Monthly Archives: September 2017

Loss of Power

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And of communications, air conditioning in hot and humid environs (and of heating in cold environs), food and water distribution, fuel supplies, and so on.

Block by block and city by city, utilities face one of the largest power restoration challenges in US history as they bring back electricity to more than 15 million people affected by Hurricane Irma.

Almost 60,000 utility workers from the US and Canada are descending on Florida and other states hard hit by the storm, with more line crews and contractors expected soon….

The Wall Street Journal article from which the above quote was taken was strictly about the subject of that quote.  However, there’s a much larger lesson, of much broader national security—even survival—implication, that Irma (and Harvey) would teach, were we willing to listen.  The lesson needs to be learned widely, too, from individual citizens to government at all levels.

That lesson is the outcome of an EMP strike or strikes, which would drop our power grid, producing all of those follow-on failures even more thoroughly and over the entire nation.  Such a strike is the sort of thing Russia actively tested when it was the core of the USSR, a capability possessed by the People’s Republic of China, and something northern Korea has been threatening us with since they successfully tested an ICBM.  We got a taste of this from the Northeast Blackout of 1965, and that wasn’t even from an EMP, just an “ordinary” failure that cascaded.  These hurricanes should finally prompt us to take action.

Some estimates, possibly apocryphal, but maybe not, have 90% of the American population dying in the immediate and near-term aftermath of a suitably timed EMP attack.  The collateral damage would hit Canada and Mexico, too, limiting their ability to help us as they would need to see to their own survival first—as Mexico has had to do with its withdrawal of an offer of aid to Texas in the face of its own back-to-back devastating earthquake off its West Coast and hurricane coming ashore on its East Coast.

The necessary lessons involve individual preparation: non-perishable food and water supplies, alternative power sources or thought-out plans for doing without power (Florida Power and Light and Duke Energy are estimating nearly a week to restore power to “most” customers in one area and 10 days or more to customers in another area), neighborhood plans for security and first aid patrol until legitimate authority can arrive (days or weeks later in the case of an EMP attack, at least days later as the hurricanes are demonstrating).  At the corporate level, the lessons include hardening facilities against EMP attack (a stretch, with Equifax demonstrating that corporations too often can’t be bothered with hardening against hacks) and provisioning alternate power sources.  Government lessons begin with restoring security and medical services promptly; restoring power/facilitating utilities’ efforts to restore power; and food, water, and fuel distribution.  At the national level, this includes hardening our power grid against EMP attack and ensuring continuity of communications with the population and with our defense establishment.

And that’s just for starters.

Nonsense

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The National Park Service is handing $100,000 to UC Berkeley in a “research” grant to “to ‘honor the legacy’ of the Marxist revolutionary group the Black Panther Party.”  Worse, it did so without following its usual competitive bidding process for research grant money.

This cooperative research project between the National Park Service (NPS) and the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) on the Black Panther Party (BPP) is anchored in historical methods, visual culture, and the preservation of sites and voices.  The project will discover new links between the historical events concerning race that occurred in Richmond during World War II and the subsequent emergence of the BPP in the San Francisco Bay Area two decades later through research, oral history, and interpretation.

Committed to truthfully honoring the legacy of BPP activists and the San Francisco Bay Area communities they served, the project seeks to document the lives of activists and elders and the landscapes that shaped the movement[.]

This is…nonsense.  To truthfully handle the legacy of the Black Panther Party domestic terrorists, the Department of Justice should be the ones conducting this “research.”  If the NPS is serious about finding out things concerning the relationship between the Black Panthers and American society, it should claw back those $100,000 and transfer them to DoJ.

NPS’ funding announcement can be seen here.

Berkeley and Free Speech

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It seems that Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos have been invited by the The Berkeley Patriot, a student publication at the university, to speak at a four-day “Free Speech Week” later this month.

UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof is claiming that the organizers haven’t yet “submitted the information or forms required to ensure the events occur.”

“This is all about providing to them the security they want and we want to offer for their events, and it can’t happen overnight,” he added, noting that a speech given by conservative Ben Shapiro on Thursday requires the university bring in “a huge number” of police officers and “spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Recall the violence with which the Left attacked those attending, or trying to attend, Shapiro’s speech.  There’s a hint in Mogulof’s remarks regarding the safety of those of whom the Left disapproves.  There’s a hint regarding Berkeley’s attitude toward the speech of which its management disapproves.

Medicare for All

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Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) is beating that drum, again, and has support from some Progressive-Democratic Party Senators.

The health proposal, dubbed Medicare for all, would offer the same suite of medical benefits required for some insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act and eliminate most out-of-pocket costs. Mr Sanders argues that although taxes would likely rise to support the new system, families would save money by no longer needing to purchase health coverage. The government, he says, could also secure lower prices for medical services.

Of course it has the same stuff as Obamacare—it’s the planned evolution of Obamacare into a Federally mandated single-payer system.  Because Government Knows Better, especially one run by Progressive-Democrats and their Social Democrat crony.

“Taxes would likely rise”—yewbetcha, to the tune of an additional $24,000 per family.  Whether we want that “benefit” or not.  Families can save money by not having actually to purchase coverage?  That’s rich: what do these guys think those 24 stacks are, if not coverage purchase costs inflicted on us whether we want or need coverage or not?  Aside from that, lots of folks, my family included, don’t use health care services very much; we don’t need coverage against costs we don’t incur.  That’s for one geezer family.  Those 24 stacks represent no net savings for us at all.  The young families also are healthy, don’t use health care services very much, and so have no need of health coverage.  And as they’re just starting their lives, they don’t have those 24 stacks to begin with.

Government can get lower prices?  That’s, um, rich.  Just like it (doesn’t) get lower prices on so many other “services” it provides, what with requiring contractors to pay prevailing union labor wages, whether the contractors employ union workers or not.

[P]rivate insurers wouldn’t be permitted to compete with the government plan for basic coverage….

This, I suppose, is one way in which Sanders’ government would get lower prices—competition raises prices, after all, in his and his Progressive-Democrat cronies’ fetid imaginations.

The 96-page bill offers no mechanisms to pay for the plan….

Of course not.  Money grows on trees.  Or, as I speculate Sanders will tout in his promised for “tomorrow” white paper on funding, money is in the bottomless wallets of the rich.