02.08.11
Posted in Imminent Catastrophe, War On Terror at 5:02 pm by George Smith
Again proving they don’t get the news much in the hills of Yemen and the tribal lands of Pakistan, there’s this from the Telegraph, a famous UK funny paper:
Wall Street bosses have been warned that al Qaeda has targeted America’s banks and financial institutions for another 9/11.
Counter-terrorism agents fear some top banking executives may have been singled out for assassination attempts.
They have urged improved security amid fears that al Qaeda in Yemen may again try to send package bombs or potentially deadly biological or chemical materials through the post to bank chiefs.
What? They’re going to send bad things to Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon?
And why are we supposed to be scared of this?
Further:
Among the banks getting the security briefings were said to be Goldman Sachs, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase and Barclays, according to NBC.
Intelligence officials insist the threats are general and not aimed at any individual or bank.
It’s good to know Homeland Security is giving pep talks to the bankers, reassuring them that whatever happens we’ll bail them out and avenge whatever needs avenging.
The Daily Mail piece originated in the New York Daily News here.
One commenter succinctly explains al Qaeda’s (and, by extension, the US government counter-terror service’s) dilemma in the shaping of perceptions.
Essentially, the war on terror has lasted too long and had too many whoopie cushion alerts. For most people it’s a phony war. No one even expects this administration, or any other, to get Osama bin Laden.
On the other hand, many Americans saw their jobs and immediate futures go up in smoke in 2008 due to Wall Street.
So Wall Street being in the cross-hairs of anyone doesn’t roil the sympathetic fear juices like it should.
The comment:
Ooooh, no, don’t blow up Goldman Sachs! They care about all of us little people so much!
This illustrates another reason why no one except cybersecurity beat reporters and upper class financial services creeps/nerds give a shit when the Wall Street Journal reports the NASDAQ has been hacked.
One of the larger issues, which the national security poobahs in this country have yet to visibly grapple with or discuss, are the potential consequences of economic inequality becoming so great that American business becomes even more suspect of operating only under rules of bad faith. In other words, that it will be thought deserving of anything it gets whatever the circumstances.
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02.07.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism, Imminent Catastrophe at 1:37 pm by George Smith
Iranium, the movie aimed at getting the bombers and cruise missiles flying toward Iran, rates a solid B when divorced from its obvious politics, mostly for watchability as a History Channel style documentary.
There are much worse ways to burn an hour.
A history of Iran dating from the Shah is delivered first. And at about the thirty five minute mark, the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy shows up, led by Frank Gaffney but also including people you’ve seem from embedded YouTube video at DD blog already.
The Cult explains electromagnetic pulse attack is the way Ahmedinajad will accomplish his stated aim of ending American civilization. And then one is delivered animations of a Scud missile fired over the US from a motorized barge 100-miles offshore. (Or suitcase nukes could be brought across the Mexican border. There is literally nothing that’s out of Iranian reach.)
Nine out of ten Americans dead within a year.
The movie’s only potential show-stopping flaw is Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis whose once good reputation was rotted during the Bush years by various public views taken on war and imminent catastrophe.
The unfortunate catarrhal phlegm gurgling and flapping in Lewis’ throat had me about ready to sick up at one point. It has to be heard. The sound man must’ve been in tears.
The short message of the movie is that Iran is a menace to the entire world. Similar to the Soviet Union and the old popular domino theory, it stands ready to invade/infiltrate/influence countries from the south side of the Persian Gulf to Argentina. Yes, Argentina!
The movie makes it case by relying on the words of its religious leaders and Ahmedinajad. And they have always helpfully come off as both mean and nuts.
Iranium sells itself slightly short by over-reliance on Cliff May. He’s onscreen a great deal near the end, undermining the movie with a lack of recognition factor.
Unless you read the Ventura County Star, about the only newspaper in the country to regularly run his opinion pieces.
Iranium — the movie — is here. Totally G-rated. And it’s free for the time being.
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02.05.11
Posted in Extremism, Imminent Catastrophe, Stumble and Fail at 9:37 am by George Smith
Earlier in the week I commented on how Ed Schultz on MSNBC has implicitly asked viewers to entertain the idea that Wall Street threatened national and world security. Not in connection with the economic collapse — which is the most obvious conclusion which actually can be drawn.
But currently with speculation in commodities, most notably food, causing spikes in pricing, privation and subsequent popular uprising in Egypt.
It was startling to see the conspiracy laid out in the mainstream. It is not, however, nearly as lunatic as Glenn Beck’s claims that the Egyptian uprising is caused by a socialist Muslim conspiracy.
This conspiracy, Beck explained, was aimed at creating a world ‘caliphate’, employing the tactics from an obscure book, The Coming Insurrection, now made famous by his name-dropping the title as a way of working up his audience over the idea that others are soon coming for them.
Beck’s crazy tirades can also be summed up by an illustration taken from the cover of the old short manual of Afghan jihad.
It’s here — a map of the world with an Islamic dagger through it. The manual contains a reference to establishment of a caliphate and it’s probably no coincidence that this has trickled down over the span of many years, now finding lodgment — far removed from any original source — in Beck’s addled head. [1]
I actually watched a couple of Beck’s episodes and by late Friday night — a rerun — he’d lapsed into a poor man’s Jack D. Ripper/Strangelove mumble, going on about how he was giving his audience facts, facts — and was criticized for it by people covering these facts up.
And here’s where my desktop copy of the Strangelove script always comes in handy:
“The facts are all there, Group Captain … I have studied the facts carefully for over seventeen years and they are here … I have studied the facts, Group Captain, facts, and by projecting the statistics I realized the time had come to act … The absolutely fantastic thing is that the facts are all there for anyone who wants to see them.”
In Strangelove, Ripper’s mania is humorously laid out in many ways, one of them being his repetitive obsession with the facts about fluoride. On Fox, however, the network obviously believes it’s appropriate to send something ad hoc but similar out to millions of easily confused Americans packaged as a show of news and opinion.
When you get down to the nut of it, it’s the work of cynical shitheels.
Back at MSNBC, Dylan Ratigan — like Ed Schultz — was on a similar commodities pricing riff. For Ratigan it wasn’t just Wall Street, but primarily the US government — the Fed, printing money and causing a rush into commodities by Wall Street investors.
Krugman’s blog addressed it today. And it’s always a wonder what a cogent argument from a big scientific mind can do:
What’s behind the surge in food prices? The usual suspects have made the usual claims — it’s all about the Fed, or it’s all about speculators. But I’ve been looking at the USDA World supply and demand estimates, and what stands out from the data is mainly that we’ve had a huge global harvest failure …
Why is production down? Most of the decline in world wheat production, and about half of the total decline in grain production, has taken place in the former Soviet Union — mainly Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. And we know what that’s about: an incredible, unprecedented heat wave.
Obligatory disclaimer: no one event can be definitively assigned to climate change, just as you can’t necessarily claim that any one of the fender-benders taking place right now in central New Jersey was caused by the sheet of black ice currently coating our roads. But it sure looks like climate change is a major culprit. And it’s not just the FSU: extreme weather elsewhere, which again is the sort of thing you should expect from climate change, has played a role in bad harvest around the world.
Back to the economics: if you want to know why we’re having a spike in food prices, the data suggest that the key cause is terrible weather leading to bad harvests, especially in the former Soviet Union.
An ‘ah-ha!’ short essay, so to speak.
Footnote:
[1] The precise reference from the ‘manual’ is: “I [the author] present this humble effort to these young Moslem [sic] men who are pure, believing, and fighting for the cause of Allah. It is my contribution toward paving the road that leads to majestic allah and establishes a caliphate …”
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02.04.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism, Imminent Catastrophe at 1:04 pm by George Smith
“Gaffney favored supporting Hosni Mubarak’s rapidly-dying regime because he’s ‘our dictator’ and [a] check on Islamists.” —Michigan live
“[It] is predictable that, within days – if not hours, America will be formally endorsing a new Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government. This will be an unmitigated disaster … — Gaffney’s homepage
“Frank Gaffney was a hard-line cold warrior bent on confronting and undermining the Soviet Union when he arrived at the Pentagon in Reagan‘s first term. Mr. Gaffney had worked for Democratic Sen. Henry M. “Scoop??? Jackson, an ardent anti-Soviet, and then did staff work for the Senate Armed Services Committee. He knew firsthand that Washington’s neglect during the post-Vietnam era had led to what the Army‘s own chief of staff termed in 1980 the ‘hollow Army.'” —WaTimes
“Neocon loon Frank Gaffney has clearly gone off the deep end, first claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the Obama administration, and now warning his conservative brethren that the Brotherhood is worming its way into their movement, too. — Salon
And on Monday Gaffney will be one of the stars in the documentary, Iranium, a push to get the bombers going over Iran. Iran will knock the United States back to the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with an electromagnetic pulse attack. One year later, 90 percent of us will be dead from starvation or extreme conditions brought on by zero electricity.
Funny as this may read, Gaffney is what’s considered “normal” for the GOP right and at Fox News where he’s a big star.
DD’s great archive of Frank Gaffney-ism.
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02.02.11
Posted in Imminent Catastrophe, Satan's Bank, Stumble and Fail at 10:03 am by George Smith
Last night’s Ed Show on MSNBC featured an extended riff on Wall Street speculators and the price of food worldwide. It linked this — using financial giants Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch — repeatedly. (Follow the link, click on the tab for “Speculation wreaks global havoc” — if interested.)
Host Ed Schultz linked it all to riots, which start out as protests over food pricing, in the Middle East, specifically in Tunisia and Egypt.
The upshot, which was posed as a question for viewers to answer at the bottom of the screen was this: Does US business represent a threat to national or world security?
For the thrust of the segment, the implicit answer was yes.
Schultz brought in Dylan Ratigan to discuss this and the latter wasn’t ready to go along with the supposition. Ratigan averred, however, that it was a complicated story, one in which Wall Street speculation played a part.
DD isn’t going to embrace the idea but it does again bring up the question I’ve discussed over the past year. (See here, in my last posting for 2010.) And Paul Krugman has devoted a bit of time lately to discussing commodity prices and worldwide fluctuation in the same without mentioning speculators.
But that this idea has now shown itself at a mainstream media outlet, albeit one that’s increasingly hitched its fortunes to viewers from the center left, is still quite startling.
In any case, I’ve made posts over the past couple of years where, demonstrably, US businesses have threatened US security. Most notably, from large agribusiness, via the examples of mass food poisonings written off as an acceptable cost to the industry. For example, it’s just a fact now that US agribusinessmen have proven to be better at distributing disease than bioterrorists.
And in a much broader sense, the worldwide economic collapse brought on by Wall Street has had grave implications, causing instability and suffering, and consequent problems for security, worldwide.
Schultz’s segment, reprinted and cleaned up a little from here, approaches the same conspiratorial tone the mainstrean usually likes to laughingly dismiss as the property of cranks and crackpots:
Yemen and Tunisia have also had mass protests. They’re all autocratic, majority Muslim nations, but they’re not all oil states. Tunisia is mostly secular.
So what else do these countries have in common?
One thing is high food prices, a factor in how all the riots really started and how all of it started. And it’s not a coincidence that all of them have high food prices right now.
Food prices have skyrocketed around the world and a big reason for that is Wall Street.
It started in 1991 with surprise, surprise Goldman Sachs.
Before then, wall street speculators played only a minor role in food prices. The way it worked food companies and their suppliers, america’s farmers, wanted to keep their business stable. Even if prices spiked for wheat, corn, or other agricultural commodities.
So they’d hedge their bets, signing contracts, futures, to lock in prices for some point in the future.
Speculators helped, putting enough money in the system to keep things liquid.
After the depression, FDR saw that speculators could drive up the price of wheat, corn, whatever, by betting on commodity futures the way Wall Street later bet on dot coms.
Distorting food prices like that could destroy the very stability future contracts were created to provide so FDR signed into law what are called position limits — limits on how much of the total betting could be done by wall street.
And what do you know it worked.
For decades the price of wheat was driven by fundamentals like the weather and Wall Street couldn’t stand it.
In 1991, Goldman Sachs asked the commodity futures trading commission, the CFTC, to give them a waiver on those position limits, so they could bet as much as they wanted.
A CFTC appointee for the first president bush said sure.
More than a dozen other firms followed suit.
Goldman Sachs even created commodities indexes. To simplify the betting and goose casual investors into the casino. Again, Wall Street followed suit.
Remember the real estate bubble?
Wall Street wanted to hedge all of those bets it made on mortgages.
So they ramped up their bets on commodities.
And when Wall Street started losing money on sub primes, they bet it on commodities instead.
By 2008, Wall Street had five times more futures contracts in commodities than it did in 2002.
Commodity indexes held about $13 billion in 2003.
By 2008 it was over a quarter trillion.
That’s how we got the oil bubble.
And record high gas prices added to the cost of shipping food plus speculators looking for another bubble, and you get a food bubble.
Estimates speculators held 65% of corn futures’ contracts, 68% Of soybean, 80% of wheat. By mid 2008, the IMF food price index jumped more than 80% in just a year and a half before.
It was the first time in history the proportion of people going hungry worldwide went up.
The number of chronically malnourished people rose by 75 million in 2007.
40 Million in 2008.
That’s why Egypt had riots back in 2008.
Along with 30 other countries, Italian moms marched against the price of pasta. Wall street speculators admitted they were doing it.
In 2006 Merrill Lynch said speculation accounted for 50% of the price of commodities. Half the price.
In 2008 a Goldman Sachs research paper said, quote, without question, increased fund flow into commodities has boosted prices.
2009 — even Republican senator Tom Coburn admits the speculation, quote, helped to inflate futures prices and there by disconnect futures from cash prices impairing farmers’ and grain elevators’ ability to hedge price risk.
Even Coburn said there was so much Wall Street money distorting prices that farmers and other guys who actually need commodity futures couldn’t use them to keep their companies stable anymore.
We don’t notice price hikes so much because most of our food prices come from marketing and packaging.
But in the developing world, the price of food is everything.
And what country imports more wheat than any other?
Egypt.
Where the price of wheat rose 70% last year.
Last summer Goldman called a report on the role of speculation in food prices, quote, misleading and blamed other factors.
A lot of reports mentioned that Russia cut off its wheat supply last year. What they don’t tell you is why. Because futures traders asked them to.
And, of course, there’s always a reason to promote Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein.
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02.01.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Imminent Catastrophe at 2:10 pm by George Smith
Next week, the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy/bomb Iran/missile defense lobby will roll out its new ‘blockbuster’ documentary, Iranium.
DD is so there.
The production values on the website, here, are top notch.
Starring the usual cast — Frank Gaffney, Clifford May and assorted perps from the GOP far right — DD readers might also want to reserve their seats now.
Some dude, Robert Dreyfuss, at the Nation blogs about a screening of it at the Heritage Foundation — here.
Dreyfuss has apparently just discovered the favorite meme the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, the one it has peddled since 2008 or so:
Perhaps the high point of the film was when Frank Gaffney, the extreme right militarist who leads an outfit called the Center for Security Policy in Washington—waxed poetic about how Iran could soon be able to detonate a nuclear “electromagnetic pulse??? (EMP) weapon in the American heartland that would, he warned, “take down the entire power grid??? across the United States. Not only that, said Gaffney and others, but this “strategic EMP attack??? would destroy everything in the United States that relies on electronics, and with a few years “nine out of every ten Americans could be dead.??? This, Gaffney warned, with a serious face that made it clear that he wasn’t joking, was to carry out Iran’s “stated purpose of bringing about a world without America.???
What Dreyfuss and the Nation may have missed: The Cult has been making this movie over and over for the last couple of years, from shorter documentaries to commercials for YouTube.
Now the Nation’s audience of progressives who like their stories dressed up as new intellectual air-freshener get the scoop.
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12.20.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Imminent Catastrophe at 10:41 am by George Smith
UPDATED
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy will use any right wing political handle to advance its agenda. Currently, it’s ratification of the START treaty.
Yes, a treaty which is aimed at controlling and curbing nuclear proliferation and reducing the weapons, in the hands of the Cult, does no such thing.
In fact, just the opposite. It threatens US civilization because it allegedly has a negative effect on the building of unlimited ballistic missile defenses which are, of course, needed to protect US civilization from a catastrophic end brought about by electromagnetic pulse attack, launched by terrorists who have obtained a nuclear weapon.
But new START is designed to get us back into Russia and the business of monitoring and securing nuclear weapons so that this is less likely.
If you think about this presentation too much, the rickety quality begins to make your head hurt.
But that’s not the point. The idea is to repeat the meretricious argument so many times it becomes an embedded truth.
And while electromagnetic pulse doom hasn’t developed a significant constituency clamoring for protection from it, the model used to to try and establish it is the same as has been used to embed other myths (often called “zombie lies”) — like massive growth by the US government while everyone else was taking the chop or that global warming is a hoax.
The issue of an electromagnetic pulse ending US civilization is much more fringe. It’s good for weekly television shows and movies but not cut from the same universally appealing cloth as other popular zombie myths. However, the lack of enthusiasm for it, as compared to others, among the right has definitely impeded the effort to make it a more shared story.
And it is also not as energizing as the dose of good old spite calling for blocking of START ratification because the Republican Party is furious over the repeal of DADT and any other legislation passed in the lame-duck session. And, of course, because it’s part of the strategy to destroy the president.
In any case, the head cheerleader for this obscure meme is, as usual, the Heritage Foundation.
In the past, I’ve described Heritage in this manner:
Heritage … mentioned last week, is a propaganda organ for the pushing of far right policy dressed up as scholarship.
It gathers various suspect ideas — that healthcare reform must be defeated, that the welfare class is getting too much in entitlements and undeserved stuff, that the rich are being taxed too much, that gays are assaulting the precious institution of marriage, that global warming, while no longer a cruel hoax, if dealt with will result in diminished US business, poorness for the wealthy and a much weakened military, that poor people who aren’t white are unjustly sopping up national treasure that could be spent on missile defense, a project which spreads freedom around the world, that the auto-industry bailout and cash-for-clunkers took money away from freedom-ensuring missile defense, etc — and employs its stable of bought-and-paid-for experts to craft pieces which exhort readers on the excellence of such beliefs.
A snapshot from Heritage’s website today:
Breaking wind: Vulnerable. End of the world. Armageddon.
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11.29.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism, Imminent Catastrophe at 7:58 am by George Smith
Given the bum’s rush by one of their own in Congress in October, the collection of nuisances and parasites known as the Cult of EMP Crazy have begun prepping the astro-turf.
This means the releasing of a report, just before Thanksgiving, warning of all the standard horrors due from approaching electromagnetic pulse doom. And what must be done to stop it. Namely, the putting of said “report” into the hands of GOP Congressman who can be persuaded to add something noxious as an appendix to legislation to be done before the end of the year.
This new thing is the work of the Heritage Foundation, the far right group/organization useful for the gathering of various suspect ideas — that healthcare reform must be defeated, that the welfare class is getting too much in entitlements and undeserved stuff, that the rich are being taxed too much, that global warming, while no longer a cruel hoax, if dealt with will result in diminished US business, poorness for the wealthy and a much weakened military — and employs its stable of bought-and-paid-for experts to craft pieces which exhort readers on the excellence of such beliefs.
Today’s Heritage menu, for example, features blandishments to raise the retirement age, a short video on why START should be opposed, an argument that since China isn’t really green — the US shouldn’t need to go green, either, and how food stamp programs need abolition because the people who use them are parasites usurping money that could be used for ballistic missile defense to save us from EMP attacks.
Well, not the last one. I made it up. But Heritage will probably get around to it, sooner rather than later.
The first place to go to get a good GOP/extremist right astro-turf campaign going is World Net Daily.
So today, from there — courtesy of Heritage, in “Report warns Obama about new Dark Ages:
Two national-security experts have issued a report through the Heritage Foundation that warns Obama administration officials to start working now to prevent – and mitigate the damage from – an electromagnetic pulse attack on the United States because of the potential for “unimaginable devastation.”
“Not even a global humanitarian effort would be enough to keep hundreds of millions of Americans from death by starvation, exposure, or lack of medicine. Nor would the catastrophe stop at U.S. borders. Most of Canada would be devastated, too, as its infrastructure is integrated with the U.S. power grid. Much of the world’s intellectual brain power (half of it is in the United States) would be lost as well. Earth would most likely recede into the ‘new’ Dark Ages,” states the report by James J. Carafano, the deputy director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies and director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, and Richard Weitz, senior fellow and director of the Center for Politial-Military Analysis at the Hudson Institute.
The report, which is described by the Heritage Foundation as a “backgrounder,” is titled “EMP Attacks – What the U.S. Must Do Now” and was released just days ago, says what is needed right now is for the government to “prevent the threat,” by pursuing “an aggressive protect-and-defend strategy, including comprehensive missile defense; modernizing the U.S. nuclear deterrent; and adopting proactive nonproliferation and counterproliferation measures.”
Unimaginable devastation.
Next, Clifford May to write an opinion piece saying the same thing for the Ventura Star or a couple other little newspapers in various Bumblefucks scattered across the nation. To be followed by another piece in USA Today, like the piece about four weeks ago.
Maybe they could step up the game a little and enlist Ted Nugent to write about it for the Washington Times. That’s if he could be pried away from recommending the elimination of Social Security, Medicare and all taxation for a minute or two.
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11.23.10
Posted in Extremism, Imminent Catastrophe, War On Terror at 1:24 pm by George Smith
Today the Los Angeles Times bit on one of those things that destroys the credibility of newspapers — the maker of tungsten-lined underwear who claims his sales have soared.
“A Colorado man thinks he’s found a way to protect your private parts from unwanted radiation and government peeping at airports,” it begins.
“Jeff Buske of Larkspur is selling tungsten-lined underwear on-line …”
Where on-line?
Ah, you have to wait for it.
Infowars.com, the creation of fringe radio personality Alex Jones. The newspaper declines to helpfully inform readers that people who visit infowars.com are nuts.
Besides the ads pushing golbuggism, colloidal silver snake oil, and fluoridation contaminating your precious bodily fluids, today’s big stories on the website include an expose on how the RAND Corporation is behind the outbreak of hostilities between the Koreas and how the “US military industrial complex armed North Korea with nuclear weapons.”
In other words, the people allegedly “buying” tungsten-lined underwear are the same people DD occasionally mentions as part of the longstanding US extremist fringe.
Now, we’re not just talking Tea Partiers here.
It’s the real cream of the damaged crop, those who exchange e-mail newsletters on how the US has set up death camps, that electromagnetic pulse doom is about to rain from the sky, and that the collapse of US civilization is imminent. So one needs to harden and prepare the bunker in the pasture for the time when the hordes — the rest of us — coming storming out of the cities, desperate to take their stuff.
Somehow you don’t get that from the Los Angeles Times, despite the mildly tee-hee quality associated with talk about shielded bras and “nipples.”
One is tempted to call it a new low for the newspaper. But it’s not.
Everyone in the mainstream media jumped on the rubbish after it crept onto one TV network.
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10.28.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Imminent Catastrophe at 8:59 am by George Smith
Jason Sigger at Armchair Generalist notes a piece on electromagnetic pulse doom in the current issue of USA Today here.
J. notes it’s a more balanced piece than usual. That’s very true. But only in comparison with what has been the general procedure with such things.
It still starts with the cliche lede on the matter:
The sky erupts. Cities darken, food spoils and homes fall silent. Civilization collapses.
End-of-the-world novel? A video game? Or could such a scenario loom in America’s future?
There is talk of catastrophe ahead, depending on whom you believe, because of the threat of an electromagnetic pulse triggered by either a supersized solar storm or terrorist A-bomb.
Here’s the same idea from the same newspaper, from September 2009:
“It sounds like a science-fiction disaster: A nuclear weapon is detonated miles above the Earth’s atmosphere and knocks out power from New York City to Chicago for weeks, maybe months. Experts and lawmakers are increasingly warning that terrorists or enemy states could wage that exact type of attack, idling electricity grids and disrupting everything from communications networks to military defenses.”
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy splits into two basic camps.
A tamer wee side concerned with solar ejections, one which has fueled apocalyptic angry sun and end-of-the-world stories this year. A couple of examples are cited here.
Contrary to the idea that there hasn’t been enough public warning about this, nope. There has been no shortage of news, if only because it also provides an opportunity to engage in end-of-the-world scenarios with clips from the movie, The Road.
The other part of the Cult of EMP Crazy is the rich cast of GOP characters pushing missile defense and many other bad ideas.
And USA Today mentions one of its chieftains in the top of the story — Newt Gingrich — without adding the disreputable nature of his work. It includes one of the man’s stock quotes on the issue.
Over the past couple of years, using anthrax-denier GOP crackpot Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, the Culf of EMP Crazy has turned electromagnetic pulse attack on the US into a cottage industry.
It’s for the selling of a book, regular congressional hearings featuring the same people over and over always saying the same thing, a yearly festival, the prediction of imminent catastrophe, regular astro-turfed pushes into the mainstream newsmedia and promotion of white male Tea Party survivalism fantasies.
They’ve even made movies and commercials no one cares to see.
This piece, from DD blog last year, summarizes its membership:
Next up, a survey of all the press the GOP electromagnetic pulse crazy lobby placed over the last ninety days, in excerpts. (Minus larger opinion pieces placed directly by the EMP Crazy lobby members, covered earlier on this blog. And since this blog has already covered all the major GOP politicians and celebrities involved with it — Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Curt Weldon, Trent Franks, Roscoe Bartlett, Pete Hoekstra, etc — their contributions can be more finely delved in the link at the very foot of the piece.)
Readers again notice it’s exclusively the property of the crank GOP right, now the great norm of the party …
The acute observers of Congressional nuisance nobodies will also note it encompasses the same people constantly pushing Islam-o-phobia. And a handful of people who think the president is a secret Muslim.
And DD noted this as recently as Monday, when citing The Tennessean newspaper’s story of ‘national security experts’ in the business of making money of the latter here.
Indeed, one sees the stink of this wafting into USA Today lede, one insinuating terrorists might bring on EMP doom with an A-bomb.
That’s the message of the Islam-o-phobes in the bunch.
In other words, the Cult of EMP Crazy is largely a vile-smelling potpourri of characters with bad intents and political agendas completely at odds with anything that would actually benefit the American middle class.
It cannot be emphasized enough. Reasonable people consider this exclusively GOP cult rotten to the core.
So it’s almost purely coincidence that Cult of EMP Crazy stories now rope in a small number of real scientists who speak of solar storms and ejecta in 2010.
To the old hardcore who make up the cult, this is a gay convenience, another handle for mouthpiecing the group’s standard toxic bullshit into the mainstream media.
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