Tech doomsday scenario No. 2: Wall Street gets e-bombed News flash: In what authorities suspect was the aftermath of an electromagnetic pulse weapon, a rogue attacker took down much of lower Manhattan today — causing equipment failures and power outages on a massive scale and shutting down financial markets across the country.
Though most commonly associated with nuclear explosions, you don’t need a nuke to create an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to do serious damage. EMP devices emit extremely high-frequency signals that fry electronics to a crisp, rendering them useless. An EMP will also wipe out or corrupt any data not stored on magnetic or optical devices. Worse, EMPs are largely untraceable, because the weapon itself destroys any evidence of its use.
A van with an EMP device in the back could effectively shut down big chunks of the U.S. economy simply by driving down Wall Street with the signal turned up, says Gale Nordling, CEO of Emprimus, a (US) company that helps enterprises protect against threats from non-nuclear EMP.
Nordling was last referenced on this blog as a guest at right-wing crazy radio here.
In the Nineties your host edited the electronic Crypt Newsletter. It was a publication that explored the world of computer virus writers and apocryphal wonder technology. It was sort of an anti-Wired, all e-mail and web postings, no glossy pages or advertising. And it new the subject of EMP Crazy well, even in those distant mists of the past.
Around 1998, the House Joint Economic Committee held a long series of hearings on the dread coming menace of electromagnetic pulse weapons.
At once a reader sees how long this sort of rubbish has been regularly bubbling and percolating.
Anyway, a good twelve years ago a retired Army general by the name of Robert L. Schweitzer testified before Congress on how an electromagnetic pulse ray could take down Wall Street. At one time he also made news for a sunken treasure hunt with John Singlaub off the Philippines.
A few years later, he died.
However, electromagnetic pulse rays still have not impinged upon Goldman Sachs, although we all might now wish it.
During the June [Congressional] hearing, Schweitzer made seemingly contradictory claims during the course of his presentation. At different times, Schweitzer claimed that electromagnetic pulse guns could be made for $800, that they could be made for $35, that they had been used against London banks although he was informed this was a hoax, and such weapons were now capable of disrupting Wall Street.
” . . . the cost is about $800 to do this,” Schweitzer said at one point.
As for knocking out Wall Street, Schweitzer later commented to Congressman Saxton, “[It] can be done with going to RadioShack and buying the components . . . And the prices are from $35 to $200 to buy components and do a number on Wall Street.” Schweitzer also alluded to, but did not mention by name, a generic hacker tech catalog that claimed to sell parts and schematics for such a weapon.
Further, Schweitzer testified that London banks were attacked by radio-frequency weapons, a myth that has been touched on in Crypt Newsletter.
“I was told that was a hoax,” Schweitzer said to Saxton. “. . . and it’s disputed in the Intel community and elsewhere but I think, frankly, and having gone into this in great detail, the dispute is to protect the fact it happened.”
Schweitzer added later: “I validated [this]. It isn’t just taking rumors or drivel off of the tabloids. These are solid facts that I’m giving you.”
These hearings were notorious for the amount of frank lies and trash delivered. While the web was still far too young for authorities to blame all Internet evil happening in the US on the Chinese, the Yellow Peril meme raised its head in another way.
At the time, the Chinese were said to be sending in sleeper agents to contaminate southern California public schools.
Why? To make our kids feel bad.
As an independent example, consider from the same sessions, other testimony — presented by author Dr. Peter Leitner on alleged Communist Chinese “yellow peril”-like subterfuge: “I’ve heard rumors . . . One I found particularly disturbing . . . [and] I haven’t seen any recorded documentation of these incidents . . . where very young-looking Chinese students were going to the United States and placed in high schools in the U.S. except their ages were 24 – 25 years old . . . They were brilliant students . . . Well, it turns out it’s an example of a sleeper agent, somebody who is put in position. He already has advanced degrees before coming in, then is put into the position as a seed and then is allowed to flourish in a totally unfair competition with U.S. student counterparts.”
Part of one new business strategy for making money from nothing is career advice.
At any one moment it’s easy to get the impression that half the on-line revenue in advertising now comes from either offering courses for retraining or the sale of job-hunting advice.
Nowhere is this more obvious than at my hosting provider.
Yahoo relentlessly bombards browsers with ads, columns and stories on getting a job.
For instance, the daily ‘apply for a training grant and go deep into debt to get a 2-year degree or you’ll never get a job’ pitch.
Call it working over another subprime crowd of suckers, a lure that promises reward, never to be adequately delivered, if only you’ll go deep into debt to get some kind of vocational training certificate at whatver for-profit little school is offering them in your area.
Or, there is the ‘The 10 best-paying jobs are … post.
And then the always favorite variation on what not to do during a job interview.
Typical advice, condensed: Scrupulously avoid being human and capable of error.
All of these work off the guilt-trip assumption that high unemployment in this country — more specifically, the reader’s lack of it — is the result of character and skill set faults in the job-seeker.
It’s hard to imagine a worse article or one more demoralizing than the link I’m going to post. How not to f— up an interview in 50 — that’s fifty — easily digestible bon mots.
Why only 50 Why not 100? Why not 200?
Doubtless fifty was probably thought to have the best chance at getting linkbacks and ‘most e-mailed’ status among the busy bees scavenging for jobs.
Remember, these advices and articles only work by leveraging desperation. Their ubiquity now guarantees they provide no service or common sense advice that people haven’t already considered.
They work for an industry that needs everyone to believe that American economic calamity is the fault of an inferior US worker.
DD has done the theme up previously here, here and here.
Don’t smell like a cigarette, it advises. Don’t fail to demonstrate the proper qualities of a lickspittle. Don’t smell like this or that. Don’t ask too many questions or talk too much but don’t appear mum. Don’t sit down wrong. Look at the boss but don’t look at the boss.
It’s here — furnished by someone named Karen Burns who knows how to make a job out of leveraging the joblessness of others.
“What and when MI5 knew about torture” is the headline of a story in the Guardian here.
The introduction reads:
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5 throughout most of the years of the so-called war on terror, insisted yesterday she had not known that Khalid Shiekh Mohammed was being waterboarded.
In a response to the appeal court’s judgment that MI5 officers had a “dubious record” on torture, she sought to blame the US and maintained that only after she retired in 2007 did she discover that the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks had been waterboarded 160 times. “The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing,” she said. Critics, though, said it was stretching credulity to claim surprise.
However, British intelligence and anti-terrorism police regarded information extracted under torture as worthy of consideration, no matter the source or procedures used to extract it.
This pertained to the the infamous London ricin trial in which the government’s chief informant was an Algerian named Muhammad Meguerba.
However, as time went on, Meguerba’s material could not be brought as evidence. And this was said to be because it had been made in a confession extracted under torture while in Algeria, a confession that was later recanted.
A London jury eventually concluded there had been no UK poison ring, just one loner with wild plans — Kamel Bourgass, a very bad man who had been convicted in a previous trial of murdering a Manchester police office during his capture.
The Guardian piece continued:
Eliza Manningham-Buller spelt out her position in written evidence to the law lords in 2005: “In some cases, it may be apparent to the [security and intelligence] agencies that the intelligence has been obtained from individuals in detention … though even then the agencies will often not know the location of details of detention,” she said.
Though she added that detainees could “seek to mislead their questioners”, she said: “Experience proves that detainee reporting can be accurate and may enable lives to be saved.”
She referred in her statement to the “ricin trial” and the Algerian supergrass in the case, Muhammad Meguerba. “Questioning of Algerian liaison [security service] about their methods of questioning detainees would almost certainly have been rebuffed and at the same time would have damaged the relationship to the detriment of our ability to counter international terrorism,” Manningham-Buller said.
Lord Bingham, the senior law lord, said in the ruling that intelligence extracted by torture was not admissible in British courts: “I am not impressed by the argument based on the practical undesirability of upsetting foreign regimes which may resort to torture.”
Keystone Boys State will be held at Shippensburg State Teachers College in June. It’s still not too late to try and throw away a week of high summer learning to be a lickspittle, cheerleader and rule-follower at a small insignificant school in PA.
Every since a couple years ago, DD’s recollection of his week at Keystone Boys State way back in the day is still the only memoir of KBS life on the web. And it stubbornly remains a thorn in the side of Keystone Boys State here.
By comparison, KBSer’s attempts to offset this generous publicity fall by the wayside.
Here’s an excerpt from my recollections of Keystone Boys State life:
One of the objections to DD’s description of Keystone Boys State (ca. the early Seventies) was its nature as a camp administered by military men. Campers were herded, minded and ordered around by active duty members of the four services for the duration of a week in the summer even though it was ostensibly under the umbrella/direction of the Pennsylvania American Legion.
But perhaps the barking of orders, inspections and compulsory afternoon intramural sport have been packed away, relics of a much earlier era. However, in the early Seventies, it was a firm and strong part of the command structure.
Here is a video some stalwart Keystone Boys Stater has put on YouTube as counterpoint.
Young Pennsy men! Can’t you just see yourself this summer standing before some fattish guy doing military-style motivational calls and responses?
Yes? Well, heavens! Why are you still reading this blog?
Today, in from the wires on Satan’s favorite bank in Pasadena, OneWest:
Many borrowers complain they get the runaround when they call their lenders for help, receive contradictory information from different employees and are required to repeatedly fax the same documents.
At the same time, suicide threats from distressed borrowers are so common that one lender, OneWest Bank Group in Pasadena, Calif., had to establish procedures for alerting the police. Lenders’ call-center employees are under heavy pressure. “These people make $14 or $15 an hour, and we ask them to move mountains,” said a OneWest executive at an industry conference last month.
That’s so considerate. One can but be astonished at the great labor of the “lender’s call center” and pure milk of human kindness dispensed by OneWest.
From the Wall Street Journal inside a larger article on how another big menace, Bank of America, locked a woman out of her home unjustly and stole her pet parrot.
Now if Jihad Jane had been caught doing such things, the US government’d handle things a little differently, DD thinks.
A couple facing foreclosure from OneWest Bank has joined the growing number of homeowners, attorneys and real estate professionals who believe the bank would rather foreclose than modify a loan.
“It comes down to money and greed. All they want is your home,” said Tom Cravalho, who with his wife Mona has been working for nearly two years to get out of an adjustable rate mortgage.
The Cravalhos said their original lender, IndyMac Bank, agreed to a loan modification in the summer of 2008 that would have offered them a 3 percent interest rate for five years. But then IndyMac was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which sold the bank’s assets to a group of investors who formed OneWest Bank in March 2009.
Tom Cravalho said OneWest Bank has refused to honor the original agreement or discuss new terms. The Cravalhos’ attorney believes OneWest is more interested in reimbursement from the FDIC for the bad loan under a so-called “shared loss” agreement than it is in modifying the Cravalhos’ mortgage.
DD began writing on Satan’s favorite bank when the Huffington Post started its celebrity-run campaign to get people to move their money from big evil parasite banks to small community-oriented banks that allegedly care about their customers.
Just to keep current, I went back to Move Your Money to check if OneWest was still in the list of recommended allegedly not-evil banks.
Yep. No change. Large evil bank still in master list of allegedly small not evil banks.
“AlterNet writer Stephen Pizzo has a simple question for people still using a big bank,” states the Move Your Money blog fatuously. “Why? They’re bad for you, bad for the country, and everybody knows it.”
The Cult of EMP Crazy is ridiculous for many reasons.
One of the more noticeable of these is the practice of spitting out the exact same scripts and stories, sometimes more than a couple times every month. EMP Crazies are such crappy opinion writers they pretend to not notice that every single one of them always emits the exact same lines, like a chorus of trained parrots.
“Ever heard of Electromagnetic pulse, or EMP? Probably not, unless you’re a nuclear weapons expert.”
No, wrong. Ding! Ding! For the love of Pete, have mercy! Only for the second or third time this week.
“What if the electricity suddenly went out?” asks KT McFarland.
Who is KT McFarland? Someone who tried to run against Hillary Clinton. Oh, this really does not look good.
“Kathleen Troia ‘K.T.’ McFarland served in national security posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations,” it reads. “She wrote Secretary of Defense Weinberger’s November 1984 ‘Principles of War Speech’ which laid out the Weinberger Doctrine. She is a senior adviser to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a frequent contributor to the Fox Forum.”
“What if the electricity suddenly went out?” KT writes, a second time. In case you, like, didn’t see it in the lede.
“Nothing would work – not the phone system, or water pumping stations, or planes, trains or automobiles. Your toilet wouldn’t flush and the TV wouldn’t turn on. Planes would stop in mid-air. (That’s a helluva trick of physics, aerodynamics and internal combustion! — DD) The only way to communicate would be face to face. Credit cards would be useless.
“Tens of millions would die of disease and starvation.”
So club the Obama administration over the head again for not doing anything to stop it — like bombing Iran.
KT McFarland, Tea Partier: ‘Throw the bums out!’ and Yellow Peril shtick.
Less clownish rock band with pretty girl making Faustian deals. Way less Iggy Pop.
Now, Iron Man 2 is more like it, making better use of heavy metal and rock star metaphors.
Iron Man set to AC/DC.
Mickey Rourke as The Wrestler as the Bounty Hunter as Whiplash, originally one of the “ten crappiest Iron Man villains” ever. Well-explained here.
And Don Cheadle as War Machine. Doesn’t he seem a little small for the part to you? War Machine was big and mighty, like the young Jim Brown. Ah, Robert Downey’s wee, too, and he works splendidly as Tony Stark.
Tipped by Armchair Generalist, someone with a good eye. The second trailer is cooler than the first.
Guaranteed to spawn too many US military officers and analysts telling magazines and newspapers America needs its defense contractors to make something like that. To limit collateral damage in the war on terror, of course.
Good news, lads! Good news! Between Wall Street and the way things are done here, the US is getting set to march proudly into the future. Home-schooling for everyone! Fire more of those slackers with three months off in the summertime.
“The urban core has suffered white flight post-the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education, blockbusting by the real estate industry, redlining by banks and other financial institutions, retail and grocery store abandonment,” Brooks said to applause from the standing-room-only crowd.
“And now the public education system is aiding and abetting in the economic demise of our school district,” she said. “It is shameful and sinful.”
Under the approved plan, teachers at six other low-performing schools will be required to reapply for their jobs, and the district will try to sell its downtown central office. It also is expected to cut about 700 of the district’s 3,000 jobs, including about 285 teachers.
“The Kansas City school board voted … to close” fifty percent of its schools to avert bankruptcy it sez.
More than a year ago I coined a phrase that seems to have made its way into the econolexicon; writing about how cutbacks at the state and local level would tend to undermine fiscal stimulus at the federal level, I said that we had fifty Herbert Hoovers.
“It is always easy to find people who will pontificate about these matters and blow smoke in everyone’s ears … It’s a fancy idea lab, but the ideas are not that good.” — Me
“Electromagnetic pulse guns, genetically designed killer diseases and swarms of miniature self-guided missiles — if these sound like the products of a mad scientist, they should,” reports the Washington Times here. “They are among the threats predicted during the U.S. Army’s 11th annual Mad Scientist Future Technology Seminar (no, really) in Newport News, Va.”
“It is only a matter of time before there is a significant high-tech surprise awaiting U.S. military forces” … is this bullshitters paradise’s motto, reads the newspaper.
Refreshingly, DD was asked to deliver a dash of ice-water to the face.
“The summary lists five ’significant findings’ of the seminar, concluding that ‘emerging biological technology … especially in the hands of non-state actors, has the greatest potential to catch the Army unprepared in the short term’ by allowing the creation and delivery of new diseases for which there is no cure,” continues the Times. “The summary states that this capability likely will be available to U.S. adversaries ‘as early as 2015.’”
“The seminar concluded that ‘EMP weapons will become available to potential adversaries in mortar and artillery rounds soon … blending technologies necessary to generate an EMP with advances in miniaturization could produce a hand-held EMP gun before 2020.”
EMP guns lagging behind custom-made plagues? You don’t say, Misters Science Fiction Men! How about turning people into living shrapnel bombs, like they did in an episode of Fringe last year?
George Smith, a defense technology analyst and a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, said in an interview that he was skeptical about the value of such exercises … They have been predicting some of these things for 20 years,” Mr. Smith said about some of the advanced threats discussed in the summary.
That’s just a fact. Electromagnetic ray guns have been promised for as long as DD has been in cyberspace. It’s the weapon that’s always coming but never quite arriving, despite much hoping and wishing.
And a few times a month DD gets querulous mail from people wishing to show me their EMP guns or impugn my character for writing stuff like this here.
What’s changed most, however, is the need for the Army’s ‘mad scientist’ picnic.
There isn’t any.
Anyone who follows national security affairs knows there’s no shortage of predictive analysis rank bullshitting about the many enemies the US is likely to face. Potential foes and their fancy weapons and plans lurk everywhere! MacGyver-like terrorists will make Facebook and bags of high-tech dirt into existential threats.
“[Adversaries] are likely to try to bypass the military, shifting ‘toward a focus on disrupting transportation, banking, and government infrastructure within the United States’ by exploiting malicious use of the Internet and other computer networks, ‘generating greater stress in an increasingly vulnerable U.S. homeland,” says some alleged director of Army intelligence analysis named Tom Pappas.
