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At the end of Drones over paupers: An Empire Merry Xmas, a syndication piece at GlobalSecurity.Org, I made the joke: How difficult is it to find someone to assert the Beast [the US stealth drone] was taken over by alleged Iranian cybergenius and tricked into landing [there], for a website, desperate for eyeballs, that used to be a newspaper that went out of business in the real world for lack of readers?
The above is a Google/YouTube analytics shot of where the listens/views for “The National Anthem,” my Predator drone tune, come from. US is #1, obviously. Afghanistan is #2. Heh. Sometimes small curious presents come in the guise of statistics.
Now I’m not into much belief that the Taliban and civilians in the countryside have the most broadband connections for idle surfing.
Which leaves our guys, the men who call for the drones, stumbling across it. Or people in for the Karzai share of national loot.
“If you have gold and your ass don’t smell; We won’t bomb you straight to Hell”
Well, because you have no heart and are only worried about the bottom line, you immediately exploit. Take out an Internet ad campaign, like the one above, from which I snagged the screen snap.
Only distilled or sterile water should be used when irrigating the sinuses, the Missouri health department said today in an alert following the deaths of two people in Louisiana.
The deaths were caused by an organism called Naegleria fowleri that can lead to a brain infection called primary amebic meningoencephalitis. Both people had used tap water to flush water through their noses with a device known as a neti pot.
The organism travels to the brain through the nose, destroying tissue as it goes. It can not cause an infection by drinking water through the mouth …
The infections can occur when people swim in fresh water lakes and rivers and inhale water up their noses. In rare cases the cause has been linked to untreated swimming pools or tap water … There are about three cases of Naegleria fowleri infections a year in the U.S. according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Tap water is sanitized by chlorination but not rendered sterile. That is,
most microbes — but not all, are killed. And in the case of Naegleria, if a couple of them are present in the tap — in areas where the water is taken from sources where they are found — shotgunning them into the sinus with a “neti pot” is … not so good.
Way way back in the day, when trying to pick Ph.D. research, I was interested in invasive microorganisms because of their potential production of proteolytic enzymes, catalysts which degrade connective tissue.
Because of this I occasionally browsed papers on Naegleria infections. They were always fatal. And in the years since not much progress has been made on Naegleria infection for two reasons: Its relative rarity and the fact it presents so late the patient is beyond hope and no treatments can be tested for efficacy.
As for use of “neti pots”? It’s a vile habit, old wive’s tale preventive scam medicine for stupid people in modern America.
I had allergies as a child. Many kids do and it’s no big deal.
However, with my parents all slight illnesses or infirmities were to be vigorously attacked, no matter the pain and cost involved.
So every other Saturday morning in the spring and summer for a couple years I was taken to an eye, ear, nose and throat man in the county seat for mechanical neti-potting treatments.
There I’d be strapped into a chair, my head restrained and my body tilted back. A nozzle would be stuck up my nose and a machine would begin pumping saline water through my sinuses for a few minutes.
Sh-pummm, sh-pummmm, sh-pummmm went the machine.
“Cough, ackkkk, gurgle-gurgle-gurgle!” went me.
When I could snatch a breath, I’d scream. It was kind of like being water-boarded, I suppose.
Because of Newt Gingrich’s momentary popularity — I noticed he’s the cover of Newsweek which must surely mean the bubble’s about to burst — many more people have been familiarized with the mythology of electromagnetic pulse doom.
Right now, it’s not just for the far right GOP missile defense/bomb Iran lobby anymore.
And although Gingrich has tried to make it seem an entirely pseudo-intellectual thing, there’s no escaping its attachment to extreme Christian religiosity and the belief that catastrophic end times are upon the country, trials which will only be survivable through Godliness and the quick adoption of the skills of the deep woodsman and farmer.
A political blog, Maryland Juice, points out Roscoe Bartlett, the ancient Republican Congressman who has been warning of electromagnetic pulse attack for as long as I can remember, is running for re-election.
Bartlett has never been successful in getting any electromagnetic pulse defense legislation passed. He has forever been a minor Congressional nuisance, one who always gets re-elected despite serving his Maryland constituents poorly.
However, at Maryland Juice, Bartlett’s participation in a wacky survivalist documentary called Urban Danger is noted.
There are a number of teasers for Urban Danger, peddled on DVD, posted to YouTube.
Here is the best, if that’s the word to use:
Bartlett is on first.
The script: The US will collapse soon, through an unspecified series of disasters which include (but are not limited to) total electrical grid failure, rampant bioterrorist-spread disease, and the death of money. Only those in the country, on farms with their own fruit trees, vegetable crops, chainsaws for cutting firewood, elevated water supply, and Bible-reading skills will survive. You will have to defend yourself from the hordes fleeing the cities, just like in AMC’s The Walking Dead.
You must view all three Urban Danger teasers to get the full bit. (I jumped on the grenades so you don’t have to.) But watching the one posted, if you can endure it, delivers the general idea. There ain’t no progressives in this bunch. Or children and other young people, it would appear.
This old white Christian paranoid End Times mania is inseparable from the electromagnetic pulse attack story. And the political professional EMP lobby has always nourished it.
These days it’s virtually mainstream due to adoption by significant segments of the country’s dysfunctional and increasingly irrational political class.
Newt Gingrich’s rise in the polls has brought attention to his various “big ideas,” and plenty of derision from other GOP Presidential hopefuls and the media. Among the most undeserved targets is the former Speaker’s concern about an electromagnetic pulse (or EMP) attack …
The usual media suspects have recently run skeptical stories on his “doomsday vision” and “silly science” … A single nuclear weapon detonated above the U.S. might not kill anyone immediately. But in the worst case millions could subsequently die from a lack of modern medical care or possibly food, since farmers couldn’t harvest crops nor distributors get food to market. Access to drinking water could be cut if many of America’s dams, reservoirs and water-treatment facilities were shut down …
Mr. Gingrich deserves credit for bringing EMP to public attention.
Here’s a real dose of cheer, emblematic of the legion of crazy far right white f—s delivering public service announcements for what to watch out for when the electrical grid goes down.
More of the magazine writer’s fascination with asking wealthy people who used to be big deals for wisdom on solving the world’s problems. It’s the presentation of symptoms of a spectacularly America-centric disease — hubris: The witchdoctor-like related beliefs that great money means wisdom and that if you were once great in one thing, you’re stupendous in all endeavors thereafter.
In this case, it’s Jacob Weisberg speaking with Nathan Myhrvold, who many years ago was a big name at Microsoft.
I’m not sure what it is with the lithping speakers this week(odd coincidence, mainly) but if you go onto the videotaped interview at this link, you’ll notice Weisberg has one. If you can endure the entire segment, you’ll hear him actually say “yeth” at one point.
As an aside, I have no idea why anyone would think someone with a lisp is a good choice as an interlocutor for video interviews.
Myrhvold is not particularly interesting. He’s focused only on innovation in computer science. The first thing out of his mouth is Apple, all fine and good. But it’s no unusual observation and there’s a case to be made that iKit, illustratively, has had little power in getting the country out of the morass.
We will not be iTuning and iPhoning ourselves to national prosperity. And the Egyptians are not free of dictatorship yet, despite the existence of Facebook.
Surprisingly, Myrhvold doesn’t get anywhere near discussion of the hard
sciences, excellence in which has been dominating for most of my life. And which underlying achievement and discovery in provides the bedrock upon which all technology is built. Funding big science post WWII has been a government job. It is not about venture capitalists and wealthy benefactors rewarding big thinkers.
So this Myrhvold segment, you may guess, is nothing about that. Instead it is all talk about venture capital and bankrolling start-up entrepreneurs. It’s banal. And it’s also a threadbare cliche. This is all anyone ever talks about in these types of things — how to harness or gather means in bringing wealth to the funding of small businessmen with big ideas.
F—— wow!
Perhaps promised later segments will improve. However, I’d be willing to bet most readers won’t hang around for them, since this one’s so crap.
Plus, there’s the … lithp. (Can you see me rolling the eyes?)
Jesus H. Christ on a stick, one really can’t be supercilious enough!
It’s one thing to be sensitive to an obvious handicap, quite another when the handicap is passed off in this manner. It’s like asking people to entertain the notion that someone with an artificial hand could be a hot passer in the National Football League.
When he isn’t patent-hunting or contemplating how to slow global warming, Myhrvold loves to cook. Perhaps not surprisingly, he applies scientific principles in the kitchen, which are at the heart of his six-volume, 2,400-page cookbook, Modernist Cuisine: The Art of Science and Cooking, published this year. According to Myhrvold, food is at the center of a lot of our social issues. “If you can make food that’s good for you and delicious, that solves some pretty major societal problems.???
Forty five million people on foodstamps in this country, now, Nathan.
And not one of them served or much interested in a six volume 2,400-page cookbook from an ex-Microsoft guy, I bet.
Ripples from the Newt Gingrich electromagnetic pulse attack phenom, published in the New York Times days ago, continue lapping over the minds of those mesmerized into believing one of our most long-standing techno-rubbish myths.
In this case, it’s our electromagnetic pulse bomb — the weapon that’s been coming but never quite arriving for twenty years.
While the Times is correct in dismissing any Iranian or North Korean threat—neither country has missiles capable of reaching the U.S., Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons, and both have never demonstrated a desire to commit national suicide—what Broad does not mention is that the effects of EMP are hardly “poorly understood???: the U.S. has an “E-bomb??? in its arsenal.
More than that, the Pentagon considered using it during the 2003 invasion of Iraq …
The principle is simple enough: a tube filled with explosives, wrapped with copper wire, encased in a metal shell. The copper wire is used to create a powerful magnetic field and when the explosives are fired, they compress the magnetic field to produce a powerful burst of electromagnetic energy called the “Compton effect.???
A large enough device can generate up to two billion watts, about what Hoover Dam turns out in a day.
The weapon is attached to a cruise missile. Any piloted craft would run the risk of frying its own electronics, because EMP waves can bounce off objects, like the ground, and be reflected back at the attack craft.
One of the features of our electromagnetic pulse bomb story — and it’s been a solid one for virtually two decades — is that spectacular claims are routinely made, wonderful things requiring no substantial evidence for verification.
This also is one of the rules William Irving Langmuir developed to described really bad science [in 1953, built upon a description of US physicist Robert Wood’s debunking] of French scientist Rene Blondlot’s “N-Rays” back in 1903 — but that’s another long story.
Briefly, it’s the “science of things that aren’t so” and that neatly describes the provenance of America’s electromagnetic pulse bomb mythos, too.
I’m going to cheat, as usual, and allow something published at Globalsecurity during the summer (by me) to do the heavy lifting. A the time, there was a Post story indicating American worry about a Chinese electromagnetic pulse weapon, brought on by standard pathologies that define the US newsmedia and its interaction with the US war machine.
Because there has been so much nonsense printed in the US media about our electromagnetic pulse bombs and rays (for close to two decades), the Chinese — maybe — thought they should look into it, too. This, in turn, sparked a minor US intelligence evaluation to determine whether or not generals should be worried about such a thing.
For the Washington Post blog article [in mid-summer], the electromagnetic pulse bomb or ray was rebranded as a high power microwave weapon. This is a semantic trick US arms developers came up with a number of years ago to escape the ridicule attached to older electromagnetic weapons projects.
The Post’s blog spawned this explanation, capped by one ludicrous sentence:
“The United States and other governments have long worked to perfect high-power microwave technology.
“The problem, experts say, is that it’s been difficult to make the weapons both safe and effective. An HPM device would have a range of only a few hundred yards; weaponry that was designed to have a greater range could effectively set the atmosphere on fire.”
Set the atmosphere on fire. A good copy editor might have immediately spiked that for the sin of being an unprovoked assault on common sense.
However, the EMP/HPM crowd has played fast and loose with facts for close on twenty years. And they have been very good at getting the ludicrous into the news. The result has been that journalists and passers-by, people who do not know better, fall prey to the classic American trait of belief in utter bull—- because said bull—- is published in so many places …
For the Post, Jason Ukman ran down John Pike at Globalsecurity.Org, an agency for which I’ve been known to take on the role of “expert” on cybersecurity and cyberwar. And electromagnetic pulse bombs and rays used to regularly be part of that beat. giving me ample opportunity over the years to heap scorn upon them.
For the Post, Pike delivered this: “People have been talking about these things for many decades and they just haven’t gone anywhere” …
“All the same, given U.S. research efforts, Pike said it wasn’t surprising that the Chinese were pursuing the technology,” reported the Post.
“One would be amazed if they were not doing this sort of thing,” Pike told the newspaper.
And this is a classic case of mirroring — a foreign power believes it should be in the business of trying to make electromagnetic pulse weapons because it’s military men have read about our efforts to make the same things for years. That no one actually ever makes them, or anything that actually works, is beside the point.
The problem with these types of weapons can be explained. But it’s never mentioned in news stories. Never.
Two years ago I put it this way …
The fundamental problem associated with non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons is simple to describe.
And it’s never addressed, except through elliptical statements about limits of their “portability” and the ability to predictably “couple” the weapon’s electromagnetic effect to a target. The problem is this: dispersion cripples such notional weapons, or as a scientist might say, any effect is constrained by the law of inverse squares. Nature’s laws, fortunately for us, aren’t subject to whimsical change.
“The intensity of the influence at any given radius r is the source strength divided by the area of the sphere,” explains a page at a university physics department. “Being strictly geometric in its origin, the inverse square law applies to diverse phenomena. Point sources of gravitational force, electric field, light, sound or radiation obey the inverse square law. It is a subject of continuing debate with a source such as a skunk on top of a flag pole; will it’s smell drop off according to the inverse square law?”
A bit of scientific humor, the latter bit about the skunk.
But there is never any humor associated with stories of electromagnetic pulse bombs [and rays]. It is always deadly serious stuff.
If you’ve followed the story for a long time, another facet of it is made abundantly clear. Through the years, various kooks associated with electromagnetic weaponry have come and gone. Some have retired. One, a much decorated old military man, even died before he found the grail.
But the ranks of electromagnetic pulse nuts is never really thinned. There are always more of them arriving or in development.
The National Ground Intelligence Center assessment on China’s interest in the empire’s electromagnetic pulse weapon crap is here.
On page four of the eight page scan, it reads:
“It is widely acknowledged that (conventional) explosively powered [radio frequency] sources with military application are a difficult technological hurdle (despite some overly hyped Internet articles on e-bombs to the contrary), and it is very unlikely that China could have overcome these hurdles.”
Over the years, I’ve been responsible for damaging many of these articles. What the assessment does not mention is that defense contractors in the pay of the US military were those who were very guilty of the hype thing.
Notoriously, just before the United States charged into Iraq a decade ago an editor from one of the big news agencies called to ask how journalists could protect their laptops and phones from the electromagnetic pulse weapons we were allegedly about to use on Saddam Hussein.
The man wanted to know if they could store their stuff in a microwave oven, the reasoning being that if a microwave kept radiation in during cooking, it might keep it out, too.
No joke, sadly. Electromagnetic pulse weapons over Iraq in 2003. Now you know why we won that so easily.
Like the related techno-mythology of electromagnetic pulse attack on the United, the mythology of our (or someone else’s) magical electromagnetic pulse bomb refuses to die.
It’s regularly published here, there and everywhere, completely free of any reasonable standard of proof. And you can distinguish it by the many features described here. The most amusing, or painful — depending on your mood, are the fantasies fit for the entertainment of small children.
In summer with the Washington Post it was “set the atmosphere on fire.”
For today’s piece in Counterpunch: “A large enough device can generate up to two billion watts, about what Hoover Dam turns out in a day.”
Getting this techno-crazy-weapon excrement into print in the United States is easy. Publishing something sensible on the subject, not so much.
“Some scientists believe we can live forever …” exclaims one the hosts. That means, for the purposes of the story, two scientists. One of whom speaks with a lisp, perhaps because his ZZ Top-length beard is getting tangled up in his lips and … teef. Sadly, messing up the perception Britishes don’t suffer fools gladly like Americans.
Cue the lecture room with a PowerPoint presentation shot. (Alternatively, some very wealthy libertarian computer programmers musing on how old age could be programmed away with just the right combination of algorithms and megadose pill-taking.)
“The main reason I want to live forever is because it’s fun to be alive,” says another scientist, running with his older Dad in the desert.
Shouldn’t the fellow be in the lab working on lengthening those telomeres? The clock’s ticking.
“There are some doubters,” says NBC newsperson Michelle Kosinski.
“Research is in the early stages … and there’s not a lot of funding,” she adds, just before the break for a commercial.
Not surprisingly, William Broad’s front page cover of the Newt Gingrich and his obsession with electromagnetic pulse attack myth-making ignited many other original stories and echoes throughout the media sphere.
They repeat the script described yesterday.
At the top of the list was DC’s far right newspaper, The Washington Times.
We also could fall victim to the devastating effects of an electromagnetic pulse. With an EMP, almost everything powered by electricity would effectively be wiped out – not physically, but practically. Such things would simply cease to work.
Imagine the havoc this could cause. Your cellphone? Useless. The same goes for your TV, radio and computer. Your car might still run, but good luck driving on roads with no working stoplights, accessing your GPS devices for directions or buying gasoline from pumps that won’t pump. We’d be in the dark, literally – plunged into the early 19th century in a matter of seconds.
Back to the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Always. No matter who peddles it, from Newt Gingrich to some astroturfing flunky on a conservative blog, robotic in its recitation.
Today William Broad of the New York Times put Newt Gingrich’s role as one of the chieftains of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, into that high button newspaper.
DD blog touched on it last month, along with Gingrich’s numbing videos for the electromagnetic pulse doom lobby, here.
Indeed, I’ve covered the Cult of EMP Crazy, and the spectacularly loathsome Gingrich’s regular shilling, for it for years.
Now that Newt Gingrich is enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame atop the heap of horrid GOP presidential hopefuls I can use it as an excuse to show him back when he was basically the famous person for a group of relative nobodies (but persistent nobodies) in the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy.
Here are three videos of Newt on Youtube, doing his EMP doom tap dance. Two of them are for the [far right] lobbying group, EMPAct America.
The third is for Fox News where he advocated for starting a war with North Korea back in 2009. (This was subsequently pulled by its poster after I linked to it.)
Gingrich’s robotic script on the subject, completely in line with everyone else in the lobby, is that electromagnetic pulse doom is easily achievable and that it will end US civilization. It is not. But to argue it gives the people who own the script way too much he said/she said stage time. It’s what they live for.
This is frequently extended to encompass the collapse of the entire western world. The passing of the United States from the world scene takes down all Anglo civilization.
This is always coupled to pleas for more spending in ballistic missile defense and recommendation for preemptive sneak attack on Iran. And it is delivered in a stream of movies, seminars, op-ed pieces and straight news stories, one which has flowed steadily for a decade. At least.
And why special attention for Iran?
Because in all the common electromagnetic pulse doom scenarios peddled by the lobby, it is either a potential Iranian nuclear bomb, or an Iranian-made one given to terrorists, launched from a barge off the coast of the eastern US, which brings on the second coming of the Dark Ages.
It is a persistent lobby with no constituency anywhere but in the far right.
And like a large bit of dog dung festering in the sun attracts green bottle flies, over the years the story of electromagnetic pulse doom has also attracted fundamental Christian super-church preachers who believe and sermonize that the attack will herald the second coming, a final battle between good and evil, their natural ascent into heaven, and the damnation of everyone else.
In addition, it has also inspired a small congressional caucus of worthless and demonstrably incompetent nobodies — most notably the ancient Republican Rep., Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland who made it one of his life’s causes. More recently, Bartlett’s Cult of EMP Crazy leadership baton has been taken by a GOP politician from Arizona, birther and believer that sharia law is permeating the precious bodily fluids of American justice, Trent Franks.
Surviving EMP Doom will come by rule of the gun and those who have prepared themselves (the new Tom Doniphons) for it in the countryside, preferably with lots of pemmican, jerky, gold and silver, canned foods, stockpiled gasoline, underground dugouts full of ammunition and a corral of horseflesh or lovingly maintained old cars not reliant upon chip technology.
A far right Christian religiosity runs through electromagnetic pulse attack mythologizing . It’s the good and Godly in a struggle for what’s left of America principles and pieties against the ravening, formerly fat and lazy Democratic liberal hordes, spilling out of the cities like the zombies in AMC’s The Walking Dead.
Broad touches upon it briefly, as taken from the central book of electromagnetic pulse doom mythology, William Forstchen’s One Second After (also a Gingrich co-author):
The book describes an electromagnetic pulse attack on America, conjuring a world in which cars, airplanes, cellphones and refrigerators all die, and gangs of barbarians spring to life.
Despite being blown off by almost everyone (except the lunatic right and the repellent homophobe and Gingrich presidential competitor, Rick Santorum), — “Mr. Gingrich’s warnings remain persistently urgent,” writes William Broad for the Times.
Which, honestly now Mr. William Broad, just doesn’t quite describe the entire flavor of the matter.
“Some people praise Mr. Gingrich as an atomic visionary,” reads the Times piece. Near the end.
