Monthly Archives: July 2026

The Next Carrington Event

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“Authorities on space weather” are worried about a Carrington Event, a solar storm of civilization-destroying magnitude, happening in the relatively near future. Three scientists, including Brian Walsh, Boston University Associate Professor of Engineering; Daniel Welling, University of Michigan Assistant Professor of Climate & Space Research; and Allison Jaynes, University of Iowa Physics Professor—have dreamed up a program called StormWall that entails launching a half-dozen school-bus-size satellites into geosynchronous orbit, holding in their aggregate 838,000 pounds of barium, lithium or sodium. On warning of an inbound Carrington solar storm, the satellites would release that material, sunlight would “quickly” ionize it, and the resulting plasma would mitigate the surface effects of the storm as well as shield, mostly, satellites in orbits below geosynchronous, for a few hours.

It would be a single-use system that, like the automobile airbags to which the designers liken it, then would need replacement. They sell their system’s tens of billions of dollars cost as trivial compared to the losses an unprotected modern population would suffer, and in this much they’re correct. Further, in the best-case scenario, just the research would require at least five more years just to develop the rockets capable of launching such mass so high.

As often is the case in academia, they’re overthinking and over-engineering a solution to the real, once a century threat of a Carrington event. The Carrington Event of 165+ years ago burned a few telegraph stations. The threat today is the wave guide that is our electrical power grid. It would be much cheaper to harden our grid by installing surge-protecting circuit breakers in a multiplicity of places throughout the grid to break up the wave guide. This also is a well-established technology, easily emplaced, and far cheaper to do so. All that’s necessary is the political will (tacitly assumed to be extant for those satellites and their launches) to install them.

A not very distant secondary threat is the fragility of all of our computing requirements, primarily financial, control nodes of our distribution networks, defense establishments. Faraday cages would protect them—even older, more established and cheaper technology—as would surge protectors.

Of course, the surge protectors are one-use affairs, too, but they’re much more cheaply and easily replaced than those half-dozen school-bus-size satellites with their heavy payloads. The Faraday cages themselves would be undamaged by the electrical surges the Carrington event would generate.

In orbit, our satellites still would need protection, but hardening them is equally straightforward, and it could be done as we replace them–which we ought to be doing anyway to protect them from EMP that our enemies would create in any kinetic war.

A Question

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With all the hyped up fears of a coming crash in the stock market and in the economy overall—some pundits are claiming the coming crash will make the Panic of 2008 look like a little burble (e.g., the Federal government will have to make a choice between letting banks and other financial institutions fail en masse or firing up its printing presses)—more and more folks are pushing buying gold and silver or bragging about the gold and silver they already hold.

So my question: what’s the value of all that gold and silver in such a catastrophe? Do these folks really think they’ll be able to exchange their gold or silver for their rent/mortgage payments? Their grocery and utility bills? Their gasoline down at the filling station? Or get those things with markers for their gold and silver held in brokerage accounts rather than in their closets in physical form? What if their broker is one of those financial institutions that went bust? Those holdings, if not lost forever, will be inaccessible for weeks or months while the broker’s assets wend their way through bankruptcy courts and the innumerable legal fights over distribution.

And: how will the holders sell their gold or silver, whether held in physical form or in brokerage accounts? Who will be willing to spend their cash on hand to get those metals?

Guests and Wedding Expenses

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A letter-writer to Market Watch had this, even as she offered some money-saving tips that he thinks he’s found:

I found I may be in danger of spending close to $7,000 as a wedding guest this year—and that’s while I’m also trying to save up for my own wedding.

That’s just…foolish. Even for the several weddings aggregated that he plans to attend.

As long as enablers like these…guests…keep supporting deliberately ostentatious ego-trip weddings, those costs are only going to rise.

Who Can Afford Obamacare?

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The lede:

Rates for many Affordable Care Act plans rose by double digits this year. Insurers want to do the same next year.

It’s especially bad in Progressive-Democrat-run States. For instance:

In Washington state, Centene is asking for a 28% hike, after boosting rates by 35% in 2026. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois wants 15%—on top of a 28% increase this year.

Who can afford Obamacare? Nobody. Not the individual, not the nation at large. That’s what those unconscionable Federal subsidies, only recently cut back, kept hidden for so long, at the Progressive-Democratic Party government dependency pushers’ behest. Dependency is votes, as they’ve long known.

It’s time the Republican Party stopped dithering and cowering. The party needs to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with an interstate commerce-centric, lightly regulated (which would entail rescinding a double potful of regulations) free market for health insurance, one in which insurers could offer plans that customers actually want, and at competition-driven prices and deductibles, and coverages. Especially that last would drive costs down. Plans that don’t try to cover everything, unless that’s what enough customers want to make a market, plans that cover only a few things, that cover only catastrophic medical events, and every coverage level in between—whatever the customers want in sufficient aggregate to make a market.

Deterrence and Responses

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Russian President Vladimir Putin can destroy NATO with a simple move, goes the intro. The simple move would be a minor incursion into Poland, perhaps, or seize some Baltic Sea islands, or (my own speculation) enter Lithuania from the Suwalki Corridor in a claimed need to widen it and then watch the NATO nations dither and not respond, which would demonstrate to the world, to Putin, and to those NATO member nations just how worthless and timid and uninterested in defending each other, much less themselves individually, the alliance is. Which is what President Donald Trump (R) has been complaining about and why he’s been prodding, even provoking, those nations to do more for their own defense.

On the other hand, those member nations could promptly and in useful coordination act to defeat the incursion, taking prisoners, inflicting casualties, and driving the remainder back out of the invaded (because that’s what it would be, never minding the timid euphemism that is “incursion”) nation. That would provide a measure of deterrence, but only in a tit-for-tat sort of way. We and our NATO fellows should have learned as long ago as our Vietnam War that tit-for-tat only leaves the door open for another try later on, with greater friendly casualties—and as the present barbarian case in Ukraine is demonstrating, increased civilian casualties.

There is another response, though, that would act to strengthen both deterrence and the durability of deterrence. That move would be simultaneously to defeat the invasion and to attack some key fuel and energy targets, complementary to Ukraine’s extant targeting, inside Russia. And, while that’s in progress, for the governments of the UK, France, and the United States jointly and publicly to point out to Putin that NATO has nuclear weapons, also.

Gerald Baker, in his article at the link, at first considered that with Russia’s military-in-being and economy so badly diminished by the barbarian’s war on Ukraine, a Putin incursion would be unlikely. Baker reported hearing rumors, though, that Putin actually is contemplating such a move.

I don’t think that’s so outlandish, and haven’t thought so from the jump (yeah, yeah, yay me). Putin’s armies don’t have to be up to snuff, neither does his economy. Especially his armies, but also his economy, only have to be better than what NATO has to offer in counter, and NATO’s relative weakness is the current situation. And: Putin has an additional critical advantage here: he has the political will to act; nor NATO nor national leadership has any such will.

That puts a premium on that third response option. And the lack of it would demonstrate the toothless nature of the NATO kitten, even were it to make the second response.