A damaging, fast-spreading computer bug forced an Atlanta-area hospital system to shut its doors for nearly three days last week and divert ambulances to other facilities.
Gwinnett Medical Center’s two campuses, in Lawrenceville and Duluth, Ga., were forced to declare “total diversion” status and turn away all but extreme trauma …
[Malware] affected connectivity only, and did not compromise medical records or affect patient care “in any way, shape or form.”
What happens when power fails due to heavy rains, high wind or hurricane? Possibly, some resources are maintained through limited emergency generator back-up power.
A hospital is not expected to cease operation or turn away patients in such emergencies.
Chalk some of this up to bad infrastructure, poor staffing and unwise decision-making and choices when the transition to networked services was made.
The bedrock of the practice of medicine and keeping people alive is in the real world, not the virtual. There’s a need to look for better help when failure in the virtual takes your legs out from under you more than momentarily.
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.
It’s time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression. True, it’s not a full replay of the Great Depression, but that’s cold comfort.
Art for all the songs I’ve put on YouTube, done months ago.
Depression or Great Depression, minor details to those stuck in it.
Systemic features of the US American economic model have destroyed any concept of “awesome possibilities” for most of even the most wishful thinkers not in the 1 percent.
This week’s issue of the Financial Times focuses on the American employment picture. It’s unremittingly grim.
It touches on issues that have been discussed before on the blog.
1. Big corporate America’s dislike of American labor. The result, except for taxpayer-funded weapons production, was the shipping of everything to Chinese plants. The destruction of jobs became paramount and remains that way.
2. The work that cannot be outsourced is not enough to sustain a country as large as the United States. This means a gradual slide into the irrelevance of a banana republic with the world’s largest military. (Like a patient just diagnosed with incurable cancer, the slope of decline is gradual but inexorable and sure. However, it is expected in all cases that at some point the cancer load, in this case US economic dysfunction, becomes too great and the rate of decline accelerates into fatal catastrophe.)
3. Primary non-military/security growth jobs are all in parts of the economy which produce nothing and, except for moving money and creating money products, pay very little. They’re either in finance, food service preparation, sales of retail goods (all made in China) or the old DD blog pejorative — bedpan technicianry — workers who will be needed in the warehouse industry for the elderly and sick.
America used to be exceptional. Postwar, it maintained lower unemployment than the Europeans and a higher rate of jobs turnover … No longer. Today, somewhat remarkably, US joblessness is higher than in much of Europe.
[In decades past jobs] might be lost rapidly in a downturn but were swiftly reallocated to more productive sectors when economic growth resumed. That is not now the case.
“I know companies that employ senior engineers whose only job is to find ways to reduce the headcount,??? says Carl Camden, chief executive of Kelly Services, a booming staffing agency based in Michigan. “The name of the game everywhere is to reduce permanent headcount and we are still only at the early stages of this trend.???
This is hardly a novel observation. — DD
… America is employing a decreasing proportion of its people.
Manufacturing is nowhere in the top 20, and such jobs cannot replace the pay and conditions once typical of that sector. “The food preparation industry cannot sustain a middle class …???
Some have moved from claiming unemployment benefits to disability benefits, and have thus permanently dropped out of the labour force. Others have fallen back on the charity of relatives. Others still have ended up in prison. In 1982 there were just over 500,000 in jail; today there are 2.5m.
There are no solutions in sight. Great inequality is intertwined with the inability of the country to mobilize its human capital. And the lack of interest and ability to maximize is human resources, historically, leads to decline and the inability to rise to any and all future challenges.
This is very much about class war, one conducted, since the Eighties, by a corporate monarchy imposed on the rest of the population, for the sole benefit of itself. There is no social compact.
The FT acknowledges this has made the 2012 election one about class warfare.
“This should be both welcomed and feared,” writes one columnist. “Welcomed because America needs an election focused on the economy.”
Finally, more of the obvious. Still, it is worth repeating:
Mr. Obama is not a class warrior. But he has not yet found a compelling way to address what lies behind America’s deepening inequities. The Republicans are even further from a solution. Let us hope class warfare marks only the starting point for a conversation.
The only thing missing is a detailed discussion of another big factor which accelerated the dysfunction of the American economy since 2000: The hardening of the state’s condition into one justifying a permanent war footing.
The permanent war footing separates one entire class of American workers — those who work for arms manufacturing and in the large homeland/natsecurity support role of finding and identifying enemies to use them on — from the ills affecting all other portions of the 99 percent.
The best song DD wrote in 2011. It should be on your critic’s list.
Welcome to the US of Penitentiary; we all get there,
eventually.
We lock up the poor for all the rich; and we do it right, without no hitch.
Welcome to the United States of Greed; it’s the only country you’ll ever need.
If you’re into frauds and useless devices — Uncle Sam, the best of choices!
“CareerBuilder,” one of the many odious American job hunting sites published a handy guide to the stealing of labor in the US.
It’s called “a quick guide to minimum wage.”
Readers can see how penurious all the red states are, either below the national minimum wage or with no minimum wage law at all. The federal minimum wage is a big $7.25. In Georgia, they pay $5.15. And in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee, there is no minimum wage law at all. How surprising. (They may have lost the Civil War but …)
“Today, people still debate what should be considered an acceptable hourly wage, how changes to it might affect businesses and how much the government should be involved in the issue,” writes some minor minion of the devil.
Short version: The biggest business in Postville, Iowa, was a kosher meat-packing plant that employed illegals and abused them. The Feds swept in a couple years ago, ended it, while arresting and jailing the company owner on criminal counts.
Since Postville’s economy was primarily based on slave labor, even now — with the company under new ownership and operating legally — it has been unable to recover.
It’s a pattern that is everywhere throughout the US system, an economic model built upon stealing labor. And it does not seem surprising that after decades of relying on such a thing, any place that loses it by force remains unable to cope and rebuild.
Today, the meatpacking plant, under new ownership, uses the federal e-verify system to check workers’ immigration status. The hourly wage on the poultry line is higher than it was before the raid, but few Iowan-born locals work there. Ridding this small community of its illegal workforce, far from freeing up jobs for American-born citizens, has resulted in closed businesses and fewer opportunities. Even nearly four years later, many homes still remain empty, and taxable retail sales are about 40 percent lower than they were in 2008 …
One reason immigrant turnover in the town is higher than before the 2008 raid may be that legal immigrants have more employment options than the mostly undocumented Guatemalans and Mexicans who used to work at the meatpacking plant. They are also less vulnerable to abuse.
“The only good thing I see about this raid is at least it brought to the front page that our food is cheap in part because immigrants are exploited and are victimized,” said Sonia Parras-Konrad, a Des Moines immigration lawyer who represented, pro bono, dozens of the Postville detainees. Undocumented people are often afraid to report labor abuses and crimes for fear of being deported, she says.
Parras-Konrad and Brackett, the Lutheran pastor, both told Yahoo News that the undocumented population is on the rise in the town and speculated that the plant may be hiring illegal immigrants again.
It’s a terrible story with no morals and no happy endings. It shows only
that when one of the foundations of an economic system reliant on abusing people is torn out most of what was built on top of it comes down, too.
