The photo above represents your alternative source of light at night after an Electro-Magnetic Pulse takes down the power grid. The same source will also provide all of your evening’s externally generated heat, unless you have a fireplace and a cord of wood. And if you need to contact someone long-distance… well, why not try shouting at the Moon? The chances of getting an answer back from her are about equal to those of reaching your loved ones across the continent.
But wait, I forgot: we don’t need to worry! The mainstream media, having heard from someone or other (I can’t imagine whom: their sources are usually named “Anonymous”) that President Trump issued an executive order to secure the power grid in March of this year, have devoted themselves to deriding the threat’s reality. If Trump wants it… he ain’t gonna get it; if he says it’s deadly… let’s invite it to a party!
Hence the article, “Is It Lights Out for Trump’s EMP Push?” in Politico by one Sarah Cammarata. Tommy Waller urged the audience of Frank Gaffney’s Secure Freedom Radio podcast (Nov. 22) to track down this piece and read it. We should alert ourselves, he advised, to the degree of arrogance and contempt with which a genuinely terrifying and imminent threat to our survival—as opposed, say, to rising sea levels—is greeted by Democrat representatives and their media lackeys (what one might call the Traitor/Useful Idiot Complex).
To arrogance and contempt, Mr. Waller might have added “early adolescent command of the language and pre-adolescent analytical abilities”. Those are further qualities, at any rate, which Ms. Cammarata brings to the discussion. The notion of an “EMP push” in the title is already a head-scratcher. Donald Trump hasn’t been “pushing” for an EMP: he has been trying to secure our national grid against a major EMP’s apocalyptic effects. Cammarata, however, appears to have her attention focused on something more like high-fiving: and hence she communicates in a kind of kid’s shorthand (as when a child says “beeper” for “smoke-detector”). One of her opening sentences reads, “On Sept. 13, controversial physicist, self-declared climate skeptic and backer of the fight against EMPs William Happer left the White House.” I suspect that neither Happer nor anyone else with a degree in the sciences would describe himself as a “climate skeptic”… or are we to suppose that he doubts the existence of climate? Controversial physicist? Is that a new variety of physics—or does Ms. Cammarata’s set simply disagree (having mustered the entirety of their gray matter to produce a thumbs-down) with his belief that plants actually like carbon dioxide? The fight against EMP’s? Again, one doesn’t fight an EMP: that’s rather the whole point, Ms. Cammarata. You can’t fight them. They occur naturally, and a major solar-pulse event appears to be overdue by about half a century. You and your chattering legions may conclude over cocktails that you can fight “climate”—but a massive ion storm, at least, is irresistible. What you do, or what one does (or what a functional adult would do), is protect the electric grid from utter incineration.
But, no, let’s denominate all the significant factors with the same precision as is used in labeling Bill Nye “the science guy”… and then let’s whoop and holler because “we won” and “they lost”.
I know that Thursday is Thanksgiving. I know that I, for one, will find great joy and gratitude in my heart late Wednesday night if my son’s plane lands safely, despite the machinations of certain unscreened intruders for whose ease Ms. Cammarata’s clique has already dissolved our border security. The truth is that featherbrains and subversives have transformed our national celebrations of solidarity, thanksgiving, and respite from routine anxiety into the most fearful times on our calendar; for it is precisely at these times, when parents, siblings, and children are en route to annual reunions, that diabolical minds would most like to spring a calamitous trap upon us…..
As I sat pecking those last words on my iPad, a “news flash”—courtesy of our Big Brotherly link to reality, Twitter (that is, our link to Big Brotherly reality)—informed me that two people had been shot in an incident at a North Carolina medical center. Stop the presses! The propaganda machine never misses a chance to inform us of more gun violence, as if this were almost as great a menace to our safety as… climate change!
Yet in the matter of a legitimate threat whose eventual realization is as sure as sunrise, we are to smirk and cherry-pick stray facts as springboards for jokes. “Warnings about electromagnetic pulse attacks have long inspired eye-rolls or outright guffaws among national security experts, but advocates of the issue briefly found a home on Trump’s National Security Council….” The joke’s the news, you see, in the Cammarata school of journalism. No names, just “eye-rolls” and “experts”. And yes, on any given Thanksgiving or Christmas, your son or daughter’s plane is more likely to plunge to earth because of a terrorist bomb than because of an epochal solar flare… so let’s all have a good holiday laugh as we roll the dice along with our eyes. If we lose, just about everybody dies… but the odds of winning seem really good. Today.
Just about everybody, yes. Peter Pry’s commission (described by Cammarata as “now-disbanded”, as if its members had been sent packing in disgrace) reproduced a projection of federal agencies that ninety percent of the continental US’s population would die within a year if the national grid went down. About all we ever needed to do (and this has been known for years) in order to insulate ourselves from major consequences is enclose our generators in Faraday cages, an incredibly cheap and quick fix to neutralize such a devastating blow. (“Some experts predict [the hardening measures] could cost billions of dollars,” notes Cammarata, eyes rolling, with her typical accuracy and precision—and displaying the concern for frugality that she brings, I’m sure, to her assessment of the Green New Deal). Instead, we shall stay just as we are until a major storm of solar flares produces something like the 1859 Carrington Event (a recurrence of which, as I’ve indicated, is overdue). Then our lights will go out, our heating and cooling systems will be kaput, aircraft will fall from the sky, cars with computerized systems will refuse to run, gas will not pump, refrigerated food will thaw, credit cards won’t work, any water not cranked up from a well (i.e., all water that once flowed from urban and suburban faucets) will dry up, hospitals will offer no assistance, emergency responders will be stalled and overwhelmed, rioting and panic will erupt… but no, it hasn’t happened yet, so why should it happen tomorrow?
Pardon me if I now reproduce a full paragraph from Politico which captures like no other the utter frivolity of the discussion:
A consensus among most in the scientific community is that EMP attacks are nothing to worry about and even a laughable subject. But a smaller group of scientists has argued that the federal budget should make a priority of spending for preparing for EMPs — as do some political figures, such as Cruz, who reject the much greater scientific consensus about the perils of human-driven climate change.
Sigh. For once and for all, scientific truth is not determined by majority vote—not even a majority formed of scientists. On issues as complex as the behavior of Earth’s magnetosphere—or of its climate, by the way—an endocrinologist’s or entomologist’s verdict carries no more weight than a trucker’s or shoemaker’s. Indeed, even within relevant fields, experts in one area must cross-reference their understanding with that of experts in other areas. “Science” does not qualify as a specialization of any sort. “Most scientists” laughed at Watson and Crick when they first presented research that would lead them to discover the double helix of DNA. In general, laughing is not a scientific response. Yet here we find the jolly “most scientists” trope so favored by exponents of manmade climate change trotted out to dispose of EMP concerns; and, indeed, Cammarata explicitly nudges in the idiotic “climate-change denier” slur (nobody denies that climates change, by the way) to tar the Cassandras of the insecure grid. She well knows, too, that names like “Cruz” (“Carson” and “Gingrich” were introduced earlier into the rogues’ gallery) will further prejudice Politico’s readership against viewing the crisis as serious. So the argument amounts to this: “We know that the Trump phalanx is always wrong about everything; we see them here clamoring for billions of our money; most scientists disagree with them, and they fail to show similar anxiety over Global Warming, regarding which most scientists are again on the other side; ergo, laugh away at them—and let’s have some contempt in that laughter!”
The single advocate of the “most scientists” position named by Cammarata is “Arthur House, the former chairman of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority”—and House, indeed, doesn’t criticize the science behind EMP anxiety; he only emphasizes that utility companies are unlikely to foot the bill for securing the grid if left to make their own decision. This is precisely the self-interested motive for reprehensible inaction which Peter Pry repeatedly underscores, and which is documented exhaustively at SecureTheGrid.com. Need I add that many of our “most scientists” have been employed at one time or another by these highly compromised private-sector quasi-monopolies? In other words, in the process of ridiculing the threat, Ms. Cammarata has exposed to us the primary reason for why we should mistrust the scoffers.
The article’s most appalling moment comes about halfway through. Having been assured for several hundred words that “most scientists” consider the probable effect of an EMP on our grid no worse than the aftermath of a hurricane (I actually added that tidbit to Cammarata’s detail-starved ramble from other sources), we’re now in for a final, clinching argument. Our friend Mr. House, who appears to wear a second hat as a security expert, delivers the following insight: “The problem is it’s such a blunt instrument. An EMP just wreaks havoc without much precision. In that way, it’s like an unsmart bomb.” Umm… did you get that? We have nothing to fear because… because an EMP attack would kill virtually all of us. It thus “invites massive retaliation” on the part of the Dr. Strangelove crew surviving in bunkers, concludes our “expert”… as if any of our land-based nukes would remain capable of launch, or as if Kim Jong Un or his handler, Xi Jinping, would give a damn if a few millions of rabble were smoked. Sleep tight!
If House’s confidence that an adversary would decline to murder three hundred million of us is the article’s most appalling moment, its most puzzling feature to me is the final several paragraphs that seem to ramrod in the names and protests of numerous EMP-worriers. I confess that on my first perusal of the piece, my iPhone buried its concluding words under such a mountain of advertisements that I failed to notice them. The discussion appeared to have ended. Later I found that, incoherently, the advocates for the contrary position came trickling in, their voices already drowned under a steady din of laughter from the scientific (but unnamed) multitude. Puzzling, yes: what does Sarah Cammarata make of the overwhelming authority (if underwhelming numbers) behind her opposition? Why smuggle this section in almost as a postscript? Is she in fact somewhat persuaded of the risible view, but anxious about becoming a laughing-stock herself? Is it so very painful to admit that perhaps Donald Trump did one thing right?
I wish I were making up all the incoherence and puerility that besets the Cammarata piece at every turn. Alternatively, I most sincerely wish that I took more comfort in the assurances of unnamed “experts”. I wish I could understand why the high-balled estimate of cost for neutralizing this low-balled menace to humanity is just too much, yet the sacrifice of our First World economy to ensure that time-shares in Florida don’t go under the waves is a good swap. I wish I hadn’t just finished reading Diana West’s American Betrayal—that I wasn’t so convinced, both through reading and through personal experience, that our government, our education system, our news media, and even our clergy were riddled with people devoted to our nation’s collapse, if not actively in the pay of its mortal enemies. I almost wish that I could coast insouciantly through my evenings awash in Daiquiris and through my days surrounded by other texting-and-chirping idiots like me. As Sophocles’ Teiresias laments, “What a fearful thing is thought when thinking brings no advantage!”
On my own (that is, without the aid of giggly “informants” like Cammarata), I’ve tried to understand the other side of the issue. I keep dredging up versions of House’s insane cocksureness just above: assessments that an atmospheric detonation adequate to take down the national power grid would imply the ongoing presence of full-blown thermonuclear warfare, and would further imply… what? That “their” destruction would be mutually assured in ours? That the consequences of “their” aggression would almost certainly carry over into “their” terrain? Again, if “they” are Xi Jinping and his genocidal Caligulas—or, for that matter, if “they” are merely the Iranian mullahs eager to be transported to the Gardens of Paradise—how is such chessboard strategizing a comfort? And how do we actually know who “they” are before the lights go out… and why does all such reassurance, without any exception that I have so far found, ignore the eventual certainly of a purely natural EMP of major proportions?
Because it’s well worth adding that at no point does Cammarata register the possibility of a catastrophic EMP’s occurring quite naturally: she wears the tribal feathers quite prominently in that regard. Yet such stupefying negligence should make our lack of preparation exponentially more alarming (assuming that our “beloved enemies” would commit only tactical slaughter, not genocide). We have no viable plan on the drawing board, either, for averting a large asteroid on a collision course with Earth… and I don’t think I’m far wrong in supposing that a meteoric event could produce an EMP event—that a Tunguska-level vaporization of a massive rock in the upper atmosphere could black out an entire continent today.
But “most scientists” are unconcerned, because no catastrophe happened yesterday and, probably, none will happen tomorrow. Now, death by… whatever… from “climate change” in a dozen years (by drowning? by overheating? by rioting? I never understood exactly what—and it changes) … yeah, we hear that “most scientists” are down for the Race to Save the Climate. Of course, “most scientists” need grant money from our highly politicized federal agencies.
Meanwhile, the Russians and the Chinese have long since secured their grids, though money is much tighter in both economies than in ours—and they don’t seem to be spending a penny on keeping sea water off the beaches. Why is that, do you suppose? Guess they just don’t have any “scientists”.
Semper Lux Mundi ("Always the Light of the World") 