MAY 21, 2011
• The New Dark Age of an EMP
So your alarm doesn't go off and you wake-up one morning late for work. If you take the time to go through an abbreviated morning routine, you quickly realize that the lights are out, the coffee maker isn't working and the refrigerator... Well, you get the idea—the power is still off.
The upside is that since you’re late to work you skip the cold shower. After mismatching your socks in the dark of the room, you manage to rush out the door while dressing on the run. Once outside, you notice that most of the cars in your neighborhood—or in your apartment complex—are still there.
That’s weird, you think. Then you jump into your car, turn the key and...
Nothing. The car won’t start.
Just great.
So you whip out your trusty cell phone to call in late and it doesn’t work either.
When it rains its pours.
You step out of your car to see one of your neighbors cussing his portable AM/FM radio. Having already learned everything you are just figuring out, your neighbor is now miffed at being unable to hear news from his non-working radio.
Now, on top of all that, you see another neighbor returning from a short walk to the local store. He reports that the store is powerless and the ATM at which he stopped isn’t working.
Maybe a transformer went out, you think.
What you don’t know is that across the entire country, no one has power.
In fact, across the entire nation any car build after about 1980 isn’t starting and will not run.
Worse still, during the night thousands of passenger airplanes lost power in mid-flight and plummeted from the skies. At those thousands of crash sites millions of people have died. And even if the survivors could be transported to the hospital, it would be a pointless effort. You see, the same problem has hit the hospitals. During the night critically injured people in hospitals across the country died when the life support equipment on which they depended lost power while back-up generators failed to kick-in. And anyone depending on life support equipment during operative procedures died on the operating room table.
Of course, standing in front of your home, you don’t yet know all of that. You also don’t yet know that if you are living at a higher elevation than the local water supply you will do without because the electrical infrastructure necessary to pump it up to higher ground is now gone. And since the electrically driven valve systems at the water stations are fried, the available tap water might be only what is left in the lines.
Gone, too, is any chance of accessing your bank holdings and finances. You are now unable to conduct any electronic transaction, communication or—eventually—use what will become valueless paper money. In the months following this morning, people in need of life preserving medications will die. As you stand there in the yard, perishable food everywhere is spoiling without refrigeration. Without a means of replenishment, non-perishable food supplies in major cities will be depleted in under a week—more likely within three to five days or so.
People without stored food and water will die of hunger. Society will breakdown and eventually in the cities, “every man for himself” will be the rule of the day. Martial law will be declared in some places, but for the most part even that will be of little consequence because the automation to enforce it will not exist. The outlook is so much more bleak than even this that it staggers the mind to contemplate.
Sounds like science fiction, doesn’t it?
Well, it is true that a somewhat similar story is played out in a recently published novel called, One Second After, by William R. Forstchen. But the storyline is not science fiction. It is science fact. It’s a reality that just has not yet happened.
What I’ve just described is the morning after the explosion of a nuclear bomb high above the center of the country. Exploding at an extremely high altitude, the chances are there isn’t a blast crater, little if any architectural devastation, no fallout and radiation of comparative insignificance to those of us on the ground. Instead, the massive explosive power of the bomb interacts with atmospheric elements to create a phenomenon that brings America to its knees in the way described above.
Here’s how that happens: When the nuclear warhead detonates in the upper stratosphere, the byproduct of high-energy gamma radiation travels outward in every direction. The downward-traveling gamma radiation interacts with air molecules to produce two types of ions: Positive ions and recoil ions—the latter of which are called Compton recoil electrons. The interaction which creates these ions also produces a charge that separates (or ejects, if you will) the newly created Compton recoil electrons. As the Compton recoil electrons expand outward they interact with the earth’s magnetic field (as part of a process called, charge acceleration). The end result utilizes earth’s electromagnetic field to deliver an instantaneous electromagnetic pulse overloading every electronic circuit it its path. This is called an EM Pulse—or EMP.
And that’s not all. Simultaneously there also occurs something called a magnetohydrodynarnic EMP that moves relatively slow (as in perhaps one or two blinks of the eye) and which is similar to the effects of a geomagnetic solar storm. This particular aspect of the catastrophe sends low frequency current into the earth that travels along transmission lines, contributing to the event’s extensive damage.
All of that—the whole thing—occurs in the matter of seconds. One second everything is fine and one second later every electronic component not “hardened” (protected) against an EMP is fried. What is protected against such an event? Mostly high-end military equipment built to withstand and retaliate in the event of a nuclear strike.
Everything else is pretty much toast.
None of this is temporary. The only replacement components available will be in other countries—provided they haven’t been similarly attacked and are predisposed to provide help.
And even if those places (like China or Japan, for example) still exist and are willing to help, it will easily be years—nearly a generation worth of years—before we climb back out of the new dark age.
Could this really happen?
Absolutely. Easily. It isn’t likely to be the results of a massive strike involving dozens of nuclear warheads such as we feared from the Soviets as recently as the early 1980s. Rather, it would more likely be only one or two warheads, launched from off of our shores using a submarine, container ship, barge, oil transport or similar vessel. Speculatively speaking, it could even be launched from our own soil. Regardless of the exact point of origin, anything launched from so close to home would be practically impossible to identify and destroy before it reaches the altitude necessary for the job.
So who would do it? Take your pick from any candidate calculated to have motive, resources and opportunity. A state-sponsored terrorist equipped by any one of our nuclear enemies comes readily to mind (Iran and North Korea, for example). Whether we contemplate the traditional devastation of a nuclear blast or the more wide-spread crippling of an EM pulse, it is no stretch of the imagination to envision a one or two-warhead attack by people who have shown no compunction when using children as instruments of death, beheadings as praiseworthy and genocide as a routine. We would be foolish to dismiss the motivations of our opposition and the wherewithal of their sponsors.
How informed is our government? Well, pursuant to a National Defense Authorization Act for the fiscal year of 2001 an EMP Commission was cobbled together to study the matter. They were tasked with identifying the steps necessary to protect military and civilian systems from an EMP attack. The Commission was reestablished via a follow-up statutory enactment of 2006. In all there have been made public at least two fairly extensive reports and one written testimony arising out of a 2008 appearance before the House Armed Services Committee.
These reports are feely available as pdf downloads when you visit online the EMP Comission By Clicking Here. Probing to detailed depths, their reports clearly innumerate the preventive steps necessary for EMP survival. In reading their literature, it becomes alarmingly obvious that we are a nation unprepared for an EM attack. Even though the reports don’t say it, an EMP attack would eventually plunge us into something just short of a modern dark age.
With our economy already facing crisis, unemployment looming at the threshold of double digits and Quantitative Easing of the money in line to devalued the dollar (a common precedent of the process) the questions facing you are, What have you done to prepare for a short term or long term emergency? Have you stored nonperishable food? How about water? Have you thought about personal and home defense?
An EMP blast could happen at any time—even before you finish reading the next sentence. Are you prepared? If not, don’t let further inaction be the source of regret when you are sitting in the dark without electricity and thinking back to having read this warning.
Preparation costs very little. Failing to prepare can cost your life.
MAY 4, 2011
• Rights vs Privileges
At various times it has been in vogue to assert that certain privileges are actually rights. For example, in his Fireside Chat of January 11 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed that there is a “right to a useful and remunerative job.” More recently it has been widely asserted that there is a right to healthcare.
If not a condition of human psychology, then it is at the least a habit to accept at face value a message without regard for the meaning of the underlying words and precepts.
So, what exactly is a right? Or more to the point, what is it in the American psychology (or ideology) that accepts as a given the concept of a right?
For answers we can begin with the foundation of American government.
From the second paragraph of Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness…
Right off the bat, before we even get to the idea of rights, some would see a problem: All men are created equal? Some would ask, “How equal is it when the son of a wealthy man has all the advantages that money can buy?” Or, “If we are all created equal, what about the mentally handicapped?”
Such questions presume a position that the Declaration of Independence does not advocate. The phrase, all men are created equal, does not suggest that all men have equal opportunity. Also, the phrase does not say that all men are created equally followed by a sentence ending period.
What the phrase does say is that we are all born (created), that a Supreme Being (our Creator) endows (freely furnishes or provides us with) rights (things to which we have a claim) and that among those things we may claim are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Nowhere in the phrase is equality equated to a condition of our circumstances. Rather, the equality is a condition equated to birth (our creation). Some are born into wealth, others into poverty. But regardless of the circumstances into which you are born, we are equally all born—created. With that, comes the philosophy that we are all invested with certain rights.
Now, an unalienable ris something to which you have not only a claim but also a claim that is impossible to have taken away from you. In other words, the right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are things that you may not be denied or refused. Through your own efforts—or lack thereof—you might forfeit your Life, your Liberty or the Pursuit of your Happiness. But barring an illegal infringement upon others or the civil society, it is impossible for another person to take away these rights to which you have a claim.
Why? Well, this brings us to the wisdom of accepting—or at least acquiescing—the source from which our rights are derived. Legitimate historical scholarship tells us that all of the signers of the Declaration of Independence believed in the existence of God. There were a few of these men—numbering 3 as far as can be easily documented—who believed in the existence of God but did not identify with specific churches. But regardless of religion or theology, the signers to the Declaration of Independence established that the Creator (God) is the source of our right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. This had far-reaching consequences as far as government is concerned. After all, if God grants a right to a person, who among us may take or infringe upon that right granted by God?
It goes without saying—but I will make note of it nonetheless—that it is beyond the powers of mankind or government to take away, limit or re-define rights that are granted by God. Or to contrast the supremacy of these rights in another way, any right granted by government can be altered, regulated or taken away by government. Thus, for these reasons, whether you believe in the existence of God, it is to your own foolish detriment to advocate the removal of Him as an integral necessity to American philosophy, ideology and government.
So, knowing all of this, and understanding that a right is something to which you have a just claim; do you have a right to healthcare? Do you have a right to own a house? Do you have a right to an apartment? Do you have a right to own a car? Do you have a right to a job? When you lose your job, do you have a right to unemployment compensation? It is certainly popular to suggest that there are a wide range of rights to which a person is entitled. But are we really entitled to these things in the way we hold that we are entitled to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness?
To answer that, consider this: As a result of each individual’s employment, money is paid toward a fund upon which an individual may depend during finite periods of unemployment (provided they meet specific qualifications). It is important to note that the fund is a result of what the individual did to contribute to its existence. In other words, you have a right to unemployment compensation because your previous employment was contributory to the existence of the fund. Unemployment compensation is a right established and managed by government but which you and your employers are the source. This right comes to you because of your own effort and not because you are infringing upon someone else to provide that right.
This illustrates that for a right to exist there is at least one component upon which that right rests: The source—or provider—of that right.
Can this be compared to other rights? Certainly. For example, do you have a right to a job at another person’s private enterprise? If my company makes and sells the Super-Duper Grand Widgets, what just claim do you have to a job in my company? After all, in creating my company I am exerting my God-given right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of my Happiness. It is my right to have the company and you do not have a just claim to a job in my company. If you did have a right to that job, it would be at the expense of me—your claim would reduce the value of what would otherwise be my God-Given right (to have the company and deny you that job). Since you do not have that authority, then a job is not a right.
It is, however, the exercising of your Life, your Liberty and your Pursuit of Happiness to do whatever is necessary to obtain employment within my company—to sway or convince me to hire you.
And that is the difference between a right and a privilege. You have a job, you own a car, you have an apartment, you own a house and/or you have healthcare as a privilege—not a right.
Healthcare only seems to be something of a different matter because it can impact your life on a primal level—it can mean the very perpetuation of your life. We live in a country where you can now go to the hospital and if your situation is life-threatening, you will be treated. But if you can afford to pay, you are expected to do so. If you cannot, you are fortunate enough to be in a place where help is available to meet the financial obligations for the services rendered. However, the financial assistance in such instances is not available because the healthcare is a right to which you are entitled. Instead, the assistance is available because you live in a civil society with an economic system that motivates rather than mandates such charity.
Indeed, this matter is often clouded by arguments concerning the financial impact of healthcare. Such arguments are usually along the lines of, “You shouldn’t have your life savings wiped-out and be left destitute because of the expense in treating a life-threatening ailment.”
Really? What about house payments, investments and even IRS intrusions? All of these things and others—some freely chosen and others imposed—can leave you destitute. And yet you do not have a right to these things. The very moment that the thing you want must be provided by someone else, it becomes a privilege for which you are responsible to obtain. A job is offered by someone and you qualify for it. A car, a house or an apartment are all built and sold by others—and it is your privilege to purchase those things. You decide what is important to you and you spend accordingly. Foolishly overburdening yourself with a mortgage, vacation expenses, car payments, consequences of pregnancy or deciding against the monthly expense of healthcare coverage are decisions that can leave you homeless and broke.
How you succeed or fail is the result of privileges afforded to you at the behest of your right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness.
That is the nature of life and the risk inherent to living.
APRIL 14, 2011
• American Affairs Thus Far
During 1946 the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York wrote an article in a publication called American Affairs(I donated all my old copies to the library just a few years ago and went back to the library to personally look this up).
The then Chairman, Beardsley Ruml, noted that the Federal Reserve was able to create out of nothing all the money that the government would ever want. He said, in short, that since people with money spend on goods and services, prices respond by going up. To control this process money should be taken away through taxation so that instead, the government could spend it (this raises prices also, but he didn’t point that out).
And then he wrote:
“The second principal purpose of federal taxes is to attain more equality of wealth and income than would result from economic forces working alone. The taxes which are effective for this purpose are the progressive individual income tax, the progressive estate tax and the gift tax. What these taxes should be depends on public policy with respect to the distribution of wealth and of income. These taxes should be defended and attacked in terms of their effect on the character of American life, not as revenue measures.”
“Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete,” Beardsley Ruml, American Affairs, January, 1946 pp. 35-36
The above quote is indicative of the evidence that America has reached the present state of affairs as an end result of Socialism permeating our society from the top forces in economic oversight down to the man in the street. Throughout history Socialism has failed every time it was tried and it is again failing now. America, with a population that has been the most socioeconomically comfortable of any throughout history, is the ultimate and final proof that vindicates Margaret Thatcher when, in 1976, she said, “...socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They (socialists) always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them.”
Welcome to Amerika.
MARCH 31, 2011
• A Thousand Years and 9.86 Microseconds
I’ve long-heard discussions regarding the biblical account of creation in 7 days. Some arguments are that it could have just as easily been 7,000 years since another biblical verse (rendered in a different context) indicates that for God, a day is as a thousand years. Looking at it that way, science can more easily tolerate a creation wherein God’s use of the “natural laws” that He had created might be more accommodating of the geological record.
Well, now I’d like to add to that discussion. In a number of places I’ve read that the March 11 2011 earthquake—which reportedly moved the Japanese mainland by as much as 8 feet—caused a change in our planet’s mass, thus shortening the length of a day by 1.8 Microseconds. Many of these sources, such as the text at the CBS News story, Earth’s Day Length Shortened by Japan Earthquake, indicate that this wasn’t the first earthquake-induced shortening of the day. This article suggest a total shortening of the day by 9.86 microseconds after tabulating the effects of the 8.9-magnitude Japan earthquake, the 8.8-magnitude Chilean earthquake of 2010 and the 9.1-magnitude Sumatra earthquake in 2004.
This got me to thinking. The world is covered in volcanoes popping-off throughout history. If you hold to the creation belief, who is to say that God’s use of the geology He created didn’t involve world-wide volcanic eruptions affecting the passage of time (as we understand it). Maybe the planet was spinning like a top! Or maybe there was one huge continent and the “spreading” factor of erupting volcanoes moved the earth’s mass outward, thus slowing the passage of time that constituted, “a day.”
Otto Muck, the writer of The Secret of Atlantis (Analyzed Here) once postulated that an asteroid struck the mid-Atlantic ridge, opening an ocean-wide rift along the submariner floor. If even partly true, surely the impact on the passage of time could have been massive.
So, what am I saying? Well, I don’t have a conclusion in which to neatly wrap this up and I can’t even confirm if this speculation is all that original. I’m just throwing it out there to suggest an influence on the passage of time in relation to the biblical and geological record concerning creation.
MARCH 10, 2011
• Guess Who Went To Breakfast in Chile?
I’ve spent the last few months working on a massive web site re-vamp and expansion. I hope you like it because I learned my lesson and will not be doing that again!
Book news: I’ve already announced that the print edition of Socials is coming. The delay has been me because I want to reshoot the cover. Yeah, yeah, I know—most writers hand it off to the publisher who takes care of it. Fortunately The Lighthouse Press allows me the latitude to bring to life my own vision. So, the re-shoot for Socials is next followed closely be the release of the novella.
After that… Well, would you believe a 4th edition of The Gray Stopgap? Lighthouse Press mailed to me the remaining 40 or so copies of the last edition and is okay for one more trip to the well—a trip to precede the long awaited Stopgap Sequel. So, the first novel is still unavailable unless you find it on line for a price ranging from a few bucks to $500 (no, really, I’m serious). The out-of-the-world price is a topic I address in Q&A on the News page (link to your left) so I won’t go into that here.
And there’s no date on the release of the Stopgap sequel, either.
If you’ve been following the political world—or my e-mail rants about it, then the entry below is old hat to you. However, you might be interested to know that it was to be a featured discussion on the March 11th, Look Who’s Coming to Breakfast show, a weekly radio program of I love Chile Radio.
Why a radio station in the country of Chile? Well, I gave some serious consideration to moving there and it was John Allan—one of Breakfast’s co-hosts who hooked me up with enough information that I was able to make an informed decision. At any rate, Mr. Allan took a shine to my narrative below and I granted him permission to discuss it on air—along with his co-host Steward Steward (no really, that’s his name—I’d come up with something more believable if I were making this up).
Of course, that was the morning of the Tsunami in Japan and while I was up all night and morning, I missed most of the Breakfast show and am unable to report whether the topic was bumped. Since that particular show hasn’t started offering pod cast, yet, one can’t go back and listen.
If you get chance, though, you might give the show a try. It’s not one of those really slick, high-end productions. It’s more like two friends who agree with one another only about a third of the time and while you’re puttering around the house with your coffee they’re in your living room during their two-thirds time of disagreeing. Oh, okay, it’s not quite that confrontational—presumably they are friends, after all.
If you’re in the USA catch the show via your web browser every Friday at 6-9 am PST, 7-10 am MST, 8-11 am CDT, 9-12 am EST (and 10 am - 1 pm in Chile). I know that all looks a little confusing, but we’re talking about 4 U.S. time zones and a fifth time zone for Chile: And don’t even get me started on the whole Daylight Savings thing!
For the Friday radio show web site, click, LOOK WHO’S COMING TO BREAKFAST, and select audio streaming from the radio station web site, click I Love Chile.
UPDATE 2019—The Look Who’s Coming to Breakfast radio show, and subsequently the “radio” sub-directory of the website through which the program streamed is now unavailable.
MARCH 4, 2011
• Take That, Obama!
In case you haven’t been closely following it—or you’ve been foolishly following the lame liberal media reports—I’m pleased to report that team Obama got a figurative whipping for having ignored constitutional law and the court. As you should know by now, about 28 states filed suit against the government, arguing that Obama Care was unconstitutional. The Florida Supreme Court agreed, and in his 75-page decision, the judge said, basically, that because the foundation of the individual mandate upon which Obama Care rested was unconstitutional, the whole bloody thing was null and void.
(NOTE: Some have argued that the government made the mistake of not employing Obama Care “severability” language that would have allowed the implementation of legal portions of the law while unconstitutional portions were thrown out: Be that a mistake or not, it wouldn’t have mattered. Since both the government and the judge agreed that the law was nothing without the individual mandate—which was subsequently ruled unconstitutional—the whole unconstitutional house of cards fell and “severability” was and is a moot point. )
At any rate, that was 10 days ago and starting 9 days ago the Executive branch of our government has openly violated the Constitution by proceeding with implementation of Obama Care instead of adhering to the judge’s ruling that stayed implementation. They should have ceased implementation and immediately appealed. What Team Obama next did next was insulting: They filed for a clarification since they, said, the judge hadn’t issued a separate “stay” that allowed them to implement the law while on appeal. The problem is that on page 75 of the original ruling, the judge CLEARLY said that the decision was the declaratory equivalent of a stay and that he EXPECTED the government to comply.
And so when this clarification thing came up, the judge socked it to them. The end result, after a very much needed chastising, was that the Judge went a step further than they would have liked. He has forced the administration to stop playing word games by allowing them 7 days of further implementation BUT they MUST also appeal to either the 11th Circuit or the Supreme court by that 7th day: Failing that, they whole thing is over. Done.
So, Obama and company now have to actually abide by the rules (which must really aggravate King Obama). I’m sure they’ll file in time, but I’m gleeful that they have been thoroughly lectured and forced to get this mess over with even sooner than they would have wanted.
As former Reagan administration official/conservative talk show host/Landmark Legal Foundation president and attorney Mark Levine described it on his March 3
Gotta love that.
For better details see this link: Speed Up or Stop
