and other types of ray guns.
Microwaving facilities pictured as part of the Directorate also look to have cost a small fortune. One 27,000-square-foot concrete monolith is worth $9 million, resulting in a “cost-effective and timely capability.”
Vendors capitalizing on the VMAD include Raytheon, CPI (Communications and Power Industries), and Veridian Engineering—a tech firm menacingly cited for its part in researching “biological effects.”
The hype on the Sheriff, as it was called then, was so thick a German television crew asked me just before the outbreak of war in Iraq if the Pentagon would use the “death ray.” This was the perception overseas. Back in 2002.
Over the years, DoD’s publicity campaign for the ADS was always the same.
Noxious and intelligence-insulting, it boiled down to:
Recruit some journalist to be the gimp in a strapped down chicken test, the piece of meat to be left out standing in the field as a target.
In return the reporter got to visit wherever the pain ray was stationed — in the past couple years, Moody AFB in Georgia — to write a story about how great the thing was.
The pain ray was always said to be a revolution in military less-than-lethal technology. It was something needed by our boys, pronto!
Richard Machowicz of Futureweapons was one strapped down chicken a couple years ago. Even 60 Minutes was recruited.
In 2008, on the 60 Minutes advertisement for the ADS, from el Reg:
The omega in our story is another weapon that’s never done anything but win the hearts and minds of its handlers and the journalists commissioned to write about it after it had shot them. Just prior to the war, the Vehicle Mounted Active Denial System, since shortened to just Active Denial System, was ridiculously hailed by people in the Department of Defense as the biggest breakthrough in weapons technology since the atomic bomb. From there, it’s been almost all downhill for the Hummer-mounted pain gun that heats the top layer of skin with millimeter waves.
It had been hoped that the ADS, nicknamed The Sheriff, would arrive in Iraq in time to aid pacification and occupation operations. But a peculiar thing happened.
In their quest for publicity, the weapon’s minders worked out a system whereby reporters would be given the opportunity to be burned and awed by it in return for cheerleading notices. The practice worked but not in the way ADS pushers had hoped. Many stories, all glowing, were generated. But at the same time, the US gained a world reputation as a nation that tortures prisoners. This cognitive dissonance erased the value of the ADS publicity scheme. A Hummer-mounted ray gun that agonizes people, even if only non-lethally, is seen as a potential instrument of America-style torture, one aimed at unarmed foreigners.
Since the beginning of the Iraq war, the ADS has been regularly promised and every year it has failed to show, left to languish by Pentagon men who probably don’t want to see their careers go down in flames over it. Moved from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, the ADS has had progressively less money devoted to it, a sign that at least a part of the DoD wishes it would go away. Its liabilities include factors ranging from possible foreign public relations nightmare to its being recently described on “60 Minutes” as against the ingrained culture of a military that wants weapons which kill people as fast as possible.
The Air Force resorted to something of a Hail Mary pass for it earlier this month, farming the ADS out to “60 Minutes” where, as usual, it was described as a wonder weapon, one that could have solved a multitude of big woes that are now water under the bridge, like the blasting of Fallujah. “Pentagon officials call it a major breakthrough which could change the rules of war and save huge numbers of lives in Iraq,” claimed CBS News’ David Martin. Like many who had so bravely gone before him, Martin allowed himself to be shot by the ADS in return for a puff piece explaining that the reason it wasn’t already in Iraq saving lives was because of lack of proper backbone among Pentagon leaders.
In five years of war, the ADS became politically untenable. “You don’t ever, ever, ever want a system like this to be thought of as a torture weapon,” Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Sue Payton told “60 Minutes.” Payton also told the news operation she “loved” the ADS and “started giggling” after being shot by it, adding another negative – a whiff of craziness – to the stigma of the pain ray.
Since the war began, few ADS stories have been complete without indication that it was going to Iraq soon. This time it’s for summer fun. The bright side is that if it continues true to form, it’s just another in a five year-long list of assorted threats and promises never quite delivered as billed.
The ADS program was also contaminated by the Pentagon’s reliance on kooks. And its inability to control them once they’ve been released from active duty.
The US military’s pain ray, aka the Active Denial System, is a certified excrement magnet. In March Reg readers learned that the US Air Force wonder weapon is still being pitched as a game changer in Iraq, a prediction that’s never even been close to being tested.
ADS defenders claim the Pentagon, afraid that using it would be a public relations disaster, won’t give the non-lethal pain ray, a gun that shoots millimeter waves, the green light. It’s something the US would use to torture foreigners, preferably smaller and not as well-armed as our boys.
Ah, but maybe it’s not just a pain ray – maybe it’s a death ray, too! And it’s been hiding in plain sight under cover of a non-lethal weapons program.
Seeing undercover Muslim subversion everywhere in the US, Gaubatz via TPM:
[Said] in September 2008 on a now scrubbed blog post at www.jihadishere.blogspot.com that: “We are now on the verge of allowing a self admitted ‘crack-head’ to have his finger on every nuclear weapon in America.”
But back to the ADS and what was written at el Reg:
[The] interesting [death ray] allegation comes by way of a man named Dave Gaubatz, and FrontPage magazine.
Gaubatz, described as a former veteran of the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, informed FrontPage that 60 Minutes, as well as everyone else, had been fed a crock on the pain ray. It was originally designed, he said, as a straight lethal ray gun and it’s been operational for years. It was ready for use in Iraq where it could have slain the enemy and saved American lives. And 60 Minutes made a big mistake by not getting the truth of this and “putting our soldier’s lives in danger everyday.”
“Each day that goes by and another soldier dies should weigh heavily on every member of 60 Minutes,” said Gaubatz.
Well into the weird, Gaubatz explained that journalists have all been fed a story about the non-lethal weapon. This is true, but only to a point – one not yet in crazy world. Then the narrative jumps the cliff. The journalists are culpable because they’re “liberals who know less about the Ray Gun [yep, that's in caps] than they do basic fundamentals of war.”
And readers now see what happened to the Active Denial System.
Although the Pentagon’s careful publicity campaign for it spanned many years and many journalists, it backfired badly.
While various big name reporters were consenting to be shot by the ADS, in order to transmit stories on the great new non-lethal wonder weapon, the rest of the world — not being stupid — perceived it much differently.
That message: The US had invented a nefarious device to be sent to the Muslim world for the agonizing of civilians. Just another instrument of torture.
One imagines very few sane US military leaders would want to see their careers incinerated upon publicized or leaked news on use of the wonderful pain ray on civilians in Afghanistan.
So the ADS — while sent there for a brief period — never fired a shot, according to reports. And has now been shipped home for obvious reasons.
There’s a book in this story. One on how really stupid ideas, packaged in futurism, whizz-bang technology, the hype of sycophants and the belief in American exceptionalism in all things, blow up when the rest of the world doesn’t agree to drink the Kool-Aid.
Or, more simply: Just because you can make such a thing doesn’t mean you should.
The Department of Defense also commissioned the programming of a war game to model use of the pain ray. I had a copy of the game, played it and reported on the technical aspects of it here.
It looks to be as full of made-up rubbish as everything else he has done, which according to Media Matters, is plenty:
That’s right. Breitbart, delusional nut that he is, thinks that his and Frank Gaffney’s “reputations” will help “provide a check and balance” that will keep the site from publishing “false information or propaganda.”
Good grief.
Breitbart’s “reputation” is that of a liar whose websites run wild with fringe conspiracy theories. Gaffney himself fits right in, with a record of pushing bizarre, obviously false claims
Gaffney is a card-carrying original member of the Cult of EMP Crazy from when Pennsy GOP kook Curt Weldon was in the House of Representatives. Weldon was and is also part of the Cult. And he was also certain that Soviet suitcase nukes were on the loose.
However, Weldon was run off the reservation permanently by voters when the FBI started investigating him for influence peddling in 2006. But Gaffney thought he was tops.
“The nightmare scenario is this: A rogue nation like North Korea or a stateless terrorist like Bin Laden gets hold of a nuclear weapon and decides not to drive it into a large city but rather to launch it on a Scud-type missile straight into the atmosphere from a barge off the East Coast,” claimed Gaffney.
Many years ago, Gaffney was not quite so famous as the crank he is now. He just hated on arms control, non-proliferation pacts and peace. The right-wing GOP noise machine changed that, giving him bigtime amplification, allowing him to reveal his much broader tastes.
“You may remember Gaffney from his crackpot claim earlier this year — published on Breitbart’s Big Government, no less! — that the Missile Defense Agency’s ‘new’ logo ‘appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo,’ which Gaffney identified as a ‘nefarious’ ’symbolic action’ that he suggested represented an ‘act of submission to Shariah,’ continued Media Matters.
Wait. The last bit is a DD joke. Sun Tzu was never a member of the Cult of EMP Crazy. But he is part of Big Peace. Go ahead, click that link. Don’t worry about feeding the trolls.
Big Peace was announced with a bang, according to Media Matters.
To DD, it wouldn’t seem to matter so much. Its many gobble-wallahs from the far right have already been getting whatever needs to be written published in many other older crank venues like the WaTimes, Family Security Matters, blogs at the Heritage Foundation, Human Events, the Examiner and World Net Daily.
Its very practical function is as another glorified spam machine, the standard tool of the GOP.
Hard to watch warning: DD jumped on the grenades so you don’t have to.
Lonely Frank Gaffney, ranting and screeching at the EMPAct America conference. Turn down the volume. Eleven views and rising fast.
Lonely Frank, lamenting — in 2009 — the Obama administration’s fascination with health care reform and energy policy, instead of electromagnetic pulse attack. Which would result in the “cratering” of the United States.
Curt Weldon at EMPAct America. SCUD in a tub, electromagnetic pulse doom presents us with a “moral dilemma.” Lose some weight, already.
National Georgraphic’s special on electromagnetic pulse doom was hijacked to the web just prior to the weekend.
Originally, it was briefly shamed by Jason at Armchair Generalist here where you could see the initial trailer.
However, publishing the entire thing to YouTube, where one assumes it will soon be yanked for copyright violation, allows the viewer to skip through segments without having to endure the entire thing.
And the immediately noticeable central feature is its total reliance on catastrophism. More specifically the potential imminent arrival of national doom.
What viewers of extended cable service wouldn’t notice is that the show was essentially the work of the small but fanatical special interest lobby — the Cult of EMP Crazy’s poor man’s Umbrella Corporation, so to speak, EMPAct America.
In essence, National Geographic Channel was captured — made into a zombie for the sake of EMPAct America’s end-of-the-nation script. One which will surely come true if we don’t listen to them.
EMPAct America is a reprehensible nuisance. Since catastophe is its only tool of messaging and so determined has it been to push it, this little lobby has actually contributed measurably to end-times hysteria in the US. The kind that’s now the special property of the extremist Republican party.
Here’s the final segment on YouTube, starring Forstchen — who’s usually heard but not seen on Coast to Coast radio — and his small town, persuaded to enact an exodus scene — the hungry and thirsty lost trudging along a rural road, passed by an occasional flivver, the only thing that can still run.
I’ve written repeatedly that the Cult of EMP Crazy is notoriously manipulative.
It plays to the extremist crank, as if craziness and fractured ideas need to be encouraged and amplified in American society. It captivates fundamentalist religious zealots who welcome the end times because of the punishments they think will be meted out to everyone not on their “to-be-saved” lists.
In fact, if you’ve followed Cult of EMP Crazy videos and newspaper claims on this blog, you’ll have sensed the undercurrent.
The Paul Reveres, the proper followers of Jesus Christ, the survivalists and the stalwart GOP rump are kind of hoping for an electromagnetic pulse attack so they’re vindicated and the unbelievers are struck down in one blow. And they won’t share their stash of pemmican with such scum when civilization fails
Anyway, it also hypnotizes stupid white guys in baseball caps. Guys training to work in homeland security.
DD knows the next video is hard to endure.
Our Paul Revere in a Guinness cap waves around the book of William Forstchen. He has the script memorized although his delivery is stumbling. And then the good parts: Our enemies will pounce. Al Qaeda will get the EMP scud in a tub. The Russians will come out of Venezuela. The Chinese will come out of Panama.
Heck, the Chinese will storm out of the port of Los Angeles or the yards in Long Beach! He knows, he grew up on southern California. Boy, are there lots of Chinese people here.
And here are the grinning fundamentalists, Jack and Rexelle van Impe, their smiles revealing they’d be pretty tickled if 90 percent — all the heathen — were killed off after an electromagnetic pulse disaster.
Naturally, one expects exploitation from the Heritage Foundation and the GOP. It’s called inspiring the base.
Here National Geographic gets into the game, massaging its ratings for the last couple of weeks, hoping to pick up the viewers who fall into the baseball cap man demographic.
Coming from what used to be regarded as an august source, it’s more mainstreaming of extremism in 2010 America.
In the blink of an eye the Huffington Post has established itself as another flugel horn for the Cult of EMP Crazy. As well as a place where posters couldn’t be bothered in the slightest to read what their compatriots are writing on the same subject. Just as long as it all gets into the Google News feed, pronto.
“Learn more about what would happen if an EMP bomb were ever detonated in the video below,” teases Bianca Bosker.
It’s the double opportunity for National Geographic-style info-adver-tainment and catastrophism.
Dig the title:
How an EMP Bomb Would Be a Deathblow to Life as We Know It
