Survivalism expert Jim Rawles discussed the mindset of preparedness in an uncertain world, and the wild cards to prepare for including solar flares, EMP attacks & global economic collapse …
Part of what made Mark Thompson’s write-up for TIME magazine on electromagnetic pulse doom so wretched was the omission of how many far right kooks subscribe to it. When a journalist does this he’s dishonest, trying to cover up those inconvenient details which strip an issue of respectability and take it into the land of nuts.
The box quote is from a recent post to YouTube of a recording from Coast to Coast, the nationwide radio show that caters to listeners who believe in ghosts, big feet, UFOs, chem trail poisoning and the coming end.
For the past two years, electromagnetic pulse doom has been a regular feature of it, too. And one can frequently hear William Forstchen there, for his book — One Second After — which deals with an EMP attack throwing America back to the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Forstchen is connected with Newt Gingrich, another member of the Cult of EMP Crazy, one fond of pushing the author’s book because he wrote a foreword for it.
Amusing one-star reviews of the book are here on Amazon.
Forstchen’s book is only fiction.
However, there is a far right kook portion of this country’s populace that is obsessed with end times mythology and survivalism. The Coast to Coast guest tries to make the point that the Christian white identity crazies who comprise ninety-nine point eight percent of it somehow share common ground with tree-huggers and hippies.
When the mainstream media covers these stories, the pieces are linked to the arrival of Barack Obama as president of the United States. And more and more, one sees experts from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks extremism in the US, consulted when small groups of these people are carted off to jail.
The electromagnetic pulse doomers are not generally potential criminal nuisances. But they share much with the Hutaree including an increasingly insane rage over the Obama administration.
Some, like the Hutaree, are obsessed with the apocalyptic ending of civilization. Fortschen’s book, for example, is hardly the only example. Here is another entire series of Christian sermonizing built into an extended parable about the end brought on by an electromagnetic pulse. (And still another here, including a rant about the president.)
Reasonable people see the connections. The far right is a home for these types. It is welcoming and inclusive to them in 2010. The raging gripes about the descent of the US government into tyranny and the coming of the end are part of the mainstream daily noise.
Stockpile! Obama will bring on the end of things. The masses — me included — will come rushing out of LA, head north and try to steal your stuff. Buy ammo or books on how to make landmines and makeshift claymores, so you can defend your stuff from those of us who would take it without paying in silver or gold.
“[Some white Americans, all Republicans] think an electromagnetic pulse — EMP for short — set off by a hostile nation exploding a nuclear device in space could fry computer chips — shutting down everything from toasters and cell phones to trucks moving food, medicine and other essentials around the nation,” reports the Oregonian.
[A precious metals] dealer, said some of his customers ‘are actually making sure they have a vehicle that’s not going to be impacted by an EMP.'”
“Failure of the power grid is a common theme — say if huge federal deficits trigger inflation and workers abandon their jobs, or if solar flares damage the grid the way they fused telegraph lines in 1859.”
“[Some fellow in the countryside] has factored predatory gangs into his plans to flee to his Snake River hideout with his wife … and their supplies.”
TIME magazine has just demonstrated it is as lame as your longtime perception of it.
Today, writing about the Cult of EMP Crazy, Mark Thompson does the usual bad dog journalist thing of imagining there must be some relative merit to the Cult — and that the truth must be somewhere between it and the people who have reasonably been brushing off Roscoe Bartlett for over a decade. (And the Heritage Foundation for the last couple of years.)
If America needs a new threat around which to organize its defenses, try this one: Bad guys explode nuclear weapons miles above U.S. soil, sending out an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that fries the electronic guts of everything in America. The nation’s financial and transportation systems collapse, hospitals and the Internet go dark, water and electrical grids freeze and runaway Toyotas with electronic throttles are finally brought to a stop. “The EMP resulting from the blast would cause widespread damage, devastating the economy and resulting in the deaths of millions of Americans,” the hawkish Heritage Foundation warned last week, launching a call on Congress to establish an EMP Recognition Day.
The Heritage Foundation. Hawkish.
Calling the Heritage Foundation ‘hawkish’ is like calling a blue whale “big-ish.”
But wait, Thompson’s clowning gets better:
“Despite repeated warnings, Congress has taken virtually no action to prepare or protect against an EMP attack,” write the Heritage Foundation’s Jena Baker McNeill and James Jay Carafano. “In order to facilitate a national discussion regarding the EMP threat, Congress should establish March 23 as EMP Recognition Day” — not coincidentally, that’s the date of Reagan’s famous 1983 speech launching his missile-defense initiative. Leaving aside the contradiction of urging Congress to concentrate attention and resources on a threat that most in Washington consider an infinitesimal probability, the whole notion seems rooted in some visceral need for foes with diabolical destructive abilities. There’s something almost pathetic about cowering in the shadow of such a threat, instead of shrugging it off with the resilience that was typical on the American frontier.
As its own contribution to EMP Recognition Day, the Heritage Foundation — sounding more like the Green Party than the conservative think tank that it is — is urging lawmakers to shut down congressional cafeterias, walk to work, shut off their BlackBerries and turn off the lights. “If Congress took these four steps for one day,” the Heritage Foundation says, “all members would understand the magnitude of the dangers posed by an EMP attack.” (They’ll also be slimmer, healthier and more mellow.)
[Crap deleted for the punch line]
Like with taxes and health care, the debate over the EMP threat is polarizing.
The line asks readers to believe the unbelievable — that a sizable number of Americans have an opinion on electromagnetic pulse doom, like they do on real daily news, like health care reform, as opposed to extremist right-wing manufactured stuff, like EMP.
It also leaves out all the self-impeaching details on the true nature of the Cult of EMP Crazy: That it’s not only the property of the missile defense/bomb Iran lobby, but also exclusively GOP far right and home to birthers, the nuts pastor of a superchurch hoping for end to come so Jesus can take his flock to heaven, a congressional staffer who used to push the non-existent threat of suitcase nukes, and still another fringe GOP congressman who is a birther, to name a few.
An enemy detonates a nuclear weapon over the Pentagon. In four seconds, the blast wave reaches the Jefferson Memorial. It collapses in an instant. Scorching hot winds, at 300 miles an hour, scour every person and vehicle off the Memorial Bridge. The fireball, bright as a thousand suns, quickly reaches the Capitol building. The structure shakes, yet stands. But inside, everything flammable — from clothes to curtains — bursts into flames.
Soon, 40 square miles are covered by roaring flames. Fingers of fire stretch as far as eight miles from the blast.
The D.C. area is home to 5.3 million people. All who haven’t died within the first hour of the attack are in desperate need.
It’s not a happy scenario. And Washington’s doing nothing to improve it.
While there is no one in policy-making position in the current US administration who even remotely cares about electronic pulse doom or the notional threat it is said to pose, the Cult of EMP Crazy is so vigorous it has true believers all over the country.
And if there was a demographic study or poll to test the water, DD would theorize EMP Crazy — when not being exploited by the missile defense lobby — aligns with Tea Party membership and the irrational belief that the US will soon collapse from a combination of socialist tyranny, apocalyptic attack from overseas and the ruination of its currency.
EMP Crazy, as now owned by the GOP — the party of the irrational far right — seems to grow in appeal in this demographic the more ridiculous and extreme it becomes.
For today’s bit from the front lines, into this rather standard brew is popped Nicola Tesla kooky-ness and the belief that he could trigger earthquakes with electromagnetic rays. This idea, while it may sound odd and utterly nonsensical, is not uncommon in US extremism.
During a recent free seminar, a New Mexico woman explained how a single solar flare incident, or one 10-kiloton nuclear blast 300 miles in the atmosphere over the state of Kansas, could destroy a century’s worth of accumulated technology in this country.
The force created by a flare or a nuclear explosion— or even some other solar incident— is called an electromagnetic pulse, (EMP).
It would easily knock out all major power sources, land line and cell phone communications, emergency service telecommunications, erase all electronic digital data and even disable all forms of transportation dependent on any sort of electronic ignition devices.
A simple power outage could become much more once those trying to call their local utilities provider or start their car would soon discover. If a nuclear device exploded from a 300-mile distance above the earth, it would create only a brief light flash, probably unseen by most.
Virginia Silcox, a Training Specialist II with the Emergency Operations Training Academy in Albuquerque, New Mex., laid out the scenario of an immediate return to the 19th century to a small audience in Del Norte earlier this month.
During the four-hour seminar, Silcox gave a PowerPoint presentation followed by a detailed discussion and the construction of actual Farraday cages used to protect electronics … Basically the EMP attack was first known as Nicola Tesla’s death ray, Silcox said, technology some speculate was stolen from Tesla following his death in 1943.
Tesla used a little black box in his Colorado Springs laboratory in the early part of the 20th century and created an actual earthquake in the city while testing his vibration technology equipment there.
But the Heritage Foundation always finds a way to raise the bar.
And the latest Heritage feat of intellectual heavy lifting is to recommend that Congress establish an official Electromagnetic Pulse Recognition Day today.
I hear you thinking: “Ah, DD, now I know you’re really bullsh—— me!”
While more than half of Congress basks in the afterglow of a most momentous piece of legislation, Heritage has not been letting the grass grow under its feet — setting two of its always busy experts to writing an ‘analysis’ calling for an EMP Recognition Day because:
The likelihood of an EMP attack is disconcerting.
And because it makes anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s SDI — the original missile defense initiative.
To get in the right mood on EMP Recognition Day, the Congress could, according to the Heritage Foundation:
1. Close all cafeterias.
2. Walk to work.
3. Turn off Members’ Blackberries.
4. Shut off the lights.
That’s because after an electromagnetic pulse attack American technologic civilization will have ended, so these steps are a soft way of mimicking that.
DD thinks maybe Roscoe Bartlett could lay silently under a shroud on the floor of the House for the entire day, though. But that’s about it for the 70-90 percent dead thing.
“March 23 should be designated as EMP Recognition Day on the Hill,” Heritage insists.
If only they could have waited until April 1 — next Thursday.
Because the Cult of EMP Crazy is such a vigorous lobby, it has achieved a set of unusual consequences.
Jason at Armchair Generalist discusses the recent Joint Operating Environment report from the US military, one which contains a couple of surprising paragraphs on the always coming but never arriving menace of non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons, a development which some in the military actually seem to think might be likely.
Sigger includes some rumination from a deputy secretary of defense on wild German plans to launch V2’s at New York after towing across the Atlantic on submersible barges.
One of the headmen of the Cult of Cyberwar, James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, admits the cult has overdone it in recent months.
This in a short essay, “The Cyber War Has Not Begun,” here.
Lewis writes:
No nation has launched a cyber war or cyber attack against the United States … Pronouncements that we are in a cyber war or face cyber terror conflate problems and make effective response more difficult.
This is a bit like seeing the town whore swearing she’ll attend regular meetings of the Church Universal and Triumphant. One can’t help but be impressed — but only in a jaundiced way — wondering how long this ‘conversion’ will last.
Lewis, readers have seen, has been one of the chieftains of the Cult of Cyberwar. And DD blog’s survey of citations of his name, and a few others, in media databases over the past few months shows his footprint clearly.
Here is the unscientific master list, taken from a search on cybersecurity/cyberwar through newspaper databases over the past year, current only to January 19:
1. Alan Paller, SANS — 84
2. McAfee — 80
3. James Lewis, CSIS — 47
4. Booz Allen Hamilton — 38
5. Symantec — 31
6. Mike McConnell, BA — 25
7. Paul Kurtz, Good Harbor — 11
8. Richard Clarke, Good Harbor 4
‘Control values’:
1. Gene Spafford, Purdue 25
2. Marcus Ranum 0
Here, we don’t split hairs over the precise syntax used by each of the Cult of Cyberwar’s chieftains. Lewis cannot escape that he was one of the major contributors to the bad state of affairs to which he now says nay.
If readers have followed this specialized topic, they know this in response to US cyberczar Howard Schmidt’s recent statement to Wired that the United States was not in a cyberwar. And this was in the context of Booz Allen Hamilton’s Mike McConnell, who had been in the mainstream media repeatedly over the past few months — from 60 Minutes to the editorial pages of the Washington Post — mercilessly pimping the idea that the country was in a cyberwar and that it was losing.
DD has written about this a number of times, most recently here and here.
A couple things lend themselves to helpful repeat use:
In the case of Mike McConnell’s list of citations, one remarkable feature [was] that not a single reporter writing these things identified him as the chief salesman of Booz Allen’s cybersecurity business operation. It’s a computer security business which rides on stories about looming cyberwar and the national shortage of computer security workers, to be trained on the taxpayer dime and then poached so that they can be leased to the government by Booz Allen and its competitors.
All this, even though the big aimed-at-the-US-government consulting and contracting business gleefully flogs McConnell and whatever he’s saying or doing on its homepage daily.
What could be better than to have a VP on 60 Minutes telling everyone about the lurking menace of cyberattack, being able to feature that on your homepage right next to your links for cybersecurity job staffing for positions like “Defense Intelligence Critical Infrastructure and Homeland Defense Analyst” or “Iranian Cyber All-Source Analyst”? In case that country is planning to cyberattack us.
“Booz Allen Hamilton, a leading consulting firm, helps government clients solve their toughest problems with services in strategy, operations …” reads the website.
One sees the work afoot here. It could not be more obvious. One has the right to make a good living and there is no better place to present a sales pitch refined into a story of national menace then at 60 Minutes.
As for the James Lewis’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, it sold itself to one of the country’s biggest computer security vendors recently, for the sake of providing ‘research’ on the universal menace of cyberattack throughout the country.
And this was encapsulted in another vignette taken from the archives of recent national news:
Globally, widespread cyberfacilitated bank and credit-card fraud has serious implications for economic and financial systems and the national security …
Power plants, oil refineries and water supplies increasingly dependent on the Internet are under relentless attack by cyber spies and thugs, according to a McAfee report.
The “Critical Infrastructure in the Age of Cyber-War??? analysis by the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said the price of “downtime??? from major attacks exceeds six million dollars a day.
“If cyberspace is the Wild West, the sheriff needs to get to Dodge City,??? concluded the study commissioned by McAfee, which sells computer security software.
The Wild West analogy is one of James Lewis’s favorites. And while there may be truth in it, it’s purpose has been to merely feed hyperbole on the subject.
Well sorry, the man can’t have it both ways now.
James Lewis can complain that the manipulative hyperbole on cyberwar on the media isn’t helpful and that the US is now not in a cyberwar. But he should also have mentioned that he’s been one of the primary contributors to the hype. And that the selling of the services of the think tank shop one works out of to a large computer security vendor, for the purpose of furthering the message of cybercatastrophe, is also not much in the way of a confidence builder.
So why is the US not in danger of being crippled in a a cyber-ambush staged by another country?
Lewis answers this question in his essay, but even that is a fairly obvious revelation.
We’d start bombing the hell out of them. With or without ironclad proof of some other country’s complicity has never been an impediment to violent action in recent history.
The Cult of EMP Crazy can’t let a week go by without getting into print.
Anything will do — stories in major newspapers and magazines, opinion pieces or long letters. Even when a journalist writes a weakly critical piece for something like Foreign Policy, as Sharon Weinberger did about a month ago (see here), the Cult uses it as an opportunity to thunder back with an article just as long.
So Foreign Policy lays out the red carpet for Peter Pry, one of the original floggers of electromagnetic pulse doom.
Pry is mad as hell and won’t abide it. “The Boogeyman Bomb” article wounds him deeply. And he goes through the usual arguments, delivering the claims of which the Cult has grown so fond.
Say such things often enough, or turn up the volume sufficiently, and that will do it. This works partly under the assumption that Americans judge the rightness of something by the number of people who can be convinced to chant it in unison.
“Weinberger accuses the EMP Commission of deliberately ‘exaggerating the capabilities of a potential EMP attack,'” complains Pry. “This is a serious allegation, as deliberately misrepresenting the facts about the EMP threat would constitute an ethical and legal violation.”
Perish forbid anyone would have done such a thing from the Cult of EMP Crazy.
Now let’s count the number of scripts Pry delivers.
One scenario of particular concern is a nuclear-armed Iran transferring a short- or medium-range nuclear missile to terrorist groups that could perform a ship-launched “anonymous” EMP attack against the United States. Iranian military strategists have written about EMP attacks against the United States, and Iran has successfully practiced launching a ballistic missile off a ship and flight-tested its Shahab-3 medium-range missile to detonate at high altitude, as if practicing an EMP attack.
The Bomb Iran script, beloved by the missile defense lobby, the Heritage Foundation, and anyone in the GOP far right who wants to, well, just bomb Iran.
There will always be individuals who disagree with any commission’s findings — no matter that the methodology, research, and analysis are excellent — just as there are those who disagree with the 9/11 Commission, the weapons-of-mass-destruction commission, the Warren Commission, or any other commission.
This is a uniquely new script, one exhibiting a bit of megalomania. It compares the EMP Commission, which few Americans have heard of or give a shit about, to the Warren Commission — set up to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the 9/11 Commission, which many, many, many Americans did know of and give shits about, for obvious reasons. So much so that books issued by both were best-sellers.
How’s that EMP Commission book doing, by the way?
Weinberger alleges that the EMP Commission and concern about the EMP threat is strictly partisan. But the EMP Commission’s bipartisan credentials are impeccable. It was established by a Republican-dominated Congress in 2001 and re-established by a Democrat-dominated Congress in 2006. Commissioners were appointed on a bipartisan basis. The EMP threat, and the necessity to do something about it, is one of the few issues on which Democrats and Republicans in Congress are working together.
The ‘bipartisan’ script. This one omits that the Cult of EMP Crazy has always been the exclusive property of the GOP far right. From ex-Congressman Curt Weldon, to EMP doom eminence grise Newt Gingrich, to hawk/birther Frank Gaffney, to birther Arizona Congressman Trent Franks, to Fox News star Mike Huckabee, to everyone at the Heritage Foundation ever, to the old white guys club listed down the side of the EMPAct America booster page here.
This only proves that Foreign Policy editors are weak, being unable to make Pry tell the entire story in favor of just the sole item that, yes, occasionally the Cult of EMP Crazy gets to appear before Congressional meetings attended by both Democrats and Republicans. And that sometimes Democrats make polite noises and nod their heads at these things.
As to Weinberger’s complaints that Newt Gingrich and others concerned about the EMP threat sometimes recommend to popular audiences the novel One Second After, which describes a hypothetical EMP attack on the United States: Since Uncle Tom’s Cabin there has been a venerable tradition in U.S. democracy of educating and building popular support for causes through novels.
Script which must mention William Forstchen’s not really famous novel. This time accompanied by implied comparison, in terms of importance, to famous novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. See megalomania reference, above.
An EMP attack is the only option for a single nuclear weapon that offers terrorists or rogue states any realistic chance of defeating the United States, perhaps eliminating the United States as an actor from the world stage, permanently.
The total destruction of American civilization script. In this case, not accompanied by the standard statistic of almost the entire population starving or passing away in the year following attack due to absence of basic amenities.
And here — right on time — another dose of stock Cult of EMP Crazy from Heritage Foundation central casting at Fox News Video.
Update:
A reader writes: “A (non-nuclear) EMP device was employed by terrorists at the end of this week’s episode of 24 — which no sensible person watches anymore.”
This marks the second time an EMP bomb was used in the series, at least. One was deployed in Los Angeles a couple seasons back.
Yup, everything was coming up roses for the good-until-proven-otherwise guys. That is, until Kayla unknowingly drove an electromagnetic pulse bomb into the office and short-circuited CTU. This looks like a job for Absurd-o-Meter.
In an only slightly related note, the 24 character, the snivelling Dana, could prove crippling to Katee Sackhoff’s career.
Sadly, Sackhoff has been in a number of roles ranging from dreadful to merely bummerish, including that of a publc sex-crazed anethesiologist in Nip/Tuck, since Battlestar Galactica.
There are fewer more poisonous articles than those which lash nabbed terrorists together in search of a trend or a growing problem.
“Recent cases show challengeds of US terrorists,” reads the latest, from Associated Press.
Reporters Eileen Sullivan and Devlin Barrett lash together a collection of designated bad people in the news and consults a variety of experts to read the future. The future, in these stories, being always rotten and getting worse. No context in terms of what problems the US faces by comparison, or the amount of miscellaneous mayhem that goes down every month on US streets, is furnished.
It reads:
One was a drywall contractor and father, another a petite woman who cared for the elderly, another a U.S. military officer. The most alarming thing about a string of recently arrested terror suspects is that they are all Americans.
And there’s the crazy guy who shot and wounded guards to the entrance of the Pentagon and the man who wandered around as a construction worker nobody at nuclear plants in the US and then went off to crawl the dunes of Yemen for years. The crazy kid is left out because he was not a Muslim. Same for the poor man’s Ted Kaczinski who flew his airplane into an IRS building. And the deadliest bioterrorist in history, against which individuals like Jihad Jane seem silly — Bruce Ivins — is also not here.
Just not the right religion.
And of the terrorists selected for this story, only the US Army-minted Nidal Hasan proved truly capable — killing thirteen.
One might venture to say the number still seems quite small in a country as diverse and vast as the US, particularly when considering the poor state of mind imposed on nearly everyone by current economic conditions.
” ‘These cases, [one counterterrorism expert] said, ‘underscore the constantly evolving nature of the threat we face,'” reads the AP piece.
Another way to look at it, logically, is to see that it’s a rather bad argument for endless war and increasingly oppressive snooping, vigilance and intolerance. And that next to everyday problems like rising unemployment, broken government, and the failure of the United States to effectively educate and lead as befits a country of its history and size, these are only small annoyances which — by their exaggeration — point to a self-imposed increasingly bleak future.
A drift into terrorism is “a combination of psychology, sociology and people who, just for cultural reasons, gravitate” [to Islamic extremism] … We can’t assume we’ve got months and years,” Michael Chertoff opines.
Chertoff can always be counted on to reliably deliver the noxious disguised as wisdom. Just last month he was part of a program which CNN ran repeatedly over the course of one weekend, a feature presentation selling the idea that cyberattacks will deliver the new WMDs.
Chertoff’s observation on US terrorists implies one ought to take up the very bad idea that we need to quickly develop the right amount of observation and surveillance, marked up against a scientifically approved list of social character markers, so that these troublesome people can be ferreted out sooner — before too many of them show up and the streets run red with blood.
I know there are more of them out there,” says someone named Jack Tomarchio, another former Dept. of Homeland Security employee.
In these stories the most toxic quote always seems to be delivered by the ubiquitous Bruce Hoffman, a “terrorism expert at Georgetown University.”
“The spate of cases over the past two years shows the conventional wisdom about who is a terrorist is dangerously outdated,” the AP says Hoffman informs.
“There really is no profile of a terror suspect; the profile is broken … It’s women as well as men, it’s lifelong Muslims as well as converts, it’s college students as well as jailbirds.”
These words work to create the impression that terrorism is sort of like a hard to diagnose disease or a trace poisonous gas, floating through the air, capable of infecting or tainting anyone at anytime depending on a panoply of inner weaknesses. And that the only way to stop it is to go to the source and deliver a regular prescription of root terrorism-killing antibiotic or antidote — the burning and stamping out of Muslims who look at the US with anger from other countries.
It is the most meretricious thing, a prescription for endless war, more threats to blow out of proportion next to more urgent problems diminishing the quality of life and blighting futures nationwide. Except for those in the business of explaining and countering terrorism.
Today, this in from Yahoo News on absurd potential changes in public school history textbooks for Texas. The reason being, as goes Texas, so everyone else must suffer equally.
A greater emphasis on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s.??? This means not only increased favorable mentions of Schlafly, the founder of the antifeminist Eagle Forum, but also more discussion of the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association and Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America.
One would be hard-pressed to name one substantial thing the Heritage Foundation has contributed to the US.
Paul Revere’s? Uh-uh. Great inventors? No. Scientists? No. Great advancers and defenders of civil rights and the rule of law? No. Healers and philanthropists? No. Eradicators of smallpox? No. Discoverers of electricity? No. Great astronauts of our time or first makers of the electric guitar? No and no. Arms controllers and peace workers? No. House of Nobel laureates? No. Invented the Internet? Sadly, no. Heroes of bloody Tarawa or the Meuse-Argonne? No.
Haters of homosexuals. Yes. EMP Crazies? Yes. Despisers of Democrats? Yes. Upholders of old-right-wing-white-guys political club? Yes. Dumping ground and sounding board for out-of-power GOP pols? Yes. Bomb Iran lobby central. Check. Advocates of using lasers to battle pirates? Yes!
A reduced scope for Latino history and culture. A proposal to expand such material in recognition of Texas’ rapidly growing Hispanic population was defeated in last week’s meetings—provoking one board member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out in protest. “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist,” she said of her conservative colleagues on the board. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”
It’s a damn shame when the last and only way to learn about the intertwine of American and Mexican culture — like if you don’t live in California or Arizona — is through the record catalog of ZZ Top. I heard it, I heard it, I heard it on the X!
A more positive portrayal of Cold War anticommunism. Disgraced anticommunist crusader Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator censured by the Senate for his aggressive targeting of individual citizens and their civil liberties on the basis of their purported ties to the Communist Party, comes in for partial rehabilitation. The board recommends that textbooks refer to documents published since McCarthy’s death and the fall of the Soviet bloc that appear to show expansive Soviet designs to undermine the U.S. government.
Can we have a shout out for Roy Cohn, too, while you’re at it?
Language that qualifies the legacy of 1960s liberalism. Great Society programs such as Title IX—which provides for equal gender access to educational resources—and affirmative action, intended to remedy historic workplace discrimination against African-Americans, are said to have created adverse “unintended consequences??? in the curriculum’s preferred language.
Thomas Jefferson no longer included among writers influencing the nation’s intellectual origins. Jefferson, a deist who helped pioneer the legal theory of the separation of church and state, is not a model founder in the board’s judgment. Among the intellectual forerunners to be highlighted in Jefferson’s place: medieval Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, Puritan theologian John Calvin …
[The] recommendations include an entry listing Confederate General Stonewall Jackson as a role model for effective leadership, and a statement from Confederate President Jefferson Davis accompanying a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.
A recommendation to include country and western music among the nation’s important cultural movements. The popular black genre of hip-hop is being dropped from the same list.
To DD this is more richly amusing than dismaying.
In education, we could get exactly what we’ve been working to deserve. If one believes in a God, he apparently has a very finely developed dry sense of humor.
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.”
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.