Hurricane Irene hit the East Coast and left more than 6 million homes and businesses without power. Transportation services were disrupted as a result of the hurricane. More than a million people got an idea of what it would be like if the United States were attacked by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon …
To address this threat, it is essential to expand the ballistic missile protection of the U.S. homeland.
Today, the Cult of EMP Crazy infiltrated the New York Times website via Greenwire, a “blog on energy and development.”
Written by Peter Behr, it has all the features common in an electromagnetic pulse crazy plant — sources almost exclusively from the cult lobby.
DD blog has dealt with most of the matters and individuals previously.
Today’s post agains swims under the common cover of protecting the grid from a solar flare, a point the Cult has cynically used to get itself into the news many many times.
Customarily, the Cult is only interested in using electromagnetic pulse doom stories as rationalizations for increased missile defense. The “unquiet angry sun” bits furnish them an extra argument used to publicize the standard agenda on a repeated basis.
The electric power industry is challenging an analysis of the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threat that was an instrumental part of the 2004 report by the congressional EMP Commission. The commission focused on surges affecting the power grid from a high-altitude nuclear detonation. The same analysis, by prominent researcher John Kappenman and the California-based firm Metatech, also underpins warnings of widespread grid damage from geomagnetic currents triggered by a massive, once-in-a-century solar flare.
The electric power industry, not having been born yesterday, knows exactly where this is coming from — a small lobby with no real political power.
The researcher mentioned is not prominent but, rather, someone from a very small business which has been attached to the EMP lobby for a good long time.
Regular pieces on DD blog have made it impossible to avoid the many valid criticisms of the Cult of EMP Crazy.
The Greenwire blog mentions them, elliptically, giving the lobbyists their opportunities to respond with the usual lame dodges:
There may also be political and ideological differences over the EMP response.
The impetus for action began with concerns by some leading conservatives over the threat of EMP from a terrorist-launched missile. The EMP campaign has stirred opposition from some liberals who see a conservative interest in reviving a Reagan-era missile defense debate, some EMP action advocates say.
“Within the administration and among some of my Democratic friends, there is a willingness to close their eyes to anything that is nuclear generated,” said Rep. Trent Franks (R-N.M.), a leading member of the congressional EMP caucus. He said the nuclear scenario is “broader and more dangerous if it occurs” than the solar storm. “I am concerned that terrorists the world over are beginning to dial in to the grid’s vulnerability.”
The “congressional EMP caucus” has always been a small pest group, traditionally led by Roscoe Bartlett, now by Republican Trent Franks. Its members produce no legislation in any other areas of endeavor and it is “bipartisan” only in the sense that its GOP principals usually find one or two trivial Democrats willing to be their pets for cosmetic purposes.
Trent Franks is the very picture of a GOP extremist. He’s a birther and was also the politician who accepted Frank Gaffney’s “Team B” sharia-law-impurifying-the-American-justice-system report, something regarded as a bona fide piece of trash by all reasonable people.
The electromagnetic pulse lobby is defined by the company it keeps with many bad ideas. Traditionally, journalists — perhaps like Greenwire’s — don’t like to deal with the sprawling and odious crackpot nature of all of it.
However, there have been some exceptions. Notably, last week Frank Gaffney, and by association the EMP lobby, were made appropriate fools of on the Alyona show at RT.
Paradoxically, the Alyona Show was mentioning Gaffney in connection with a big Cult of EMP Crazy confab at the Heritage Foundation, one memeant to lobby for a National EMP Awareness Day. (We’ve dogged that previously, here.)
At the EMP Awreness Day “summit” cult members spoke about what they usually like to talk about — Iran attacking the US, terrorists attacking the US with a nuclear missile, or terrorists attacking a United States city with an electromagnetic pulse suitcase of doom.
The electromagnetic pulse suitcase story is a common one with the Cult. (There’s a picture here.)
Sometimes the electromagnetic pulse suitcase is souped up into a larger mobile device, said to be easy to get or in the hands of terrorists. The threat scenarios are always peddled by the small number of specialty businesses within the electromagnetic pulse doom lobby.
Pry, for today’s example, is another source in the Times story.
Anyway, as with lobbyists, the Cult of EMP Crazy is no exception, it is considered important to seed various claims into government reports, or — even better — to actually be able to author such reports.
This is where the Times’ Greenwire blog is dishonest.
The story intimates that the electric power industry (NERC) and the Energy Department were formerly “on the same page” concerning the electromagnetic pulse threat.
FERC, NERC and the Energy Department appeared to be on the same page. NERC and DOE were sponsors of a workshop on the EMP threat in November 2009. The workshop’s report (pdf), “High-Impact, Low-Frequency Event Risk to the North American Bulk Power System,” was issued in June 2010 by NERC and DOE.
It concluded, “Recent analysis by Metatech and Storm Analysis Consultants suggests … that the potential extremes of the geomagnetic threat environment may be much greater than previously anticipated.” The workshop’s EMP task force was chaired by Kappenman, a principal with Storm Analysis Consultants, and Metatech President William Radasky, and they were instrumental in writing that section of the 2010 report, industry officials say.
Common sense would seem to dictate that leaders of corporations ought not to be empowered by the US government to provide threat assessments which stand to directly enrich their interests.
But that’s how the US conducts business. From top to bottom, people read of agencies subverted by the businesses they are supposed to regulate.
And sometimes people then come to the conclusion that the US government is only a tool for the accelerated transfer of taxpayer dollars into the coffers of such mentioned businesses.
Which is a pity …
The latest example … comes to you courtesy of the Department of Energy and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (or NERC).
Reads the New York Times, courtesy of Matthew Wald:
A report just issued by the Energy Department and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, known as Nerc, an industry group that polices the power grid, lists three categories of threats to the grid: coordinated cyber- and physical attacks, pandemic disease and electromagnetic damage.
What Wald does not mention, or perhaps has failed to notice, is the “report??? has essentially been written by the small interests which make up the Cult of EMP Crazy, with government workers as their staff.
Three of the report’s authors are part of the bomb Iran/ballistic missile defense lobby. (Follow the link.)
These include John Kappenman — billed as being part of something called Storm Analysis for the report, William Radasky of Metatech and Michael Frankel of Roscoe Bartlett’s old EMP Commission.
For the past couple of years this group has been given short shrift. Under the wing of Roscoe Bartlett, members of the EMP Commission went before Congress repeatedly, only to be appropriately brushed off.
Compared to the businesses in the North American electrical power industry, these authors — members of the EMP lobby — are in very small and insignificant business operations. Metatech, for example, was able to slip into the NERC report a graphic on notional mobile electromagnetic pulse devices attacking the United States. (The report is here — see page 92.)
At one point, the Times’ Greenwire blog addresses the conflict of interest point raised here last year.
Kappenman said he agreed that the EMP threat should be thoroughly studied but that the complaint that his and Metatech’s analysis is not verifiable is off-base. “Essentially what NERC has decided to do is not allow commercial firms like mine to be a provider of this sort of simulation software. … The fact that I and others would like to be compensated for providing the code isn’t reason to think it is invalid.”
Kappenman said he also hears concerns that his studies are influenced by the opportunities to sell hardware solutions to protect the grid: “We should talk about that elephant in the room, I guess.” He said he has been involved in researching protection against EMP threats since the early 1990s, at EPRI’s request.
“I have never attempted to patent that technology. … It has been in public domain for 20 years. I have no control over it,” he said. While he is involved in commercial solutions to the EMP threat, if utilities begin to buy the safeguards, bigger firms will step into the picture “and will no doubt do a better job than I ever could in competing for the marketplace,” he added.
“We should talk about that elephant in the room, I guess,” concedes Kappenman. Who them proceeds not to actually talk about it, instead changing the subject by saying bigger companies might be able to compete better than his.
If DD were a betting man, he’d wager the electric power industry simply doesn’t want to have to put up with these small businesses. And it considers the electromagnetic pulse lobby a nuisance, one that — in the past — has been fond of hauling it before meetings chaired by Roscoe Bartlett. These are always meetings virtually no one attends but lobby members.
And so it made a tactical error when it originally allowed the EMP lobby to author a report, one then given weight by publication on its website.
Now it legitimately wishes to correct the matter.
NERC can do this by generating a new report, one separated from the EMP lobby and its small businesses. And it has valid arguments for doing so.
The power industry knows the score behind the scenes.
The electromagnetic pulse lobby has no real political power. And it owns an issue that not even half of the Republicans in the House really care about.
Brushing the kooks off once again is eminently doable.
How the President can lose to someone who’s nuts in 2012.
The ignoramus/rage vote over conditions goes all for the other side.
Can the Democratic Party sell the fact that the opposition is aimed at destroying Social Security and Medicare? It doesn’t have the best track record selling anything.
In T-shirt pictures:
The party of Ted Nugent vows to stop the war on lemonade stands
Only a soulless bureaucratic punk would authorize or advocate shutting down a kid’s sidewalk lemonade stand. And a normal, thinking, reasoning human being would be incapable of such a callous, power-abusing act of indecency. But in America today, the abject, heartbreaking reality is that such subhumans not only exist – they now infest our government like an evil pod of nonthinking death-row criminals …
Maybe the first thing Mr. Obama should do as proof that he is serious about reducing goony government regulations on business owners is to get his teleprompter gang to set up a statement for him to read that indicates he supports kids who sell lemonade.
Then he should visit Texas, witness how Gov. Rick Perry does it, stop at the first neighborhood lemonade stand he sees and give the young entrepreneur a buck or two to stimulate the economy. Just sayin’.
“Subhumans infest the government like … non-thinking death row criminals” and we know this because they’re attacking children’s lemonade stands.
In this context, “I’m voting for the psychopath” T-shirts aren’t the least exaggerated.
Late last year and again last week DD called the Republican Party a serious threat to national security. All because of its transformation into a cult of psychopaths who deny science.
Anyone who deviates from the orthodoxy of these psychopaths gets thrown down.
Presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman, because he refuses to be be or act like a psychopath, is the best living example. He’s been punished for being a rational person and, subsequently, is virtually non-existent as a contender.
Today, Krugman uses the word “terrify” twice in reference to the GOP and its denial of science.
Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.??? This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.
Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,??? one that has “got some gaps in it??? — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got peoples’ attention was what he said about climate change: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.???
That’s a remarkable statement — or maybe the right adjective is “vile.???
In his book “Fed Up,??? he dismissed climate science as a “contrived phony mess that is falling apart.???
I could point out that Mr. Perry is buying into a truly crazy conspiracy theory, which asserts that thousands of scientists all around the world are on the take, with not one willing to break the code of silence.
Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.
Because of a combination of things — a weak President who either does not understand the nature of his foes or is constitutionally unable to aggressively confront them in a time of great national peril — a psychopath could get elected in 2012.
Many Americans find strongmen appealing. In a time of peril they yearn for someone who looks good, talks big and who will say whatever lies are necessary to encourage their fantasies. And they will want to lash out. The biggest target will be the man in office.
Today we have GOP Presidential hopefuls — [the psychopaths] — who proudly squawk their disbelief, even antipathy, towards science.
They don’t believe in global warming. They don’t believe in evolution. They don’t believe in science that studies pollution or the trouble with having dirty air and water because they believe regulating water and air so they’re safe are impediments to amassing great wealth.
So they call for the EPA’s destruction.
They don’t even believe in the technology of modern lightbulbs!
You cannot shame or ridicule them on the subject. They’re impervious to facts and reasoned argument …
The serious security threats from this country are not exterior. They’re all internal. The GOP has made itself over into one of them.
You can’t have a modern nation run by such people.
If you cut out the swearing and the tirades, the show would last at least half the duration of last night’s two-hour workout …
We were sort of hoping for something to write home about, if only to shock you sitting in front of your monitor.
So we’ve spent a year in the company of the Nuge and we doubt we will be there for the next show here in town. By the time he got to the big immigration/White House cocksucker speech we wished we were home watching El Topo …
We love Uncle Ted because he at least creates a striking image in a sea of normalcy. Like counter-programming to everything else we see weekly, he reminds us that not all is well in the heart of the average American, beyond politics, and hasn’t been for some time. Before Obama, Bush Jr., Clinton, or even Reagan. Even after a Perry term, things will never be completely “right.”
On the audience:
Random Notebook Dump: When you shoved your hand down the back of your wife’s pants and then winked … in our direction, we knew you were a special person.
Perfect.
Ted’s mentally ill rage bits eventually scuff the shine off the ball of the chrome trailer hitch for even the most hardened.
Another inescapable character in the pantheon of GOP/Tea Party extremism is the lightbulb nut.
Michele Bachmann, Ted Nugent, etc.
Today, NBC distributes a story straight on a hoarder of incandescent lightbulbs.
Why?
To show us how apparently lots of people believe you might be able to sell them on eBay for big bucks as a scarce commodity in the near future. And because it’s a fight against modernity creeping unconstitutional state totalitarianism.
“These edicts always come from the government. It’s an attack on civilization. It’s a condemnation on our standard of living.???
DeCoster has collected hundreds of bulbs in her basement, not only because she hates the alternative, but also because she considers it her “social obligation.??? Hoarding bulbs is her form of peaceful rebellion against what she sees as an unconstitutional measure forcing Americans to change the way they have lived for decades.
[Actually, 14 million unemployed and 48 million on foodstamps is a change in the way people have “lived for decades” but, what the hey!]
Light bulbs have even become a 2012 campaign issue. GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has repeatedly spoken out against the new standards on campaign stops and supported a failed last-minute effort in the House to repeal the mandate for the more-efficient bulbs.
“I think Thomas Edison did a pretty patriotic thing for this country by inventing the light bulb …???
“This is how liberty dies,” reads one quote, attributed to Rush Limbaugh.
Barack Obama and, probably, lots of people think presidential debates are good.
“How so?” DD asks.
When the people you debate don’t respond to logic, facts or reason, how can one win even a semi-intellectual contest with them? You’d have better luck arguing with a wooden table.
Toman is a local Tea Party man running for a position on the Bethlehem Public School District board. Over the last couple of years published material on the blog has made it clear he despises public education.
His extremist views make him unfit for any elected office in a modern democracy.
In the last week he has mused about how the United States ought to be a theocracy.
I believe separation of Church and State with its doctrine will be placed on center stage in 2012 with the Christians again showing their ignorance of scripture and the Biblical teachings. They will be supporting some Heathen claiming to be a Christian; all the while the so call Christian Voter ignores the Constitution and the essences of Romans 13:1-6 and what the civil magistrate should be doing.
The understanding of the Bible and God’s law is imperative if we are to know how to separate church and state, and knowing the true meaning of what a theocracy is. Neither the church nor the state can take away conscience or man’s right to property as given to him by God. All spheres of life are under God and owe their boundaries, as fixed, by Him and His sovereignty; this then becomes a true theocracy under Godly men …
As we drift away from God and His law we see 70 years later, the devastation done to the social fabric, the people and their freedom.
It remains for us to rightly divide the Word if there is going to be a correction and that correction will only come if God has mercy on us if we understand salvation is through Jesus Christ, and not the State …
It’s incomprehensible that any concerned parent (who is not a fundamentalist religious extremist) would vote onto a school board anyone who held such views.
However, toxic extremists get elected when the local news media refuses to do its job.
At the end of 2010 I made my list of the greatest threats to US national security for the coming year. They were all internal and the list is here.
The GOP was last but not least on it:
The Republican Party is a threat to security. And not solely because of its descent into right-wing extremism or its desire to torpedo a nuclear arms reduction treaty because it despises the president.
As the party that denies science, one that will put people in committee chairmanships overseeing science and technology issues in the House who are … opposed to science whenever it contradicts their political views, the GOP poses a threat to America’s future.
You can’t have a forward-looking and capable nation with people in power who truly believe global warming and evolution are hoaxes.
Today we have GOP Presidential hopefuls who proudly squawk their disbelief, even antipathy, towards science.
They don’t believe in global warming. They don’t believe in evolution. They don’t believe in science that studies pollution or the trouble with having dirty air and water because they believe regulating water and air so they’re safe are impediments to amassing great wealth.
You cannot shame or ridicule them on the subject. They’re impervious to facts and reasoned argument.
And Rick Perry, like Michele Bachmann, and the rest in a group that gets higher numbers than the non-existent John Huntsman, are psychopaths. Huntsman apparently refuses to act like a psychopath and is punished for it in the popularity contest.
Psychopaths are defined by their lack of empathy, continual lying, irresponsibility, poor behavior, gigantic egos and mercilessness.
And to win support from the Tea Party wing for the nomination, the GOP representatives must exhibit all these traits.
Even if, deep down inside, one of them actually believes throwing off all scientific thought because it’s all either hoaxes or socialist elite plotting is a bad idea, the front-runners would never admit it.
Many consider this a joke, a source for laughs. And I suppose it is if your belief is such people could never be elected president.
But they could. And here’s how it could happen.
It’s not unreasonable to think that Barack Obama will either choose to do nothing that matters on unemployment and the economy or will be stymied by the GOP.
And enraged by bad conditions, just enough of the voting public will act out of either stupidity or spite in a desire to strike back in the voting booth, that a GOP psychopath who doesn’t believe in science will get elected to the most powerful country in the world.
How could that be so bad? We elected George W. Bush and the country survived.
Well, it really didn’t if you look close. The place is wrecked. The government is paralytic, purposely so.
It is the desire of half of the Congress to smash any government action.
In the last couple months this blog has dealt, off and on, with the “cyberwar” word.
And one of the bits the fearmongers of “cyberwar” have glommed onto to is the meme that the financial system could be destroyed through cyberattack.
Well, the GOP threatened to make the nation default, the President gave them what they wanted, and a credit rating agency issued an opinion squarely blaming the Republican Party.
The stock market went volatile and in this financial system thousands have lost money, all as a result of a combination of obeisance to GOP psychopaths and a disintegrating world economy that needs to look to the US for some measure of stability.
The serious security threats from this country are not exterior. They’re all internal. The GOP has made itself over into one of them.
Paradoxically, Wall Street and the wealthy — always marked as the theoretical targets in discussions of cyberwar — went out of their way to guarantee the Tea Party would take control in 2008, so displeased were they with the alleged socialist in the White House.
And they’ve been damaged by their real world choices.
You put psychopaths in power, people who don’t believe in anything outside what is passed around their own warped cult, and you have the very strong although minority party in the US.
One wonders what the long view thinkers in the Pentagon make of it? Do they have any real long view thinkers?
Certainly no one in the parked in the public defense think tanks ever discusses the issue of a major political party morphing into a security threat.
What is the point of a mighty war machine when everything has been destroyed at home, when their is no belief in science or even logic, because it clashes with internal beliefs?
What do the Pentagon men do?
Just keep polishing and admiring their squadrons of flying robot drones?
Flatten the area of Tripoli where it is believed he is holed up with a human shield surrounding him. Kill all those people and get it over with. Implement total war for a week, and cockroach Gadhafi will be entombed in a pile of rubble …
As of right now, no one knows what will be the result of the Mideast rebellions. No one knows – or is telling us – if Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood is behind the scenes bankrolling or fanning the flames of the Mideast rebellions to re-establish the Islamic caliphate …
The Obama administration is backing all of the Mideast rebellions. From Egypt to Libya, there’s not a word of caution from the Obama administration about these rebellions; not a word of caution about what the new political environment will be if the rebellions succeed. The president’s radical America-hating chums obviously continue to influence their community organizer.
Obama administration types are not just throwing caution to the wind by backing these rebellions. They are throwing the world into a potential hotbed of life-threatening extremism …
It would be wise to be very cautious and suspicious of the rebellions in the Mideast. Too many violent rebellions in that part of the world have led to brutal regimes who maintain power through genocide, societal destruction …
Wrong about everything. And stupidly so.
Worth reprinting because the GOP is the party of Ted Nugent. And it’s silent today, unable to react to Libyan news because it means the president’s policy, despite how much it hates the guy, didn’t hurt the situation.
The GOP hated the Libyan conflict because it was its leaders didn’t start and had no power over. And while it loves war in the Middle East, it’s internal logic and hatred of the president prevented it from having any view of events which made sense.
